Ned Barnett: Professor's 2017 book predicted Trump's extreme policies. Now she has hope

Ned Barnett, The News & Observer on May 15, 2025

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Nancy MacLean, a Duke professor of history and public policy, studies the past, but these days she should also get credit for predicting the future.

MacLean’s 2017 book, “Democracy in Chains,” explored how Libertarian billionaire Charles Koch and others sought to free capitalism from regulation by creating systems that would enable a wealthy minority to rule. MacLean showed how that strategy evolved around right-wing ideas put forth by the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan, a figure The Atlantic called “The Architect of the Radical Right.”

Much of that strategy had been moving in the background of American politics for decades, but it has emerged full-blown in Project 2025, the radical policy plan being carried out by the second Trump administration.

Last week I spoke with MacLean about her warning that democracy is being undermined to advance an unpopular agenda. She mentioned three areas where her book’s arguments have been borne out.

First, what’s happening under President Trump isn’t about conventional politics, or even about Trump. It’s the surfacing of a long-term movement to advance the financial interests of a minority at the expense of the majority.

“Anyone who thinks that this was simply about partisanship — about Republicans versus Democrats or even liberals and conservatives – wasn’t understanding what’s really happening. What we’re dealing with now — and (former Sen.) Orrin Hatch said it in my preface better than I — is that these people aren’t conservative. They are radical libertarians and they are radical reactionaries.”

Second, her book illustrated the tactics needed to gain support for an unpopular agenda. “The radical, Koch-funded right knows that they cannot win by honest persuasion of a majority of the people for the goals they’re trying to achieve,” she said. “That is why they have had to turn to disinformation and to find ways to rig the game so it comes out their way. We saw a lot of that early on in North Carolina with gerrymandering, voter suppression.”

Third, she said “Democracy in Chains” illustrated “how much this cause has depended on achieving power at the state level, where it is much easier to rig the game than at the local or federal level.”

After the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the Koch-funded movement focused on the 2010 election, after which Republicans gained control of more state legislatures and began testing ideas. At the state level, she said, “is where a lot of the mayhem has been inflicted and where a lot of the policies we are seeing now were first tried out, like universal school choice, the strategies of voter suppression and the attack on the content of education.”

MacLean said the right-wing movement to seal a political minority into power made Trump’s election and reelection possible. The keys include the Citizens United decision, the rise of conservative think tanks, increased voter suppression, the dismantling of unions and even the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine for broadcasters.

“There is no way that Donald Trump would be sitting in the White House today were it not for the investments made by Charles Koch and other big, dark money donors on the right,” she said.

A change MacLean did not expect is the Trump administration’s departure from a Koch-style approach that worked within the rules to change the rules.

“What we’re seeing now with the Trump administration is a kind of chaos like the film title, ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once.’ The things they are breaking are the things that hold many people’s lives together,” she said. “I guess I never expected such extreme callous recklessness.”

MacLean thinks the U.S. is at a moment similar to the 1850s or 1920s. “The old systems have broken down, they’re not working well anymore,” she said. “They are rewarding people at the top and not helping the people who are the majority and it’s an explosive situation.”

But she sees hope in the widespread resistance to Project 2025 and the meanness of Trump policies

“I think we are really beginning to see the pushback on all of this. People don’t like it. They are horrified, they are outraged and they are scared,” MacLean said. “This is not going to go down well with the American public. I am absolutely convinced of that.”