In June 2017 MacLean published Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, focusing on the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan and his work in public choice theory, Charles Koch, George Mason University, and the libertarian movement in the U.S, who, she argues, have undertaken "a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and national levels back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation." According to MacLean, Buchanan represents "the true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right." Receptionĭemocracy in Chains, "led to an enormous, highly charged debate," mostly along partisan lines between "Team Public Choice or Team Anti-Buchanan". In 2013, MacLean participated in SPNC panels and forums held in opposition to the legislative agenda of Republican majority of the North Carolina General Assembly. She served as co-chair of Scholars for a Progressive North Carolina (SPNC). In 2010, MacLean to moved to Duke University. In defense of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), representative Javier Morillo said that MacLean and fellow signatories of the open letter had “signed onto a set of arguments without doing some research and fact-checking you require, when producing work in your own fields.” Later, Morillo and Andy Stern (then SEIU-president) publicly apologized to MacLean and other academics. In 2009, she published an open “letter of concern about SEIU’s interference with UNITE–HERE”, the hotel-employees and garment-workers union, which was co-signed by other academics at Northwestern University. MacLean spoke in favor of and participated in the Living Wage Campaign.
Maclean’s doctoral thesis later became her first book, published as Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994).įrom 1989 to 2010 MacLean taught at Northwestern University, where she served as chairwoman of the Department of History, and as the Peter B. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied under Linda Gordon. In 1981, MacLean completed a four-year, combined-degree, B.A./M.A program in history at Brown University, graduating magna cum laude.