MacLean:
The Koch network and their allies claim they want "liberty." They actually call themselves "the liberty movement" or sometimes "the freedom movement," and speak in this very anodyne language about how they want to have limited government and freedom and lower taxes. For older white conservatives this language is very appealing. But what really bothered me in writing "Democracy in Chains" is that they’re not being honest. As libertarians they believe that there are only three functions for a legitimate government: To provide for the national defense, to ensure the rule of law and to maintain social order. Other than that, everything is illegitimate because other functions of government depend on taxing people -- and particularly better-off people, in a system with progressive taxation. For this type of libertarian thinking, taxing people to provide for programs, services and resources with which they may not agree is illegitimate coercion and therefore must stop.
In this Koch-donor dream, we are all responsible for ourselves from the cradle to the grave, unless there is a charity that happens to take an interest in us. We do not have federal laws to outlaw pollution or to prevent discrimination. Instead we trust everything to the free market and private property. This cause has pitted itself against the whole American model of 20th-century government. Regulation of food and drugs, the New Deal's federal support for workers to organize and hold corporations accountable, the civil rights movement, the women’s and the environmental movements, all of these things are illegitimate in the eyes of these people on the right.
Say that you want to do your homework on libertarianism, I mean actually do it and not some half-assed or obviously cherry-picking hatchet-job-style excuse for doing one's homework, one would encounter the essay "What Libertarianism Is" by Prof. Hospers. Since Hospers was the first Libertarian Party presidential candidate (1972), doesn't he have some credible claim to be an influence on the modern libertarian mindset? Key phrase from Hospers: "Other men's lives are not yours to dispose of." (To give you an idea of the mindset of Rand-haters: I once used this formulation as a characterization of Rand's basic idea about individual rights, only to have my Rand-bashing interlocutor say that such a position was actually Kantian. You know, the whole humanity-as-an-end-in-itself idea expressed another way. Now, this Rand-basher was himself a professed Kantian, but couldn't bring himself to concede that Rand had something useful, insightful or true to say even here, even where she supposedly agreed with his favorite ethicist Kant. Whatever the Rand-basher does, crediting Rand for something doesn't seem to be part of the repertoire. I've pretty much had it with Rand-bashers; disgusting creatures.) So: other men's lives are not yours to dispose of. Or put more generally: the individual's life is his own and not the state's to dispose of. What each person does with his or her life is a matter of ethics and morality, but - short of actions that amount to disposing of the lives/actions/minds of others by force - these matters aren't the business of the state; indeed, the libertarian view is that the state is proscribed from becoming the very thing it's supposed to be instituted to guard from: an initiator of physical force, an agent of the law perverted, to use Bastiat's phrase.
So as nice and desirable as things like a 40-hour work week ("progressives") or moral virtue ("conservatives") are, the libertarian view is that these things aren't the business of the state since to get the state involved is to forcibly make people do things (or forcibly prevent them from doing things with consenting others). Sorry, "progressives," but while desirable things like a social safety net are a moral responsibility and imperative of decent people who can afford it, there is no implication here that the coercive institutions of the state are the appropriate mechanism for that. What's more, there's no good reason to think that a sufficiently robust cultural framework won't result in a satisfactory social safety net; indeed, the classic doctrine of subsidiarity essentially mandates that this is a responsibility of people as members of civil society unless the state were the only agency that could carry out such a function . . . and how plausible is that? How many "progressives" have really thought that one through? Just how robust were institutions of civil society in America prior to the New Deal, and considering the context that America wasn't as rich back then (for reasons not having to do with the then-non-existence of the New Deal).
Anyway, this gives some idea of the considerations motivating the libertarian position and accounting for its widespread appeal (among homework-doers). It's not merely a "Koch-donor dream" but a position spelled out with considerable supporting argument by philosophers such as Nozick. If you're going to characterize an opposing political viewpoint, whom do you use as a key strong representative, a think-tank-donor type, or an Ivy-League philosophy professor-type? Depending on which representative figure the person uses, will that (not) affect your assessment of the credibility of the characterization?
What makes MacLean's characterization weird here, on her own terms, is that while it may well be a "Koch-donor" position that taxation - especially the redistributive sort that can't remotely be justified on grounds akin to the Takings clause of the Constitution as some other forms of taxation might be likened to - is morally illegitimate coercion, I've never associated that position with James Buchanan of all people. I associate it most immediately with Rand, Hospers, Nozick, Mack and numerous anarcho-capitalists. Those I named are philosophers by profession. I don't associate the taxation-is-on-par-with-forced-labor notion with Mises, Hayek, Friedman, or Buchanan, figures who are economists by profession. But MacLean has been making this big deal about Buchanan being ideological fuel for Koch political operations, so how can that be? Where the fuck would the Kochs have gotten the taxation-is-illegimate-coercion position from, then, since it's not from Buchanan (and certainly not associated with him exclusively)? I don't think MacLean really knows; as other libertarian critics have pointed out, she's demonstrably way past her depth in this subject matter. This can be shown with a simple modus-tollens style of process of elimination: if she weren't out of her depth on the subject of libertarianism, then why would she neglect to mention all the other outstanding libertarian thinkers and their influence? That she doesn't mention them is pretty definitive evidence that her thesis - a Koch-Buchanan-fueled libertarian effort to subvert democracy - is not plausible or credible, and that she is simply out of her depth.
That would also explain quite simply, elegantly and powerfully how she could characterize libertarian thought the way she does above, in the pat and smug way in which she frames it. Unless a charity "takes an interest," and without the state as provider, we're "on our own from cradle to grave." (What failure of imagination does it take to conclude that without the state as provider, we're at the arbitrary mercy of some charity, one that only happens to take an interest at that? In what plausible scenario do we have such arbitrary charities if the state gets out of the charity business? You would either have to have an imagination over-active enough to somehow get from humans as we know them to there being only arbitrary charities in a libertarian society, or an imagination under-active enough to somehow not get from humans as we know them to a robust support network in a libertarian society. What, would libertarianism in politics make people less benevolent in life generally? How fucking perverse does one's mindset have to be in order to draw such an implication? "But Rand said to be selfish" combined with "selfishness by any definition means not caring for anyone but oneself" is only more of the same negligent cognitive perversion.) And it's somehow the libertarians, in MacLean's fevered depiction, who have failed to consider with sufficient thoroughness the matter of how private, non-state individuals can look out for one another. Somehow it's they who've failed to do their homework, see.
So in the midst of all this cognitive context we get phrases such as libertarians "trusting everything to markets and private property," like that's something we're supposed to automatically process in terms of everything currently political. Taken on its face it literally means that libertarians would entrust everything to markets. From hearing critics of libertarianism, you'd think that libertarians are so non-homework-doing that they actually don't have any moral values or principles beyond that of "liberty" -- that they cognitively process all things normative in terms of that only. (As if this wasn't already a intellectually shoddy strawman against libertarianism from "conservatives" and others to the effect that libertarianism has no place for virtue, benevolence, etc., but only liberty and property rights. And it's the libertarians who seem to have to keep reiterating that it's not about virtue and benevolence when it comes to political philosophy and it would be foolish to mix or conflate normative domains like that; the political is only a subset of the normative and is limited to the prevention of force so that people can dispose of their own lives as they choose.) (The Randian criticism of "the libertarian movement" is in essence that it is philosophically unserious, pushing political reforms that have no chance of success without a shift in the nation's values which its political platforms have no chance of effecting. Lesser criticisms of "libertarianism" among certain Randians basically make the same mistake that the conservatives do: the claim that the libertarian refusal to treat politics as just a straightforward extension of ethics -- that the basic idea going under the heading of libertarianism, i.e, individual rights, is specifically concerned with the political -- shows that libertarians don't treat ethics or philosophy seriously. That would not follow, of course, although there are plenty of philosophically unserious libertarians out there.)
The basic point here is that had MacLean done her homework on libertarianism, she wouldn't characterize it the way she does. I don't think she could pass an Ideological Turing Test. (A sample of her writing on libertarianism could not be mistaken for one by, say, Caplan himself.) The best libertarians know well enough not to conflate the ethical and the political, and it's her characterization of libertarians that shows that either (a) she attributes to libertarians a conflation of the ethical and the political such that a drastic reduction of the political means a drastic reduction or precarious situation as far as human benevolence is concerned (and that libertarians are okay with that), and/or (b) that she conflates the ethical and the political herself. Heck, if there's one key distinguishing feature of libertarianism as contrasted with mainstream "conservative" and "progressive" thought, it's the insistence on keeping crystal clear the distinction of the two domains, the ethical and the political (the latter being a subset of the former). The ethical is about the chosen, the political about the forced. Without outside prompting from libertarians themselves, I don't think MacLean and her ilk would ever get around to identifying much less appreciating this feature of libertarian thought.
(Let's say that libertarianism does entail an assault on "democracy" or majority rule or the demos having ultimate say over the disposal of the lives of individuals. Wouldn't MacLean have to show that this is unequivocally a bad thing? The Bill of Rights isn't a democratic thing; it's very individualistic, actually. (Intellectually lazy statist: "But isn't individualism the same thing as anti-social atomism?" If man's mind is the primary source of economic value-added, of production and trade, then what's desirable about a democratic action to impose a 40-hour work week regardless of the judgment of the producers/traders involved? The demos, via the state, purports to exercise superior judgment in regard to others' economic activities. "Conservatives" pull this same shit inasmuch as they support state restrictions on sexual activities they find immoral: their judgment is superior to yours, thereby putting your sexual life and choices properly at their disposal. But one also notices how much conservatives fall back on libertarian ideas and rhetoric when criticizing "progressive"/"liberal" proposals for state activities. What's so hard to grasp about supporting both a cultural conservatism and a political classical-liberalism, anyway? And what wisdom are we supposedly going to find in the demos? Last I saw, proponents of big-government-ism and democracy hadn't solved the basic problem of politics set forth in the Republic: how can you have an optimally decent and functional polity without an optimally decent and functional soul in those having say over how the polity is run? It's a challenge faced by libertarians and statists alike, since libertarians have an idea of what an optimally decent polity is like - it's quite minimal in scope and function - but they can't realistically expect to see such a polity in action and sustainable long-term if the people operating within it and forming its policies aren't decent enough to make it happen. You might get intellectually and morally perverted "progressives" taking over and redefining "liberty" to fit within the constraints of their favored laws, as they interpret them.)
Now, from this point onward what I'd like to do is to focus on stronger representative criticisms/critics of libertarianism wherever they might still be found. MacLean isn't qualified to be a serious critic, but perhaps someone like Elizabeth Anderson is. But I have a meta-level concern here that remains: what of the stature of a critique such as MacLean's within academic circles? Or, to put it another way: would critics of libertarianism themselves do well to appeal to MacLean as any sort of expert, or would they find better ammo in Prof. Anderson? I already know what my answer is; the question is whether enough leftist "progressives" in academia have enough of a clue to make the needed differentiation here. We have enough piss-poor criticisms of libertarianism (especially by leftists) as it is; shouldn't the critics of libertarianism themselves help out in separating signal from noise? Considering the sorts of pressures that leftists in academia put on advocates of Incorrect ideas ostensibly in the name of intellectual Quality Control, shouldn't they be calling for MacLean to withdraw or repudiate her Democracy in Chains book unless or until it meets basic scholarly standards (and even better, to the satisfaction of reasonable, reputable or established libertarian scholars)? I mean, we wouldn't want future, up-and-coming critics of libertarianism to waste their time on inferior material, would we?
In other words: shouldn't a Professor of History at Duke do the right thing here without too much prodding from reasonable and decent folks? Don't we want to oppose the lowering of academic standards, which lowering would only provide fuel to critics of academia from FOX News and elsewhere? Can't we acknowledge that even a Professor of History at Duke can wade into areas well out of her depth? The damage would be that which comes from not recognizing the reality here, not calling it out for what it is. All I know is, a book on "the libertarian movement" which focuses mainly on Koch and Buchanan raises red flags from the get-go, and the author's subsequent characterizations of "libertarian thought" look similarly disingenuous. Surely the academy shouldn't be comfortable with high-profile but piss-poor criticisms of a political position advocated by the likes of Hospers and Nozick, just because the source of the criticism is a Duke professor and the political position targeted is still academically unpopular. Right?
By the way, and hopefully one last point: MacLean says in the quote above, re-quoting: " But what really bothered me in writing "Democracy in Chains" is that they’re not being honest." The "they" here is "the Koch network and its allies," but what really bothers me here is that this statement about the Kochs & allies is not connected in any clear way with what she says after that, or before. All she says afterward, of course, is that the ideological platform of Koch & allies is at odds with 20th-century "progressive" big-government ideology. How is that Koch & allies not being honest? Are they representing themselves as being pro-democracy (even with tensions between democracy and property rights)? She includes among the "progressive" ideas opposed by libertarians the "civil rights movement," reflexively lumping together private and public discrimination. What she has trouble showing, by her own tactics and rhetoric, is how "the libertarians" whose views she purports to characterize aren't being honest about the implications for "civil rights." She and/or Brad DeLong just got done quoting Buchanan and a co-author stating opposition to enforced integration (as a consequence of freedom of association). So that would be a case of Buchanan being up-front and straightforward about his opposition to the totality of "progressive" "civil rights" policies applying to both public and private entities. So it's not like Buchanan was misrepresenting his own policy positions. So, again, who in the "Koch network and its allies" is not being honest and how? All I see here is more of the same that I had already gathered from my inquiry into the MacLean controversy: she is intellectually sloppy, playing fast and loose with facts and interpretations while convincing herself that this is all normal scholarly procedure. Again, that fact in itself is what really bothers me. Piss-poor attacks on libertarianism are easy to come up with or find; the question is how an attack can be at once piss-poor and yet granted the status or veneer of academic and scholarly credibility. Unfortunately, it appears that you need a rare Dershowitz-type with the integrity to call out intellectual malpractice among political allies, or such calling-out just won't get done. How well does this speak for the current intellectual culture predominant in academia and on the left?
[Addendum: I saw the tail end of the MacLean-Salon interview after posting the above. There's this ridiculous exchange: [Interviewer] "To them, it seems like you have violated the tenets of their political religion." MacLean: "They’ve certainly never had an outsider research and write about their movement. So what I have done, in effect, is create a mirror to this cause and its history, and I believe these critics are looking at that mirror and they don’t like what they’re seeing. It’s deeply disturbing to them. Emotion is a huge part of what is driving the response." How fucking smug can you get? The smugness and hubris would be a good explanation for this kind of statement, but that explanation still doesn't get her off the hook for piss-poor scholarship where that involves misleading cherry-picking out of the context of a relevant totality of facts. Anyway, I'd say the smugness may be the biggest count against MacLean, because it says that whatever facts she encounters in the future, they will be interpreted in light of her existing thesis. So if a libertarian scholar says that MacLean did a piss-poor job of scholarship, that protestation can readily be framed by her as being shown a mirror and not liking what one sees; the epistemic loop is closed. And what credibility can I possibly assign to her statement that "They’ve certainly never had an outsider research and write about their movement"? I mean, I remember historian Jennifer Burns publishing a book in 2009 titled Ayn Rand and the American Right. Does this not count according to MacLean? I mean, Burns is an outsider to the Objectivist movement, and one thing I do know about the history of books on Rand/Objectivism by outsiders is the usually-very-justified hostility with which such books tend to be treated by Objectivists. I got no such vibe from more than a few Objectivists about Burns' book. I did, however, get very much that vibe about another book published in the same year by Anne Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. I read most of both of these books myself, and share the overwhelming Objectivist response in both cases: the Burns book is a decent scholarly treatment as intellectual history, while the Heller book is much less so (and its philosophic vacuity is in evidence by the lack of any Peikoff in its bibliography of works about Objectivism, while various other secondary works are listed). Burns has enough sense to know what her philosophic depth is, and it's reflected in her writing, whereas Heller pretends to grasp what made Rand tick but doesn't. So I have a couple concrete instances here to compare/contrast to MacLean, and the very distinct vibe I get is that while both MacLean and Burns are historians by profession and academic distinction, MacLean comes off as a lot more like Heller, and a lot more like the leftist lowlife one can find all over the internet, in her tactics and selection of facts. But I grant that there may be some obscure interpretation under which MacLean's "no outsider" claim is true - I just don't consider it credible given the source - seeing as that, aside from Burns (a Hoover Institute scholar - no outsider to "right-wing" thought there), no scholarly treatment of the history of the libertarian movement from an outside figure comes to my mind. It would be a goddamn shame, however, if the MacLean book were to serve as some kind of standard for how that task is done. We'd also have to deal with a core issue in connection with why such a task may never have been undertaken by an outsider in an uncontroversially reputable fashion, and that is: is it possible for a conscientious scholar of libertarian intellectual history to remain an outsider and not become a convert? Put another way: is it possible for a conscientious inquirer to embrace the Rand/Hospers formulation of the basic principle that man is an end in himself, has a right to exist for his own sake, and a right to dispose of his own life as he chooses -- much less all that in conjunction with Rand's identification of the role of the mind/intellect/reason/thought in human existence and its implications for material production and trade -- and not emerge a radical for capitalism? If I doubt that it is possible, does that give me the same smugness problem that MacLean has? But what if I did my homework thoroughly? What if I simply can't find or think of a good refutation of the Randian argument for capitalism? That I haven't found anything remotely resembling a good rebuttal to her "What is Capitalism?" essay or other writings along those lines, suggests either that I haven't looked or thought long and hard enough, or that any such rebuttal simply doesn't exist (and that if it did exist, it'd be well-known or I'd have discovered it long ago, not that it somehow does exist and is exceedingly difficult to find or anticipate). Maybe if the vast majority of existing criticisms of Rand weren't so piss-poor, and the higher-quality criticisms that do exist not directed at her identifications concerning the role of the mind in man's existence/production, I'd say that maybe there's a chance that the reasoning in "What is Capitalism?" somehow doesn't hold up and someone has or could show that. But how much time should I spend pursuing any such refutation, given my time/priorities/resources, if the available evidence tells me that it won't ever be found? I can look only so hard and for only so long. Meanwhile, Prof. MacLean has right in front of her ample evidence that longtime scholars of libertarianism, people with academic pedigrees with solid reasoning to offer, don't take her scholarship seriously. So why the arrogance and smugness on her part, combined with no apparent effort to step up her game in the face of scholarly criticism? Is it that she simply doesn't expect her leftist colleagues to call her to task? I'd say that such a lack of expectation on her part is eminently justified: leftists on the whole are really that bad a bunch of "intellectuals" whose polemics against other viewpoints are invariably piss-poor, and this is due to the nature of the entities involved: the leftists and their tactics, the competing viewpoints considered in the totality of their strengths and weaknesses, the nature of the research/homework required to support or attack the competing viewpoints, the habits of thought required. Any sensible critique of libertarianism would almost surely have to come from somewhere considerably to the right of "progressive" leftism, taking into full consideration for instance the Tomasi position which aims to reconcile "social justice/fairness" arguments with standard libertarian ones. Leftists like MacLean are certainly not up to such a task whereas heavy-hitters like Anderson might well be. But I have Rand as my pro-capitalism goalie, remember. Does an Anderson or Freeman have sufficient ammo there, i.e., we can in fact separate intellectual from economic freedom, i.e., a free mind and free market aren't corollaries after all, i.e., full and unrestricted private property rights aren't the material expression of intellectual production after all? How does that work? Maybe I'll have to revisit Gewirth's argument for non-libertarian rights to see what I may have missed? Failing that, maybe Beyleveld? Damn right I have in possession a hard copy of Beyleveld's book defending Gewirth; why would an ethical-theory thorough-homework-doer not?...]
[Addendum #2: In what purports to be a "response to critics," MacLean re-stated her thesis in summary form as follows: "My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance." I'd say that this only makes MacLean looks worse as a historian. Historical causation is a real thing, and can be traced to the ideas of historical actors -- which means ideas are, in one form or other, directly or indirectly, the drivers of history. This is even more clearly the case when we look at intellectual history and the necessary dialectical processes involved. So how plausible is it, from the standpoint of historical analysis/understanding, that the billionaire Koch, armed with an idea he especially likes formulated by James Buchanan, and along with wealthy donors and staff, could launch a devastating attack on democracy? Koch could unload billions upon billions of dollars on a chaining-democracy campaign but that doesn't guarantee any change of minds, which would be necessary to cause historical change. I mean, if it were a matter of the number of dollars involved, have you seen the amount of money that gets poured into mostly-leftist academia? How about all that money tied up in the political sector itself? Could Koch ever hope to compete? If it's a matter of ideas over and above the money being used to bankroll their propagation, then MacLean should be willing to get serious and explain how the set of ideas being promoted by Koch & allies can credibly lead to the social-institutional changes she fears. She should be able to explain how and by what mechanisms the "right-wing machine" propagates ideas, but do do that she would have to do a lot more looking at non-Koch actors on the right. The "right-wing" ideas-nexus would include various think-tanks (Cato, Hoover, etc.), some amount of academic presence, talk radio, FOX News, National Review, Wall Street Journal, etc. As I understand it, the Cato Institute began as an operation with support from both the Kochs and from Rothbard. What's Rothbard's role in this "right-wing" nexus? And then Hayek's and Friedman's and Mises' (who has a think tank named after him)? They didn't get Koch bankrolling, but their ideas have been at least as effective at promoting libertarian "democracy-chaining" (can I just say that this is a euphemism for "keeping government limited to protecting rights"? why not?) as anything from "the Koch network." The WSJ's op-eds broadcast, daily, ideas not funded by Koch. Talk-radio isn't Koch-funded and has proven more influential in American political discourse than whatever the libertarians have offered. So for MacLean's thesis to seem plausible we need to whittle down its substance, to something that might not be so interesting after all. The thesis would need to be something to the effect that these radically libertarian ideas, ideas more radically opposed to democracy than those found on conservative-dominated talk radio or other non-libertarian but "right-wing" sources, have ended up having an outsized (relative to intrinsic merits) impact on public policy discussions due to the work of Koch and his network of allies. And this poses a threat to democracy great enough to warrant a book whereas all these other streams of libertarian, conservative or "right-wing" thought don't pose quite that level of threat. Apparently it's the billionaire Koch and his rich buddies that make the difference. But I ask again: if money is the deciding factor here, then what about the bankrolling of mostly-left academia? Surely the academic left have both the intellectual and financial wherewithal to counter whatever propaganda the Kochs and their buddies brew up? Keep in mind that MacLean and others consider it unthinkable that a dynamic in which the libertarian ideas win out on their merits is at play here. It's the inferior, anti-democracy libertarian notions that have gained such influence as they have because of heavy financial backing. (The mostly-left academy, on the other hand, isn't unduly influenced by financing sources.) I mean, if you do think libertarian ideas are inferior on their merits, then to handle cognitive dissonance you would need to have an explanation for how they can become so influential and especially among non-academics more than academics. And academics are smart people, book-learning-wise at the least. There are institutional norms in place to combat intellectual fraud and laziness, so arguments against libertarianism emerging from academia shouldn't typically be expected to be shoddy, so perhaps those arguments are of high-enough quality to warrant a rejection of libertarianism among academics. That might be a way of explaining the cultural success of non-leftist ideas in an appearance-saving way, and perhaps one seemingly immune to disconfirmation on the assumption that libertarianism is indeed intellectually inferior (and which would thereby warrant not expending the effort and resources to look for disconfirming evidence). But is it plausible? For one thing, we already have a plausible and at least partial explanation from Nozick as to why the academic social sciences and humanities are leftist-dominated. For another, MacLean is asking us to accept that a Koch-fueled effort at democracy-subversion mainly on the basis of one economist's ideas poses a special danger, in the midst of an entire stream of libertarian and anti-"progressive" thought out there. Not only do I find that intellectual-historical causation attribution dubious, it doesn't properly account for the influence of other libertarian and right-ish ideas. Assume that the Koch bankrolling does advance Buchanan's public-choice democracy-chaining ideas more than they'd be advanced otherwise. Okay, but then what. What is the totality of the intellectual influences on the "extreme right" or libertarianism? Does that totality depend so much on which ideas are bankrolled? Or does it have more to do with the merits of the ideas? How do ideas get influence in the long run, if not on their merits? The leftist academic Nancy MacLean can throw that back at the libertarian and point out the large influence of leftist ideas in the academy, and how could that be from something other than the merits? And what then about the economics profession; how did that not end up being leftist-dominated? Let's say that when you have a large-scale ideological push-and-pull within and among various different institutional backdrops, within one nation or several, it gets somewhat complicated, lots of factors at play. Not all the defenders of this or that view are brilliant and humane, not all critics are smug lightweights, cognitive biases can play a powerful role, etc. What doesn't ring true in all this is that a messianic billionaire and rich allies can successfully fuel an intellectual movement (on its merits or otherwise) by bankrolling it. What rings more true is that if ideas have influence there's probably some merit or grain of truth to it, but only probably. (The success in the spread of Marxism is an example of why this is only probable, and even there the successes it had may have been rooted in some grain of truth or other which Marx and subsequent lesser Marxist minds package-dealt with all the bad stuff, and/or which could be found in other non-Marx philosophers anyway.) And what seems pretty much preposterous to me is that one could take a good look at the libertarian intellectual landscape, whether in terms of merit or influence, and come away with the notion that a Buchanan-Koch agenda has some enormous impact not found elsewhere in the movement. MacLean is "finding" intellectual causation that a fully context-keeping examination wouldn't find. It's like if a right-winger made some kind of big deal about "the Soros network" even though Soros couldn't compete with the kinds of dollars pouring into all of academia and even though the ideas he's funding are only part of a vast nexus of left-wing ideas scrambling for attention and support. How would that even be institutionally and psychologically realistic? Well, the same exact question arises in connection with Koch bankrolling libertarian ideas. Here, the main concern about MacLean becomes not so much her connecting dots between Buchanan's public choice and Koch-funded political activism, and whether she's doing scholarship properly there, but about whether she can, as historian, even present a realistic narrative about ideological-cultural causation. The fact is that the current semi-democratic institutional framework in the USA and elsewhere is not only enormous itself but is embedded in an enormous ideological-cultural-institutional context that involves an enormous amount of pushback against "extreme" ideas such as libertarianism...much less things like the utopian presuppositions of Plato's Republic in which the rulers are steeped in philosophical learning! In this context, American "democracy" is not anywhere close to being in imminent danger. And what if democracy-chaining ideas have a lot of merit going for them to boot? Either man's mind belongs to the demos or it doesn't....]
[Addendum #3: While MacLean gave every which dubious excuse for not engaging directly and with due care with critics, there really would be no excuse whatsoever for her not to respond to Jennifer Burns's criticism. Burns is a professional historian with a book on the intellectual history of American-right politics published by OUP. On its face, Burns has a demonstrated expertise in this area of research. What's more, as I've already mentioned, Randians didn't attack her or her book the way they have attacked so many books on Rand; the Randians I tend to encounter usually thought the book solid scholarship for what it covered, even if it was philosophically quite slim. When even Randians don't find much grounds for bashing an author's book on Rand, that's pretty good evidence that the author is careful and reliable. (Have you seen how ferocious Randians get in online discussions when they find someone to be misrepresenting a position Rand takes? Surely they have a solid and well-earned reputation for such ferocity by this point. The only distinction at that point is whether the ferocity is expressed politely or, well, more in the manner Rand herself would have expressed when confronted with misrepresentations or distortions of her views, if she choose to spend her time on such things after encountering such distortions countless times already. BTW, Rand may not be unique here: is there any philosophical figure in history who hasn't been seriously misrepresented or distorted by a lot of readers? There's probably some kind of law with which such a phenomenon could be expressed, like the chances that a philosopher will be misrepresented the more readers he gets, or something along those lines.) Anyway, if MacLean doesn't generate a response to Burns, a published authority in this very genre of research, then that's a red flag that she's not doing serious scholarship as she purports to do in her book. Again, this pertains to a meta-level look at the behaviors and tactics of an intellectual that would shed some light on the state of the debate. As for the substantive merits of MacLean's narrative about intellectual causation, "right-wing" or otherwise, I think my Addendum #2 sufficiently picks apart its logic in light of the actual history of libertarian thought, American political history, and some basic common sense about institutional dynamics and causation. All that can be established with any significant degree of certainty is that Koch & his network have had some measure of impact on contemporary American politics, but within the totality of all impact-contributions from all intellectual sources taken together, the influence is not large enough to be something an intellectual heavyweight would devote an entire book to. The leftists who attribute enormous influence on Republican thought to Ayn Rand, may be on the scent - she sells a lot of books, after all - but their causal explanations remain piss-poor. It's not like Republicans generally are into Rand the way students of Peikoff's courses are, for example, and so right off the bat you get a "Rand's ideas that have been influential" vs. "Rand's ideas that are most essential for a philosopher to grasp" distinction that has to be worked out. And it's not like leftists are generally unfamiliar with the distinction between a thinker's influence and a thinker's ideas as they are meant to be grasped and integrated; they raise that distinction about Marx all the time, to distinguish the crimes against humanity committed in his name by those influenced by him, from the Marx-as-he's-supposed-to-be-studied so that monumental crimes supposedly wouldn't keep being committed in his name. But those same leftists won't hesitate to name this or that asshole or politician as representative of "Ayn Rand's influence." As for the intellectual causation connecting Marx with 20th century mass-murderers and famines, how about the simple, elegant and powerful explanation: he called for the abolition of private property in "the means of production," i.e., in man's mind. With such little to no regard for the individual in the original Marxist program, how were Stalin and Mao not properly adhering to Marx-prescribed practice? The intellectual causation here is pretty simple and straightforward, and it's no secret that "intellectuals" jumped on the socialist bandwagon in huge numbers without putting the kind of careful thought into it that Mises did. And how about Nazism - would that have gained the traction it did were it not for the intellectuals' widespread touting of the virtues of socialism? It would seem that the greatest threats to democracy have come historically from movements, whether right-wing or left, that touted this thing called Socialism. Has that intellectual-and-political history been given the treatment it is due by the academic historians? Apparently not. Heck, if you fret over the supposed threats to democracy coming from "the libertarian right" but don't raise much of a stink about the real and historically-established threat to democracy - and more importantly, to freedom - coming from the socialist left, you might well be a (political) idiot.]
[Addendum #4: Having encountered this comment from Roderick Long, on the manner in which she quotes Rothbard regarding "the negro revolution" in an article of that title, I think it's safe to conclude that MacLean is either grossly incompetent or grossly dishonest when it comes to the way she uses quotations. (Her lie-by-citation occurs on p. 61 of her earlier book, Freedom is Not Enough.) She doesn't just pull this shady shit in this instance: she obviously did it to quotations attributed to Cowen and Buchanan, ripped blatantly and all-too-selectively from their original contexts and used to attribute to them views they did not hold. This is no-brainer stuff and the credulous MacLean-apologists who enable this shady shit (how else to describe this shady shit?) should and perhaps do know better. There is simply no excuse for such practices, much less a clear pattern of them. It's also all too clear from many comments sections for pieces discussing MacLean's book that libertarians and leftists think differently enough that they have very different standards for assessing evidence and attributing motives, among other cognitive practices. What's particularly galling, however, is the way that the leftist MacLean-apologists will put forth considerable efforts to discredit the criticisms from libertarianism and readily impugn their motivates, while having no problem with the way MacLean blatantly and obviously distorts people's positions using really shady and easily discredited quotation practices. If we can't even get the supposed progressive liberal thinkers of the left to agree that MacLean's book is unreliable (as to facts-in-context and overall narrative) and demonstrably and blatantly incompetent and/or dishonest in numerous instances, then the leftists are really deep in their own shit cognitively speaking. If they're this bad when it comes to this hack job on an important non-left thinker and his putative influence, just how fucking bad and downright nasty might they be on other politically-charged topics? I haven't even yet blogged in detail on the left's absolutely, ridiculously, fucking awful excuse for commentary on Rand, arguably their most formidable adversary and a thinker whose ideas I know enough about to distinguish between a decent commentary and an absolutely fucking shitty one, the latter being typical coming from the left. Disgusting creatures. And MacLean in particular has squandered any presumption of innocence with her brazen assault on standards of intellectual, academic and scholarly integrity. Her thoroughly shitty manner of "responding" to her critics only seals the deal. For a professor of history at Duke, it's a fucking disgrace. As a glimpse into the contemporary leftist mindset and its slimy and sick-puppy standards of intellectual justification, the MacLean fiasco is but one informative and instructive, and reasonably prominent, example. How can anyone who is adequately informed call it otherwise?]
[Addendum #5: some knock-down, no-brainer evidence regarding MacLean's slimy and twisted excuse for scholarship and narrative-development, as presented by Don Boudreaux: 1 2 . The leftists who come to the defense of this piss-poor "scholarship" are too small-minded to realize that they only destroy their own credibility for purposes of that inevitable future event that some right-winger uses MacLean-style tactics on their words and ideas and they start complaining, attacking and impugning motives. Heck, they'd complain about tactics that fall well short of MacLean's obvious hackery, and still assume the worst about the right-winger's motives. We're not talking about people with healthy thinking habits here. Were I blissfully unaware of the shitty thinking habits of leftists and then encountered MacLean and her dialectically-inept apologists, I'd be astonished that this utter fucking epistemically-useless shit, from a professor at a top university no less, is being touted as serious, credible, reliable, or defensible scholarship. But after seeing leftists behave the way they have these past couple years especially, in their inability or refusal to handle a Trump election victory with maturity and sanity - much less the wider intellectual context within which this patently infantile and insane behavior takes place - I don't think I'd be astonished by anything coming from the left anymore. As a favorite anti-leftism polemicist of mine regularly points out, these twerps are ignorantly and/or willfully destructive and it does little if any good for anyone to mince words about this deplorable phenomenon. Leftists should exercise the decency to clean up their demonstrably intellectually-fraudulent act ASAP, it's not that complicated a message. They can start by repudiating the fraudulent piece of shit that is Prof. MacLean's book. No-brainer stuff, a quick and easy test of basic intellectual sanity.]
