In Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, MacLean traces an important strand in the history of ultraconservative thought in the United States, outlining how it informed campaigns to privatize everything from public education to Social Security. She begins her story in the 1950s, as the civil rights movement is fighting to desegregate the public schools, and follows the career of the Nobel Prize-winning political economist, James McGill Buchanan, as he connects with various wealthy libertarians, most particularly Charles Koch. It was Buchanan who taught Koch that for capitalism to thrive, democracy must be enchained. Professor MacLean discusses her book and the fierce rightwing response to it. A chapter from Democracy in Chains, "A World Gone Mad," can be found here. 

MacLean is the immediate past president of the Labor and Working Class History Association and award-winning author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan(1995), and Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2008).