Surviving Koch: Nancy MacLean Wants You to Ignore Donald Trump

Let’s forget about Donald Trump.

For just the next 10 minutes.

For just as long as it takes to read this.

I know, I know: it’s not easy, what with his threatening to launch nuclear weapons at North Korea and hiring lunatics and firing lunatics and breaking up with other, more evil lunatics and defending white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, Neo-Confederates, the KKK, and other “very fine people” like this fellow from the march in Charlottesville.

But we really need to forget about him for a moment. Or at least not pay attention to him—and that means not hanging on his every tweet or obsessing about his connection with Russia or his incoherent hate rallies, because if we mute the whole Donald Trump catastrophe, we just might have find time to focus on something a whole lot worse.

In her latest book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, historian Nancy MacLean shines a light on that something a whole lot worse: Charles Koch. But more importantly, she traces the development of the billionaire’s libertarian ideology and political strategy back to one man: the late Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan.

Buchanan and Koch’s brand of libertarianism prizes economic freedom and unfettered capitalism above all else. As such, its adherents are significantly less than chuffed when the federal government makes them pay taxes for things like public schools, health insurance, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and social programs.

But here’s the kicker: Buchanan knew that American Democracy—the fact that