Nancy Maclean’s newest book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, has been named a finalist in the 2017 National Book Awards.

Maclean is the award-winning author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry, a New York Times “noteworthy” book of the year, and Freedom Is Not Enough, which was called by the Chicago Tribune “contemporary history at its best.” She is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and lives in North Carolina.


Maclean is the award-winning author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry, a New York Times “noteworthy” book of the year, and Freedom Is Not Enough, which was called by the Chicago Tribune “contemporary history at its best.” She is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and lives in North Carolina.

About the Book (From the publisher)

Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.