American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

by Joseph J. Ellis

Jane Mayer has chronicled that campaign in Dark Money (2016), which identifies Lewis Powell, a Richmond attorney and soon-to-be Supreme Court justice, as the unlikely architect of the conservative strategy that would enjoy such resounding success over the ensuing decades. In a long memorandum entitled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System” (1971), Powell laid out his blueprint for “guerrilla war” to capture the citadels of liberal influence in academia, the media, and the courts. It began with a steady flow of money from the wealthiest members of the corporate elite, which would then be funneled through philanthropic foundations—thus “dark money”—to newly created think tanks explicitly committed to conservative or libertarian principles. Over the next decade, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute became the institutional embodiments of Powell’s strategy. In 1982 a $5 million start-up grant from the Olin Foundation created the Federalist Society at Yale as a network for conservative law students, lawyers, and judges. The legal principle binding its members together was originalism.*