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Okay, Here's the news: the right wing Jihad didn't start with Ronald Reagan; it didn't start with Barry Goldwater. No, as this well-documented and persuasive book documents, it started back in the New Deal.

Yes, the "Masters of the Universe" of American business revolted against FDR's effort to dig the U.S. out of a depression created by the excesses and unbridled greed of Wall Street (sound familiar). Even back then, companies like General Electric (which later put Ronald Reagan on the map as a company spokesman and groomed him for political office) were working to create a propaganda machine to get workers -- against their own economic interests -- to side with the rich bosses.

The New Deal right wing efforts disclosed in "Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan" ran like a subterranean stream that grew into a mighty river by the time it was able to put Ronald Reagan in the White House and reframe political discourse in America to favor corporations and the ultra-rich.

A review of "Invisible Hands" in the Dallas Morning News notes the role of corporate America in propelling the right wing movement to power:

The American conservative movement has been, in part, a prolonged reaction to the New Deal, and histories of the movement tend to focus on politicians – Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and a few others.

But in Invisible Hands, Kim Phillips-Fein convincingly argues that the principal impetus for the conservative resurgence, which was crowned by Reagan's 1980 election, came from business leaders. Pierre DuPont, Joseph Coors and others believed that government activism and regulation constituted a threat to American democracy and poured their money and energy into changing the direction of the nation's politics.

Phillips-Fein, a professor at New York University, presents a superbly researched history of how businesspeople tried, with varied degrees of success, to promote a laissez-faire economy. Their efforts began a year after Franklin Roosevelt took office, with creation of the American Liberty League. This venture was quickly branded by New Dealers as the "Millionaires Union" and had little influence. But business leaders persisted, embracing the principles of economists such as Friedrich von Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom criticized collectivism and centralized economic planning.

Phillips-Fein observes that even the election of Republican Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 did not satisfy the business conservatives. They viewed Eisenhower as insufficiently committed to deregulation of the economy, so they renewed their efforts to shift public opinion. New outlets for their views, such as William F. Buckley's National Review, think tanks, radio programs and socially conservative Christian groups constituted a loose alliance of pro-business activists.

One of the most important players in the movement was Lemuel Boulware of General Electric. Phillips-Fein explains how he brought public relations expertise to GE's anti-union efforts. She writes that Boulware "never believed that the working class was inherently liberal or Democratic. ... Instead of being radicalized on the job, they could be instructed in the ways of the marketplace." The job of doing this instructing fell to another GE employee, Ronald Reagan, who carried Boulware's message first to GE plants across the country and then to the larger public.

***
From Publisher's Weekly, where "Invisible Hands" received a star review:

Looking beyond the usual roster of right-wing Christians, anticommunist neo-cons and disgruntled working-class whites, this incisive study examines the unsung role of a political movement of businessmen in leading America's post-1960s rightward turn. Historian Phillips-Fein traces the hidden history of the Reagan revolution to a coterie of business executives, including General Electric official and Reagan mentor Lemuel Boulware, who saw labor unions, government regulation, high taxes and welfare spending as dire threats to their profits and power. From the 1930s onward, the author argues, they provided the money, organization and fervor for a decades-long war against New Deal liberalism—funding campaigns, think tanks, magazines and lobbying groups, and indoctrinating employees in the virtues of unfettered capitalism. Theirs was also a battle of ideas, she contends; the business vanguard nurtured conservative thinkers like economist Friedrich von Hayek and his secretive Mont Pellerin Society associates, who developed a populist free-market ideology that persuaded workers to side with their bosses against the liberal state. Combining piquant profiles of corporate firebrands with a trenchant historical analysis that puts economic conflict at the heart of political change, Phillips-Fein makes an important contribution to our understanding of American conservatism.

From a review on Amazon.com:

First, given my response, I should state explicitly that, no, I do not know the author from Adam, I am not a scholar in American political history, and I am at the moment just over halfway through the book.

I am nonetheless leaping to tack some gold stars onto this Amazon listing because I would like to see this excellent, timely chronicle in as many hands as possible. This is exactly the history of modern conservatism and the GOP we need at the moment, one that swats away all the cultural-religious distractions and traces the programatic efforts by businessmen, bankers, and economic libertarians since FDR to equate America and Capitalism, with the former being merely the means and the latter the true end.

While liberals of my generation have been fretting over gay marriage, deconstruction, and identity politics, the state has been completely retaken from the New Deal compromise in decisive class warfare waged from above. Class warfare? While the author does not harp on the term, I insist on calling it by its proper name, as Lewis Mumford used to say. The facts should be brutally obvious by now. Can anyone deny that the middle class is caught in a veritable Dresden of class war, raining debt, fear, obscurantism, and havoc from above?

By concerted effort and planning, as this book details, a relatively small cadre of blueblood patroons, capitalist absolutists, Hayek disciples, and Chamber of Commerce hacks have succeeded in reversing the New Deal, which they regarded as criminal collectivism, and returning us right back where we started, back in the Great Depression, briefly interrupted. I had read bits of this history elsewhere, but the author does an excellent job of weaving it together. While she can't resist colorful zingers about the zanier zealots (who could?), this is largely a calm, level-headed history without that tone of outraged, preachy sarcasm that inflects so many liberal polemics.

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