I was late in starting to read Serge Truffaut’s latest book, Powell Memorandum (Éditions Somme toute, Montréal, 2024, 176 pages), because I fear works that present themselves as docufictions.
The genre, in fact, bothers me a little. Its aim is to reveal thorny information, but we never really know if the latter is documentary or fiction.
At the same time, docufiction, if well constructed, can give momentum to the documentary genre. An investigation into the sources of the bitter Trumpist right or its ilk elsewhere in the world is austere. With a slight fictionalization, it might go down better.
This is the challenge that the former international affairs columnist of the Duty in his Powell Memorandum. Where do the attacks on the “so-called free and democratic world over the last 30 or 40 years” come from, he asks? Can we identify “a text that would be at the origin of “Trumpism,” the Tea Party, the metamorphosis of the Republican Party into a sounding board for excesses that, in a time not so long ago, would have been described as totally unhinged by the entire political class”?
To conduct the investigation freely, Truffaut invents a minimalist fictional framework. Roland Lautenbacher, a Montrealer of Ukrainian origin, horrified by the rise of an increasingly extreme right in the United States and elsewhere, entrusts Christian Cioban, a sort of “private detective of ideas”, with the mandate of going back to the source of this ideological drift.
These two characters, who love jazz and who take a little too much pleasure in letting us know that they are gourmets, sum up the fictional aspect of the book. Everything else, or almost everything else, that is to say with the exception of the experts they consult—journalists, professors, unionists, left-wing activists—and to whom Truffaut gave names of greats of American jazz, is true, according to the checks I have made.
Before setting off on American roads to discover the truth, Cioban went to McGill University, where an economic historian explained to him that one could not understand the Trumpist drift without going through the reign of Ronald Reagan, President of the United States from 1981 to 1989.
It was with him that “the deregulation of public force, of the State, not to say its destruction,” began. Reagan hated government, especially taxes and duties that were used to distribute wealth. He violently attacked unions and deregulated left, right and centre to leave the field open to big business and the ultra-rich.
The crux of the story is not fiction. It is, Truffaut tells us, a “text written in 1971 by a lawyer named Lewis F. Powell Jr. and simply entitled Powell Memorandum “The Powell in question is a business lawyer who has notably defended the interests of tobacco companies.
In the 1960s, American capitalists were worried. It was a time of protest: black ghettos were revolting, students were demonstrating against American interventions in Vietnam and Cambodia, and young people at Woodstock were rejecting the established order.
Worse, a book by lawyer Ralph Nader becomes immensely popular by exposing the lies of the automobile industry and an essay by biologist Rachel Carson exposes the dangers of pesticides. Capitalism is threatened.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is therefore calling on Powell to orchestrate a counterattack. His document will become “the ideological foundation upon which the Republican Party and the economic elites” will base “their war against anything that even remotely resembles the policies advocated by the center and the center-left.”
Powell advocates an all-out ideological war in universities, in the media, in government, in the intellectual community and through judicial activism against everything he equates with socialism. Two months later, he will be appointed to the Supreme Court.
Far-right libertarian billionaires like Coors, Koch, and Mercer will implement Powell’s agenda by funding foundations—including the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute—committed to the war against leftist ideas: financial and environmental regulation, global warming, civil rights, taxing the rich, welfare programs, and the social-democratic spirit of the New Deal.
It is clear that it worked when we see the current worrying state of American democracy, whose metastases are spreading everywhere, even in Quebec and Canada. Truffaut’s docufiction, ultimately, mainly illustrates the sad truth.