"What is really happening to American politics? Behind the headlines of billionaires taking over our government is the surprising story of a secretive cause with deep and troubling roots. Democracy in Chains uncovers the history of the well-heeled radical right's vast network and explains why this movement doesn't want simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance as we have known it in the United States. But while billionaires now drive the effort, they did not start it; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Nancy MacLean names the true author of this cause's playbook--the Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan--and documents for the first time the strategy he and his collaborators developed over six decades to disempower the majority. In an engrossing narrative, MacLean shows how Buchanan first forged his ideas in Virginia, in a last-gasp attempt to preserve the power of the white elite in the wake of Brown