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Summary Of Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands

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In Kim Phillips-Fein’s narrative, Invisible Hands, she highlights key figures that joined together to try to end the New Deal. The group consisted of elite businessmen and theorists who became extremely politically influential in the 1930s to 1980s. The ultimate goal for this group, the conservative party, was to maximize profits and lobby against government regulations, policies, and unions that jeopardized their profits. Phillips-Fein gives an inside look at the creation of the conservative party and the decades of bombardment that America took while the conservative movement influenced policy all throughout the country.
The economic history and theory during this time period as seen from Kim Phillips-Fein’s narrative was given in a top-down …show more content…

Phillips-Fein’s writing provides historical examples that helped back her overall message of Invisible Hands; her message being that the business elites had heavy political influence during the four decades of the period. A book that can be compared to Phillips-Fein’s work is Jim Powell’s FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression. In this writing we see more of a one sided view of liberalism with a lot of history based around Roosevelt rather than the conservative movement. However, in both writings we can trace a similarity in the New Deal and draw a conclusion that there were those who supported more government regulations and those who did not. In Powell’s writing he stated that FDR “seemed willing to try practically anything as long as it involved more government control over the economy” , this very point shows why the conservative party, as pointed out by Phillips-Fein, was so aggressive in reducing the need for government control. In both cases it seems apparent that since the New Deal was unleashed that there was a persistent movement in supporting and opposing …show more content…

Phillips-Fein generalized the conservative party as being associated with only business elites and lacked proper information on how companies were able to manipulate and teach conservative views to the labor force and steer them away from unions. Although Phillips-Fein understood what the goal was to these corporations, “weakening regulations, limiting labor unions, and rolling back taxes” she was not able to develop reasoning for why the American people believed in the conservative party. From this, it appeared that the conservative party itself was birthed and consisted of only the elites, and the party supporters were absent in voting. In her text it would have been helpful for more examples of the grassroots campaigns that took place in capturing the supporters and dismantling unions. Her writing affirmed her belief in liberal ideology and backed her views in Invisible Hands, but shaped a one sided argument which emphasized if not entirely on the negatives of the conservative

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