This is an excellent survey of US political thought as it was influenced by very conservative businessmen. They certainly seem to have changed the country's conversation to match their world view. ( )

“The invisible hand of the market”, from Adam Smith’s “An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations” is a beloved sound bite used whenever a politician wants to block or eliminate a law they see as detrimental “to business”. Like most of the beloved snippets from Smith’s most famous book it is taken out of context and misused. Kim Phillips-Fein’s book “Invisible hands : the businessmen's crusade against the New Deal” published in 2009 uses the phrase in the title of her book both ironically, she shows us just how little trust business men have in the market and literally, for the organized forces working to influence government policies to favor the wealthy and to stay hidden in the background.

Phillips-Fein’s subtitle seems to imply that businessmen only became active politically after after Franklin Delano Roosevelt managed to get his “New Deal” passed into law. In fact she reveals that organized political lobby groups, although they were not called that at the time, existed as far back as the late 19th century and the “National Manufacturers Association”, an anti-labor union group. Conservatism in the first decades of the 20th century did little to hide that it favored only the wealthy, a tiny part of the voting population.

Sinclair Lewis is often, incorrectly, attributed as the source for “When fascism comes to America it will be carrying a Bible and wrapped in the flag”. Whether you accept the connection between fascism and corporate political power the pro-wealth conservatives realized that religion and patriotism were good cover for policies that only served the rich. The DuPonts’ “American Liberty League” was one of the first attempts to cloak their movement in the tapestry of patriotism. Conservative activists formed “religious organizations” to push the idea that Jesus was a capitalist. The founder of these organizations confessed after retiring that he could have cared less about religion, he just wanted to save the wealthy. The group's true purposes were not that well disguised. One legislator referred to the Dupont organization as the “American Cellophane League” because, he said, it was made by the DuPonts and you could see right through it.

Then came Barry Goldwater. His campaign preyed on working class discomfort with post World War Two social changes and professed that conservatives were “protecting traditional values”. What Goldwater was protecting is best expressed in something he wrote, “I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I will do whatever it takes to keep it there.” The social turmoil of the 1960’s and 70s, Civil Rights, Feminism, anti-war protests, political scandals, the oil embargo, all set the stage for Ronald Reagan and Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy and the divisive politics of today.

Phillips-Fein’s book was an eye opener for me, I thought the politics of wealth was a modern problem. I can’t recommend the book enough. It exposes the “Invisible Hands” that work to hold down the majority and make the wealthy even richer. ( )

Meh. This one starts out great, then doesn't develop for a while, then keeps on not developing and then... ends. This is probably my fault. I was *so* happy to read a balanced account of how the institutes and think tanks and so on that fund American Conservatism (economically and intellectually) were formed. And I knew the book ended with Reagan. So I assumed that Ms Phillips-Fein would explain how the conservative movement went from a handful of small organizations with virtually no important pull to the formative political force of our time. Why did people suddenly start voting for conservative policies? Why did the Democrats suddenly start acting like libertarians? I have some ideas, but I'd like to know what P-Fein thought about this. Instead, you get fifteen pages about how Reagan wasn't getting support from large business, about how everyone really favored Carter, and then one sentence: "But in the weeks leading up to the election, the ambivalence that business leaders had expressed about Reagan in the spring disappeared," p 259. Was this an act of God? I'm pretty sure God's a socialist. Is he just testing us? Is this our Exodus? If so, where the hell is our Canaan?

To be fair, she does suggest one explanation for this in the Bibliographic Essay: "the free-market agenda in and of itself might have provided ways of bridging the divide between economic classes and creating a conservative movement, quite independent of its connection to cultural politics." This seems reasonable, and I hope she follows it up. I'm tired of reading silly arguments about how militant action in favor of the 'free market' is just racism. It's not. It is, I would say, much more terrifying.

Anyway, a well written summary of a whole range of conservative institutions, with very little pointless polemic. Can't overstate the importance of the absence of pointless polemic. ( )

Any good history of how some set of ideas came to prominence is necessarily going to have to give a lot of non-intellectual explanations: it'd be very naive to suppose ideas succeed in politics on their merits! Phillips-Fein's history is good precisely because she traces all the money that funded the newsletters and think tanks and campaigns that made the conservative movement.

The effect on the reader of this story is, I think, to make him feel that the movement is somewhat discredited, since it's success is so clearly not a vindication of its ideas. But so it goes. If you aren't disenchanted with political movements by the end of this book, you weren't paying attention.

That said, I believe it's even-handed. I have no idea whether the author thinks F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman are cranks or sages. And that's how it should be. ( )