Art 2. Vol 1. 2026
The Long Game: How Conservative Think Tanks Built MAGA
Let’s look at a fifty-year planning that was hiding in plain sight the entire time
Let us establish something upfront that political commentators on both sides consistently fail to appreciate: MAGA did not begin with a man descending a golden escalator in June 2015.
It began with note written in 1971 by a corporate lawyer from Virginia named Lewis Powell who was deeply worried about what hippies were doing to capitalism.
This is the story of how the American conservative movement spent fifty years building the intellectual infrastructure for a revolutionary societal change and then handed the keys to Donald Trump. It is, depending on your politics, either the greatest long-game in democratic history or the most elaborate own goal ever scored. Possibly both.
The Memo That Started Everything
On August 23, 1971, Lewis Powell sat down and wrote what he called a confidential memo to the US Chamber of Commerce. He titled it “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” which, points for clarity. Alarmed by what he saw as threats to capitalism from labour unions, consumer advocates, and progressive movements, Powell urged businesses to mobilise. He called for a coordinated effort to influence policy through lobbying, think tanks, media campaigns, and strategic litigation. Corporations, he argued, should fund academic programs, shape public opinion, and place business-friendly voices in positions of power.
Two months after writing this memo, Richard Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court. Whether Nixon read the memo before or after making that decision is, diplomatically, an interesting question.
The blueprint called for a steady flow of money from the wealthiest members of the corporate elite, funnelled through philanthropic foundations of “dark money” to newly created think tanks explicitly committed to conservative or libertarian principles and patience, as it turned out, was the point.
The Architecture of Patience
By 1982, a network of wealthy businessmen and conservative thinkers had created the first of many organisations that would embody Powell’s most important ideas. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973. The Cato Institute. The American Enterprise Institute. The Federalist Society, founded in 1982 by law students at Yale and the University of Chicago who had decided that the entire legal establishment was irredeemably liberal and something needed to be done about it.
In 1971, there were only 176 companies with offices in Washington DC. A decade later, in 1980, there were 2,445 companies, 9,000 lobbyists, and 60,000 trade association employees.
In nine years, the corporate and conservative presence in Washington grew by a factor of fourteen. That is not organic political participation. That is a coordinated institutional project of almost breathtaking scale. While the left was dominating the culture, the music, the universities, the television. The right was quietly building the infrastructure.
The Federalist Society deserves particular attention, because it is the most consequential organisation in American political life that most people outside America have never heard of. Created in 1982 to counterbalance what its founders considered a liberal legal establishment, it gradually evolved into the conservative legal establishment, and membership is all but required for any conservative lawyer who hopes to enter politics or the judiciary. It claims 40,000 members, including five Supreme Court Justices, dozens of federal judges, and every Republican attorney general since its inception.
Five Supreme Court Justices. Every Republican attorney general. The organisation that started as a law school debate club is now, without meaningful exaggeration, the most powerful legal network in the country.
The conservative legal movement was originally spawned to counter the liberal legal network and broader Rights Revolution, helping to entrench the US power structure around the internecine conflicts of lawyerly elites.
Project 2025: The Policy Manual Nobody Wanted to Admit Knowing
By the time Donald Trump arrived on the political scene, the Heritage Foundation had spent fifty years producing policy papers, staffing Republican administrations, and waiting for a moment when the full programme could be implemented.
Heritage worked at developing new ways to directly influence policy should a conservative Republican ever be elected to the White House. Thus, in the early eighties, Heritage produced the first precursor to Project 2025. Which means Project 2025, for all the shock it generated in 2024, was essentially Heritage’s fourth or fifth attempt at the same document. They had simply been waiting for the right president to use it.
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told the New York Times that he sees the foundation’s role as “institutionalising Trumpism.” He also described the country as being “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
That last sentence, delivered on Steve Bannon’s podcast, is the kind of thing that tends to get quoted at length without anyone stopping to note how extraordinary it is for the president of a major policy institution to be talking about revolutions on Steve Bannon’s podcast. These are strange times.
The Irony at the Heart of It
Here is the structural irony that the entire fifty-year project cannot quite escape. For all the talk of a newly populist Republican Party capable of appealing to its emergent working-class base, Project 2025 in no way speaks to this new constituency. At bottom, the current orientation of the Heritage Foundation contains tax cuts targeted at higher earners without concern for the debt, more militarism almost everywhere, a slashed federal workforce, an anti-labour orientation, and a scaled-back social safety net.
These are the policy preferences of the donor class, dressed in the language of the working-class revolt. The people attending MAGA rallies in rural Pennsylvania and the people who funded the Heritage Foundation have almost nothing in common except a shared enemy.
Heritage’s president has declared that Trump is “superior to Reagan in his willingness to upend the status quo,” and is positioning the foundation for the next fifty years of conservative movement-building.
Fifty years. That is the timescale these people think on.
The Powell Memo was written in 1971. Project 2025 landed in 2025. That is a fifty-four year gap between the blueprint and the building. No political movement on the American left has demonstrated anything remotely approaching that kind of institutional patience.
Whether that patience has produced wisdom, or simply the longest and most elaborately funded act of political self-deception in modern democratic history, is a question that American voters are, at this particular moment, actively in the process of answering.
The think tanks are watching. They have been watching for a very long time. The Indian scene is different, the think tanks are closer than you think they are.
Delhi Polity 