Tag Archives: Powell Memo

The Long Game

Historians and scholars have pointed out that the current, previously unthinkable assault on America’s Constitution–especially on Separation of Church and State–and the accompanying war on science and education aren’t sudden eruptions. Recent documentaries like “Bad Faith” have focused on those I think of as the “anti-Founders,” the men who began their theocratic and plutocratic efforts more than fifty years ago, willing to play the long game.

A game that is now bearing (rotten) fruit.

I was intrigued to come across a description of one strand of that long game, written in 2023 for Inside Higher Educatiion by Linda Stamato. Linda is an unusually perceptive scholar with whom I’ve become a sometime-email-correspondent, and her analysis focused on a much-discussed memorandum written by former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell–a memorandum “credited” with triggering the long corporate war against the nation’s universities and public education.

There is significant recognition of the way Powell’s memo jump-started the war on public education via the so-called “privatization” of the nation’s public schools through the vouchers that send our tax dollars to private, overwhelmingly religious, schools. In this essay, Stamato focuses on the less widely recognized influence of that memo on the current, ferocious assault on higher education. 

As she wrote,

The “war” on higher education in the U.S.—and the status it once held as a public good—has been going on for decades. This war no doubt has many points of origin. One can be found in a once-obscure, intended-to-be-confidential document, written for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971 by Lewis F. Powell Jr., shortly before he ascended to the nation’s highest court.

Decidedly conservative, and dead set against the academy, the Powell memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” placed higher education in its crosshairs.

Powell’s manifesto—the focus of this essay—laid the groundwork for much of what we now see in the efforts to undermine tenure, to prohibit faculty from appearing as expert witnesses to share their professional knowledge in legal proceedings and to undermine the autonomy of institutional governing boards, not to mention the explosion of bills and laws emanating from state legislatures that would dictate what is to be taught in college and university classrooms.

Powell’s memo began with the thesis that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” and he outlined what Stamato described as “a comprehensive, coordinated counteroffensive on the part of the American business community in response.” That response singled out “the Campus” as a source of those attacks.

Powell saw “bright young men,” from campuses across the country,” who were seeking “opportunities to change a system which they have been taught to distrust … if not, indeed, despise.” They sought these opportunities to challenge free market ideology through employment in “the centers of the real power and influence in our country”—namely the news media; in government, as staff and consultants; in elective politics; as lecturers and writers; and on the faculties of educational institutions.

Stamato describes Powell’s prescriptions for battling what we might now call a “woke” ideology–measures that we can now see in a variety Red state efforts to “balance” faculty ideologies and monitor what can be taught in America’s academic institutions. 

As Stamato reports, Powell’s memo prompted corporate interests to take up the challenge, and college campuses have been targets ever since. 

Richard Vedder, writing in Forbes, lays out the conservative campus movement—and it is that—as taking “at least four forms: entire schools where conservative or traditional values dominate campus life, national organizations promoting conservative ideas, foundations which support conservative or libertarian enclaves on campus, and non-university think tanks and research centers which provide conservative analysis of the world outside the traditional Ivory Tower.”

The article describes the ways in which the rise of conservative think tanks have influenced not just educational institutions, but the courts–and their success in creating language that obscures their ideological intent. Terms such as “intellectual freedom” and “viewpoint diversity” are used to justify restricting intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity. (One thinks of Humpty Dumpty from Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word, it means what I say it means…”)

The article is well worth your time to click through and read in its entirety.

The Powell memo, along with racism and fundamentalist hysteria over the growing secularization of society, spawned the current resistance to “elitism”–i.e., knowledge and expertise.  America’s current dysfunctions and the elevation of dangerous and embarrassing ignoramuses to positions of authority are rooted in efforts that began a long time ago. 

You really need to read the whole essay.

Comments

Follow The Money…

A recent diatribe posted to the progressive site Daily Kos made me think. It began with a recitation of the many indisputably negative elements of our current social and political environment.

Violence toward women and minorities has exploded. Armed militias tried to assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House in an attempted coup directed by the Republican President of the United States. They tried to kidnap and murder the Democratic governor of Michigan. They’re blowing up power substations from Oregon to the Carolinas. They’ve embedded themselves in DHS, police departments, and our military. They’re coordinating with fascists overseas.

“They” are the MAGA extremists, Neo-Nazis and Christian Nationalists who perpetrate most acts if domestic terrorism, and those who facilitate and/or excuse them.

The writer blamed all of this on “Reaganism” and the GOP, an accusation that vastly over-simplified the complexities of social outcomes. (That said, I agree that the rise of populism and the takeover of the Republican Party by radically Rightwing extremists Is hugely implicated.)

What caught my attention was the post’s reminder of a 1971 memorandum written to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell prior to his elevation to the Court. Historians and political scientists have noted the influence of that memorandum on businesses seeking to influence government policies in ways that would benefit their bottom lines.

Powell asserted that “leftists” — whom he defined as “middle class socialists and communist sympathizers” — had taken over the “government, universities, the Supreme Court, and our media.”

Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen’s views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment….

Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.

On the Court, Powell was part of the majority opinion in Buckley v Valeo–the decision equating money with speech and striking down legislation intended to limit the influence of money in political campaigns. The author of the post correctly noted that Buckley struck down “nearly a century of campaign finance legislation going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt’s Tillman Act.”

It’s hard to argue with the post’s assertion that the Court “tripled down” on the equation of money and speech in Citizens United or with his assertion that between 1933 and 1981, pretty much everything that went right for middle-class Americans was the result of progressive policies: the right to unionize, unemployment insurance and workplace safety rules, Social Security and Medicare…

A top personal income tax rate between 74% and 91% throughout that period kept wages strong for working people and prevented the corrosive wealth inequality we see today. We didn’t get our first billionaire until after the Reagan revolution.

It’s easier to argue with the characterization of that period  as one of ” uninterrupted political and economic progress”–a description that conveniently  ignores much of the inequality and turmoil of those years–but the description of America after Buckley and Reagan is accurate:

Republican-leaning businesses bought up radio stations from coast-to-coast and put “conservative” talk radio into every town and city in America. Wealthy people began running for political office or supporting those politicians who’d do their bidding.

Conservative donors demanded rightwing economics and political science professors in universities across America. Rightwing think tanks and publishers were funded to support them. Billionaires founded a movement to pack our courts, including the Supreme Court.

The rise of neoliberalism has decimated the middle class and further enriched the wealthy. While I would quibble with details of the writer’s lengthy diatribe, I do echo his conclusion: we need to turn back to

the lessons of the New Deal and Great Society, embraced by presidents and politicians of both parties for a half-century, and rebuild our middle class and our democracy, along with our trust in each other.

The question, as always, is “how do we accomplish that?”

Thanks to the availability of huge amounts of money, a distinct minority of Americans  currently control many state governments, and is vastly over-represented in Congress. The money that has poured into the political system in the wake of Buckley has funded  sophisticated gerrymandering, misleading lobbying, and  overwhelming political influence via campaign contributions. It has supported the messaging that has drawn a variety of culture warriors, racists and their ilk to the GOP.

Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination, but unless the current iteration of the GOP suffers a crushing  electoral defeat–and soon–I don’t know how we begin to fix this.

Comments