Worth Reading

This isn't new, but I thought you'd all like a look at Lewis F. Powell's conservative call to arms, known as the Powell Manifesto, written in 1971 and the intellectual lynchpin of what became the conservative movement in modern politics. Try to forget, as you read it, what you disagree with, and to notice what works about it, how the conservatives built, while out of power and in the midst of Watergate, and how it served them afterwards.

It was, by the way, a different time then. Bank of America branches were firebombed, radicalism in the US was something other than what we saw during 1999's Battle in Seattle. I don't say that with phony nostalgia, either. I have less use for the Weather Underground than I do today's college Republicans.

However, and this is key, I think, look at the rhetorical stance here. Powell argues that Big Business isn't influential in America. He even argues that lobbying for big business is hard as phony proof that business had little influence on American politics. Sure, it's baloney, but the key motivating bit in this piece is that "we're in the minority, we're under attack, they're trying to destroy us."

He also argues for what became corporate America's most effective weapon -- active public relations, combative if need be.

What Powell called for came to pass. His allies formed right wing think tanks, their own quasi literary publications, they branded the media "liberal" and won over a lot of ordinary Americans to the corporate cause, convincing them that their interests were the same as the interests of businessmen. He did this at a time when it seemed that the country was headed leftward. When he did it, it was barely noticed. Look where we are now.