September 6, 2024
A brand new investigative podcast reveals the poisonous legacy of the founding father of contemporary American plutocracy.
When Supreme Court docket Justice Lewis Powell died in 1998, The New York Occasions’ obituary hailed him as a choose “who introduced a voice of moderation and civility to an more and more polarized Court docket throughout his 15-year tenure.” The newspaper added, “He was the balancer and compromiser, a political reasonable with an aversion to heated rhetoric and doctrinal rigidity.”
As so usually, the Occasions was distilling the elite consensus, a view that had a component of reality provided that one accepted a really slender that means of “moderation.” Powell’s fame as an avatar of middle-of-the-road sanity rested largely on his social liberalism. Powell joined the Supreme Court docket in 1972 after an extended profession as one of many nation’s high company attorneys, identified notably for his lengthy affiliation with the tobacco firm Philip Morris. Powell’s fame for moderation rested largely on his private model as an old-school Southern gentleman and his liberalism on social issues. He was a part of the 7-2 majority that affirmed a constitutional proper to abortion in Roe v. Wade and helped shield affirmative motion in Regents of the College of California v. Bakke (1978). Each selections have been overturned by subsequent right-wing courts.
Powell additionally benefited from the distinction between his social liberalism and the more and more strident conservatism of newer Republican appointees to the Supreme Court docket. When Powell resigned in 1987, Ronald Reagan tried to switch him with Robert Bork, a rebarbative reactionary who was seen because the antithesis of Powell. Bork’s nomination failed, however subsequent Supreme Court docket justices resembling Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have made many centrist liberals nostalgic for the age of Lewis Powell.
But Powell’s moderation was extremely selective, coming into play solely on points the place the facility of massive enterprise was not at stake. On financial issues—which make up the majority of circumstances that come earlier than the Supreme Court docket—Powell was no compromiser however an open partisan of unchecked company domination of society.
A part of the energy of the superb new documentary podcast collection Grasp Plan (created by the journalist David Sirota and his group at The Lever) is that it completely debunks the tasteless picture of Powell as a reasonable and as a substitute reveals that he was one of many founding fathers of contemporary American plutocracy. Powell earns explicit delight of place within the present due to his authorship of a infamous 1971 memo (ready for the US Chamber of Commerce) that laid out a technique for a company counterrevolution in opposition to the rising social actions of the Nineteen Sixties and early ’70s (notably the Black Energy motion, environmentalism, and client safety). The memo was a name to arms for company America to make use of its financial energy to push again in opposition to the left, with explicit emphasis on the significance of gaining sway over the courts, the academy, and the media.
The Powell Memo was the Challenge 2025 of the Nixon period—an in depth program for establishing and entrenching right-wing energy over the commanding heights of American authorities and society.
Present Challenge
On the left, there’s been a lot dispute over the precise affect of the Powell Memo: Was it actually the blueprint for the conservative counterrevolution in opposition to liberalism that has remade America—or simply the little-read grousing of an indignant company lawyer?
Writing in The American Prospect in 2005, coverage analyst Mark Schmitt decried the “delusion” that the memo was influential. Schmitt claimed: “The memo was circulated inside Chamber of Commerce circles and have become public after Powell’s affirmation to the courtroom, when journalist Jack Anderson unearthed it to query Powell’s judicial temperament. After that, it appears to have been forgotten.”
To its credit score, Grasp Plan forthrightly addresses Schmitt’s cheap argument, and makes use of contemporary investigative reporting to doc that the Powell Memo, removed from having been “forgotten” after Jack Anderson’s reporting, was in reality the seedbed for high-level right-wing organizing that undergirds the conservative counterrevolution.
To light up each the Powell Memo and its legacy, Grasp Plan highlights Powell’s formation throughout his profession as a company lawyer. He was no mere legal-gun-for-hire for Philip Morris however a full-fledged wartime consigliere, deeply concerned in strategizing the agency’s lengthy marketing campaign of disinformation to discredit the science proving that smoking causes most cancers. This marketing campaign included pioneering the creation of astroturf teams that each lied in regards to the science and pretended to be impartial grassroots voices—a way later picked up by fossil gas companies selling local weather change denial.
This opposition to mainstream medical science grew out of a perception that nothing ought to stand in the best way of company revenue, actually not any concern for the well being of people or collective concern for environmental prices. A part of the spark for the Powell Memo was Powell’s anger that client advocate Ralph Nader was turning into a preferred hero, topic to glowing profiles even in pro-business journals resembling Fortune.
This pro-capitalist perspective went hand-in-hand with rabid anti-communism and a willingness to assault any radical motion as subversive. Throughout his years as a company lawyer, Powell was an in depth confidant of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and an informant to the FBI. The Powell Memo compares the Black Panther Get together and New Left teams to Nazis.
The Powell Memo was written at a time when company America felt below siege by the rising calls for of latest social actions. It helped impress the counterrevolutionary response to progressive politics that encompassed not simply Midwestern producers and petite bourgeoisie (who had lengthy fashioned the spine of the American proper) but in addition new allies amongst nation membership Republicans and company America (in different phrases, the type of individuals Powell labored with at Philip Morris). These teams had been at odds for the reason that begin of the Chilly Warfare—which divided the isolationists from the internationalists—however the Powell Memo found out a method to unite them in opposition to a typical enemy.
The Powell Memo provided the enterprise world an strategy to politics that Powell had already seen work in Philip Morris’s marketing campaign in opposition to medical science: a flexing of lobbying energy by astroturf teams and a two-fisted opposition to any try and restrict company spending in politics.
Grasp Plan opens with a outstanding scene that occurred after Powell was elevated to the Supreme Court docket. Philip Morris threw a lavish social gathering, hiring none apart from legendary CBS Information anchor Walter Cronkite to emcee a present highlighting key moments in Powell’s life. Powell was additionally offered with a present: a judicial robe with the Phillip Morris emblem stitched on—as if he had been a race automobile driver promoting his sponsor. There’s not a lot of a leap from that robe to the costly presents Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have accepted from their billionaire buddies.
Removed from being forgotten, the Powell Memo was an underground bestseller in enterprise circles. The Chamber of Commerce made copies simply accessible within the many 1000’s. Readers of the memo embrace a veritable pantheon of right-wing donors: the Koch brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Joe Coors.
In 1973, the Chamber of Commerce organized two Powell Memo Job Pressure conferences. One was held in Disney World and was attended by Republican Home minority chief Gerald Ford (who would quickly to ascend to the presidency). Different members of the duty drive, as David Sirota notes, “included CBS president Richard Jenks, ABC government James Hagerty, Advert Council chairman Barton Cummings, Metromedia government Mark Evans, Hill & Knowlton president James Cassidy, and newspaper magnate Edward Scripps II.”
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A concurrent Powell Memo Job Pressure met in Dallas and featured a speech by a younger tv producer, Roger Ailes—later the founding father of Fox Information. In response to a report by attendee John Howard (president of Rockford Faculty), Ailes “outlined the facility which advertisers would have the ability to exert upon TV programming in the event that they had been moved to take action.” Ailes suggested company on “the place and the way they will apply leverage and be given the instruments to exert the leverage.”
In 1974, CBS president Arthur Taylor in correspondence wrote about how the Powell Memo Job Pressure spurred him to push journalists at this community to be friendlier to large enterprise. Taylor wrote, “I’ve been making an attempt as persuasively as attainable for the final 12 months to right the scenario at CBS Information with some outcomes, however I’m afraid it’s going to take a very long time.”
Given the proof offered in Grasp Plan, the Powell Memo had a really clear real-world affect. It wasn’t a distant capturing star. It was an enormous asteroid that smashed the earth. It supplied the theoretical program for right-wing suppose tanks within the coming many years of ideological conflict, and gave company donors a technique for maximizing the affect of their spending in politics. Extra broadly, it may be pretty seen because the inspiration for such establishments as Fox Information and the Federalist Society.
From the vantage level of the current, the Powell Memo was the precursor to Challenge 2025. The query that ought to hang-out us is: If the Powell Memo achieved a lot, how far more may Challenge 2025 accomplish?
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Onwards,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Writer, The Nation
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