that were turned down by the senate so it isn't clear at least to me whether nixon had a plan when he put powell on the court although i've heard a theory about the first two nominations being set up so he could get powell but i i don't know about that and so i have to say he had to know lewis powell was well known he was head of the american bar association various stablished lawyer as i said on the boards of all of these companies well known in virginia and nationally as a distinguished lawyer frankly was always corporate lawyer was a very soft spoken southern general he wasn't the everything everything you hear about him he's described as you know mild mannered and gracious and i'm sure he was he just had a very corporatist sort of state of mind but you know the same day nixon nominated lewis powell he had to open and he nominated william rehnquist the conservative and these two actually turned out to be very different justices the conservative who we

think of as the conservative william rehnquist actually wrote dissent after dissent against lewis piles corporate rights decisions and lewis powell who we think of as this moderate mild mannered judge turned out to be the revolutionary who created a whole new theory of corporate speech which had never existed in america up to that time i think we're in a lot he was it was brilliant you know where he just he pointed back to santa clara he said you know this court without benefit of discussion or debate you know just created this but. now i'm going this is your turn. one of your chapters one of the chapters in your book ask the question did corporate power destroy the working american economy what were the what are the things that came out of the paul memo that we can explicitly track back to it and it's been nearly forty years now what impact. on our economy and on. culture can we

you know connect those dots draw lines from you know. my view is almost everything eventually comes back to the powell memo and these corporate rights decisions and it's not a simple scuse me a simple tracing back to that it's really about whether lewis powell succeeded in doing what his memo said that the chamber of commerce and corporate america should do which is change the legal social and economic structure it wasn't just about winning a few supreme court cases it was about change in american culture and that is i think what they succeeded in doing so i think we now see the results not only in our democracy after citizens united but in the food we eat the water we drink the wars we fight. almost throughout our society i talk about schools essentially being corporate ties now and the economy i think what we see in the economy is once we accepted the lewis powell theory the chamber of commerce theory that corporations

are just like people and have rights rather than being tools that serve us rather than we are tools that serve the corporations once that got flipped around everything was beyond debate so if the if corporations wanted to start up at all the benefits and privileges of a corporation but put all the jobs and to sweat shops overseas or into dangerous factories in china that would be just fine. according to the law so so so many things what happened is we changed into from thinking that you know good jobs good wages pensions unions things that actually helped america and the american middle class get strong that those were expenses that had to be cut that those were burdens on competitiveness we were just led to accept driven to accept really because when we tried to enact laws. to change that they were struck down we

were turned into another marketplace in the world rather than something unique the where we could have build in a merican middle class and in fact even worse i think countries like europe are actually doing better at protecting their middle class than we are now because of this clearly and and the. this concept of corporations as persons and and speech or money as being something other than property as has been speech. how do we. you know you call for an amendment to the supreme court or to the constitution to to basically say ok the supreme court doesn't you know they can they can no longer make these lewis powell like rulings because we're going to amend the constitution. how do we get to their. well we get there like americans have always gotten there so this isn't. i do propose as many others do this from great groups out there free speech

for people move to amend public citizen many common cause people the american way a lot of americans are coming together to say this is not about tinkering this is not about a little legislative fix we are facing a fundamental structural problem that's been created by the corporate right's doctrine and we need to overturn that doctrine with the fundamental structural reform which is a constitutional amendment and so it's no different it's no more difficult than it was in the progressive era when they passed and ratified four constitutional amendments one wasn't so smart that prohibition you know the other three were really good and one things we take for granted now women get to vote we elect our senators we have a progressive income tax relief the congress has the power to have a progressive income tax when the court said no congress can't do that we had an amendment to say oh yes we can we the people can do that and that's where we are now we need two thirds of calm. to vote on the eventually and be ratified by three

quarters of the states but how we get there is out in the states and the cities and the towns and that is happening right now we have resolutions once going to the floor of the new mexico house on tuesday just passed out of committee today a resolution calling on congress to send the people's rights amendment to the states for ratification we've got montana supreme court pushing back saying well in montana anyway we're going to regulate corporate money in our elections and that will probably make its way to the supreme court so we just have all of these different places where americans are coming together to say enough we are this is breaking our country it's breaking our democracy we the people means we the people and we need to get back to that article three of the constitution defines the court the judiciary and section two of article three as the the supreme court itself that specific court the high court will operate within. the use of the word regulation

of congress or within basically within rules defined by congress for it the exact wording wouldn't be possible and the last president to really seriously take this seriously as franklin roosevelt. would have been possible instead for congress to pass a law saying that the supreme court does not have the power to say that corporations are persons well you know that even more politically impractical in my view it is more politically impractical because it's asking congress to do something but i also actually believe that the supreme court it's a dynamic process so yes the supreme congress has the ability to define the jurisdiction of the supreme court congress has some ability to define the numbers of justices on the court which is why we had franklin roosevelt's so-called court packing plan there is a healthy tension that the elected branches should bring. to the supreme court from

the president to the congress and you know when president obama called out the supreme court two years ago after citizens united and that was considered shocking no that's not shocking that's that's how our system is supposed to work the supreme court has incredible power as an unelected body to decide what the law is in deciding cases and that's an extraordinary power that should be exercised judiciously and they have overstepped they have overstepped to become so pro corporate that it's appropriate that congress and the and the presidency keep some tension there but in the end though i think what's most the biggest check and balance on the court that the framers gave us was article five the amendment process and we've used it seven times to overturn supreme court cases the supreme court decided women did not have a right to vote we overturned that many other examples so in the end the ultimate interpreters of the constitution are we the people the supreme court has a job to do to decide cases and we should leave them to do their job but when they

blow it and it becomes a chronic sort of catastrophic slow motion catastrophe for the country we have the duty to use our authority and duty really under article five to amend the constitution to say the supreme court you've gotten off track we get back on the road to a country of equal people equal free people who can govern ourselves and corporations are not among those people exactly are they are merely a tool as you say except little months brilliant thank you so much frankly is and i'm very glad to be here. to watch this conversation again as well as other conversations with great minds go to our website conversations with great minds dot com. well going into the future of science technology innovation all the latest

developments from around russia we've got the future are covered. guitar sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture.

welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. coming up in this half hour we revisit a conversation i had earlier this month the doctor corey robin in that interview dr robin talked about the true nature of conservatism and what's behind the onset of neoconservatism and the tea party in america today here's a look at. for tonight's conversations of great minds i'm joined by dr corey robin dr robert is one of america's foremost scholars on contemporary forms of conservatism in american society his writings appear in the new york times harper's the london

review and a variety of other publications he's a widely recognized for his work his blog has been awarded to the char charm work for the third place award by three steely the best writing in politics and social science in two thousand and eight he was named the lawrence as rockefeller a visiting fellow and a fellow in the program and ethics and public affairs at princeton university currently he's an associate professor of political science at brooklyn college in the city university of new york graduate center and the author of multiple books including his most recent the reactionary mind conservatism from edmund burke to sarah pail an actor corey robin thanks for joining us from our new york city studios tonight. thanks for having me push it what is what is conservatism in your opinion how would you define that. both as a as an abstraction as a word and also as a movement. it's a movement a reaction against the democratic movements from below these are movements like

abolitionist movement the french revolution the labor movement the women's movement and what conservatism is is a politics of reaction against these movements that tries to come up with a defense of hierarchy. in that in the face of those movements william f. buckley rather famously said conservatives stand athwart the arc of history with their hand shouting stop it sounds to me like you're saying it's quite that benevolent. yeah i mean it's conservatism and some conservatives like to say that they have some kind of a patient towards history but but what they really have an orientation to is the question of democracy and hierarchy that's really the fundamental question and in opposing movements egalitarian movements democratic movements they often times rather than trying to stop history will try to send it in a different direction and so again from the beginning with edmund burke in the

seven hundred ninety s. up through the neo conservatives most recently they're not trying to stop the direction of history they're really trying to change the direction of history trying to make it less equal and less free in many ways in the in the seventy and thirty's thomas hobbes of a biot then laid down kind of the first marker of the modern conservative movement and say in the human nature is essentially sinful and without the iron fist of church or state life would be nasty short. i'm paraphrasing badly here i know and also the modern liberalism the idea that people can govern themselves something that was picked up a generation later by locke and were so and then a generation after that by jefferson. and do you see a direct arc from from hobbes and leviathan and to. read and burke and his famous debates with thomas thomas paine which so provoked pain that he he wrote

the rights of man and just as a rebuttal to burke and from there to russell kirk nine hundred fifty three the conservative mind which was the animating force for barry goldwater and william f. buckley is the is that it can. it was ark and if so is it is there still some purity left to it or is it been completely distorted in the last three or four decades. well i think hobbes is a really complicated figure the continuous thing is that he faced this extraordinarily mass mobilization from below commoners who wanted to transform the british monarchy to abolish it and to create a republic and why hobbes is so important is this he's really the first person to understand that if you're going to construct a defense of hierarchy a defense of authority a defense of power in the face of that kind of movement you can't simply state the traditional arguments he understood that the reason that did that the mass

movements had triumphed was that those traditional arguments no longer worked so what he did was he took the arguments that he was of this mass movement and he tried to use them as an argument on behalf of hierarchy and that's what's so fascinating by him is that he really understood you know to boil it down to simple terms if you're going to beat the left you have to oftentimes borrow from the left and i think you see this over and over and over again with burke in his battle with pain. and so on up until the modern era but the barry goldwater conservatism in arguably the william buckley william if i interviewed buckley back when he was alive i wrote a number of years ago and have. without going into all that. they seem to hold to an ideal almost an idealized world and it seemed. the hierarchy was important i mean you know kirk's the first

chapter of the conservative mind is devoted to burke and burke's whole thing as you point out was was hierarchy. but there was utopianism. that's the was associated with the goldwater movement the drew in people like like hillary clinton and me when we were teenagers i was thirteen and you know when i went door to door my dad for barry goldwater and that seems eight to have been largely lost and corrupt you know if there's any little piece of it left it might be in the ron paul movement by modern conservatives the. modern conservatives seem to be not about the elegant discussion but rather the defense of billionaires and transnational corporations and my mis understanding the sore is. has there been some sort of a transformation or a coup a seizure of conservatism by the very wealthy. well it's important that you know

first of all this utopian element of conservatism because it's oftentimes been denied by conservatives themselves and by historians but i think you're absolutely right and again this goes back to the very beginning that what's what's made conservatism such a kind of a strange animal and hard to get you know one's mind around is that it has been this defense of inequality of this defense of hierarchy but it has been defended in school extraordinarily utopian oftentimes almost futuristic progressive terms and goldwater in that regard was very much in keeping with the conservative movement and i would say in terms of the contemporary scene i think you saw some of that that kind of utopianism with the neo conservative movement that really dominated the bush administration of the second bush administration in its vision of a kind of. a modern and american imperium it was an extraordinarily utopian vision of the united states governing the planet and moving the wheels of history forward

and you know that was that was the operative framework of the conservative movement up until you know several years ago not in that we're not talking you know ancient history here i think what's going on today. did to get to your question. is that conservatism the conservative movement has really succeeded in all of its air at least in most of its primary goals remember the modern conservative movement begins in the wake of the new deal it is a tremendous amount of momentum in the one nine hundred sixty s. in the one nine hundred sixty s. and it really comes to power with ronald reagan and its primary goal was to rollback of the welfare state which it has to all intents and purposes succeeded in doing to stop the civil rights movement in the fan the feminist movement and to a large degree it has succeeded in doing that the one movement it is not been able to roll back is the gay rights movement which is a sort of interesting story in of itself but it's succeeded in its goals and i think that's part of the reason why conservatism today seems like such

a bankrupt movement it's not because it went off the rails or anything like that the way some people like to claim it's that it succeeded in doing what it had to do and now the question is what future does it have in my prognosis is that it's really going to be on a downward trajectory and it won't really have a kind of idealistic mission like the one that you talked about from goldwater until it has a real movement from the left to oppose once again doesn't have that in occupy wall street. well that remains to be seen it's very interesting occupy wall street is the it is the beginning of something but remember occupy wall street has yet to pass a single law has yet to empower a single political official it has yet to win an election or anything like that and it is uncertain about what it's trying to do it has certainly caught the attention

and perhaps even begun to set the agenda but there's a big big difference between the beginnings of a social movement and a kind of transformative politics of the sort that we saw in the one nine hundred. he's with the new deal or in the one nine hundred sixty s. with the civil rights movement and the great society so i don't think it's until you're really going to see until occupy really becomes a kind of for middle political power that really can essentially get control over the political agenda and start legislating then i think you'll begin to see the beginnings of a conservative backlash but we just haven't seen it yet you argue the you know conservatism is basically reactionary force against democratic movements and it that being the case this country was born in revolution our founding principles are revolutionary and a lot of the rhetoric i'm hearing right now from from the republican right in the

primaries doesn't sound like an appeal to constitutional principles although it's wrapped in that it sounds like an appeal to articles of confederation principles when individual states were actually sovereign and and. so if if there is some truth to that perception could it be that throughout its history in modern america the conservative movement has been fundamentally in opposition to the american revolution the revolutionary principles the constitutional principles to what america is. what we have to be careful here because of course the articles of confederation at the time that they were adopted was thought to be the fulfillment of the revolution of the american revolution itself and there was a big battle over the constitution whether or not that was a betrayal of the revolution or fulfillment so i don't lie to you i try to be careful about saying that one movement is sort of anti american or in sync with america america is a complicated animal but you're absolutely correct that the contemporary

conservative movement and in this regard it's in keeping with you know a certain part of the conservative movement historically is very much appealing to the principles of opposition to national. political power defense of local and state privileges but the reason why that is is that at least for the most of the twentieth century the national state has been seen as the instrument or the arm of these democratic movements from below him in of course that goes back to the civil war the abolitionist movement turned to the national state to abolish and break the chattel slavery the labor movement did the exact same thing in order to try to bring to bear the power of the national state over modern corporations and employers the civil rights movement did the same in the sixty's so conservatives have good reason to oppose the national state because to their mind and i think they're somewhat accurate in this perception the national state has really been the

instrument for democratic emancipation and i think that's really the fundamental thing that's driving the conservative movement i'd like to i'd like to drill a little more into that into that piece if i can we have to take a real quick break here more conversations with great minds featuring dr corey robin coming up right after this break. download the official anti obligation to on the phone on pod touch from the i choose ops to. watch on t.v. life on the go. video on demand on tees and line road

calls an r.s.s. feeds now in the palm of your. question on the dot com. more news today violence is once again fled up. and these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations are the day.

well go back to conversations of the great minds and joined by dr corey robin a leading scholar on conservatism and neo conservatism in america and author of the reactionary mind conservatism from edmund burke to sarah palin let's get back to it . dr robin did you want to finish that thought that you were on when i interrupted

you. no i was just as we were wrapping up i was just to say that the conservative movement the reason why it has historically opposed national political power and defended local government or state government or you know and sometimes perfectly no government at all is really because they have seen and i think and rightly so the national government as the wing or the arm of the instrument of the great social movements of the left the abolitionist movement the workers' movement the feminist movement civil rights movement and so that's why they're always in this battle and sometimes they're very forthright about this barry goldwater inconscious of a conservative says that the bearer of the state's rights principle today writing in one nine hundred sixty is the anti integration movement in the south and so they've always understood a very clear connection between these principles absolutely. thomas jefferson was.

and is criticized these days by some of the more conservative historians like joseph ellis for being so fond of the whig histories. i thought was actually brilliant and was fascinated by jefferson's observations of them but he hated hume and wrote at length about how much he hated hume and everything from his jurisprudent prudence to is to his history. you write about how hume. in the in this in the seventeen hundreds was i don't recall the year and i'm guessing you may. basically laid down a legal principle that established for several hundred years it literally up until nine hundred eighty in the united states that it was legal for a man to rape his wife. can you tell us about that and what does that have to do with the modern conservative or the historic really the you know three century.