The White-Supremacist Roots of America’s Libertarian

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Democracy often hinges on straightforward arithmetic. Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the United States appeared to be moving closer to the democratic principle of “one person, one vote.” In recent decades, however, that progress has eroded. Presidential elections have twice resulted in winners who did not secure the popular vote, and efforts to restrict ballot access have expanded at the federal, state, and local levels.

In Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, historian Nancy MacLean traces these developments back to resistance against the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In response to school desegregation, white supremacist leaders organized what they called “massive resistance.” In Virginia’s Prince Edward County, officials went so far as to close the entire public school system for several years rather than integrate.

According to MacLean, defenders of racial hierarchy soon recognized that direct defiance of federal law was unsustainable. As public opinion shifted against segregation, they sought subtler strategies. Rather than openly defending Jim Crow, some intellectuals began questioning democracy itself as an obstacle to preserving existing power structures.

One of the central figures in this shift was economist James Buchanan. A free-market advocate who chaired the economics department at the University of Virginia, Buchanan founded a center for political economy in 1956 aimed at countering what he viewed as the dominance of collectivist thinking. By the late 1950s, Buchanan and his colleagues proposed privatizing public education as a response to desegregation, reframing racial inequality as a question of market efficiency and parental choice.

Critics argue that this approach ignored longstanding disparities in wealth and opportunity, ensuring that privatization would reinforce segregation rather than eliminate it. Although Virginia lawmakers ultimately rejected the proposal, MacLean contends that its logic has endured. Privatization, she writes, has since shaped policy debates across public life, from infrastructure failures to labor disputes, as part of a broader effort to limit democratic control and expand elite influence.

A key supporter of this intellectual movement was billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. In the early 1980s, Koch helped fund Buchanan’s institute at George Mason University, transforming it into a major center for libertarian economic thought. Scholars trained there went on to promote policies that emphasized market outcomes over democratic decision-making.

Even after Buchanan’s break with Koch in the late 1990s, this tradition continued. Economist Tyler Cowen, writing from George Mason University’s Koch-funded Mercatus Center, argued that highly market-oriented societies have often been less democratic. He suggested that if democratic institutions obstruct market reforms, those institutions themselves should be reconsidered.

Cowen went further, proposing that weakening constitutional checks and balances could produce better outcomes, including a fundamental reworking of the social contract. In his view, social stratification would be an acceptable consequence of maximizing market freedom.

MacLean’s work, supporters say, offers a framework for understanding how these ideas gained influence and how they continue to shape public policy. They argue that confronting this legacy requires renewed civic engagement and a recommitment to democratic principles grounded in equal representation rather than concentrated power.

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