I've finally come to the understanding that there really is no such thing as an American left. It's not my own idea; it's just that after spending a great deal of time reading and listening to discussions about the state of the left in this country from those whom I have come to trust on these matters, it has finally sunk in that while leftist sentiment and thought is alive and well and manifold in its forms and manifestations, and is embodied in a proliferation of leftists, The Left as a relevant sector of American society is not so much a specter as a phantom. The key ingredient that is missing is labor-- at the moment a defeated and divided plurality (although the past year has seen promising stirrings). Those who claim the mantle of the left tend to be clever, academic, disconnected voices (not unlike a certain numerically nomenclatured blogger I could name) who paradoxically proclaim their leftness while connected. Hence the predominance of conflict and cancellation as the mode of online leftist discourse, and more importantly, the rarity of actual tangible political victories that could be claimed by the left-- not so much because leftists do not participate in the process, as that their campaigns, despite the demonstrable popularity of their platforms, rarely make it beyond the pupal stage since their entrees into electoral politics are for the most part successfully squelched by the superiorly funded and organized efforts of democratic party operatives and their donors who have a knack for destroying the field when it comes to primaries but a decided cluelessness about winning general elections.
Speaking of Virginia...I saw a Lewis Powell quote the other day on one of these leftist videos.
...one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups... 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.
In Richmond, Virginia, late summer 1971, US Chamber of Commerce president Eugene Sydnor reached across the back yard fence to his neighbor, Richmond attorney and soon-to-be Nixon Supreme Court appointee Lewis Powell to request a "secret memorandum" concerning what to Sydnor, head and chief stockholder of a chain of department stores was a disturbing trend -- namely the capturing of the public discussion by decidedly anti-free enterprise and anti-establishment voices. Herbert Marcuse and other exponents of the Frankfurt school diaspora, for instance, were selling books and capturing the imagination of military draft age college youths and others of their cohort, inspiring campus unrest, causing widespread skepticism among youth of the American "establishment", and seducing them away from service in what had become a very unpopular war in Southeast Asia. DC policy wonk and attorney Ralph Nader had written a best seller- Unsafe at any Speed-- about the epidemic of highway deaths that were avoidable but for the recalcitrance of the US Auto industry in making safer automotive designs, raising awareness and widespread support for an overdue and, as it turned out brief, era of government regulation of American businesses. Concomitant with these, a growing planetary consciousness inspired by humanity's civic forays into space inspired an environmental awareness that had seized the public, engendering a clamoring for accountability from the businesses whose profligate way with waste in the pursuit of greater and greater profits had visibly taken a toll on the natural beauty of the country and was threatening the future of the Earth. So it's not like there wasn't cause for the owning class to worry. In response, Lewis drafted up the confidential memo whose main point was "business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late." The memo called for an aggressive response to growing fed-up-ness with American Enterprise-- a greater presence on campuses, aggressive pursuit of legislation, relentless counterattacks to criticism of business with editorials, advertisements and media of their own.
There was something to it. I don't know that the Powell memo was ever delivered publicly, and yet, it's not at all hard to imagine the receptive audience for Powell's remarks being the paunchy, horn-rimmed, white haired set, commerce bank patrons, fat cats and glad-handers setting down their white napkins dabbed with béarnaise sauce from the corners of their mouths to applaud the pep talk from one of their better boys. The beauty of Powell's vision was that it was purposely co-opted from the enemy. It would inspire a wildfire of aggrievement on the right as a counterpart to the call on the left for justice-- fire fighting fire.
The memorandum was leaked to Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson who made much of the clandestine plan to combat public distrust in American Business with propaganda, legislation, jurisprudence, and stealth commandeering of the discourse through media, print and academic infiltration. The outing from a feared journalist did nothing to dampen the rallying of the well-heeled troops. On the contrary, fifty years later, here we are.
The question I have to ask is, so Lewis Powell said power was essential and that it had to be used. Did it necessarily follow that the right would dig in to power and exert it? What motivated the men who already had everything? More to the point, what would those on the ostensible left be able and prepared to do with a counterpart document?
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