Infrastructure envy, Part 3

A while back, I quoted former senator and presidential wannabe Bill Bradley, on the role of Lewis Powell (at the time a corporate lawyer, although he's now a Supreme Court justice) in reviving the Republican party after its 1964 thumping with candidate Goldwater:

In 1971 [Powell] wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint.

Turns out, there's a really good case to be made that Bradley's account--widely accepted--is revisionist history. As Mark Schmitt points out in The American Prospect, there's not much historical evidence that Lewis's 1971 call received much notice or had any great effect as the time--it was only noticed, and given its retroactive importance, about five years ago. Thus, there may not have been a Great Overarching Master Plan that got the GOP to where it is today.

How did the Powell letter suddenly become so important, if it wasn't at the time? Schmitt argues that, in part, it's because Democrats and the left are grasping around for a magic key to create the same sort of infrastructure that the Republicans and the right have built for themselves, and Powell's argument suddenly sounds very attractive.

But beware: The specific techniques that made the Right so successful in getting their message out may not be so helpful to the Left, unless they're interested in producing a watered-down version of the same message. And, as Schmitt adds, the Powell Letter story has a little too much of the "magic bullet" myth about it:

It implies that all liberals need to do is find our Powell, get the memo written, and implement our plan. Stand back and watch the course of history shift back our way.

But the reality of the right is that there was no plan, just a lot of people writing their own memos and starting their own organizations -- some succeeding, some failing, false starts, mergers, lots of money well spent, and lots of money wasted.

The left needs an infrastructure that will let it take on the Right Wing Media Echo Machine, that's clear--and Air America, and the Center for American Progress, and the left wing blogosphere make a good start in that direction. But it's another thing to imagine that the trick is simply to imitate everything the Right does--especially given how poorly they're playing with voters right now.

The left needs a way to build an infrastructure that plays to its own strengths: health care, clean government, checks on corporate power, fairness for working families.