Has anyone read this? I'm hearing positive interest from friends

Has anyone read this? I'm hearing positive interest from friends.

sounds like one big propaganda piece against the right wing, full of fluff and just enough buzzwords and misleading statistics to let left-wing pseudo intellectuals feel enlightened fuel their egos higher than it already is.

also unfiltered democracy is and was a mistake, if there was a conspiracy to get rid of it (there isn't) I would support it.

If you're liberal, it will reaffirm your views. If you're conservative, you're surprised to see it on the same shelf as Coulter, Hannity, and Palin. If you're moderate, you aren't picking it up.

It seems like reddit shit
>Le need to /r/esist the republicans trying to take over
But I also haven't read it and maybe it does make some good points but seems a bit silly to me

From what I've heard it has little to do with Trump (the #Resistance people are mostly centrists who thought everything was fine before Trump) and more to do with the conservative movement, which it asserts has held authoritarian and plutocratic tendencies from the beginning.

Democracy is fucking stupid, why anyone thought a mob would have inherent wisdom is beyond me

Its not about how effective it is, but about who can use it to attain power.

Of course those who are good at seducing masses would be pro-democracy, regardless of the long term consequences.

The left has always been about numbers and quantities, instead of qualities like strength, courage, and wisdom that the right represents in its metapolitical attitude.
Capitalism is not right wing, it might have competition, but its competition is limited to selling products and does not include the competition of violence and force that the old right used to represent.

>which it asserts has held authoritarian and plutocratic tendencies from the beginning.
if there's some right wing conspiracy, they're doing a terrible job.

paste dot ee/r/a6TnH/0

Nancy MacLean falls prey to the same confirmation bias as many others who believe they have unraveled a vast conspiracy, to the point of making a blatant factual error in attempting to link Buchanan to segregationist Donald Davidson with the only evidence being their use of the word "leviathan". Similarly there is speculation throughout, like this, which pins libertarianism on white and "capital" supremacism.

>The libertarian cause, from the time it first attracted wider support during the southern schools crisis, was never really about freedom as most people would define it. It was about the promotion of crippling division among the people so as to end any interference with what those who held vast power over others believed should be their prerogatives. Its leaders had no scruples about enlisting white supremacy to achieve capital supremacy. And today, knowing that the majority does not share their goals and would stop them if they understood the endgame, the team of paid operatives seeks to win by stealth. Now, as then, the leaders seek Calhoun-style liberty for the few—the liberty to concentrate vast wealth, so as to deny elementary fairness and freedom to the many.

Were some people driven to libertarianism by the Brown v. Board of Education case? I suppose some were to a degree, there are millions of people in America. Does this prove it is the overwhelming foundation of libertarianism? If you gather more evidence and do so impartially it is obvious there were a variety of influences justifying healthy skepticism towards MacLean's bold statements.

>Le superior intellect

I haven't read that book, but I read a similar book, Dark Money by Jane Mayer.

Past all the inflammatory language that sells books and gets people talking about it on the Internet, it has a pretty simply argument:
>unbelievably rich people exist
>unbelievably rich people sometimes spend money on politics
>money influences politics
>therefore, unbelievably rich people influence politics
>unbelievably rich people (besides maybe the high-profile Silicon Valley tech superstars) are generally conservative and against government regulation
>therefore, unbelievably rich people might favor spending their political dollars on libertarianism
>turns out, unbelievably rich people actually do spend a lot of money on libertarianism
>libertarianism as an ideological movement went from having almost no followers thirty years ago to being a major ideological influence in the modern republican party
>was it the money?
>probably

She supports this all with evidence she amassed during a very long, undercover, investigative journalism spree. And also the like, literal PIs that follow her everywhere she goes and steal documents from her office seem to confirm her theory.

It's becoming more of a trend in American politics in general to point out the influence of money in politics. If there is solid proof that money DOES actually influence elections, then it's not too large of a stretch to think that unbelievably wealthy people with strange/unpopular ideologies might spend money trying to make those ideologies less strange/more popular. But all of the obvious ways to give massive amounts of money have been made illegal, so they go through legal back alleys where they give larger numbers of smaller donations, making it hard to trace. That's the only "secret" part that sells the books and makes conservatives go ballistic accusing it of being a conspiracy.

I would be fine with this sort of stuff if they recognized it has little to do with the "Radical" Right.

There are 854,000 'contract personnel' with top secret clearances, employed by the government.
The federal and state governments employ at least 20 million Americans, either directly as civil servants or as private contractors and businesses which are almost entirely funded by government jobs.

The Ex-Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is a vice chairman of the same company. Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business.

This was during the Obama Administration. That's the kind of money in politics we should be worried about. Think Tanks are relatively unimportant. The Hillary campaign did a bunch of shady shit too, like violating rules involving Super PAC's being directly connected to the campaign, offering direct access to Hillary and associated officials for money, and the well known donations from Saudi Arabia, etc.

>it has little to do with the "Radical" Right.
I agree that there are MANY ways to get money into or out of the system, and MANY people do it, all for different reasons. Quite frankly, the system is broken. We just can't seem to get a hold on all the money trading hands, most likely because the people with the power to regulate such activities are the very same people benefiting from the lack of oversight. Many people will try to spin it as just a quirk of our system, or a problem that does not really have large consequences, but in my opinion, it's textbook political corruption. It's a problem that affects both the left and the right.

The goal of these books is just to demonstrate and document how one interest group, unbelievably wealthy people with a bent for deregulation, has abused this system. I think it's a reasonably sized topic for a book -- it would be difficult to capture in ONE book all the different ways that political corruption occurs. And I think these books on this specific brand of political corruption have been popular because they cover a topic that strikes a nerve with most Americans. Even if we don't see anything wrong with people simply having billions of dollars at their disposal, it irks our nearly universal democratic values that these people could be exerting more power on the system than just their one vote should allow.

Just one more thing --

>Think Tanks are relatively unimportant.
This is simply untrue. Pic related was one of my history textbooks for an American history course in college, and it was your standard just-the-facts, fairly-unbiased textbook. Though I do not have the book with me and cannot cite the page, I remember reading from here about Ronald Reagan's relationship with the Cato Institute. Every now and then, Reagan would have meetings with lobbyists from Cato, and something outstanding like over 50% of the policy suggestions made by Cato in these meetings found their way into Reagan's platforms or policies.

That is a hell of a lot of conjecture.

Has anyone read this before? I know of the Weatherman Underground but I saw this at the book store and was thinking of buying it.

Now there's an actual conspiracy right there

Several reviews have been written pointing out that the philosophers she links to American libertarianism are at best tangentially related, its also been argued she purposefully distorts the positions of various libertarian writers.

Even within the republican party libertarianism, even in its moderate form is a minority. The idea that the rich are pooring money into libertariansim and having a serious effect on politics is spurious at best.

Think Tanks are not all bad though. For many intellectuals and researchers of a conservative bent they could not do the kind of research they want in many universities: They would be past up because at best their work would be seen as uninteresting. Think tanks provide an alternative.

Granted there is always a risk of corporate donations corrupting the process but tones colleges accept such money, and private companies produce research all the time.

Her fundamental point isn't necessarily bad but the flaw is that libertarianism, as a whole, is a dead-in-the-water philosophy with little real influence. Certain regulations have been cut back over the decades, but others have grown.

Many unbelievably rich people are in favor of a strong centralized government as they don't like competition for their money

But user, those are just people donating their money to a good cause. Its only rich people who give there money to conservatives and libertarians who are evil oligarchs plotting the end of democracy.

All hail the the monarchy am I right my white brother?

Great book. Very thorough history of far left groups around the 60s

I always found the reaction to libertarian ism by progressives. At first htey are bemused by the social libertarian perspective, but they are then horrified by the views on individualism and limited goverment. So much so they conclude libertarians are worse than conservatives, despite having much more in common with them.

I'll e sure to pick it up next time I see it, how has the Weatherman Underground been generally forgotten from public memory? They were committing bombings in major cities for Christs sake!

>also unfiltered democracy is and was a mistake
authoritarianism and oppression was a mistake. The ideals of democracy and the republic should be upheld and those who wish to undermine it are traitors to the people.