Politics Will Not Ignore You

Conservatives Have Not - Liberals Have

For the last 4-5 decades, liberals grew numb to politics overall, while the conservatives planned and moved on the system. With the seed of the Lewis Powell Memo, John Birch Society, Federalists Society, Americans for Prosperity and the Libertarian Platform of 1980, a system to take over the American Experiment took shape which led to the construction of Project 2025. The conservative extremists stayed beneath the surface of the media as suggested by James Buchanan. He felt it important for the purpose of the libertarian goals to convince the working-class voters to not vote for the liberal, uplifting programs that liberals offered, even though the working-class conservative voters were the major beneficiaries of those programs, they would vote for the conservative candidate. States like Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and others have very high percentages of working-class voters that vote conservative. The information bubble these people hear are that “others” get all the benefits and which keeps them from getting more.  The conservative leaders they elect vote to cut those programs every single time. Every time.

What one can find interesting about some of these states like West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee in their past, shows a history of diminishing union activity which has led to a more conservative lean in the voting trends. In The Big Myth by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, they build a strong case of the anti-union, anti-New Deal actions taken by businesses as they worked to convince the workers to stop supporting these programs. Promises of “freedom” brought out the right to work philosophy convincing working people that they (the individual) would have more power if they went alone. They worked to convince the working people that the private sector would do a better job for working people if the government was not competing with the private sector. It did not help that the union leaders themselves were on the take and in many cases worked with the business negotiators against the best interests of the people they represented. These offers from the businesses were two-fold: 1. To lessen the demands of the union and 2. To undermine union leadership when the companies would leak misinformation. This led to backlash of members and made decertifying unions much easier for the companies. 

Keeping the working people individualized is the power of the conservative wealthy class. They know the power of people organization endangers their ability to exploit their workers. People power can be organized to shut down companies through strikes or work shortages., while helping working people believe that business interest would take better care of them than the government ever would. Conservatives getting elected would then begin to work against government to keep agencies from working efficiently and use that to proclaim that the private sector could do the job better. The question: how can an organization whose purpose is driven by mission and not profit could ever be better than one that is driven by profit first could ever do a better job? Time after time, that is being proven wrong as the private sector gets their fingers in the pie of public money to take over public sector services with results that rarely match the promises.

Conservatives will patronize democracy as long as it does not completely usurp their ability to wield power. Sadly, they no longer want to share power at a slim majority, but dominate completely. Leonard Leo (head of Federalists Society) most recently has restated his plans to use his power to crush the liberalism from our politics. (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2024/10/21/inside_leonard_leos_plan_to_crush_liberal_dominance_633963.html) This has been the politics liberals have been ignoring for years while the conservative radicals built the infrastructure to allow them to consolidate their power.

The use of the plans outlined in the Lewis Powel Memo (https://archive.org/details/PowellMemorandum-AttackOnAmericanFreeEnterpriseSystem) have developed into the 900 page plus Project 2025 (https://archive.org/details/PowellMemorandum-AttackOnAmericanFreeEnterpriseSystem) which is a blueprint for a larger, stronger more centralized (not smaller and weaker) federal government. While liberals ignored, the conservatives organized, planned, and financed. They purchased media outlets, funded media personalities, funded institutes, and university programs (George Mason – James Buchanan) law schools, business schools, and of course, politicians with unlimited campaign funding thanks to Powell’s first ruling on campaign finance that lead to following rulings to Citizens United. (Powell was a corporate hack that knowingly defended the tobacco industry against the government lawsuits that concerned the dangers of their products and their process of making them more addictive. He even knew of the advertising campaigns that targeted teenagers to get them started early because their research showed that the earlier a person started, the more definite they would have a customer for life.)

He also wrote specifically about the importance of cornering the judicial system:  Powell wrote: “Under our constitutional system … the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”  Powell provided a reliable vote for corporate causes.  And he was the author of the 1978 majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which held that corporations have a First Amendment right to support state ballot initiatives. Again, liberals ignored while the conservatives organized and took action.

Following the release of the under the radar Memo the business round table met with the following happening: “a succession of new political think tanks and right-wing public interest law firms. These included the Heritage, Charles Koch, Castle Rock, Scaife, Lynde and Harry Bradley, and Olin foundations, among many others, as well as the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Federalist Society and, above all, the Chamber of Commerce National Litigation Center.” Again the liberals ignored and were quietly allowing the growth of this cancer. Jane Mayer provided a litany of these people and groups in her book Dark Money and one author, Christopher Lenord, penned a detailed expose of the Koch brothers in his book Kochland. Some liberals like Sheldon Whitehouse, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and a few others tried to take action against these people and their plans, but alas, the actions were hardly acted on.

The conservative desire to turn the working people against the federal government became highly visible during President Obama’s term with the rise of the Tea Party when they managed to generate outrage over the Affordable Care Act building a fear that the government was going to take away your freedom by picking your doctors, hospitals, treatments and the big one – who lives and dies! Now this outrage followed the liberals having to fix the fallout of the Afghan/ Iraq Wars and the Great Republican Recession of 2008. The anger of the general public over the Iraq war and the lack of justice in the leaders of the financial industry created a void that the conservatives used to build resentment and cowered the liberals into limited action or non-action to address these issues. Politics once again ignored resulting in the conservatives gaining more informal power setting the stage to gain the formal power to implement their austerity plans against the people and to eliminate the guard rails of the Constitution.

Politics ignored by the liberal leadership now allows for the dismantling of the American Experiment.