1.Returning to the Nancy MacLean imbroglio for what I hope is the very, very last time, and only to respond to the latest Jacobin podcast where MacLean says some Things That Are Wrong about Steve Teles and I. To be clear - I don't object to her calling our arguments silly - I've
2. said sharp things about her book. I do wish that she would actually respond to the criticisms that people have made of her book, rather than switching back and forth between they're "on the take" and various change-the-subject non-responses.
3. MacLean makes the following claims about Steve and I. That we were "very quick out the gate" and "it was clear from the piece that they hadn't read [the book]." That Steve had an undisclosed conflict of interest because
4. "- he "did not alert readers that he had a book coming out with the vice-president of Cato." That what we presented as a possible alternative to her argument (Buchanan might have been opportunistically taking advantage of white politics) was "exactly what I argue in the book”
5. (Here, she suggests we pull off the tricky feat of simultaneously presenting a structural account of racism, and demonstrating that political scientists, in comparison to historians, don't really get what structural accounts of racism involve).
6. Also, responding to a question about us, she says: "their effort is a rather pathetic quest to deflect public attention from the crucial part of my book, which is how these ideas have been weaponized by the Koch donor network to achieve what it cannot achieve if it is honest "
7. And "These guys just go after these silly things in the book and misrepresent them in order to create smog so that people will not encounter the important argument of the work." Here, she may possibly not be going after us in particular, but just sloppily conflating
8. her criticisms of us together with her condemnation what she sees as a more general campaign against her - but if this is what she means, it is at best highly ambiguous in context. Responding to these points in turn:
9. The suggestion that we did not read the book is quite untrue. I read it three times before writing the response (which was, frankly, three times more than it deserved). This all came about by accident. I bought the book because it had been recommended by Jamelle Bouie,
10. And was hoping for a good, well researched take on the involvement of Koch with public choice. For my personal values it certainly didn't have to be neutral - I'd have enjoyed a good Mayer-style polemic - but it did have to be solid on the facts. Unfortunately, it stunk.
11. By coincidence, I was having coffee with Steve the day after I finished it. Since this book was on topics closely related to Steve's own research (MacLean relies on Steve's own book for parts of her narrative), I mentioned it to him, and asked had he read or heard of it.
12. He hadn't. After further discussion (when he went and read it), we decided to write a piece together responding to it. This prompted me to go back through the book again twice, highlighting important bits, and checking as many of the sources as were publicly available.
13. So this was not a Koch inspired review (readers: I am not part of the Koch network). As to Steve's purported conflict of interest - MacLean's claim demonstrates all the same careful attention to detail as her book does.
14. When the review came out @lindsey_brink was not a vice president of Cato - he had left, to help set up the liberal-leaning Niskanen Center. I don't know why he moved - I do know that there had long been speculation he was too leftie for Cato- slate.com/blogs/weigel/2… .
15. MacLean claims that her only argument was that Buchanan didn't care about white Southern politics and was just being opportunistic on behalf of individual liberty. Unfortunately, what she actually says in her own book contradicts this.
16. She declines to engage with what we discuss in our essay - how she explicitly claims that Buchanan formed his center in order to push back against a "perverted" Northern liberalism that threatened the white Southern way of life. When she talks about "individual liberty" 
17. she suggests that this is a term that had a "coded meaning." She also spends a lot of time in a somewhat odd effort to link Buchanan to Southern agrarian thought that he seems not to have been particularly influenced by (I would guess that she is trying to
18. link Buchanan's ideas about "Leviathan" to the different notions explicated by this school, but admit that the line of reasoning is too murky for me to be quite sure what her claim is. In any event, she clearly wants to have it both ways.
19. NB that as we say, we are not looking to defend Buchanan - just to see solid supporting evidence for her historical claims. Finally, and this is something where I really wish @DanielDenvir had pushed her with follow up questions -at the end of the talk, he asks her about our
20. claim that what she attributes to Buchanan, was in fact Koch's own "homespun management philosophy." This prompts her to launch into a long discussion about how Koch makes everyone "bow" to this philosophy, and completely fails to address the point we make.
21. The crux of her big argument about Buchanan's influence on Koch is a claim that Koch acknowledged the power of Buchanan's "framework" in a GMU speech. This is as far as I can see the only direct evidence of influence, But as the speech shows - web.archive.org/web/2008082813…
22. Koch is not actually praising Buchanan (who's only mentioned in passing). He is instead praising his own cock-eyed management philosophy. The smoking gun turns out to be a balloon party pistol twisted together by a children's party magician, apt to pop with rough treatment.
23. My apologies to all for this long thread - hopefully putting it together like this will allow those who want to to ignore it. Also - this is my response, not Steve's (he hasn't seen this). But the problems that MacLean faces are not simply
24. as she would like to pretend, that she has outraged libertarians and Koch flunkies. It is that the book is riddled with empirical holes (a conclusion I and Steve came to quite independently before the furore began).
25. Her situation will worsen as the reviews from people who are actually familiar with the material she is writing about start rolling in. Sooner or later, if she has any sense, she needs to start responding to substantive criticisms with substantive answers. Finis.
Minor correction - Niskanen was already going before Brink went there.
Correction - following information from Brink, the above should read "when the review came out, Brink Lindsey was on the point of leaving Cato (he departed 10 days later).
