Lewis F. Powell Jr.

What's this? You ever

heard of a guy named Lewis Powell? Oh, he's a former member of the United States Supreme Court appointed by Nixon.

But before that, he's just an attorney in private practice.

representing business served on many boards.

And if you went back and read that memo today, it would probably set your hair on fire.

It was like, Holy shit.

this situation we find ourselves in in the United States, Lewis Powell wrote the fucking blueprint for it in 1971 and a memo to the United States chamber of commerce.

And you hear, you hear anybody talk, talk about, you know, when did, when did our politics really, really change in a substantive way? What I'm asking, When did our politics really, really change?

Within a year of his New York Times broadside, the intellectual infrastructure for a full corporate counteroffensive was being assembled.

In August 1971, Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who would be appointed to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court just two months later, drafted his now infamous memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce that reads today like a founding document of the modern right.

American free enterprise, Powell argued, was under systematic attack from campuses, from consumer advocates like Nader, from the media, from the government.

Business needed to fight back, not issue by issue, but institutionally by funding think tanks, placing economists in universities, cultivating the judiciary, and buying the credibility of the academy itself.

And some of my classmates were some of the earliest members of the Federalist Societies.

And you've heard me talk about the Powell Memorandum, Lewis Powell working for the Chamber of Commerce and a Virginia business lawyer who would eventually come on to the Supreme Court.

Good morning from Macedonia, Ohio.

I see you, Ashley.

But this is when the Powell Memorandum had been written in 1987.

I'm sorry, 1971.

And Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum that talked about the intersections of capitalism, American democracy, Christianity.

And he said, you know, we got to have robust think tanks and create intellectual warriors to defend this thing we have built.

Mm-hmm.

We are in the se- we're in the sequel to slavery, and these racists, uh, racists like Lewis Powell, the author of the Bakke case, who also was the au- author, as you know, and have talked about, the Powell me- ref- uh, Powell Memorandum, which said we have to defend Christianity and capitalism, and we need think tanks, which gave birth to the Heritage Foundation, uh, a couple of years later.

Uh, they have been fighting back since the 1960s, and I think that this is a wonderful moment for us if we can seize the time, as the Black Panthers would have said in the '60s and '70s.

I say it's a wonderful time because, you know, the most recent issue of The New Yorker that just came out this week is talking about a civil war going on at The Heritage Foundation.

And then Ronald Reagan came into office and said, no, we're going to take that apart and we're going to do it based on the Powell memo from 1971.

Lewis Powell by then was on the Supreme Court and had written the Buckley decision, the 1978 decision that said corporations are persons and money is speech.

So, you know, two years after the Powell memo, you had the Heritage Foundation.

You had the ALEC being formed.

You know, he cut out part of that famous Powell memo, which was the kind of blueprint that conservatives relied on.

This was, uh, Lewis Powell, who eventually became a Supreme Court justice, but beforehand wrote this, uh, paper for, uh, the Chamber of Commerce, which basically said, "If conservatives wanna win, we have to take over the universities.

We have to be in the media.

We sort of have to be everywhere.

Uh, the expectation was w- what, uh, you described with Ball and Cohen that, that this would gradually expand and become a universal program, and yet somewhere along the line something changed, and, uh, what was that something in your view?

Well, I think there's a very important memorandum, 1971, written by Lewis Powell that not enough people know about.

He was a corporate lawyer and then became a justice on the Supreme Court.

Um, and he wrote, um, a, really I would call it a screed rather than a, a memo.

Um, you also had this changing perception of the world that seemed to infect both Democrats and Republicans, perhaps varying degrees, but as Margaret Thatcher said in Great Britain, "There is no alternative." That there is only this, uh, so-called free market system that's neither free nor a market, but is called a free market system, uh, to, to guide us.

There is only that kind of, uh, uh, capitalism and capitalism in general, that social insurance, social programs, the public sector have no place in the future of the world.

And it seems to me, uh, um, I think if we look back over the post-war era and even before going into the Depression when Social Security was created, this was not the way, uh, many people saw the world, was it? I mean, it feels to me that a minority viewpoint, a rather extreme right-wing viewpoint, has sort of suffused the whole political, uh, and intellectual world, which I guess, you know, Lewis Powell had something to do with that too, but, uh, do, uh, do you agree with that?

I agree completely, and it's- I, I mean, I don't think if we were coming up with, um, these institutions today, we would have public libraries, we would have-

And here's where the book gets its title, because Anderson names names.

The most important one is Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer who later became a Supreme Court justice.

In 1971, he wrote a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

His argument was that the business community was under attack from liberal forces and needed to mount a systematic counter offensive.