Some of the reviews for this book, those not ideologically or politically driven mention some potential out of context or overly emphasized quotes. Fair enough. We should aim to do good history when we write and read history. What I can’t deny about this book is the analysis of the information that is already publicly know, but often hidden and obscured, and the vision that this book paints about the future.
What seems to me the most important idea presented here is that even with the election of Trump in 2016 and the reorganizing, this book is a good reminder that Trump ultimately is a sympton, no matter how currently present, of the hidden attempts to undermine the financial and legal fabric of the US, and pretty much the world by extension, by liberatarian and financially conservative elements who view “personal freedom” through the lens of corporate freedom. MacLean focuses on the two figure prominently here: Jim Buchanan, the Nobel prize winning economist who helped to create the massive resistance to integration in the 1950s and helped to lead the liberatarian anti-tax, anti-regulation movement early on, and then the Kock brothers, who funded so many of the specific attempts move the country in a sharp right-ward financial direction in the last twenty.
It’s also a reminder that while autocracy seems to be in the air right now, oligarchy has long been the goal, and more obviously, oligarchy was long the present until the 1930s essentially.
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