Hi there. My name is Paul Constant. I'm a writer here at Civic Ventures. I'm a

co-founder of the Seattle Review of Books. I've worked in independent bookstores

for many years and I generally spend all my time reading when I'm not writing policy for civic ventures.

So sometimes people are shocked to learn that I do not read every single book.

In fact I cannot read every single book and sometimes the amount of shock that I get

from people you haven't read this book it

feels like almost a personal indictment so when I told my coworkers that I hadn't

read Democracy and Chains by Nancy McLean. They were horrified.

And I immediately had to rectify that error.

And now that I have read it, I'm shocked that I hadn't read it

before, because this is kind of an essential book

for understanding how we got to where we are in America today.

Democracy in Chains is a history of a Nobel Prize winning economist named James McGill Buchanan

and how he built sort of a machine that on the remains of the Jim Crow South

that would eventually come to exclude women, non-white Americans, and poor Americans

from the democratic process in America.

Sometimes you read a book that sort of shakes you to your core

because it reveals a conspiracy theory that actually turns out to be true.

This is one of those cases. McLean is a great narrator of a real

conspiracy that has stretched over most of the 20th century and which has I would say

completely shaped 20th century America.

Buchanan is the instigator of a vicious campaign to stoke opposition to voting rights,

...