It’s always hard in politics for people to take their opponents’ views seriously, but it’s become ever harder in Trump’s America. People are more engaged with politics, but only because they want to beat the other side, not understand it. This means scholars have a greater responsibility than ever to help ordinary citizens understand how the people with whom they disagree think, and what their opponents are actually doing.
Most scholars get this. Political scientists and historians, who admittedly tend to range from the political center to the left wing, have written extensively about the origins and development of American conservatism, for instance.*
This kind of work is not just important because it involves scholarly objectivity and generosity — although that is true. It also promotes smarter politics. Superficial scare narratives about the other side may make us feel good, but they can drive poor decision-making. Intelligent partisans want to understand what truly motivates their opponents so that they can learn from their adversaries and even steal their good ideas.
That brings us to Nancy MacLean’s much publicized, heavily praised (in some quarters) recent book on public choice economics, Democracy in Chains, which focuses on the role of Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan. Public choice economics is an approach that asks how special interests can seek “rents,” or income unrelated to economic productivity, by getting self-interested bureaucrats and government agencies to regulate in their favor. It examines the impact of institutional rules on economic outcomes, usually from the standpoint of an assumption that market processes naturally align with the public interest but governmental processes do not.
MacLean’s book, published by Penguin Random House, has been hailed as a kind of skeleton key to the rightward political turn in American political economy by intellectuals including the journalist Jamelle Bouie, who says he came away from the book “completely shook”; the novelist Genevieve Valentine, who says on NPR.org that the book demonstrates a “clear and present danger” to US democracy; and writers at publications such as Slate and Jacobin.
That the book has, quite amazingly, been shortlisted for a National Book Award will only increase its sales and influence.