The long misunderstood but enduringly influential supply-side movement has always had its elite and its popular wings. Establishment figures such as President Gerald Ford’s Treasury Secretary William E. Simon and Harvard economist Martin Feldstein celebrated “capital formation” and called for cuts to the capital gains and corporate income tax, while academic and political mavericks such as Arthur Laffer, Jude Wanniski, and Jack Kemp sought to forge an improbable alliance between blue-collar workers and small business by calling for cuts to the individual income tax. Under the renegade leadership of Richard L. Lesher, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the largest lobbying group in the United States) created an effective hybrid of hard-right social conservatism and supply-side economic populism. The Chamber’s monthly magazine, the Nations’ Business, addressed all workers—especially blue-collar workers—as self-employed business owners in waiting, and railed against the federal agencies that would violate their constitutional freedoms. The magazine featured articles on tradesmen who had done battle with federal health and safety regulators, long-haul truckers who had freed themselves from union oversight to build their own fleet, and door-to-door salesmen who had escaped the drudgery of nine-to-five employment. In this way, the blue-collar producer was reimagined as an aspirational small business owner rather than a wage worker—a slippage that helps explain the American right’s strangely capacious understanding of the working class today. The Chamber’s ideal entrepreneurial form was not simply the small business, but the small family business, whose natural labor hierarchies and personalized property relations stood in contrast to the suspect anonymity of the corporation.
Not incidentally, the Chamber of Commerce had close links with Amway, the direct sales company cofounded in 1958 by Chamber board member Jay Van Andel and his childhood friend Richard DeVos. In an interview with the Nation’s Business, Van Andel explained the origins of the company’s name, an abbreviation of the American Way: “We decided to use the idea of free enterprise—of the small businessman being able to go off on his own. We believed then, and we still do, that this is the heart and soul of the American ideal—to make your own way. You can start your own business, whether a fruit stand, a farm or whatever, and you can do your own thing in life.” The son of a car dealer and an electrical contractor, respectively, Van Andel and DeVos claimed to be orchestrating a free association of small businessmen. In reality, Amway was perfecting a unique way of organizing business into an elaborate structure of self-replicating contractual relationships, one in which everyone who was not a company leader assumed the hybrid identity of exploiter and exploited.