A Strategic Plan for Liberals

prospect.org — In August of 1971, corporate attorney Lewis Powell—two months shy of his appointment to the United States Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon—wrote a memo to Eugene Sydnor Jr., who chaired the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In Powell’s and the chamber’s view, the American free-enterprise system, and conservatism more generally, was losing the battle of ideas and policy to an ascendant liberalism. “No thoughtful person,” Powell wrote, “can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.” It was high time the chamber began to change all that, and to that end, Powell laid out a number of specific steps that the chamber and business could undertake. The right is reaping the rewards of having built for the long term. And the left … the left needs a Powell Memo of its own, its own 40-year plan

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