Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean

Author:Nancy MacLean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-10T15:06:03+00:00

CHAPTER 12

THE KIND OF FORCE THAT PROPELLED COLUMBUS

By the mid-1990s, a colleague reported, Charles Koch had grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress being made in furtherance of the cause.1 Among trusted allies, he revealed his weariness with the sometimes cultlike libertarian movement, “ossified by purity tests” and plagued as it was by “personality cults.”2 Nor was he all that impressed with the elected officials to whom he was more and more looking for help. The cause’s most recent near miss—the “Contract with America,” with its marquee pledge to amend the U.S. Constitution to require a balanced budget—might have caused someone with a less steely determination to give up. But Koch just kept on looking, firm in the belief that somewhere out there was the set of ideas that could break through the impasse.3 That search would lead him back to James Buchanan’s front door, which the scholar opened wide, not knowing that after doing so he would find himself exiting out of the back.

The Contract with America was not a public choice document, per se, although the man most responsible for its creation, Richard “Dick” Armey, could not have been a more loyal, dedicated, or hardworking convert to the cause. A believer in public choice theory, he had earlier been chair of the economics department at North Texas State (now the University of North Texas). “The market’s rational, the government’s dumb” was “Armey’s Axiom No. 1,” which he repeated constantly, as if that settled the matter. When the university grew too “liberal and politically correct” for his comfort, a right-wing oilman on the board of regents persuaded him to run for Congress on the Republican ticket in 1984. Armey brought a zealot’s determination to the fight for “drastic reforms,” including abolishing the minimum wage and ending Social Security. Once elected to the House of Representatives, he turned to the Cato Institute for help in staffing his congressional office. His first decade had gone well.4

With his trademark cowboy boots and Texas swagger, and a readiness to roll up his sleeves when needed to do the hard work of shepherding stray Republicans back into line, he quickly became something of a hero among his fellow GOP congressmen. When they learned that Armey was the true intellectual and strategic force behind one of the most daring forays in modern U.S. politics, every one of the 367 Republican candidates for the House and nearly all the incumbents got on board. On a late September afternoon, nearly two hundred staged a signing of the contract before news cameras at the Capitol, one by one publicly affirming their commitment to the agenda.5

The signing occurred six weeks before the 1994 elections, midway through President Bill Clinton’s first term in office. 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.

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