Episode 120: Democracy Unchained with Dr. Nancy MacLean

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Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and a past president of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA). She is the author of several award-winning books, most recently, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” The Guardian said: “It’s the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century.” A New York Times bestseller, it was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs and the Lillian Smith Book Award for outstanding writing about the U.S. South. The Nation named it the “Most Valuable Book” of the year. In late 2023, Democracy in Chains was republished with a new preface that updates the book’s story to the present.

Her other publications include Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (coming out this spring in a 30th anniversary edition that explains how today’s radical MAGA right draws from that well, but is actually more dangerous); Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace; The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents; and Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present. Her scholarship has received more than a dozen major prizes and awards, and has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowships Foundation. Lately, she has been sounding the alarm on the imminent threat of a constitutional convention, which the right has been organizing for in earnest since 2013 and is likely to convene if MAGA candidates win control of Congress in November 2025.

Democracy in Chains:

Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan

Warn Voters About the Radicalism Beyond Trump: