Conservatives Chaining Democracy

Yes, conservatives have always hated and feared democracy.  Yes, it all goes back to slavery. Yes, they will do anything to establish autocracy.

You already knew that.  But Nancy MacLain proves it.

Colin Gordon in a terrifying review:

Democracy in Chains is a revelation, as politics and as history.

We know a lot about the rise of the Right in postwar America ....

Democracy in Chains assembles all of these fragments into a much more coherent, and much more frightening, whole.

It establishes the Jim Crow roots of the modern right, not just through the GOP’s southern strategy but through shared doubts about the compatibility of property rights and democratic rule. It demonstrates that the lurch right in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Iowa represents not some existential crisis of a forgotten working class but the triumph of a long push to use statehouses as laboratories for autocracy. It understands the post–Citizens United wave of “dark money” as but the most recent chapter in a long history of corporate stealth and influence.

And it reminds us that, however incompetent the current White House and legislative leadership, they are winning handily.