Top 35 Nancy MacLean Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Months before a conservative Congress passed the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, called “the Slave Labor Act” by critics and passed over President Harry Truman’s veto, the state’s governor had signed a pioneering “right-to-work” law to weaken labor unions.”

— Nancy MacLean

2. “Democracy,” the towering African American historian John Hope Franklin observed in the midst of World War II, “is essentially an act of faith.”96 When that faith is willfully exterminated, we should not be surprised that we reap the whirlwind. The public choice way of thinking, one sage critic warned at the time James Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is not simply “descriptively inaccurate” – indeed, “a terrible caricature” of how the political process works.”

— Nancy MacLean

3. “Privately, Gordon Tullock and Jim Buchanan discussed the social control function of denying a liberal arts education to young people from lower-income families who had not saved to pay for it. “We may be producing a positively dangerous class situation,” Tullock said, by educating so many working-class youth who would probably not make it into management but might make trouble, having had their sights raised.”

— Nancy MacLean

4. “Note the emerging pattern, which we will see again: while criticizing government action that threatened his own liberty as a property owner, Calhoun saw nothing untoward in calling on the federal government to use its police powers to help his class stifle debate about its practices. That sleight of hand – denying the legitimacy of government power to act for the common good while using government power to suppress others – appears repeatedly in the pages that follow.”

— Nancy MacLean

5. “In 2010, the brilliant investigative journalist Jane Mayer alerted Americans to the fact that two billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, had poured more than a hundred million dollars into a “war against Obama.”

— Nancy MacLean

6. “The same cannot be said of James Buchanan. His impact is still being felt today. For it was Buchanan who guided Pinochet’s team in how to arrange things so that even when the country finally returned to representative institutions, its capitalist class would be all but permanently entrenched in power.”

— Nancy MacLean

7. “Both thinkers sought ways to restrict what voters could achieve together in a democracy to what the wealthiest among them would agree to.4.”

— Nancy MacLean

8. “Public interest has been subordinated to private interest, and when there is no clear distinction between them, it opens the door to endless opportunities for corruption.”48.”

— Nancy MacLean

9. “Buchanan carried the anti-organized-labor message into his classes, teaching his students that the Wagner Act had licensed “union monopolies” that distorted the wage structure. He used an example involving the state’s labor market, blaming the United Mine Workers of America for the rising unemployment of coal valleys.”

— Nancy MacLean

10. “Many liberals then and since have tended to miss this strategic use of privatization to enchain democracy, at worst seeing the proposals as coming simply from dogma that preferred the private sector to the public.”

— Nancy MacLean

11. “He and his fellow framers built numerous protections of minority rights and property rights into the document, among them the Electoral College and the Senate, with their systems of representation that favored less populous states.”

— Nancy MacLean

12. “The military officers who led the coup concluded that, once in power, not only did they have to reverse the gains that had been made under elected governments, but they also wanted to find a way to ensure that Chileans never again embraced socialism, no matter how strong the popular cries for reform.3 The solution they came up with was to rewrite the nation’s constitution to forever insulate the interests of the propertied class they represented from the reach of a classic democratic majority.”

— Nancy MacLean

13. “For all its fine phrases, what this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few.”

— Nancy MacLean

14. “Do we want to live in a cosmetically updated version of midcentury Virginia, in a country that so elevates property rights as to paralyze the use of government for democratically determined goals and needs? That extinguishes “the political we”?”

— Nancy MacLean

15. “President Eisenhower was not particularly interested in assisting integration, as he more than once made clear, but he worried that he could not maintain face as the leader of the free world if he ignored this affront to the nation’s legal system, one the Soviet Union was broadcasting to the world.”

— Nancy MacLean

16. “By 1860, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires per capita than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union. The source of southern wealth was staple crops – particularly cotton – produced by enslaved men, women, and children for world markets. So matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.”

— Nancy MacLean

17. “For all its fine phrases, what this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few. It would like to reinstate the kind of political economy that prevailed in America at the opening of the twentieth century, when the mass disfranchisement of voters and the legal treatment of labor unions as illegitimate enabled large corporations and wealthy individuals.”

— Nancy MacLean

18. “White southerners who opposed racial equality and economic justice knew from their own region’s history that the only way they could protect their desired way of life was to keep federal power at bay, so that majoritarian democracy could not reach into the region. That is why Harry Byrd was Barry Goldwater’s “philosophical soul mate,” in the words of Byrd’s biographer.18.”

— Nancy MacLean

19. “This is among the most profound shifts in our legal history,” warns a Reagan-appointed federal judge. His words bear slow reading: “Ominously, business has a good chance of opting out of the legal system altogether and misbehaving without reproach.” A subsequent headline noted that it amounts to a “Privatization of the Justice System.”73.”

— Nancy MacLean

20. “Today the big lie of the Koch-sponsored radical right is that society can be split between makers and takers, justifying on the part of the makers a Manichaean struggle to disarm and defeat those who would take from them.”

— Nancy MacLean

21. “Democratic processes are held back by authoritarian trammels,” President Bachelet complained in 2014. “We want a constitution without locks and bolts.”50.”

— Nancy MacLean

22. “He chose to build a career by turning a critical eye the other way: identifying and analyzing perceived “government failure,” so as to make the case that it should not be relied on by default without a sophisticated evaluation of its drawbacks. That was an innovative approach at the.”

— Nancy MacLean

23. “The signers promised that if the American people voted Republican, giving them the majority of seats, their new majority would bring up every item of the contract for a vote within the first one hundred days of the 104th Congress. They would radically “transform the way Congress works.”

— Nancy MacLean

24. “Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy.”

— Nancy MacLean

25. “During the boom, Chile’s economic gains had been privatized; now, in the crunch, the country’s losses were socialized.”

— Nancy MacLean

26. “If only one could break down the trust that now existed between governed and governing, even those who supported liberal objectives would lose confidence in government solutions.”

— Nancy MacLean

27. “Rowley said what others never dared to admit: “Far too many libertarians have been seduced by Koch money into providing intellectual ammunition for an autocratic businessman.” 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 tanks” would “speak out.” He was blunt about the reason why: “Too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by Charles and David Koch.”

— Nancy MacLean

28. “What animated Buchanan, what became the laser focus of his deeply analytic mind, was the seemingly unfettered ability of an increasingly more powerful federal government to force individuals with wealth to pay for a growing number of public goods and social programs they had had no personal say in approving.”

— Nancy MacLean

29. “As the main architect of the Constitution and a slave master of great wealth himself, Madison thought long and hard about how to protect minority rights in a government based on sovereignty of the people, a people then understood to be white men of property.”

— Nancy MacLean

30. “One feature eliminated local control of education; it compelled the governor to close and cut off funds to any school that planned to desegregate under federal court order.”

— Nancy MacLean

31. “Socialism, as the Mont Pelerin Society members defined the term, was synonymous with any effort by citizens to get their government to act in ways that either cost money to support anything other than police and military functions or encroached on private property rights.”

— Nancy MacLean

32. “Koch believed that what the famed economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” was so critical to the health of the capitalist system that empathy was an obstacle to acceptance of the world that must be brought into being.”

— Nancy MacLean

33. “Indeed, this massive and well-funded force is turning the party it has occupied toward ends that most Republican voters do not want, such as the privatization of Social Security, Medicare, and education.35.”

— Nancy MacLean

34. “Instead, he was mapping a social contract based on “unremitting coercive bargaining” in which individuals treated one another as instruments toward their own ends, not fellow beings of intrinsic value.”

— Nancy MacLean

35. “The paper’s owners, as one contemporary noted, took as a given that society separated itself into “those who ride and those who are the donkeys to be ridden.”25.”

— Nancy MacLean