Jonathan Adler at the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog has kept one running list of the book’s flaws. Munger’s review essay is remarkable in that it is utterly devastating to MacLean’s thesis without being an exhaustive inventory of her mistakes. She contacted none of them, nor did she contact Bruce Caldwell at Duke’s Center for the History of Political Economy. The current president of the Public Choice Society Georg Vanberg is a Duke political scientist.

One of them (Geoffrey Brennan) was a prominent Buchanan coauthor, and the other (Munger himself) has written and spoken extensively on Buchanan. Duke’s political science department is home to two past presidents of the Public Choice Society. If you're going to read one review you should read her Duke colleague Michael Munger's long review essay for the Independent Institute.

Why? I think the most important reason is that she failed to make use of some of the most obvious resources at her disposal. MacLean has not produced an objective and well-researched account of a 'stealth plan' to keep 'Democracy in Chains' but rather a conspiracy tract better suited to the National Enquirer than National Public Radio (which fawned over it) or the National Endowment for the Humanities (which funded it). Board of Education.” It fails to engage Buchanan’s ideas – or even represent them accurately. It purports to be an extensively-researched expose on an intellectual movement rooted in the economist James McGill Buchanan’s (to quote the promotional blurb) “last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Democracy in Chains is – ironically, given author Nancy MacLean’s progressive politics – the perfect book for a presidential administration that subordinates truth to alternative facts.

Democracy in chains book review