On this episode of The Critical Hour with Dr. Wilmer Leon, To honor the centennial of Madiba's birth, Former President Barack Obama delivers the 16th Annual Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture. The theme was "Renewing the Mandela Legacy and Promoting Active Citizenship in a Changing World". It focused on creating conditions for bridging divides, working across ideological lines, and resisting oppression and inequality. The Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture is a unique platform to drive debate on critical social issues in South Africa and around the world.
For most of his life, Nelson Mandela fought for democracy and equality. His presidency was defined by his efforts to solidify the fragile democracy of South Africa, and by his lessons on the politics of bridge-building' over the politics of division.
And later we'll ask the question, "Is our democracy in peril? A new book, "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America" is an explosive exposé of the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.
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.
In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.
GUESTS:
Luzuko Kuti — Spokesperson for Mandela Foundation.
Nancy MacLean — Award-winning author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry and Freedom is Not Enough, which was called by the Chicago Tribune "contemporary history at its best." The William Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University.
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