The Powell Memo Helped Create Mission 2025

When Supreme Court docket Justice Lewis Powell died in 1998, The New York Instances’ obituary hailed him as a decide “who introduced a voice of moderation and civility to an more and more polarized Court docket throughout his 15-year tenure.” The newspaper added, “He was the balancer and compromiser, a political reasonable with an aversion to heated rhetoric and doctrinal rigidity.”

As so usually, the Instances was distilling the elite consensus, a view that had a component of fact provided that one accepted a really slender which means of “moderation.” Powell’s fame as an avatar of middle-of-the-road sanity rested largely on his social liberalism. Powell joined the Supreme Court docket in 1972 after an extended profession as one of many nation’s prime company attorneys, recognized significantly for his lengthy affiliation with the tobacco firm Philip Morris. Powell’s fame for moderation rested largely on his private fashion as an old-school Southern gentleman and his liberalism on social issues. He was a part of the 7-2 majority that affirmed a constitutional proper to abortion in Roe v. Wade and helped shield affirmative motion in Regents of the College of California v. Bakke (1978). Each choices have been overturned by subsequent right-wing courts.

Powell additionally benefited from the distinction between his social liberalism and the more and more strident conservatism of more moderen Republican appointees to the Supreme Court docket. When Powell resigned in 1987, Ronald Reagan tried to exchange him with Robert Bork, a rebarbative reactionary who was seen because the antithesis of Powell. Bork’s nomination failed, however subsequent Supreme Court docket justices resembling Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have made many centrist liberals nostalgic for the age of Lewis Powell.

But Powell’s moderation was extremely selective, coming into play solely on points the place the ability of massive enterprise was not at stake. On financial issues—which make up the majority of instances that come earlier than the Supreme Court docket—Powell was no compromiser however an open partisan of unchecked company domination of society.

A part of the power of the wonderful new documentary podcast sequence Grasp Plan (created by the journalist David Sirota and his staff at The Lever) is that it totally debunks the tasteless picture of Powell as a reasonable and as a substitute exhibits that he was one of many founding fathers of contemporary American plutocracy. Powell earns explicit pleasure of place within the present due to his authorship of a infamous 1971 memo (ready for the US Chamber of Commerce) that laid out a method for a company counterrevolution in opposition to the rising social actions of the Sixties and early ’70s (notably the Black Energy motion, environmentalism, and client safety). The memo was a name to arms for company America to make use of its financial energy to push again in opposition to the left, with explicit emphasis on the significance of gaining sway over the courts, the academy, and the media.

The Powell Memo was the Mission 2025 of the Nixon period—an in depth program for establishing and entrenching right-wing energy over the commanding heights of American authorities and society.

On the left, there’s been a lot dispute over the precise impression of the Powell Memo: Was it actually the blueprint for the conservative counterrevolution in opposition to liberalism that has remade America—or simply the little-read grousing of an offended company lawyer?

Writing in The American Prospect in 2005, coverage analyst Mark Schmitt decried the “delusion” that the memo was influential. Schmitt claimed: “The memo was circulated inside Chamber of Commerce circles and have become public after Powell’s affirmation to the court docket, when journalist Jack Anderson unearthed it to query Powell’s judicial temperament. After that, it appears to have been forgotten.”

To its credit score, Grasp Plan forthrightly addresses Schmitt’s affordable argument, and makes use of contemporary investigative reporting to doc that the Powell Memo, removed from having been “forgotten” after Jack Anderson’s reporting, was in actual fact the seedbed for high-level right-wing organizing that undergirds the conservative counterrevolution.

To light up each the Powell Memo and its legacy, Grasp Plan highlights Powell’s formation throughout his profession as a company lawyer. He was no mere legal-gun-for-hire for Philip Morris however a full-fledged wartime consigliere, deeply concerned in strategizing the agency’s lengthy marketing campaign of disinformation to discredit the science proving that smoking causes most cancers. This marketing campaign included pioneering the creation of astroturf teams that each lied concerning the science and pretended to be impartial grassroots voices—a way later picked up by fossil gasoline companies selling local weather change denial.