How many of you know about the Powell Manifesto?

[GliderGuider]

No, not Colin Powell, rather Lewis F. Powell, Jr. He was a lawyer from Richmond Virginia, who took Hugo Black's seat on the Supreme Court in 1972 and served until 1987. He was known as a centrist on the bench, but his claim to fame as far as America should be concerned comes from an aggressively pro-business manifesto he wrote to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in mid-1971.

I've been casting around trying to understand WTF is going on in America today, and why. Powell's manifesto is as close as I've come so far to finding a recognizable "seed event" for the massive rightward shift in the country's philosophical center of gravity.

Powell was convinced that the American business system was under attack, specifically from universities and consumer organizations like the one led by Ralph Nader. His manifesto proposed a massive, coordinated, multi-front counter attack using corporate financial and intellectual resources. Essentially he urged businessmen to become political, in much the same way that the Evangelical church has recently encouraged political activism among its members.

He identified four fronts: academe, media, politics and the court system. In each case he proposed to foster institutions that would promote business interests, "enlighten public thinking" and resist outside control or regulation of businesses by environmentalists or consumer advocates.

The Manifesto got wide distribution within the business community, and stirred such people as Joseph Coors and organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society to contribute money and establish programs. One main aim of these new programs and organizations was and is to reeducate the public along pro-business lines by funding and promoting pro-business academic studies, news stories and litigation. Organizations like the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Smith Richardson, and Coors' Castle Rock foundations continue to do this, focusing on such areas as weakening affirmative action, and curbing access to courtrooms by death-row prisoners, the handicapped, minorities, and the elderly - to appeal, to sue, to vote.

So there it is - the origin of the rightward shift in American culture over the last 30 years. This change did not occur through some accidental convergence of circumstances. It was engineered from the ground up. When these forces teamed up with the Evangelical movement, and especially their extreme Dominionist wing, they got the power they needed to move decisively into the political arena. The rest, as they say, is history.

Seen in this context the tenor of the discussion and degree of polarization surrounding the recent presidential election makes perfect sense. American society is in the middle of being re-engineered by corporate interests, and the evidence shows they are well on their way to final victory.

Two further questions can be raised: why was the shift to the right, and why was a very active left wing unable to counter it?

The 60's were a profoundly anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchic, anti-structural time. Both the tone of the times and the agendas of the advocacy groups that appeared were tremendously threatening to business. Corporations are authoritarian, hierarchic and structural, so to protect them the movement that Powell triggered promoted those values. And those are right wing values.

The reason the left was unable to counter it goes to the diffused yet organized nature of the assault. The reason was not inept leadership on the left. Rather, the business interests had funding sources not available to the left, and were generally discreet about the goals of their actions. So it was very much a stealth move. With the money came the ability to generate mutually reinforcing messages from a number of apparently unconnected directions: universities, think tanks, media, churches and politicians. That gave the movement the power to permeate the "psychosphere" - the virtual realm where ideas live, compete, reproduce and die - and it ended up feeling to many people (51%?) like this was the only way the world could possibly work.

The final question is, of course, how do we undo the damage? I don't know, but I fear it's going to take a long time. The right wing has a 30 year head start. That's a whole generation, during which time they have not only consolidated their hold on power and utterly polluted the psychosphere with this thought pattern, but they have also dumbed down the public education system to such an extent that the critical thinking requiired to detect that pollution is to a great degree a lost art. The first weapons we need are knowledge and an understanding of what is really going on. To that end, I commit these musings to the Internets (sic).

The Powell Manifesto


Edit for formatting.

[klook]

1. Not until now. Thanks.

A recent poll of students on 12 representative campuses reported that:

"Almost half the students favored socialization of basic U.S. industries."

Ah, the good old days!

And:

Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader who -- thanks largely to the media -- has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans. A recent article in Fortune speaks of Nader as follows:

"The passion that rules in him -- and he is a passionate man -- is aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power. He thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great many corporate executives belong in prison -- for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer. He emphasizes that he is not talking just about 'fly-by-night hucksters' but the top management of blue chip business."

More frivolous lawsuits!


Complete text of the manifesto is here:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/stories/powellmanifesto.htm

edited to add Nader quote

[atommom]

2. Thanks for the information! Every scrap of logic and reason is

precious to us here on the internets. We see so little of it elsewhere....

[pnorman]

3. Selling Free Enterprise ...

... The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960". (University of Illinois Press). That's the title of the book I'm re-reading at this moment. That "Powell Manifesto" isn't mentioned, but it gives a good overview of that process which started in the Twenties, and went BIG TIME from the early Thirties. Its clearly still underway. Thanks for the tip ... I'll Google-search "Powell Manifesto" later tonight.

pnorman