Lewis Powell: God-Father of ALL "Fuck-tardity"

The spiritual ancestor of the Michael Weiner/"Savage-Glenn Beck-Bill O'Reilly-Sean Hannity brigade of ideological bullies, thugs, and gunsels--the shock-troops of what Krugman called "zombie-Reaganism, was the man who would later become Associate Justice of the SCOTUS, Lewis Powell.

The story of the so-called Powell Memo, and its balefully enduring influence is the subject of a fascinating essay on TruthOut by former colleague in the Edn. Bidness, Henry Giroux:

This is not simply a story about the rise of mean-spirited buffoons such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage. Nor is it simply a story about the loss of language, a growing anti-intellectualism in the larger culture, or the spread of what some have called a new illiteracy endlessly being produced in popular culture. As important as these tendencies are, there is something more at stake here which points to a combination of power, money and education in the service of creating an almost lethal restriction of what can be heard, said, learned and debated in the public sphere. And one starting point for understanding this problem is what has been called the Powell Memo, released on August 23, 1971 (though not made public until AFTER confirmation hearings, by Jack Anderson, the legendary DC columnist. W) and written by Lewis F. Powell, who would later be appointed as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Powell sent the memo to the US Chamber of Commerce with the title "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System."
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The Powell Memo was designed to develop a broad-based strategy not only to counter dissent, but also to develop a material and ideological infrastructure with the capability to transform the American public consciousness through a conservative pedagogical commitment to reproduce the knowledge, values, ideology and social relations of the corporate state. For Powell, the war against liberalism and a substantive democracy was primarily a pedagogical and political struggle designed both to win the hearts and minds of the general public and to build a power base capable of eliminating those public spaces, spheres and institutions that nourish and sustain what Samuel Huntington would later call (in a 1975 study on the "governability of democracies" by the Trilateral Commission) an "excess of democracy."
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Any attempt to understand and engage the current right-wing assault on all vestiges of the social contract, the social state and democracy itself will have to begin with challenging this massive infrastructure, which functions as one of the most powerful teaching machines we have seen in the United States, a teaching machine that produces a culture that is increasingly poisonous and detrimental not just to liberalism, but to the formative culture that makes an aspiring democracy possible. This presence of this ideological infrastructure extending from the media to other sites of popular education suggests the need for a new kind of debate, one that is not limited to isolated issues such as health care, but is more broad-based and fundamental, a debate about how power, inequality and money constrict the educational, economic and political conditions that make democracy possible. The screaming harpies and mindless public relations "intellectuals" that dominate the media today are not the problem; it is the conditions that give rise to the institutions that put them in place, finance them and drown out other voices. What must be clear is that this threat to creating a critically informed citizenry is not merely a crisis of communication and language, but about the ways in which money and power create the educational conditions that make a mockery out of debate while hijacking any vestige of democracy.

Powell was a Nixon nominee, named to the Court at the same time as Rehnquist. He assumed the seat previously held by Hugo Black. His notorious 1971 memo to the CoC was certainly known to the Senate and the Administration. Powell retired at age 80, in 1987 having left behind a dismal record of favoring/upholding corporate and executive privilege against individual liberty.