Lewis Powell was a Virginia lawyer.
He was horrified at the direction the country had been going - the antiwar demonstrations, civil rights, women's rights - it seemed to his conservative mind that the United States was moving too far toward being a 'welfare state,' and that neither party really represented the interests of business well.
So, he penned a memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce that laid out an entire plan for changing the dialog through talk radio, through a venue such as Fox News, and through attacks on liberalism in K-12, colleges and universities.
If you read the memo (manifesto), you can see that Powell was either prescient, or as I believe, laid out a whole decades long plan for what in effect was a slow corporate coup. https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/
The link above is what Green Peace has to say about it. The first one below is from Bill Moyers, and the second is Wiki.
https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.
So, you see, the whole swamp of corporate corruption that led to Citizens United, and the power of the NRA and other lobbies like the health insurance one. Profit over people. That is the key.
Then, also in the 1970s, the Chicago School of Economics came out with the neoliberal concept of what we call 'trickle down' economics, along with the mantra of privatization, deregulation, free trade, and gutting social programs. Guys like Grover Norquist arose as Mouths of Sauron to glibly explain the horror of this so called 'invisible hand of the market' laissez-faire capitalism in terms that sound good at first blush, but upon further thought not so much.
You'll recall that Grover is the guy who said we need to shrink government to the point where we can 'drown it in a bathtub,' and issued forth the myth that we were better off with tax cuts because we then had brass in pocket as opposed to services we needed. Remember when Bush went around the country in 2004 trying to sell the idea of privatizing Social Security. Wall Street is hungry for the Social Security Trust Fund. Still is. Look at the attacks on Social Security over the last decades.
Oh, but we're being attacked 24/7/365 on a thousand different fronts. The whole knee-jerk horror of 'sosh-a-lizm' that these lizards solemnly intone against, and these ignorant, bearded, drooling militias like those assholes in Michigan who were going to kidnap the governor of that state because they were inflamed by Trump's rhetoric.
But Trump is only the symptom of this neoliberal/neoconservative corporate capitalist imperialism. He is the proverbial 'dumb president that will merely sign laws sent to him by a Republican Congress. Hence, of course, the gerrymanders and the voter suppression. Republicans cannot defend their policies intellectually, morally or economically.
Well, enough of that. If you're interested in learning more, try a search for Howard Zinn. Read his 'People's History of the United States.' Then wade into some Noam Chomsky. I first heard of him in undergraduate school, because he is an internationally renowned linguistics professor. However, he also wrote some truth to power, and it is good. You could try 'Profit Over People,' 'Requiem for the American Dream,' and 'Hegemony or Survival.' His latest in 2016 was 'Who Rules the World?'
See, read those, my friend, and you'll still be progressive, but you will know how things got to be the way they are.
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