The other giant threat to U.S. democracy is a conspiracy hatched 53 years ago

There’s always been a missing link to what a lot of political buffs think is the biggest conspiracy theory of the last half-century.

In early 1971, a then-obscure Richmond, Va., lawyer named Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent a memo to an influential friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, outlining how capitalists should defend the free market against the convulsions of the 1960s. Powell did become famous less than a year later when Richard Nixon named him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and over a much longer period of time, so did the Powell Memo. That’s because almost everything Powell proposed — a network of conservative media, think tanks, and academic centers, as well as financial support for conservative candidates — has not only come to pass but now dominates American politics.

Indeed, liberals blaming the once-unknown Powell Memo for everything they see wrong in modern America eventually triggered a backlash. What proof was there, critics asked, that important people even read the memo or acted upon it? Even leading foes of big money in politics like Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse admitted that piece of the puzzle was missing.

Until now.

Over the last couple of years, journalists for an investigative reporting site called the Lever, led by Philadelphia-area native David Sirota, visited out-of-the-way libraries, sifted through boxes that have been unopened for decades, and found proof that the Powell Memo was indeed the blueprint for modern conservatism. Top U.S. business executives set up task forces on how to carry out the memo’s key recommendations and held meetings. One, at Walt Disney World’s Polynesian Village, attracted the top Republican on Capitol Hill and future president, Gerald Ford, while other gatherings were attended by the Koch Brothers or Roger Ailes, who later served as the founding CEO of Fox News. Inspired by the Powell Memo, radio commentaries, public service ads, and even a film narrated by Jimmy Stewart resold capitalism to the masses.

Sirota told me by phone this week from his adopted home of Denver that the Lever project aimed to answer a question that had vexed him since a stint as a young congressional aide in the early 2000s: “How did it become legal to purchase the entire political system?”

A lot of the answers, it turned out, were hiding in plain sight — or at the bottom of cardboard boxes. The result is a must-listen audio series called Master Plan that has been topping the political podcast charts since it was launched in August. Now five free episodes in, Master Plan looks at how early efforts to clean up campaign financing in America, inspired, in part, by Watergate, were undermined by Big Business’s scheme, a Supreme Court — led by memo author Powell — that turned corporations into people, and by the spigot of Big Money that was opened up.

But while the history lessons are fascinating, the real purpose of Sirota and the Master Plan podcast is to contemplate the mess America finds itself in today — with billionaire donors and their unlimited contributions setting the agenda for what issues get addressed, or more often not addressed — and to scream out that it doesn’t have to be this way.

And yet, while the corrupting influence of Big Money is a disease that affects both parties, and the current 2024 election is on track to shatter all records with more than $10 billion in campaign spending, few people besides Sirota and his Lever reporters are talking about the problem. Some of that is surely due to the tribal nature of a campaign that both parties have portrayed as do-or-die for the future of the American Experiment, which has partisans determined to crush the other side without caring where the money is coming from.

“There are definitely real stakes in this election, for sure,” said Sirota, who worked on the 2020 presidential campaign of progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders. “But when you talk about this election as being a fight for the survival of democracy, I see it more as a fight for the survival of what’s left of democracy.” In other words, Donald Trump’s authoritarianism is dangerous, but the system he threatens has already ceded power to wealthy donors on key issues from health care to taxes.

Yet, in the recent debate between the GOP’s Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, neither was asked what they would do to reduce the influence of Big Money in American politics. This despite months of headlines about corruption at the Supreme Court, where pro-business justices got luxury vacations and other gifts from billionaires, and in the Senate, where former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez was convicted of bribery after agents found gold bars in his house.

Thus, it hasn’t been a major issue in the election that Trump told a room full of Big Oil millionaires and billionaires he’d eliminate climate regulations if they agreed to raise $1 billion for his campaign, or that he flip-flopped his position on banning TikTok when he was wooing the social media app’s biggest U.S. investor, Jeff Yass, or that the world’s richest man, government contractor Elon Musk, has thrown in behind the GOP nominee. Even a credible allegation that Egypt, in 2017, sent the incoming president a $10 million bribe barely dented the news cycle.

» READ MORE: The giant U.S. scandal we don’t talk about | Will Bunch Newsletter

The debates over Trump’s dictatorial tendencies laid out by his backers’ Project 2025, or the racism of the blatant lies from the candidate and his running mate Sen. JD Vance about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, seem to matter a lot less to America’s billionaires than the fundamentals of low taxes on their wealth and minimal regulation of their businesses. Kathy Wylde, who heads a New York City business group, told Politico that Republicans have told her “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump.”

Yet, Harris and the Democrats are no angels, either, when it comes to wooing campaign cash from corporate political committees or billionaire CEOs, as evidenced at the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where lobbyists fittingly packed the lobbies of the swank Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons hotels hoping to encounter top Harris aides. The Democrats’ biggest billionaire backers have reportedly pressed Harris to go after monopolies less aggressively than President Joe Biden and his appointees have. The vice president recently announced that her plan to raise taxes on capital gains is also less aggressive than Biden’s proposal, which would surely please the donor class.

Watchdogs on campaign spending say that if you look hard enough, you can see how large donors affect what issues get a disproportionate amount of attention — such as a proposed tax on wealth — and which issues that affect millions of middle-class Americans are getting short shrift, such as the high cost of health insurance and the persistence of medical bankruptcy, a problem that exists in no other developed nation in the world.

Sirota continues to believe that change is possible. He said that despite the decades-long run of Supreme Court rulings — capped by the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision that allowed corporations or other groups to spend unlimited funds on elections — he still believes there is enough legal leeway for Congress to enact tougher proposals like Whitehouse’s DISCLOSE Act that would require so-called super-PACs or “dark money” groups to reveal their large donors. But given Republicans’ reluctance for any campaign finance reform, it’s hard to see how such bills get around a GOP filibuster.

The crusading journalist also acknowledged that — thanks to Trump’s three appointees — the current high court is probably even more conservative than the Roberts court that signed off on Citizens United, and that even modest reforms could get struck down. The ultimate solution of a constitutional amendment that would end corporate personhood and allow for campaign donation and spending limits faces even more hurdles than congressional legislation.

And yet, until such a reversal happens, America’s elections will remain a kind of shell game where the candidates fight over a handful of important issues like abortion rights while the things that truly matter to the oligarchy — low marginal tax rates, friendly regulators, tepid climate action, and avoidance of radical but needed solutions like single-payer health care or affordable public universities — are kept out of the political conversation altogether.

We now know it took 53 years, a ruthless vision, and a lot of hard work to create the network of news outlets and think tanks and to appoint the hundreds of like-minded judges that have entrenched an American kleptocracy. It may take at least that long to undo the right’s master plan.

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