In 1971, soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a memo to Eugene Sydnor Jr., the education director at the United States Chamber of Commerce. Powell told Sydnor and the Chamber that if the capitalist class wanted to be taken seriously in the halls of power, it would have to engage in a decades-long, well-funded, wide-ranging campaign to inject its voice into American political institutions.

“Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations,” Powell insisted.

Indeed, no institution was too insignificant for Powell. From the media to schools to the halls of Washington, D.C., injecting the corporate viewpoint into the discussion was paramount. He even called for school textbooks to be monitored.

Democrats—almost 50 years since the Powell Memo—have utterly failed to grasp its basic argument: that the ability to make change comes to those who strategically and methodically focus on the levers of power.

Republicans and their donors, on the other hand, got the message. In fact, not long after the memo was written, a handful of billionaires—including John Olin, who made his money in chemical and munitions manufacturing, newspaper publisher Richard Scaife, heir to Mellon fortune, and petrochemical scions David and Charles Koch—began to create an apparatus to shift politics rightward in much the way Powell outlined.