Good evening. [applause] my name is tom campbell, regulator bookshop and we are thrilled to welcome nancy mclean here this evening. Democracy in chains is a marvelous book. I have made no secret of just how important i think this book is in my humble opinion. It seemed to me then that one very important thing in politics is to understand your opponent, and understand where theyre coming from, what motivates the them, what they are really trying to do. As this book shows that our understanding of what is called, sometimes the radical right or the old right, the libertarian right, it has been very limited, and there has been a philosophy and a strategy that goes back decades that is behind much of what we see in politics now and so i think there are a few things that can be more important for those of us who dont agree with that kind of politics then to read this book, understand it, and i think we will be in a much better position to counter the arguments that are being made on the libertarian right. Nancy mclean is the william j professor of history and Political Science and Public Policy had Duke University. She taught previously at Northwestern University where she served as chair for the department of history. She came to Duke University in 2010. We are very pleased, very happy to have her here, thank you all for coming, thank you cspan for covering mass. Nancy mclean. [applause] wow. I am so thrilled to see how many of you are here. Ever since moving here we have seen so Much Community and friends and colleagues i havent met yet but hope too so thank you. I also want to give a special thanks to tom who took a special interest in this book we back when and tom called me or contacted me. Its such a wonderful story. I hope you all stay and browse if you havent been here before. Can you hear in the back . Okay. Im going to get my big voice on. Hows that. [inaudible] all right. I will do my best. Can you hear me now . Good. Im going to tell you little bit about how i came to this topic and what i learned and then i want to share with you a few passages from the book and will open it up to your questions and comments and such. I am a historian of social movement. I have a particular interest in the u. S. South and about ten years ago i had just finished another book and i was in philadelphia and i went into the archives and i learned about a story i had never heard before, even though i am a historian with emphasis on the south. In the aftermath of brown versus board of education where the county, in the name of state sovereignty and individual liberty completely shut down the Public School system and sent all the white children off to private school with public money and left the black children with no schooling for five years because those students had had the temerity to go on strike in 1951 for a decent school, a school that might be at least a little bit as nice as a white student school, and for that act which then funneled into brown versus board of education, it became, for that active resistance they shut down the school and all they had was what social music organizations could provide. I was horrified by the story especially as an educator. I was deeply moved by what had happened to the students. I started to research that story and i learned that tuition grants which we would call vouchers were crucial to the story in Prince Edward county. I learned that Milton Freedman , the chicago trained economist had issued his first manifesto for School Vouchers in 1955 after the news had been coming up from the south for several years that the most segregationists were threatening to shut down Public Education rather than allow desegregation in the court. At first i thought golly, Milton Freedman is part of my story. Let me keep him on the radar. I kept moving but in following a footnote, i learned of a 1959 report by two economists also trained in chicago who had set up a center at the university in 1956. They arrived in september just after the General Assembly passed a sweep of laws. I will give you a sense of that report in a moment with the reading, but i would just say it really shocked me to see two University Professors making an economic case for what the segregationists were asking. What really provoked me intellectually is that these economists were not making the case in racial terms, they were making it in the terms of their discipline but it was clear they were opportunistically exploiting the crisis, the tremendous crisis in tragedy that was unfolding in the south in order to push through their agenda. In fact, when they sent their report to one of the legislators who was one of the leaders of massive resistance, they actually said they were making the case and the terms of their is a plan, letting their chips fall where they may and that phrase haunted me, letting the chips fall where they may. That put buchanan and my colleague on the radar and i still thought the school story was my focus and Milton Freedman was a surprise figure i was tracing for the many connections who turned out to have two virginia people who are pushing for these tax subsidies for private education for segregated schooling. Then i learned, again by chance that a political scientist who also worked on latin america that although many people have heard Milton Freedman went to chile and advise dictatorship on how to combat inflation, in fact, Virginia School of James Buchanan had had a more lasting effect and the buchanan school. [inaudible] then i got more interested in buchanan like what is going on. What trail have i happened on so i continued to follow it and then i moved to North Carolina in 2010. At that point Milton Freedman was my focus. I thought what is he doing, whats going on and i was following all these connections. As you know, something happen in 2010 after the midterms here. A radicalized Republican Party one majorities in both houses of the legislature. All these things i was reading and this is a man who wrote very abstractly but i was trying to understand these and suddenly it became real concrete and really frightening because i was seeing these ideas play out in what im sure you all remember and have responded to over the past few years. What i was seeing as it comes from buchanans thoughts. He always argued it was a mistake to focus on the question of who rules. The real question was the rule and if you didnt like what was going on in the government, in a society, which none of his libertarian and right wing alter free markets didnt like, his focus was you had to look at the role and change the role and breakup collective power, the kind of power you would see labor unions and civil right unions, even the aarp, any groups that could make them for tax resources that would lead for his solution was to alter the nature by radical rule change. Lets go back to North Carolina where this was becoming real to me. What we saw was radical changes, one after another. Extreme gerrymandering with the operation read map, attempts to undermine unions, hostility to Public Education at all levels and radical cuts for changes to the governments of Public Education. Refusal to except medicaid even though there was a desperate need among low income people for healthcare. Rolling back measures to protect the environment and address global warming, getting rid of the Racial Justice act and then the monster Voter Suppression law. What i found disturbing and even frightening was that i could see this was an application of James Buchanans ideas, a strategy guided by his understanding of the political process and ill come back to that in a moment because he had original insights and he won a nobel prize in 1986, but driven, guided by his ideas and guided by a libertarian morality that says it would be better to let people die from lack of healthcare if they cannot afford to pay for it than to receive it from government. Its a morality that i dont think anyone in this room would share but i think its extremely important to understand that it is a coherent ethical system and frankly for some people for some, it is shaping our Public Policy as we gather here. The bottom line idea is that what they really mean by personal responsibility is that you should be on your own. You should be a self responsible individual, and if you fail to save for your future needs, whether its healthcare or retirement security, whether its your childrens college or your own, tough luck. Your failure will teach other people they need to conduct their lives differently and start saving from the moment they become able. In january, so i knew i had to get into his private papers. After buchanan died in januar january 2013, i finally got access to his private collectio collection. It was led by republicans who had been trained in these ideas and were engaging in a Government Shutdown in a case of what they might have called coercive bargaining. Its such a cause too so many. It was just wanting to go into that archive with that unfolding. In those papers, they were everywhere. I found my hypotheses confirmed in a way that literally took my breath away. One moment i will describe was finding the correspondence about his trip to chile in 1980. He was invited in by the most antidemocratic civilian associated with the regime in order to advise on this constitution and they translated his work into spanish and they gave him audiences with all these regime figures and he gave about five public lectures any thank them for the accuracy, and what i found, in 1980 chile was one of the worlds leading examples of why human rights mobilizations were beginning because the dictatorship was absolutely brutal. It was clear they had just purchased the universities before he came. I could go on. The letter that stopped my heart was the thank you letter that he wrote to sergio decastro who was one of the top advisers any thank them for the lovely lunch held in his honor, the wine in the jewelry given to mrs. Buchanan and something else. Not a word about any of this but just this Lovely Exchange between friends and i thought youre with someone who said his life mission was promoting the free society, promoting liberty. How do i get my mind around tha that. Another key moment was when i went upstairs into his personal options and found helterskelter on a chair, a series of letters from a blowup that happened after they started investing massively in George Washington university and some of the people connected engaged in what confidential whistleblower and so that was also pretty heart stopping. In any event, once i brought home these hundreds and hundreds of documents that i copied their and put them together with the published work and other source sources, i found myself lying down pieces of the puzzle because sometimes, to be honest literally nauseated me. When i saw the scope of the operation being guided by this individual, when i started to follow out the career trajectory established at george mason and saw people coming from this program and all these funded world, it was shocking. As i took the measure of this project, i saw something else. The form of government that these men understood as ideal, that they referred to as liberty mirrored that of mid century virginia minus the segregation. What am i getting at here . A great political scientist published a book about southern politics just before these events and he said virginia was the most oligarchical state in the south. Next to virginia mississippi is a hotbed of democracy. [laughter] so virginia had a leak control like you cant imagine. Harry byrd was the center, it was almost a corporate form and that made sure that they had their economic liberty and that meant no one else had their freedom and they didnt have much else besides. In the name of liberty, they practiced extreme Voter Suppression, they gerrymandered the General Assembly sort overrepresented rural conservative districts and underrepresented urban and suburban community, they passed laws and they brought in harry byrd and brought in right list immigrants to harvest his Apple Orchard because again that was liberty. Why should he employ American Workers who might have access to the constitution. As i began to trace the operation built up at George Mason University with money to apply buchanans understanding to his, as charles cook said as he gave this big gift when all this really got going, he said i want to unleash the kind of force that propels columbus to his discovery. What was really interesting, to me is that he also said since we are greatly outnumbered the failure to use our technology will will essentially lead to continued failure. This is a guy with reengineering degrees from my tea. Hes talking about ideas that can create a great advantage. What he was doing was harnessing this understanding developed by buchanan in order to achieve what he wanted. I thank you all know he wants a very audacious radical change but if you didnt, its worth knowing this man is can comparing himself to martin luther. He has that sense of his mission in life. So, he had the money and he had been funding intellectuals for some three decades until he found the technology he wanted and he found that at george mason and he turned it into an Operational Strategy for something that buchanan had long advocated. He spoke of in chaining, it was very clear to me from Everything Else i found in his paper and correspondence that what he meant was to in chain modern democracy, to undermine the power of organized citizens and this is crucial, to make changes in state and federal constitutions through persuasion or the electoral process. They tried it in chile and we can talk more about it in the q a, its coming to america. I would just say, before going to reading a few selections from the book, i honestly believe what is at stake right now is the American Democratic system. Remember im a student of social movement. The kind of government that citizen action has demanded since the 1890s. There was a time when all social movements seem to think they could be in silos the labor people here in the environmentalist here, they are coming to every group that looks to government to achieve social justice and their need to fix the environment, all of those things. This is really a unified challenge. Ill stop there again with the story, im happy to say more the q a but i want to give you a sample of the narrative. The first selection is from an early chapter about the events in the fall of 1958 in virginia. Using the power of the State Government to prevent municipalities to prevent their citizens from doing what they would otherwise what they would like to do. They would like to take away the autonomy of local communities and support on their residence the will of a gerrymandered conservative state legislature that any school was about to be segregated in response to a federal court order should be shut down. Okay. Thats the context. The chapter goes back to our phrase, letting the chips fall where they may. James buchanan and William Motter did not pu forward their proposal until early 1959. When they did it was as if they pulled down the shades on every window, canceled subscriptions to the newspapers unplugged their ear to a new set of voices in virginia. They had maintained the fight was against the government, against coercion from outsiders in a stand for liberty. They ignored the overt racism and turned a blind eye to the chronic violations of liberty and Constitutional Rights that led to the intervention. The voices of 1958 and early 1959 survived their narrow and exclusionary framing of the conflict. They came from white middleclass virginia, from parents in particular who were shocked at the actions of their state officials and determined to a wri resist. Most were moderate republicans and democrats of the expanding cities and suburbs of northern virginia. They spoke powerfully enough over a sixmonth period to move them to explain publicly what their vision of liberty would mean on the school system. In the summer of 1958, three different communities, home to a u. S. Navy base and university of virginia announced their intention to admit a few black students to some previously white schools the following september. They were moved to do so not because the white townspeople or the school board suddenly converted to equal rights under the law, and no doubt if you did, but most having been reared since infancy in the culture of jim crow did not. Still, many saw themselves as patriotic lawabiding citizens and so were unwilling to defy a court ruling even on the matter of race. Federal courts had instructed them to desegregate without further delay, particularly schools and they plan to comply. The local plans triggered the implementation of the 1956 resistance legislation empowering the governor to shut any white school that plan to admit any black student. His act would deny Public Education to some 13000 white students throughout the fall of 1958 in these communities from firstgraders to high school seniors. The reason it was only white schools is because no white schools were suing to enter black schools so they werent subject to this coercion. So, in july of 1958, the week after lindsay announced he would close the schools comfort virginia, a country dr. Who paid little attention to state politics announced that she would run for the senate seat held by harry byrd. She minced no words in explaining why she was running because senator byrd massive Resistance Program is designed to close our schools, she said. Thats hurting our children or than any other group. That moved her as a working mother of five to run for office. But she didnt stop there. The problem is not just whether local communities should be allowed to decide black children to formally white children, she argued in black and white needed better schooling and that was just the beginning of the changes she was campaigning for. I think i will skim a little bit here because i know its hot in your crowded in but ill just say a little bit more. I was blown away by this story. Its very sad she went to her death thinking nobody had ever written about her story. She was fearless in providing over an electoral system provide to keep most citizens from the ballot box. She said i believe people everywhere in virginia as well as russia should have a chance to vote for a candidate who opposes the political machine that oppresses them. Whos liberty was it protecting. She noted that in the u. S. Senate senator byrd was among the most outspoken opponents of centralization and government yet his political machine has been gradually depriving our communities and cities of their rights, now even dictating to School Boards what they can and cannot do. Her Campaign Motto was virginia zone. Thus always to tyrants. It was time for the state citizens to resist tyranny. Now i kind of want to redo more of that but i think ill hold back for the one thing i do want to tell you, in a state in whic which, our legislators talking about putting work so no future generation can change and give workers the kind of right they enjoy at mid century, i think you need to know who encouraged her to run for office. It was the president of the virginia aflcio. She had written a letter to the editor of a newspaper protesting the School Closure and he called up the house that morning and came over, shook her hand and said we would like you to run for the u. S. Senate, and they brought materials, they gave her supporters, they did everything. It was actually the Virginia Labor Movement and backed by the mainline Protestant Church activists, all these groups, they all supported the run but it was the Labor Movement that first came to her aid. I think thats extremely important for us to understand at a time when labor rights have been so much under attack. Ill stop that story there and get to the second story want to share with you. The second selection i will share is from a moment in 1983 when James Buchanan, home from chile and emboldened by the success they had enjoyed their offered strategy to achieve what even president Ronald Reagan had drawn back from, radical change to Social Security. If youve never read davids book about this, read it. I couldnt believe it. He basically said what they first tried to do in the budget could not be achieved in a democratic society, that they shouldve understood that, they shouldve gone back. Instead, reagan himself drew back because they didnt want to help people. They talked about how he would be in engaged in mortal combat with people in his own base and he drew back. Anyway, so, the point im reading from is after reagan decided not to push through the kinds of changes in what happened after that. I pick up here. These libertarians seem to have determined that what was needed to achieve their end was to stop being honest with the public. Instead of advocating for the goals, they needed to engage in a kind of crab walk, even if it required advancing misleading claims in order to take territory bit by bit in a matter that cumulatively yet quietly could begin to radically alter american society. The program on which they tested this new strategy was Social Security. It was the linchpin of the american welfare state, the most popular new deal reform, its very success had made it a target for the census creation in 1935. Now, no doubt inspired by chiles conversion, the Cato Institute turned to buchanan to teach its staff how to crab walk, my term, not theirs. Cato had made the privatization its top priority. They labeled the existing system a Social Security a ponzi scheme, a word that might be fo familiar now, it implied that the program was fundamentally fraudulent, indeed, totally and fundamentally wrong. It was fundamentally wrong in the view of the libertarians, but they learned that opposing it candidly like they used to meant political suicide because the majority of voters wanted the system to continue as it was. The professor warned, there is no widespread support for basic structural reform among any membership group, among the old or the young, the black, the brown or the white, the female or the male, the rich or the poor, frost belt or the sunbelt, the near universal meant that any attempt to fight it on philosophical programs openly about opposition was doomed. They therefore devised and taught a more sequential and devious and deceptive approach , but one that served this newly crab walking crowd well. Those who seek to undermine the structure, he advised, must do two things. First they must alter beneficiaries understanding of Social Securitys liability because that quote would make abandonment of the system look more attractive. There is a whole industry of nonprofits funded by right wing organizations that have been doing this, as im quite sure you are aware and youve seen the commercials ever since. Step one would soften public support for the system by making it seem unreliable. Step two would apply a classic strategy of divide and conquer. Recipients could be split apart in this way. The first group he defined as those already receiving Social Security benefits. The current recipients, and those close to retirement should be reassured that their benefits would not be cut. These tactics are paying off existing claims. The reason behind it is the public choice analysis. As the citizens most attentive to any change in the system, these were the people who would fight the hardest to preserve i it. Getting them out of the struggle to preserve the system would enfeeble the remaining coalition. The second group consisted of high earners. The plan here would be to suggest they be taxed at higher rates to get there benefit while selling the image of Social Security as a Insurance Program by making it look like the more discredited and on popular income transfer understood as welfare. If that message were repeated enough then the wealthy began to believe that others were not paying their fair share, they in turn would become less opposed to altering the program. The third group would consist of younger workers. Younger people needed to be constantly reminded that their payroll deductions were providing subsidy to the ages. I think if nothing else i said conveys this, i think this tells us what we are looking at here is not classic conservatism by anyones definition. That is not insight struggle of young people against their elders and say that grandma is a rent seeker which is kind of the language that this program does. I think theres one more thing to add. This patchwork of reform is buchanans language and he put quotation marks around reform to make sure the message was clear that reform was not really be an game. This package could tear at groups that had been united before in their support of Social Security. Better still they noted the member groups of the once unified coalition that protected Social Security might be induced by such changes to fight against each other. When that happens the broad failing but had upheld the system for half a century might fracture. Buchanans projection left unanswered, how do i do identify those who would benefit from the end of Social Security and turn them into active allies of the cause, and for that, to other people at the Heritage Foundation contributed this discussion with what they call a strategy for getting rid of Social Security. They said the answer to building up that group that would help to push for Social Security privatization was clear, the financial sector. The right was not against people putting away for their retirement. To the contrary. They wanted people to save actively for their own retirement as part of the philosophy of personal responsibility. They just one of those savings taken out of the hands of the federal government and put into the hands of suppercaseletter as was done in chile and they also wanted to and employer contributions to Social Security as was done in chile. I will stop that section there. The final section and the one i will close on is deeply ironic. Today you may have heard some of buchanans former colleagues are up in arms at the portrayal of his ideas and the cause they moved forward. Heres an interesting fact. The Political Team and academic allies at George Mason University pushed them aside when they called what they were doing exploitation. When push came to shove, Top University administrators chose the man who became the universitys biggest donor over there first Nobel Laureate and they push buchanan to the side. Some of those who are now complaining loudest about my book went into fancy swanky new quarters provided by charles while the buchanan papers were left to rot and building that was continuing to get old. There were a few people who remain loyal and one of them came to feel profound contempt for Charles Cogan his operation. I think this is very interesting because he was a libertarian. This is not like me, an outsider talking about this. What im about to read you comes from the john Watts Foundation in virginia. He was deeply involved in this cause but he got more disgusted after the turn of the new century at the way wealthy businessmen and women who took over what was supposed to be a group of ideas. It is a contradiction in terms to remain a selfgoverning intellectual and be part of a messianic movement. Messiahs dont entertain doubt. If it didnt bother others about themselves, it bothered him about himself. We also know that once the coke people settled in and then took over in this corner of George Mason University, now the Scalia School of law, they didnt need the whole university, just good chunks of it. The concern turned into contempt and discussed until he came to this academic enablers were now occupying his campus. He called richie fink, his former colleague at george mason and the top political strategist a third rate political hack and a man who is very appropriately named. He said whatever now what others never dared to admit. It had reached the point, he came to believe, by 2012 that there was no hope that any of those who participated in the free market think tank would speak out. He was blunt about the reason why. He said too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by charles and david coke. Did it include buchanan as wellin his suggestion of so many being bought . When buchanan no longer came to campus after 1998 when he was essentially pushed to the side to push strategy to a new generation of operatives, nor did he play any other direct ongoing role that ive been able to trace. Buchanan continued to accept th the. [inaudible] in his memoirs published ten years later he went out of his way to say looking back over his lifetime of work i have no regrets. But buchanan was far too smart not to remember the idealistic young man who had once promised Colgate Darden that he would seek to defeat liberal politics by winning the war of ideas against the other side, not by writing training manuals. Had he withdrawn after 1998 so he would not have to personally witness what his decades of work had lost . Again, we dont know. They clearly continued to respect buchanan but not so blindly for he predicted, as a 2012 election approached that the libertarian cause they shared may well suffer, at least in principle, serious harm for having become the instrument of a tyrant. Watching how coke commandeered the Cato Institute for the plan to speed up the libertarian complex of america by using the governmental apparatus that libertarians have long criticized made him angry. He saw two, and i quote, no scruples concerning the manipulation of scholarship. He wanted the output to aid his cause. When a few libertarian Board Members raised questions, one actually said we support legalize prostitution. That doesnt mean we want to be prostitution. When the board member and staff raise question, he replaced him with his own people who now included the social conservatives and Political Party figures. In the end, the loyalty was to the cause. He was concerned about cato, not america, and certainly not the fate of majority rule. Neither he nor nor any other insider every went public with their concern nor did anyone else sound the alarm for the rest of us about what the proxy army, as one rally reader called it was doing to the country. Thank you. [applause] now we have time for questions. Can you talk about the summer camps that were held at george mason to teach all the stuff to judges and others yes, at one point, i believe it was actually when he said the problem of the Libertarian Movement had always been the shortage of talent. As part of this project, youll see this going around campuses around the country now, coke and the Donor Network he assembled is investing heavily in the outpost in different schools but we now have lake forest faculty and students trying to get transparency about theirs. Its an uphill battle. Western carolina university, the faculty and students were overruled, theres some really frightening stuff playing out. Anyway what they do is create these Training Institutes. There for High School Students and teachers and faculty from different places and theres Training Institutes for federal judges. I did actually get into that, i gave a hint of the legal story. One of his colleagues was a man named Henry Manning who was a entrepreneur and built george masons law school around that and he iran these summer camps that at one point by the early 1990s had trained two fifths of all the sitting federal judges in the united states. 40 of all federal judges had been treated to a coke funded curriculum. Those efforts continue. It changed under obama because obama had a chance to not put in a number of federal judges. People this is so serious. They are dead set determined to transform our legal system and in buchanans terms, to lock it all in with these radical constitutional changes. What do you think it says about the class rule in this country and its socalled liberal opposition as they have been such an abject failure in the face of all this. Why have these ideas receive so much power when you think there are plenty of rich people with plenty of money and intellectual ideas and the money to pay for the ideas to back up opposition to this. I dont think any of this have really understood this. Hindsight is always 2020. I think theres lots of money and both parties now, especially with Citizens United and so what we have our politics to become more accountable to donors. Why was the Republican Party in washington supporting a health bill that only Something Like 12 of the American People supported . Because they were answering, they were being pushed by the freedom caucus, funded by these donors and answering to this Donor Network, not to their own constituents. Thats buchanans ideas, change the incentive, make it so they are afraid to be primary and they will answer the donors instead of their. [inaudible] we are partly led this way by our culture, how many conversations have you been in the last year were people are talking about politics and they say will be hillary and we all have to learn these lessons that its about the rules. Its about power and the democrats in washington were so focused on washington that they didnt even notice they were losing all of the states. Again, this is a strategy that is informed by virginias economy and enforced by the coke Donor Network. They now have trifecta control , both houses of the legislature and the governorship in 25 states. I think they might be starting to wake up at the national level, im not sure, but what i will say is people and places like North Carolina, even in kansas, the republicans broke rank with the party and instituted the tax cut because they realize their schools were being destroyed, the state was being destroyed by this ideology. If people want to see this turnaround, it will be incumbent on all of us. Everybody is busy. Every body has a thousand things to do but it will be incumbent on the citizen not to wait for someone else to do it but get engaged and make something happen. Given the scope of what theyre doing, the decades they been doing it, how do we combat this. I hear you but i would say the single most important thing, given the scope of this and that its been decades in development and how elaborate it is, how do we combat this, my preliminary answer to that is the single most important thing about this book and about the story i tell is that these guys are doing this because they understand people dont want what they want and if they tell the truth about what they want we will recoil and not let it happen. I think the most crucial thing we can do is inform ourselves only see what this is, make them tell the truth. If they say we want to reform Social Security say do you support the principle of social instruments. They have to get out of this language that obscures what theyre doing. I actually made a list at one point of things i think follow this analysis. I think the main thing is to realize that as a source of tremendous strength. They understand that if the majority knows whats going on and the majority sees what kind of society they would bring into being, people will want to solve it. The task is to reach out to one another to engage in get involved. Theres so many different ways and Networks People are plugged into. I think that can begin to make it different. What better conditions do they have for pushing through this agenda. They didnt like what they were seeing and they really responded. There are clearly parallels between what buchanan was doing it george mason what freedman was doing at the university of chicago. Did you see any documentation of collaboration between those two schools. Its actually quite interesting. Buchanan came out of chicago and the first years they talk about what he said up at the university of virginia of being a colony, i dont think he liked that idea. In this kind of hothouse of what was happening i talk about how even the university was being democratized, the university of virginia was changing, the state was changing, gerrymandering, and all of these Different Things happened that finally were making virginia inclusive and democratic for the first time and it was in that context, that buchanan developed a Distinctive School of economy that was focused on the political concepts. In some ways i think what they were doing was a bit different. He didnt think he got adequate recognition by them. There were all these kind of tensions. Theyre all part of this things which was promoting ideas for the world, but i think chicago maintained somewhat of a different feel. Maybe its just because i havent dug deep enough into the archives. Maybe ill leave that question will be some video to will be here next year or two years from now writing a book about that. The question is was fox news part of this network. The archival information that i had is mainly from buchanan. I dont know about the origins of fox, but i will say john stoffel who was so big up fox was definitely part of this libertarian network and when i was in the buchanans office, he had a letter from a young woman talk about the Summer Program who had done an internship with stoffel and some of his colleagues had george mason talked about making use of insight from cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology so i do think some of the tribalisms that weve seen in the effort to keep rightwing people in a constant state of fear, to think someone because a woman loves a woman that she hates the religion and wants to destroy their civilization, i think a lot of that is being exploited and i am on the direct mailing list of a number these groups and i can tell you some of the stuff they set out is just terrific. Theres a group called Judicial Watch that basically says are you aware that millions of illegal aliens are about to steal the election. Again, i think one thing citizens can do is Start Holding their elected officials accountable to the kind of stuff thats being viewed and used to get people to the polls. I talked about how this cause is taking advantage of understanding that by changing the incentive they can get elected officials, particularly the republicans, and they have no sentimental loyalties. They have made that very clear. But theyve turned it into a delivery vehicle so even people who dont can be primary to lose their position but frankly where the people of courage and that party to say this is wrong. I will not support that. I dont need this office and i dont need your donor money, and that will change things too. I think people can put out that kind of voice and put out that pressure so that would be one thing. Obviously the Federalist Society or the evangelical colleges or for that matter ale alex, how does this differ from those. You probably wont be surprised, im sorry, how does the coke funded cause, the network of organization, at this point you probably wont be surprised when i tell you i found that charles coke was one of the early people supporting the federal society and helping to promote its program. One thing i will say about both men, i think theres a danger on the left of the smartest kid on the class, arent they dumb, are we smart like trump with his tweet, that is the kiss of death. Thats the worst thing people on the left can do. It does make people look like snobs, like their condescending and it keeps us from understanding how incredibly shrewd some of these people are. Charles coke, a lot of people have said this guy inherited this guys business, big deal. What he got from his father, he has increased over a thousand times his value. Hes a very shrewd thinker, always thinking six moves ahead and i think if somebody wants to deceive this project, others have to Pay Attention and how do we save our institution. Im not sure i quite address about all these organizations, this is when a try to get into this. It was just crazy how the same people circulate in the network and the state policy network and the religious right, im actually starting to work on digital graphics because its beyond the normal human beings mind or ability. One more question and i see a gentleman there with a tie and a blue sweater. You sir, by the bookshelf. First of all, again, at this point in the story you will not be surprised to know that people who are involved in the cause helped bring us to the financial crisis. Phil gramm was working with this cause, very committed public choice economist in the senate when he was pushing for financial deregulation. His wife, wendy graham, was presiding over the center that they created in the cannons name at george mason and all of these people were involved in pushing open the financial industry for the relation for allowing all the stuff to have an. Was there a moment of shame that the ideas didnt work out . No, not a moment of shame. Just a more aggressive push to take advantage of the crisis in the dislocation of that financial collapse to move this agenda even harder. So, thank you for that question. I think our time is up but i just want to say, wow, i am thrilled to see so many people here. [cheering and applause] each year since 1950, the National Book award is given out by the National Book foundation, an organization sponsored by the Publishing Industry and literary institutions. Authors in four categories, poetry, young peoples literature, fiction and nonfiction are presented with awards. Past winners include david mccullough, joan gideon, and gorbachev. The winners of this years National Book award will be announced on november 15 in new york city. One of this years finalist for nonfiction is Yale Law School professor, james foreman, who in his book locking up our own looks at how criminal