Installation

In the summer of 1971, with the Southern air thick and humid in Richmond, Virginia, 344 days after Milton Friedman’s New York Times Magazine article—“The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”—a partner at the white-shoe law firm Hunton & Williams typed a letter on cream stationery beneath the slow rotation of a ceiling fan. Eight days earlier, President Nixon had taken the United States off the gold standard, ending the Bretton Woods system and ushering in the era of modern money. The foundations of American economic reality were shifting.

The man’s name was Lewis Powell. He was also a director at Philip Morris.

In the letter, Powell warned: “The American economic system is under broad attack… from college campuses, the media, the intellectual elite.” He laid out a strategic campaign to defend a social order threatened by the rising demands of youth, workers, minorities, and reformers—not with public dialogue, but with institutional capture.

It was a worldview that was paternalistic, elite-driven, and fearful of mass democratization. It was selfish, prioritizing corporate self-preservation over public well-being, justice, or truth. It was immoral, crafting a world of dominance and fear without compassion, humility, or concern for the common good. It was unethical, offering a roadmap for securing power through a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign that would infiltrate universities, media, courts, and bureaucracy—undermining dissent, excluding alternative views.

There is no mention of the poor. No concern for the sick. Only the corporation, under siege, sharpening its claws.

On October 21, 1971—fifty-nine days after delivering his memo to the Chamber of Commerce—the Nixon White House publicly announced Lewis Powell’s nomination to the Supreme Court. If Powell saw the irony, he didn’t mention it. The memo had been a blueprint for political capture. Now, its architect would take a seat on the highest bench in the land—a lifetime position with the power to reshape the meaning of the Constitution itself.

Forty-seven days later, the Senate confirmed his appointment with only one dissenting vote. No one asked about the memo.

Powell’s ascent to the Supreme Court marked more than a personal achievement; it signaled the institutionalization of a new ideology within the highest echelons of American jurisprudence. The principles outlined in his memo began to permeate legal interpretations, gradually steering the nation toward a framework that prioritized corporate interests and redefined the role of the individual in society.

This period—from October 1970 to December 1971—should be understood as the final step in installing a new operating system for the United States. The project had begun in 1960. By the end of 1971, the American Enterprise System had replaced the American National System that had been running, however unevenly, since the 17th century.

On the surface, they appeared identical. Same flag. Same slogans. Same holidays. But beneath, the logic had changed—like DOS to Windows, or public source to proprietary code. The default values, the permissions, the priorities—rewritten.

The American National System

It valued civic duty, patriotic service, sacrifice, and hard work. The role of a person was “citizen”—an imperfect but expanding category rooted in Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. It had helped crush fascism, and would do it again if necessary, not for profit, but because it was right.

It was deeply flawed. Slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, corruption, poverty—all were embedded. But it was reconfigurable. Movements for labor, for civil rights, for suffrage had forced patches and upgrades. The system, while far from just, could be made more just. That was its virtue: it moved.

The American Enterprise System

It grew from the coalesced anger of the defeated. The losers of the Civil War. The losers of the labor wars. The men who opposed suffrage, who fought against Native sovereignty and immigrant inclusion, who battled the regulation of trusts.

Their resentment was sanctified into ideology: rugged individualism, scientific management, hierarchy, compliance. The person became a consumer. A variable in an equation. A unit of labor or a vector of purchasing. The value of a human being was in their economic throughput.

The new lens was warped—an amalgam of capitalism, Christianity, racism, and nationalism—salvaged from the ruins of slavery and retooled to fight Communism.

The American National System was not good, per se, but it pointed in the direction of progress. When Rosa Parks refused to move, it set off a cascading logic that led to reform—not instantly, but eventually. The Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act. Each step built on the idea that the system could be moved. Could be improved.

Even its sins were not set in stone. They could be argued, resisted, rewritten. There was room for reconfiguration.

The fear Powell gave voice to in 1971 was not confusion—it was recognition. He and those like him understood that the postwar consensus was shifting: expanding the definition of citizenship, redistributing not just wealth, but legitimacy. The system wasn’t being stolen from them. It was preparing to ask them to earn what they’d taken for granted.

Rather than compete fairly, they changed the rules. Rather than share power, they redefined it.

The American Enterprise System didn’t just halt progress—it rebranded it as threat. It didn’t debate the future. It replaced the future with a feedback loop.

The cheat became the rule.

By the end of 1971, the architecture was visible. The logic had changed. A new operating system—designed not for representation, but for preservation; not for equity, but for extraction—had begun its installation. The system looked unchanged. Same buildings. Same rituals. Same flag. But the code had been rewritten. And it would not need a coup to take over. It would run quietly, effectively, under its own power. It was not a conspiracy. It was a consensus.

In the years that followed, no one needed to call a meeting. No one needed to send a memo. The system ran itself. The courts codified it. Congress enacted it. The media narrated it. Bureaucracies conformed to it. And the public, watching prices rise and unions fall and trust erode, adapted to it.

The installation didn’t come with sirens. It came with spreadsheets, legislation, and expert consensus. It came dressed as inevitability.