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THE BAFFLER
nism threatened the nation's laws and businesses. Ralph Nader was flying the consumer flag and unions were getting uppity. Things were falling apart. The American Way needed a defender. And a rising chorus of voices, including leading neocon Irving Kristol, declared it was a job for business. Corporate America, by and large, had stayed out of the country's political and cultural battles after the humiliation of the Great Depression. But this was no longer an option, according to Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Virginia corporate lawyer who served on the boards of eleven companies. In 1971, on the eve of his elevation to the Supreme Court, he did what any respectable executive would do when faced with a crisis: He wrote a memo-in this case a memo that predicted how the right would seek to set the terms of national debate. "No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under
broad attack," Powell asserted in his legendary note to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But it wasn't the Yippies who were the real threat: It was the "hostility of respectable liberal and social reformers. It is the sum total of their views and influence which could indeed fatally weaken or destroy the system." So far business leaders had "shown little stomach for hard-nose contest with their critics, and little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate." But that had to change. The Chamber, Powell proposed, should enlist a staff of scholars and speakers ("preferably attractive, articulate, and well-informed") to defend the market and provide a counterweight to slanted professors; monitor textbooks and the media for bias; churn out books upholding the system to counter works "advocating everything from revolution to erotic free love"; and hire lawyers to press business interests in the courts.
The U.S. Chamber didn't act on Powell's suggestions, but others took his warning to heart. The memo "stirred up" right-wing beer baron Joseph Coors, who shelled out $250,000 to launch a Washington-based think tank called the Analysis and Research Association-known now as the Heritage Foundation. Heritage soon began sucking in millions in donations from Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and other spiritual descendants of Harry. Within fifteen years, a phalanx of other think tanks, foundations, and legal action groups were checkbooked into existence by business interests. Older standard bearers, such as the American Enterprise Institute, got in step with the new direction. The scent of money quickly attracted swarms of bright young conservative things, not to mention established scholars, eager to cross swords with the libs. Soon America was treated to the spectacle of tax-subsidized propaganda mills that attacked the various gains and protections that working people had won over the past century. Legal foundations assailed environmental regulations. Think tanks derided unions, denounced social programs, praised hostile takeovers, and called for rolling back taxes for the rich. The Cato Institute started calling for the privatization of Social Security. At the Heritage Foundation, larval wonks churned out position papers on hundreds of topics assembly-line style. Despite their lofty titles, these think tanks were not models of intellectual rigor or honest inquiry. "We're not here to be some kind of PhD committee giving equal time," a Heritage vice president declared in 1986 to The Atlantic Monthly. "Our role is to provide conservative policy makers with arguments to bolster our side." The objectives of all this think tankery would have been familiar to right-wingers of Harry's vintage. But the unseemly redbaiting of the past had been ditched. Now rhetoric focused on enhancing opportunity and freedom for all. Still, for years Heritage and its ilk were beyond the pale of serious discourse. It took the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 to put