Modern Conservativism =

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Theocracy & White Supremacy:
Behind the Culture War to Restore Traditional Values

"We are America, they are not America."
--GOP Party Chief Rich Bond
As the United States slides toward the twenty-first century, the major mass
movements challenging the bipartisan status quo are not found on the left of
the political spectrum, but on the right. The resurgent right contains
several strands woven together around common themes and goals. There is the
electoral activism of the religious fundamentalist movements; the militant
anti-government populism of the armed militia movement; and the murderous
terrorism of the neonazi underground--from which those suspected of bombing
the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City appear to have crept.
It is easy to see the dangers to democracy posed by far right forces such as
armed militias, neonazis, and racist skinheads. However, hard right forces
such as dogmatic religious movements, regressive populism, and White racial
nationalism also are attacking democratic values in our country.
The best known sector of the hard right--dogmatic religious movements--is
often called the "Religious Right" It substantially dominates the Republican
Party in at least 10 (and perhaps as many as 30) of the 50 states. As part
of an aggressive grassroots campaign, these groups have targeted electoral
races from school boards to state legislatures to campaigns for the US
Senate and House of Representatives. They helped elect dozens of hardline
ultraconservatives to the House of Representatives in 1994. This successful
social movement politically mobilizes a traditionalist mass base from a
growing pious constituency of evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic,
pentacostal, and orthodox churchgoers , many of whom are unaware of many of
the true motives and goals.
The goal of many leaders of this ultraconservative religious movement is
imposing a narrow theological agenda on secular society. The predominantly
Christian leadership envisions a religiously-based authoritarian society;
therefore we prefer to describe this movement as the "theocratic right." A
theocrat is someone who supports a form of government where the actions of
leaders are seen as sanctioned by God--where the leaders claim they are
carrying out God's will. The central threat to democracy posed by the
theocratic right is not that its leaders are religious, or fundamentalist,
or right wing--but that they justify their political, legislative, and
regulatory agenda as fulfilling God's plan.
Along with the theocratic right, two other hard right political movements
pose a grave threat to democracy: regressive populism, typified by diverse
groups ranging from members of the John Birch Society out to members of the
patriot and armed militia movements; and White racial nationalism, promoted
by Pat Buchanan and his shadow, David Duke of Louisiana.
http://www.duke.org/
The theocratic right, regressive populism, and White racial nationalism make
up a hard right political sector that is distinct from and sometimes in
opposition to mainstream Republicanism and the internationalist wing of
corporate conservatism.
Finally, there is the militant, overtly racist far right that includes the
open White supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members, Christian Patriots, racist
skinheads, neonazis, and right-wing revolutionaries. Although numerically
smaller, the far right is a serious political factor in some rural areas,
and its propaganda promoting violence reaches into major metropolitan
centers where it encourages alienated young people to commit hate crimes
against people of color, Jews, and gays and lesbians, among other targets.
The electoral efforts of Buchanan and Duke serve as a bridge between the
ultraconservative hard right and these far right movements. The armed milita
movement is a confluence of regressive populism, White racial nationalism,
and the racist and antisemitic far right.
All four of these hard right activist movements are antidemocratic in
nature, promoting in various combinations and to varying degrees
authoritarianism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, nativism, racism, sexism,
homophobia, antisemitism, demagoguery, and scapegoating. Each wing of the
antidemocratic right has a slightly different vision of the ideal nation.
The theocratic right's ideal is an authoritarian society where Christian men
interpret God's will as law. Women are helpmates, and children are the
property of their parents. Earth must submit to the dominion of those to
whom God has granted power. People are basically sinful, and must be
restrained by harsh punitive laws. Social problems are caused by Satanic
conspiracies aided and abetted by liberals, homosexuals, feminists, and
secular humanists. These forces must be exposed and neutralized.
Newspaper columnist Cal Thomas, a long-standing activist in the theocratic
right, recently suggested that churches and synagogues take over the welfare
system "because these institutions would also deal with the hearts and souls
of men and women." The churches "could reach root causes of poverty"--a lack
of personal responsibility, Thomas wrote, expressing a hardline Calvinist
theology. "If government is always there to bail out people who have
children out of wedlock, if there is no disincentive (like hunger) for doing
for one's self, then large numbers of people will feel no need to get
themselves together and behave responsibly."
For regressive populism, the ideal is America First ultra patriotism and
xenophobia wedded to economic Darwinism, with no regulations restraining
entrepreneurial capitalism. The collapsing society calls for a strong man in
leadership, perhaps even a benevolent despot who rules by organically
expressing the will of the people to stop lawlessness and immorality. Social
problems are caused by corrupt and lazy government officials who are
bleeding the common people dry in a conspiracy fostered by secret elites,
which must be exposed and neutralized.
Linda Thompson, a latter-day Joan of Arc for the patriot movement,
represents the most militant wing of regressive populism. She appointed
herself "Acting Adjutant General" of the armed militias that have formed
cells across the United States. Operating out of the American Justice
Federation of Indianapolis, Thompson's group warns of secret plots by
"corrupt leaders" involving "Concentration Camps, Implantable Bio Chips,
Mind Control, Laser Weapons," and "neuro-linguistic programming" on behalf
of bankers who "control the economy" and created the illegal income tax.
The racial nationalists' ideal oscillates between brutish authoritarianism
and vulgar fascism in service of White male supremacy. Unilateral militarism
abroad and repression at home are utilized to force compliance. Social
problems are caused by uncivilized people of color, lower-class foreigners,
and dual-loyalist Jews, who must all be exposed and neutralized.
Samuel Francis, the prototypical racial nationalist, writes columns warning
against attempts to "wipe out traditional White, American, Christian, and
Western Culture," which he blames on multiculturalism. Francis's solutions:
"Americans who want to conserve their civilization need to get rid of elites
who want to wreck it, but they also need to kick out the vagrant savages who
have wandered across the border, now claim our country as their own, and
impose their cultures upon us. If there are any Americans left in San Jose,
they might start taking back their country by taking back their own
city....You don't find statues to Quetzalcoatl in Vermont."
For the far right, the ideal is White revolution to overthrow the corrupt
regime and restore an idealized natural biological order. Social problems
are caused by crafty Jews manipulating inferior people of color. They must
be exposed and neutralized.
The Truth at Last is a racist far right tabloid that features such headlines
as "Jews Demand Black Leaders Ostracize Farrakhan," "Clinton Continues
Massive Appointments of Minorities," and "Adopting Blacks into White
Families Does Not Raise Their IQ," which concluded that "only the
preservation of the White race can save civilization....Racial intermarriage
produces a breed of lower-IQ mongrel people."
There are constant differences and debates within the right, as well as
considerable overlap along the edges. The relationships are complex: the
Birchers feud with Perot on trade issues, even though their other basic
themes are similar, and the theocratic right has much in common with
regressive populism, though the demographics of their respective voting
blocs appear to be remarkably distinct.
These antidemocratic sectors of the hard right are also distinct from
traditional conservatism and political libertarianism, although they share
some common roots and branches.
All of these antidemocratic tendencies are trying to build grassroots mass
movements to support their agendas which vary in degrees of militancy and
zealousness of ideology, yet all of which (consciously or unconsciously)
promote varieties of White privilege and Christian dominion. These are
activist movements that seek a mass base. Across the full spectrum of the
right one hears calls for a new populist revolt.
Many people presume that all populist movements are naturally progressive
and want to move society to the left, but history teaches us otherwise. In
his book The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin explains how populism is a
style of organizing. Populism can move to the left or right. It can be
tolerant or intolerant. In her book Populism, Margaret Canovan defined two
main branches of Populism: agrarian and political.
Agrarian populism worldwide has three categories: movements of commodity
farmers, movements of subsistence peasants, and movements of intellectuals
who wistfully romanticize the hard-working farmers and peasants. Political
populism includes not only populist democracy, championed by progressives
from the LaFollettes of Wisconsin to Jesse Jackson, but also politicians'
populism, reactionary populism, and populist dictatorship. The latter three
antidemocratic forms of populism characterize the movements of Ross Perot,
Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan, three straight White Christian men trying
to ride the same horse.
Of the hundreds of hard right groups, the most influential is the Christian
Coalition led by televangelist and corporate mogul Pat Robertson. Because of
Robertson's smooth style and easy access to power, most mainstream
journalists routinely ignore his authoritarianism, bigotry, and paranoid
dabbling in conspiracy theories.
Robertson's gallery of conspirators parallels the roster of the John Birch
Society, including the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Council on
Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. In Robertson's book The
New World Order, he trumps the Birchers (their founder called Dwight
Eisenhower a communist agent) by alluding to an anti Christian conspiracy
that supposedly began in ancient Babylon--a theory that evokes historic
anti-Jewish bigotry and resembles the notions of the fascist demagogue
Lyndon LaRouche, who is routinely dismissed by the corporate media as a
crackpot. Robertson's homophobia is profound. He is also a religious bigot
who has repeatedly said that Hindus and Muslims are not morally qualified to
hold government posts. "If anybody understood what Hindus really believe,"
says Robertson, "there would be no doubt that they have no business
administering government policies in a country that favors freedom and
equality."
Robertson's embrace of authoritarian theocracy is equally robust:
"There will never be world peace until God's house and God's people are
given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world. How can
there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age
worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money
changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?"
Mainstream pundits are uncertain about the magnitude of the threat posed by
the theocratic right and the other hard right sectors. Sidney Blumenthal
warned recently in The New Yorker that "Republican politics nationally, and
particularly in Virginia, have advanced so swiftly toward the right in the
past two years that [Oliver] North's nomination [for the US Senate] was
almost inevitable." But just a few years ago, after George Bush was elected
President, Blumenthal dismissed the idea that the theocratic right was a
continuing factor in national politics. "Journalists like Blumenthal are
centrists who believe that America always fixes itself by returning to the
center. They have the hardest time appreciating the danger the right
represents because they see it as just another swing of the political
pendulum," says Jean Hardisty, a political scientist who has monitored the
right for more than 20 years:
"As the McCarthy period showed, however, if you let a right-wing movement go
long enough without serious challenge, it can become a real threat and cause
real damage. Centrists missed the significance of the right-wing drive of
the past fourteen years as it headed for success."
The defeat of George Bush in 1992 did not deter the hard rightists as they
increasingly turned toward state and local forums, where small numbers can
transform communities. They learned from the humiliating defeat of Barry
Goldwater in 1964 that to construct a conservative America would take
strategic planning that spanned decades.
Now, after decades of organizing, the right has managed to shift the
spectrum of political debate, making conservative politics look mainstream
when compared with overt bigotry, and numbing the public to the racism and
injustice in mainstream politics. When, for example, Vice President Dan
Quayle was asked by ABC what he thought of David Duke, Quayle sanitized
Duke's thorough racism and said: "The message of David Duke
is...anti-big-government, get out of my pocketbook, cut taxes, put welfare
people back to work. That's a very popular message. The problem is the
messenger. David Duke, neonazi, ex-Klansman, basically a bad person."
The pull of the antidemocratic hard right and its reliance on scapegoating,
especially of people of color, is a major factor in the increased support
among centrist politicians for draconian crime bills, restrictive
immigration laws, and punitive welfare regulations. The Republican Party's
use of the race card, from Richard Nixon's southern strategy to the Willie
Horton ads of George Bush's 1988 campaign, is made more acceptable by the
overt racism of the far right. Racist stereotypes are used opportunistically
to reach an angry White constituency of middle- and working-class people who
have legitimate grievances caused by the failure of the bipartisan status
quo to resolve issues of economic and social justice.
Scapegoating evokes a misdirected response to genuine unresolved grievances.
The right has mobilized a mass base by focusing the legitimate anger of
parents over inadequate resources for the public schools on the scapegoat of
gay and lesbian curriculum, sex education, and AIDS-awareness programs; by
focusing confusion over changing sex roles and the unfinished equalization
of power between men and women on the scapegoats of the feminist movement
and abortion rights; by focusing the desperation of unemployment and
underemployment on the scapegoat of affirmative-action programs and other
attempts to rectify racial injustice; by focusing resentment about taxes and
the economy on the scapegoat of dark-skinned immigrants; by focusing anger
over thoughtless and intrusive government policies on environmental
activists; and by focusing anxiety about a failing criminal justice system
on the scapegoat of early release, probation, and parole programs for
prisoners who are disproportionately people of color.
Such scapegoating has been applied intensively in rural areas which see
emerging social movements of "new patriots" and "armed militias" who are
grafting together the conspiracy theories of the hard right John Birch
Society with the ardor and armor of the paramilitary far right.
These hard right and far right forces are beginning to influence state and
local politics, especially in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain
states, through amorphous patriot and armed militia groups, sovereignty
campaigns, and county autonomy movements as well as some portions of the
anti-environmentalist "Wise Use" movement. The same regions have seen
contests within the Republican Party on the state level between mainstream
Republicans and the theocratic right. Some Republican candidates pander to
the patriot and militia movements as a source of constituent votes. The
political spectrum in some states now ranges from repressive corporate
liberalism in the "center" through authoritarian theocracy to nascent
fascism.
The Road to Backlash Politics
How did we get here? Despite the many differences, one goal has united the
various sectors of the antidemocratic right in a series of amorphous
coalitions since the 1960s: to roll back the limited gains achieved in the
United States by a variety of social justice movements, including the civil
rights, student rights, antiwar, feminist, ecology, gay and lesbian rights,
disability rights, and antimilitarist movements.
Hard right nativists formed the core of Joseph McCarthy's constituency after
World War II. After McCarthy's fall, they retreated until the late 1950s and
early 1960s, when a network of anti-communists spread the gospel of the
communist and secularist threats through such books as Dr. Fred Schwartz's
1960 You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists). At the 1964 Republican
convention, the growth of hard right forces became apparent. Goldwater's
candidacy represented a reaction to the values of modernity. Unlike
traditional conservative politics, which sought to preserve the status quo
from the encroachments of the modern world, Goldwater's politics sought to
turn back the political clock. This reactionary stance remains a key
component of the US hard right today. In 1961, Goldwater said, "My aim is
not to pass laws but to repeal them." Twenty years later, Paul Weyrich,
chief architect of the New Right, said, "I believe in rollback."
Hard right activists such as Phyllis Schlafly and John Stormer had helped
engineer Goldwater's nomination. Schlafly was a convention delegate in 1964,
and went on to found the Eagle Forum, which fought the Equal Rights
Amendment. Stormer wrote a book called None Dare Call It Treason. Their
aggressive anti-communist militarism worried many conventional voters, and
their conspiracy theories of secret collusion between corporate Republican
leaders and the communists--Schlafly called them the "secret kingmakers" in
her pro-Goldwater book A Choice Not an Echo--brought the hard right and far
right out of the woodwork as Goldwater supporters, which cost votes when
they began expounding on their byzantine conspiracy theories to the national
news media.
Most influential Goldwater supporters were not marginal far right activists,
as many liberal academics postulated at the time, but had been Republican
Party regulars for years, representing a vocal reactionary wing far to the
right of many persons who usually voted Republican. This hard right
reactionary wing of the Republican Party had an image problem, which was
amply demonstrated by the devastating defeat of Goldwater in the general
election. The current right-wing avalanche began when a group of
conservative strategists decided to brush off the flakes who had burdened
the unsuccessful 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign. They decided it was
time to build a "New Right" coalition that differentiated itself from the
old, nativist right in two key ways: it embraced the idea of an expansionist
government to enforce the hard right's social policy goals, and it eschewed
the old right's explicitly racist rhetoric. Overt White supremacists and
segregationists had to go, as did obvious anti-Jewish bigots. The wild-eyed
conspiratorial rhetoric of the John Birch Society was unacceptable, even to
William F. Buckley, Jr., whose National Review was the authoritative journal
of the right.
While the old right's image was being modernized, emerging technologies and
techniques using computers, direct mail, and television were brought into
play to build the New Right. After Goldwater's defeat, Richard Viguerie
painstakingly hand-copied information on Goldwater donors at the Library of
Congress and used the results to launch his direct-mail fundraising empire,
which led to the formation of the New Right coalition. And to reach the
grassroots activists and voters, right-wing strategists openly adopted the
successful organizing, research, and training methods that had been
pioneered by the labor and civil rights movements.
When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, his campaign payoff to the
emerging New Right included appointing such right-wing activists as Howard
Phillips to government posts. Phillips was sent to the Office of Economic
Opportunity with a mandate to dismantle social programs allegedly dominated
by liberals and radicals. Conservatives and reactionaries joined in a
"Defund the Left" campaign. As conservatives in Congress sought to gut
social-welfare programs, corporate funders were urged to switch their
charitable donations to build a network of conservative think tanks and
other institutions to challenge what was seen as the intellectual dominance
of Congress and society held by such liberal think tanks as the Brookings
Institution.
Since the 1960s, the secular, corporate, and religious branches of the right
have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a solid national
right-wing infrastructure that provides training, conducts research,
publishes studies, produces educational resources, engages in networking and
coalition building, promotes a sense of solidarity and possible victory,
shapes issues, provides legal advice, suggests tactics, and tests and
defines specific rhetoric and slogans. Today, the vast majority of "experts"
featured on television and radio talk shows, and many syndicated print
columnists, have been groomed by the right-wing infrastructure, and some of
these figures were first recruited and trained while they were still in
college.
Refining rhetoric is key for the right because many of its ideas are based
on narrow and nasty Biblical interpretations or are of benefit to only the
wealthiest sector of society. The theocratic right seeks to breach the wall
of separation between church and state by constructing persuasive secular
arguments for enacting legislation and enforcing policies that take rights
away from individuals perceived as sinful. Matters of money are interpreted
to persuade the sinking middle class to cheer when the rich get richer and
the poor get poorer. Toward these ends, questionable statistics,
pseudo-scientific studies, and biased reports flood the national debate
through the sluice gates of the right-wing think tanks.
Thus, the right has persuaded many voters that condoms don't work but
trickle-down theories do. The success of the right in capturing the national
debate over such issues as taxes, government spending, abortion, sexuality,
childrearing, welfare, immigration, and crime is due, in part, to its
national infrastructure, which refines and tests rhetoric by conducting
marketing studies, including those based on financial response to
direct-mail letters and televangelist pitches.
Corporate millionaires and zealous right-wing activists, however, can't
deliver votes without a grassroots constituency that responds to the
rhetoric. Conveniently, the New Right's need for foot soldiers arrived just
as one branch of Christianity, Protestant evangelicalism, marched onward
toward a renewed interest in the political process. Earlier in the century,
Protestant evangelicals fought the teaching of evolution and launched a
temperance campaign that led to Prohibition. But in the decades preceding
the 1950s, most Protestant evangelicals avoided the secular arena. Their
return was facilitated by the Reverend Billy Graham, perhaps the best known
proponent of the idea that all Protestants should participate in the secular
sphere to fight the influence of Godless communism at home and abroad, and
others ranging from the international Moral ReArmament movement to local
pastors who helped craft theological arguments urging all Christians to
become active in politics in the 1950s and 1960s.
A more aggressive form of Protestant evangelicalism emerged in the 1970s,
when such right-wing activists as Francis A. Schaeffer, founder of the
L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland and author of How Should We Then Live?,
challenged Christians to take control of a sinful secular society. Schaeffer
(and his son Franky) influenced many of today's theocratic right activists,
including Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and John W. Whitehead, who have gone
off in several theological and political directions, but all adhere to the
notion that the Scriptures have given dominion over the Earth to Christians,
who thus owe it to God to seize the reins of secular society.
The most extreme interpretation of this "dominionism" is a movement called
Reconstructionism, led by right-wing Presbyterians who argue that secular
law is always secondary to Biblical law. While the Reconstructionists
represent only a small minority within Protestant theological circles, they
have had tremendous influence on the theocratic right (a situation not
unlike the influence of Students for a Democratic Society or the Black
Panthers on the New Left in the 1960s). Reconstructionism is a factor behind
the increased violence in the anti-abortion movement, the nastiest of
attacks on gays and lesbians, and the new wave of battles over alleged
secular humanist influence in the public schools. Some militant
Reconstructionists even support the death penalty for adulterers,
homosexuals, and recalcitrant children.
One key theocratic group, the Coalition on Revival, has helped bring
dominionism into the hard right political movement. Militant antiabortion
activist Randall Terry writes for their magazine, Crosswinds, and has signed
their Manifesto for the Christian Church, which proclaims that America
should "function as a Christian nation" and that the "world will not know
how to live or which direction to go without the Church's Biblical influence
on its theories, laws, actions, and institutions," including opposition to
such "social moral evils" as "abortion on demand, fornication,
homosexuality, sexual entertainment, state usurpation of parental rights and
God-given liberties, statist-collectivist theft from citizens through
devaluation of their money and redistribution of their wealth, and
evolutionism taught as a monopoly viewpoint in the public schools." Taken as
a whole, the manifesto is a call for clerical fascism in defense of wealth
and patriarchy.
While dominionism spread, the number of persons identifying themselves as
born-again Christians was growing, and by the mid-1970s, rightists were
making a concerted effort to link Christian evangelicals to conservative
ideology. Sara Diamond, author of Spiritual Warfare, assigns a seminal role
to Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ, but traces the paternity of
the New Right to 1979, when Robert Billings of the National Christian Action
Council invited rising televangelist Jerry Falwell to a meeting with
rightwing strategists Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Richard Viguerie, and
Ed McAteer. According to Diamond, "Weyrich proposed that if the Republican
Party could be persuaded to take a firm stance against abortion, that would
split the strong Catholic voting bloc within the Democratic Party." Weyrich
suggested building an organization with a name involving the idea of a
"moral majority."
While Falwell's Moral Majority began hammering on the issue of abortion, the
core founding partners of the New Right were joined in a broad coalition by
the growing neoconservative movement of former liberals concerned over what
they perceived as a growing communist threat and shrinking moral leadership.
Reluctantly, the remnants of the old right hitched a ride on the only
electoral wagon moving to the right. The New Right coalition was built
around shared support for anti-communist militarism, moral orthodoxy, and
economic conservatism, the themes adopted by 1980 presidential candidate
Ronald Reagan.
The ardor and activism of the paranoid nativist and Americanist wing of the
New Right made many mainstream Republicans nervous. Even Goldwater divorced
himself from the more extreme New Right partisans, saying, "These people are
not conservatives. They are revolutionaries."
The Reagan Administration was masterful at buying the loyalty of the
paranoid nativist wing of the New Right. While Reagan gave mainstream
Republicans a green light for the lucrative trade with such communist
countries as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, he gave
the meager markets in Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan to the hard
right as a testing ground for their plans to fight communism and terrorism
through covert action. While he negotiated with the Soviet Union, he
continued to celebrate Captive Nations Day.
Under Reagan, the nativist-Americanist rightists received appointments to
executive agencies, where they served as watchdogs against secular humanism
and subversion. For example, a Phyllis Schlafly protege in the Department of
Education succeeded in blocking for several years all federal funds for the
Boston-area Facing History and Ourselves project, which produces a
curriculum on the Holocaust, genocide, and racism; the staffer denounced the
program as secular humanist psychological manipulation.
The first attempt to build a broad theocratic right movement failed in part
because Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, with its Baptist roots and pragmatic
fundamentalist Protestant aura, had only a limited constituency; it failed
to mobilize either the more ethereal charismatic and Pentecostal wings of
Christianity or the more moderate branches of denominational Protestantism.
Apart from the abortion issue, its appeal to conservative Catholics was
microscopic.
But as early as 1981, Falwell, Weyrich, and Robertson were working together
to build a broader and more durable alliance of the theocratic right through
such vehicles as the annual Family Forum national conferences, where members
of the Reagan Administration could rub shoulders with leaders of dozens of
Christian right groups and share ideas with rank-and-file activists. This
coalition-building continued through the Reagan years.
Most Christian evangelical voters who had previously voted Democratic did
not actually switch to Reagan in 1980, although other sectors of the New
Right were certainly influential in mobilizing support for Reagan the
candidate, and new Christian evangelical voters supported Republicans in
significant numbers. But by 1984, the theocratic right had persuaded many
traditionally Democratic but socially conservative Christians that support
for prayer in the schools and opposition to abortion, sex education, and
pornography could be delivered by the Republicans through the smiling visage
of the Great Communicator. Reagan did try to push these issues in Congress,
but many mainstream Republicans refused to go along.
Despite its successes, the hard right felt that Reagan lacked a true
commitment to their ideology. In 1988, during Reagan's second term, some key
New Right leaders, including Weyrich, Viguerie, and Phillips, began
denouncing Reagan as a "useful idiot" and dupe of the KGB, and even a
traitor over his arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union.
Under the Bush Administration, this branch of the right wing had less
influence. It was this perceived loss of influence within the Republican
Party, among other factors, that led to the highly publicized schism in the
late 1980s between the two factions of the New Right that came to be called
the paleoconservatives and the neoconservatives.
Patrick Buchanan, who says proudly, "We are Old Right and Old Church,"
emerged from this fracas as the leader of the paleoconservatives. (The term
neoconservatives, once restricted to a small group of intellectuals centered
around Commentary magazine, came within this context to refer to all
conservatives to the left of the paleoconservatives, despite substantial
differences among them. For example, traditional neoconservatives like Midge
Decter were concerned with a perceived deterioration of US culture, while
the conventional conservatives at the Heritage Foundation were concerned
almost exclusively with the economy.)
The paleoconservatives' America First policy supports isolationism or
unilateralism in foreign affairs, coupled with a less reverent attitude
toward an unregulated free market and support for an aggressive domestic
policy to implement New Right social policies, such as the criminalization
of sodomy and abortion.
The paleoconservatives are also more explicitly racialist and
anti-democratic than the neoconservatives, who continue to support
immigration, civil rights, and limited government.
The strongest glue that bound together the various sectors of the New
Right's pro-Reagan coalition was anti-communist militarism. Jewish
neoconservatives were even willing to overlook the long-standing tolerance
of racist and antisemitic sentiments among some paleoconservatives. This led
to some strange silences, such as the failure to protest the well-documented
presence of a network of emigre reactionaries and anti-Jewish bigots in the
1988 Bush campaign. The neocons could not be budged to action even when
investigative writer Russ Bellant revealed that one aging Republican
organizer proudly displayed photos of himself in his original Waffen SS
uniform, and that Laszlo Pasztor, who had built the Republican emigre
network, was a convicted Nazi collaborator who had belonged to the Hungarian
Arrow Cross, which aided in the liquidation of Hungary's Jews. (Pasztor is
still a key adviser to Paul Weyrich.)
The hard right saw Bush as an Eastern elite intellectual, and even his
selection of Dan Quayle as his running mate to pacify the theocratic right
was not enough to offset what they perceived as Bush's betrayal over social
issues.
When the scandals of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker rocked televangelism and
Pat Robertson failed in his 1988 presidential bid, some predicted the demise
of the theocratic right. But they overlooked the huge grassroots
constituency that remained connected through a Christian right
infrastructure of conferences, publications, radio and television programs,
and audiotapes. Robertson lost no time in taking the key contacts from his
1988 presidential campaign and training them as the core of the Christian
Coalition, now the most influential grassroots movement controlled by the
theocratic right.
Still, the theocratic right kept its ties to the Bush White House through
chief of staff John H. Sununu, who worked closely with the Free Congress
Foundation and even sent a letter on White House stationery in July 1989
thanking Weyrich for his help and adding, "If you have any observations
regarding the priorities and initiatives of the first six months or for the
Fall, I would like to hear them." The Bush White House also staffed an
outreach office to maintain liaison with evangelicals.
After the election of Clinton, the New Right alliance eventually collapsed.
That became clear during the Gulf War, when Buchanan's bigotry was suddenly
discovered by his former allies in the neoconservative movement.
Neoconservatives who championed the anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan contras were
offered posts in the Clinton Administration. And Barry Goldwater, toast of
the reactionaries in 1964, lambasted the narrow-minded bigotry of the
theocratic right, which owes its birth to his failed presidential bid.
The 1992 Republican Party convention represented the ascendancy of hard
right forces, primarily the theocratic right. The platform was the most
conservative ever, and speakers called repeatedly for a cultural war against
secular humanism.
The similarities between Goldwater's 1964 campaign and the 1992 Republican
convention were marked. Phyllis Schlafly was present at both, arguing that
liberals were trying to destroy the American way of life. In 1964, Goldwater
had targeted the deterioration of the family and moral values; in 1992, the
Republicans targeted traditional values.
The genius of the long-term strategy implemented by Weyrich and Robertson
was their method of expanding the base. First, they created a broader
Protestant Christian right that cut across all evangelical and
fundamentalist boundaries and issued a challenge to more moderate
Protestants. Second, they created a true Christian right by reaching out to
conservative and reactionary Catholics. Third, they created a theocratic
right by recruiting and promoting their few reactionary allies in the Jewish
and Muslim communities.
This base-broadening effort continued through the mid1990s, with Ralph Reed
of the Christian Coalition writing in the Heritage Foundation's Policy
Review about the need for the right to move from such controversial topics
as abortion and homosexuality toward bread-and-butter issues-a tactical move
that did not reflect any change in the basic belief structure. Sex
education, abortion, objections to lesbian and gay rights, resistance to
pluralism and diversity, demonization of feminism and working mothers
continued to be core values of the coalition being built by the theocratic
right.
John C. Green is a political scientist and director of the Ray C. Bliss
Institute at the University of Akron in Ohio. With a small group of
colleagues, Green has studied the influence of Christian evangelicals on
recent elections, and has found that, contrary to popular opinion, the nasty
and divisive rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and Marilyn Quayle at
the 1992 Republican Convention was not as significant a factor in the defeat
of Bush as were unemployment and the general state of the economy. On
balance, he believes, the Republicans gained more votes than they lost in
1992 by embracing the theocratic right. "Christian evangelicals played a
significant role in mobilizing voters and casting votes for the Bush-Quayle
ticket," says Green.
Green and his colleagues, James L. Guth and Kevin Hill, wrote a study
entitled Faith and Election: The Christian Right in Congressional Campaigns
1978-1988. They found that the theocratic right was most active--and
apparently successful--when three factors converged:
The demand for Christian Right activism by discontented constituencies.
Religious organizations that supplied resources for such activism.
Appropriate choices in the deployment of such resources by movement leaders.
The authors see the Christian Right's recent emphasis on grassroots
organizing as a strategic choice, and conclude that "the conjunction of
motivations, resources, and opportunities reveals the political character of
the Christian right: much of its activity was a calculated response to real
grievances by increasingly self-conscious and empowered traditionalists."
The Roots of the Culture War
Spanning the breadth of the antidemocratic hard right is the banner of the
Culture War. The idea of the Culture War was promoted by strategist Paul
Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation. In 1987, Weyrich commissioned a
study, Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda, which argued
that cultural issues provided antiliberalism with a more unifying concept
than economic conservatism. Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice
followed in 1991.
Earlier, Weyrich had sponsored the 1982 book The Homosexual Agenda and the
1987 Gays, AIDS, and You, which helped spawn successive and successful waves
of homophobia. The Free Congress Foundation, founded and funded with money
from the Coors Beer family fortune, is the key strategic think tank backing
Robertson's Christian Coalition, which has built an effective grassroots
movement to wage the Culture War. For Robertson, the Culture War opposes
sinister forces wittingly or unwittingly doing the bidding of Satan. This
struggle for the soul of America takes on metaphysical dimensions combining
historic elements of the Crusades and the Inquisition. The Christian
Coalition could conceivably evolve into a more mainstream conservative
political movement, or--especially if the economy deteriorates--it could
build a mass base for fascism similar to the clerical fascist movements of
mid-century Europe.
For decades anti-communism was the glue that bound together the various
tendencies on the right. Ironically, the collapse of communism in Europe
allowed the US political right to shift its primary focus from an extreme
and hyperbolic anti-communism, militarism, and aggressive foreign policy to
domestic issues of culture and national identity. Multiculturalism,
political correctness, and traditional values became the focus of this new
struggle over culture. An early and influential jeremiad in the Culture War
was Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. But neither
the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union, nor the publication of
Bloom's book accounts for the success of this Culture War in capturing the
high ground in popular discourse. Instead, it resulted from the victory of
hard-right forces within the New Right (which helped lead to its demise as a
coalition), and the concomitant embrace by hard right activists of a
nativist, theocratic ideology that challenged the very notion of a secular,
pluralistic democracy.
At the heart of this Culture War, or kulturkampf, as Patrick Buchanan calls
it, is a paranoid conspiratorial view of leftist secular humanism, dating to
the turn of the century and dependent upon powerful but rarely stated
presumptions of racial nationalism based on Eurocentric White supremacy,
Christian theocracy, and subversive liberal treachery.
The nativist right at the turn of the century first popularized the idea
that there was a secular humanist conspiracy trying to steer the US from a
God-centered society to a socialist, atheistic society. The idea was linked
from its beginnings to an extreme fear of communism, conceptualized as a
"red menace." The conspiracy became institutionalized in the American
political scene and took on a metaphysical nature, according to analyst
Frank Donner:
"The root anti-subversive impulse was fed by the [Communist] Menace. Its
power strengthened with the passage of time, by the late twenties its
influence had become more pervasive and folkish....A slightly secularized
version, widely shared in rural and small-town America, postulated a
doomsday conflict between decent upright folk and radicalism--alien,
satanic, immorality incarnate."
This conspiratorial world view continued to animate the hard right.
According to contemporary conspiratorial myth, liberal treachery in service
of Godless secular humanism has been "dumbing down" schoolchildren with the
help of the National Education Association to prepare the country for
totalitarian rule under a "One World Government" and "New World Order." This
became the source of an underlying theme of the armed militia movement.
This nativist-Americanist branch of the hard right (or the
pseudo-conservative, paranoid right, as Richard Hofstadter termed it in his
classic essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics") came to dominate
the right wing of the Republican Party, and included Patrick Buchanan,
Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, the
Rockford Institute, David Noebel's Summit Ministries, and Paul Weyrich's
Free Congress Foundation and Institute for Cultural Conservatism. Of more
historical importance are the John Birch Society, the Christian
AntiCommunism Crusade, and Billy James Hargis' Christian Crusade, although
the John Birch Society's membership doubled or tripled since the Gulf War in
1991 to over 40,000 members. Despite some overlap at the edges, reactionary
hard right electoral activists should be distinguished from the
extra-electoral right-wing survivalists, militia members, and armed White
racists on their right, and from the Eastern establishment conservative
branch of the right wing represented by George Bush on their left.
Secular humanism has been called the bogey-man of rightwing fundamentalism;
it is a term of art, shorthand for all that is evil and opposed to God.
While historically there has been an organized humanist movement in the
United States since the mid-1800s, secular humanism as a large religious
movement exists more in the right's conspiracy theories than in actual fact.
Secular humanism is a nontheistic philosophy with roots in the rationalist
philosophies of the Enlightenment that bases its commitment to ethical
behavior on the innate goodness of human beings, rather than on the commands
of a deity.
The conspiracy that the right wing believes has resulted in secular
humanism's hegemony is both sweeping and specific. It is said to have begun
in 1805, when the liberal Unitarians, who believed that evil was largely the
result of such environmental factors as poverty and lack of education,
wrested control of Harvard University from the conservative Calvinists, who
knew that men were evil by nature. The Unitarian drive for free public
schools was part of a conscious plan to convert the United States from
capitalism to the newly postulated socialism of Robert Owen.
Later, according to the conspiracy theorists, John Dewey, a professor at
Columbia University and head of the progressive education movement (seen as
"the Lenin of the American socialist revolution"), helped to establish a
secular, state run (and thus socialized) educational system in
Massachusetts. To facilitate the communist takeover, Dewey promoted the
look-say reading method, knowing it would lead to widespread illiteracy. As
Samuel Blumenfeld argued in 1984, "[T]he goal was to produce inferior
readers with inferior intelligence dependent on a socialist education elite
for guidance, wisdom and control. Dewey knew it...."
For the hard right, it is entirely reasonable to claim both that John Dewey
conspired to destroy the minds of American schoolchildren and that
contemporary liberals carry on the conspiracy. As Rosemary Thompson, a
respected pro-family activist, wrote in her 1981 book, Withstanding
Humanism's Challenge to Families (with a foreword by Phyllis Schlafly),
"[H]umanism leads to feminism. Perhaps John Dewey will someday be recognized
in the annals of history as the `father of women's lib.'"
To these rightists, all of the evils of modern society can be traced to John
Dewey and the secular humanists. A typical author argued:
"Most US citizens are not aware that hard-core pornography, humanistic sex
education, the `gay' rights movement, feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment,
sensitivity training in schools and in industry, the promotion of drug
abuse, the God-Is Dead movement, free abortion on demand, euthanasia as a
national promotion...to mention a few, highly publicized movements...have
been sparked by humanism."
According to the right, by rejecting all notions of absolute authority and
values, secular humanists deliberately attack traditional values in
religion, the state, and the home.
The link between liberalism and treachery is key to the secular humanist
conspiracy. In 1968, a typical book, endorsed by Billy James Hargis of the
Christian Crusade, claimed, "The liberal, for reasons of his own, would
dissolve the American Republic and crush the American dream so that our
nation and our people might become another faceless number in an
internationalist state." Twenty-five years later, Allan Bloom, generally put
forth as a moderate conservative, argued that all schoolteachers who
inculcated moral relativism in school children "had either no interest in or
were actively hostile to the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution."
The Culture War & Theocracy
Most analysts have looked at the Culture War and its foot soldiers in the
traditional family values movement as displaying a constellation of discrete
and topical beliefs. These include support for traditional, hierarchical sex
roles and opposition to feminism, employed mothers, contraception, abortion,
divorce, sex education, school-based health clinics, extramarital sex, and
gay and lesbian sex, among other issues.
Traditional values also include an antipathy toward secular humanism,
communism, liberalism, utopianism, modernism, globalism, multiculturalism,
and other systems believed to undermine US nationalism. Beliefs in
individualism, hard work, self-sufficiency, thrift, and social mobility form
a uniquely American component of the movement. Some traditional values seem
derived more immediately from Christianity: opposition to Satanism,
witchcraft, the New Age, and the occult (including meditation and Halloween
depictions of witches). Less often discussed but no less integral to the
movement are a disdain for the values of egalitarianism and democracy
(derived from the movement's anti-modernist orientation), and support for
Western European culture, private property, and laissez-faire capitalism.
This orthodox view of the traditional values movement as an aggregate of
many discrete values, however, is misleading, for it makes it appear that
Judeo-Christian theism is simply one value among many. Rather, Judeo
Christian theism, and in particular Christianity, is the core value of the
traditional values movement and the basis for the Crusades-like tone of
those in the hard right calling for the Culture War.
Traditional values start from a recognition of the absolute, unchanging,
hierarchical authority of God (as one commentator noted, "The Ten
Commandments are not the Ten Suggestions") and move from there to a belief
in hierarchical arrangements in the home and state.
As Pat Robertson said at the Republican convention, "Since I have come to
Houston, I have been asked repeatedly to define traditional values. I say
very simply, to me and to most Republicans, traditional values start with
faith in Almighty God." Robertson has also said, "When President Jimmy
Carter called for a 'Conference on Families,' many of us raised strenuous
objections. To us, there was only one family, that ordained by the Bible,
with husband, wife, and children."
In part, the moral absolutism implicit in the Culture War derives from the
heavy proportion of fundamentalist Christians in the traditional family
values movement. Their belief in the literal existence of Satan leads to an
apocalyptic tone: "The bottom line is that if you are not working for Jesus
Christ, then you are working for someone else whose name is Satan. It is one
or the other. There is no middle of the road."
The hard right activist, as Richard Hofstadter noted, believes that all
battles take place between forces of absolute good and absolute evil, and
looks not to compromise but to crush the opposition.
A comment by Pat Robertson was typical:
"What is happening in America is not a debate, it is not a friendly
disagreement between enlightened people. It is a vicious one-sided attack on
our most cherished institutions.
"Suddenly the confrontation is growing hotter and it just may become all out
civil war. It is a war against the family and against conservative and
Christian values."
Paul Weyrich sees the struggle today between those "who worship in churches
and those who desecrate them."
The root desire behind the Culture War is the imposition of a Christian
theocracy in the United States. Some theocratic right activists have been
quite open about this goal. Tim LaHaye, for example, argued in his book The
Battle for the Mind that "we must remove all humanists from public office
and replace them with promoral political leaders."
Similarly, in Pat Robertson's The New World Order: It Will Change the Way
You Live (which argues that the conspiracy against Christians, dating back
to Babylon, has included such traditional conspirators as John Dewey, the
Illuminati, the Free Masons, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the
Trilateral Commission), the question of who is fit to govern is discussed at
length:
When I said during my presidential bid that I would only bring Christians
and Jews into the government...the media challenged me, "How dare you
maintain that those who believe the Judeo Christian values are better
qualified to govern America than Hindus and Muslims?"
"My simple answer is, "Yes, they are." If anybody understood what Hindus
really believe, there would be no doubt that they have no business
administering government policies in a country that favors freedom and
equality....There will never be world peace until God's house and God's
people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.
"How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists,
New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy
moneychangers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on
top?"
The most extreme position in the Culture War is held by Christian
Reconstructionists who seek the imposition of Biblical law throughout the
United States. Other hard right activists, while less open or draconian,
share an implicitly theocratic goal. While it denies any desire to impose a
theocracy, the Center for Cultural Conservatism, which defines cultural
conservatism as the "necessary, unbreakable, and causal relationship between
traditional Western, Judeo-Christian values...and the secular success of
Western societies," breaks with conservative tradition to call upon
government to play an active role in upholding the traditional culture which
they see as rooted in specific theological values.
The Culture War & White Supremacy
The theory of widespread secular subversion spread by proponents of the
Culture War was from the beginning a deeply racialized issue that supported
the supremacy of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. To the nativist right, in
the 1920s as well as now, the synthesis of traditional values constituted
"Americanism," and opponents of this particular constellation of views
represented dangerous, un-American forces.
As John Higham argued in Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American
Nativism 1860-1925, subversion has always been identified with foreigners
and anti-Americanism in the United States, and particularly with Jews and
people of color. In the 1920s, subversion was linked to Jews, and the
immigration of people of color was opposed in part because they were seen as
easy targets for manipulation by Jews.
While antisemitism was never the primary ingredient in anti-radical
nativism, the radical Jew was nevertheless a powerful stereotype in the
"communist menace" movement. For example, some members of the coercive
immigrant "Americanization" movement adopted the startling slogan,
"Christianization and Americanization are one and the same thing."
Virtually any movement to advance racial justice in the US was branded by
the reactionary right as a manifestation of the secular humanist conspiracy.
The National Education Association's bibliography of "Negro authors,"
foundation support for "Black revolutionaries," and the enlistment of Gunnar
Myrdal as an expert on the "American Negro" were all framed in this way.
Similarly, the African American civil rights movement was from its beginning
identified by the right wing as part of the secular humanist plot to impose
communism on the United States.
In 1966, David Noebel (then of Billy James Hargis' Christian Crusade, now
head of the influential Summit Ministries) argued, "Anyone who will dig into
the facts of the Communist involvement in the `civil rights' strife will
come to the conclusion that these forces have no stopping point short of
complete destruction of the American way of life." (In the preface, Noebel
thanks Dr. R. P. Oliver, who is now perhaps best known as a director of the
Institute for Historical Review, which denies that the Holocaust took
place.)
In 1992, the civil rights movement is still seen in this light, as the
rightist Catholic magazine Fidelity makes clear:
"It is no coincidence that the civil rights movement in the United States
preceded the largest push for sexual liberation this country had seen since
its inception....The Negro was the catalyst for the overturning of European
values, which is to say, the most effective enculturation of Christianity.
"The civil rights movement was nothing more than the culmination of an
attempt to transform the Negro into a paradigm of sexual liberation that had
been the pet project of the cultural revolutionaries since the 1920s."
The identification of sexual licentiousness and "primitive" music with
subversion and people of color is an essential part of the secular humanist
conspiracy theory, and one that has been remarkably consistent over time.
The current attacks on rap music take place within this context.
In 1966, David Noebel argued that the communist conspiracy ("the most
cunning, diabolical conspiracy in the annals of human history") was using
rock music, with its savage, tribal, orgiastic beat, to destroy "our youths'
ability to relax, reflect, study and meditate" and to prepare them "for
riot, civil disobedience and revolution." Twenty years later, these views
were repeated practically verbatim by Allan Bloom, who wrote that rock
music, with its "barbaric appeal to sexual desire," "ruins the imagination
of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate
relationship to the arts and thought that are the substance of liberal
education."
The hard right's attack on multiculturalism derives its strength from the
right's absolutism, as well as from its White racial nationalism. Samuel
Blumenfeld was among the first to attack multiculturalism as a new form of
secular humanism's values relativism, writing in 1986 that multiculturalism
legitimized different lifestyles and values systems, thereby legitimizing a
moral diversity that "directly contradicts the Biblical concept of moral
absolutes on which this nation was founded."
Patrick Buchanan bases his opposition to multiculturalism on White racial
nationalism. In one article, "Immigration Reform or Racial Purity?,"
Buchanan himself was quite clear:
"The burning issue here has almost nothing to do with economics, almost
everything to do with race and ethnicity. If British subjects, fleeing a
depression, were pouring into this country through Canada, there would be
few alarms.
"The central objection to the present flood of illegals is they are not
English-speaking white people from Western Europe; they are Spanish speaking
brown and black people from Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean."
Buchanan explicitly links the issue of non-White immigration with
multiculturalism, quoting with approval the xenophobic and racist American
Immigration Control Foundation, which said:
"The combined forces of open immigration and multi-culturalism constitute a
mortal threat to American civilization. The US is receiving a never-ending
mass immigration of non-Western peoples, leading inexorably to
white-minority status in the coming decades [while] a race-based
cultural-diversity is attacking, with almost effortless success, the
legitimacy of our Western culture."
The Free Congress Foundation's Center for Cultural Conservatism disavows any
racial nationalist intent while bluntly arguing that all non-White cultures
are inferior to traditional Western cultures.
Race & Culture
The major split inside the right-wing crusaders for the Culture War is based
on whether or not race and culture are inextricably linked. Buchanan and the
authors of the Bell Curve argue for biological determinism and White
supremacy, while Weyrich and Robertson argue that people of all races can
embrace Americanism by adopting northern European, Christian, patriarchal,
values--or, in their shorthand: traditional family values.
It's important to state clearly that neoconservatives, for the most part,
share Buchanan's distaste for multiculturalism. The American Spectator, for
example, has argued:
"The preservation of the existing ethnocultural character of the United
States is not in itself an illegitimate goal. Shorn of Buchanan's more
unhygenic rhetoric, and with the emphasis on culture rather than ethnicity,
it's a goal many conservatives share. If anything, a concern that the
ethnocultural character of the United States is being changed in unwholesome
ways is the quality that distinguishes the conservatism of Commentary and
the Public Interest from the more economically minded conservatism that
pervades the Washington think tanks."
In part, it is legitimate to argue that the distinction between the old and
new conservatives on the issue of race is slim. At the same time, however,
the distinction between the approaches the old and new conservatives take on
race is the distinction between White racism and White racial nationalism.
While systemic racism enforced by a hostile, repressive state is dangerous,
the massed power of racial nationalism, as expressed in the activities of
the racial nationalist, clerical fascist regimes in Eastern Europe during
World War II, is vastly more dangerous.
The embrace of White racial nationalism by the paleo conservatives has been
extensive. Chronicles magazine wrote in July 1990:
"What will it be like in the next century when, as Time magazine so
cheerfully predicts, white people will be in the minority. Our survival
depends on our willingness to look reality in the face. There are limits to
elasticity, and these limits are defined in part by our historical
connections with the rest of Europe and in part by the rate of immigrations.
High rates of nonEuropean immigration, even if the immigrants come with the
best of intentions in the world, will swamp us. Not all, I hasten to add, do
come with the best intentions."
In his distaste for democracy, Buchanan has explicitly embraced racial
nationalism. In one column, titled "Worship Democracy? A Dissent," Buchanan
argued, "The world hails democracy in principle; in practice, most men
believe there are things higher in the order of value-among them, tribe and
nation, family and faith." In April 1990, he made a similar statement: "It
is not economics that sends men to the barricades; tribe and race, language
and faith, history and culture, are more important than a nation's GNP."
Buchanan has also stated:
"The question we Americans need to address, before it is answered for us,
is: Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country?
Because that is our destiny if we do not build a sea wall against the waves
of immigration rolling over our shores....Who speaks for the Euro-Americans,
who founded the USA?...Is it not time to take America back?"
The basic thesis of White racial nationalism is expressed by David Duke, who
won 55 percent of the White vote in Louisiana while arguing:
"I think the basic culture of this country is European and Christian and I
think that if we lose that, we lose America....I don't think we should
suppress other races, but I think if we lose that White--what's the word for
it--that White dominance in America, with it we lose America."
It is difficult not to see the fascist undercurrents in these ideas.
The Hard Right's Disdain for Democracy & Modernity
In the 1920s, at a time, not unlike today, of isolationism, anti-immigrant
activism, and White racial nationalism, democracy was seriously challenged.
With its anti-elitist, egalitarian assumptions, democracy did not appeal to
the reactionary rightists of the 1920s, who insisted that the US was not a
democracy but a representative republic. Today, Patrick Buchanan, Paul
Weyrich, and the John Birch Society also insist on this distinction, which
can more easily accommodate the anti egalitarian notion of governmental
leadership by an elite aristocracy. As Hofstadter pointed out, the pseudo
conservatives' conspiratorial view of liberals leads them to impugn the
patriotism of their opponents in the twoparty system, a position that
undermines the political system itself.
While hard rightists claim to defend traditional US values, they exhibit a
deep disdain for democracy. Dismissive references to "participatory
democracy, a humanist goal," are common; Patrick Buchanan titled one
article, "Worship Democracy? A Dissent." Like many hard rightists, Allan
Bloom mixes distaste for humanism and democratic values with elitism when he
argues:
"Humanism and cultural relativism are a means to avoid testing our own
prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether
that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice."
More specific rejections of democracy are common currency on the hard right
these days. Paul Weyrich, for example, called for the abolition of
constitutional safeguards for people arrested in the drug war. Murray
Rothbard called for more vigilante beatings by police of those in their
custody. Patrick Buchanan has supported the use of death squads, writing,
for example:
"Faced with rising urban terror in 1976, the Argentine military seized power
and waged a war of counter-terror. With military and police and free lance
operators, between 6,000 and 150,000 leftists disappeared. Brutal, yes; also
successful. Today, peace reigns in Argentina; security has been restored."
Perhaps the most disturbing manifestation of antidemocratic sentiment among
the reactionary rightists has been their apparently deliberate embrace of a
theory of racial nationalism that imbues much of the protofascist posturings
of the European New Right's Third Position politics. Third Position politics
rejects both communism and democratic capitalism in favor of a third
position that seems to be rooted historically in a Strasserite
interpretation of National Socialism, although it claims to have also gone
beyond Nazism.
Third Position politics blends a virulent racial nationalism (manifested in
an isolationist, antiimmigrant stance) with a purported support for
environmentalism, trade unionism, and the dignity of labor. Buchanan has
endorsed the idea of antidemocratic racial nationalism in a number of very
specific ways, arguing for instance, "Multi-ethnic states, of which we are
one, are an endangered species" because "most men believe there are things
higher in the order of value [than democracy]-among them, tribe and nation."
In support of this view, Buchanan even cites Tomislav Sunic, an academic who
has allied himself with European Third Position politics.
Over the past several years, Third Position views have gained currency on
the hard right. The Rockford Institute's magazine Chronicles recently
praised Jorg Haider's racial nationalist Austrian Freedom Party, as well as
the fascist Italian Lombardy League. In a sympathetic commentator's
description, the Third Position politics of Chronicles emerge with a
distinctly volkish air:
"Chronicles is somewhat critical of free markets and spreading democracy. It
looks back to agrarian society, small towns, religious values. It sees
modern times as too secular, too democratic. There's a distrust of cities
and of cultural pluralism, which they find partly responsible for social
decay in American life."
Similarly, Paul Weyrich's Center for Cultural Conservatism has praised
corporatism as a social model and voiced a new concern for environmentalism
and the dignity of labor.
In the wake of the schism within the right wing, the formation of coalitions
is just beginning. Whether the US is indeed endangered because it is
multicultural may depend on whether mainstream conservatives embrace a
paranoid, conspiratorial world view that wants a White supremacist theocracy
modeled on the volatile mix of racial nationalism and corporatism that
escorted fascism to Europe in the mid-century.
Defending Democracy & Diversity
If the left of the current political spectrum is liberal corporatism and the
right is neofascism, then the center is likely to be conservative
authoritarianism. The value of the Culture War as the new principle of unity
on the right is that, like anti-communism, it actively involves a grassroots
constituency that perceives itself as fighting to defend home and family
against a sinister threatening force.
Most Democratic Party strategists misunderstand the political power of the
various antidemocratic right-wing social movements, and some go so far as to
cheer the theocratic right's disruptive assault on the Republican Party.
Democrats and their liberal allies rely on short sighted campaign rhetoric
that promotes a centrist analysis demonizing the "Radical Right" as
"extremists" without addressing the legitimate anger, fear, and alienation
of people who have been mobilized by the right because they see no other
options for change.
That there is no organized left to offer an alternative vision to regimented
soulless liberal corporatism is one of the tragic ironies of our time. The
largest social movements with at least some core allegiance to a progressive
agenda remain the environmental and feminist movements, with other pockets
of resistance among persons uniting to fight racism, homophobia, and other
social ills.
Organized labor, once the mass base for many progressive movements,
continues to dwindle in significance as a national force. It was unable to
block the North American Free Trade Agreement, and it has been unwilling to
muster a respectable campaign to support nationalized health care. None of
these progressive forces, even when combined, amount to a fraction of the
size of the forces being mobilized on the right.
"It's a struggle between virtual democracy and virulent demagoguery," says
author Holly Sklar, whose books on Trilateralism document the triumphant
elitist corporate ideology implemented in the United States, Europe, and
Japan. Trilateralist belt-tightening policies have caused material hardships
and created angry backlash constituencies.
The right has directed these constituencies at convenient scapegoats rather
than fostering a progressive systemic or economic analysis. Ironically,
among the right-wing's scapegoats is a conspiratorial caricature of the
Trilateralists as a secret elite rather than the dominant wing of corporate
capitalism that currently occupies the center and defends the status quo.
Suzanne Pharr, an organizer from Arkansas who moved to Oregon to help fight
the homophobic initiative Measure Nine, is especially concerned that even in
states where the theocratic right has lost battles over school curricula or
homophobic initiatives, it leaves behind durable right-wing coalitions
poised to launch another round of attacks. Pharr says:
"Progressives need to develop long-term strategies that move beyond
short-term electoral victories. We have to develop an analysis that builds
bridges to diverse communities and unites us all when the antidemocratic
right attacks one of us."
Obviously, individuals involved with the antidemocratic right have absolute
constitutional rights to seek redress of their grievances through the
political process and to speak their minds without government interference,
so long as no laws are violated. At the same time, progressives must oppose
attempts by any group to pass laws that take rights away from individuals on
the basis of prejudice, myth, irrational belief, inaccurate information, and
outright falsehood.
Unless progressives unite to fight the rightward drift, we will be stuck
with a choice between the nonparticipatory system crafted by the corporate
elites who dominate the Republican and Democratic parties and the stampeding
social movements of the right, motivated by cynical leaders willing to blame
the real problems in our society on such scapegoats as welfare mothers,
immigrants, gays and lesbians, and people of color.
The only way to stop the antidemocratic right is to contest every inch of
terrain. Politics is not a pendulum that automatically swings back and
forth, left and right. The "center" is determined by various vectors of
forces in an endless multidimensional tug of war involving ropes leading out
in many directions. Whether or not our country moves toward democracy,
equality, social justice, and freedom depends on how many hands grab those
ropes and pull together.

[BILL]

Nobody <No...@nowhere.com> wrote in message
news:mfr%2.12046$8m5....@newsr1.twcny.rr.com...

> Theocracy & White Supremacy:
> Behind the Culture War to Restore Traditional Values
>
> "We are America, they are not America."
> --GOP Party Chief Rich Bond
> As the United States slides toward the twenty-first century, the major
mass
> movements challenging the bipartisan status quo are not found on the left
of
> the political spectrum, but on the right. The resurgent right contains
> several strands woven together around common themes and goals. There is
the
> electoral activism of the religious fundamentalist movements; the militant
> anti-government populism of the armed militia movement; and the murderous
> terrorism of the neonazi underground--from which those suspected of
bombing
> the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City appear to have
crept.

Your showing your basic dishonesty right at the beginning. The objective
evidence indicates that the motive for the Oklahoma City bombing was to get
back at the government forces that caused the deaths of men, women and
children at Waco - NOT some phantom Neo-nazi group. The Nazis had nothing
to do with it!

> It is easy to see the dangers to democracy posed by far right forces such
as
> armed militias, neonazis, and racist skinheads. However, hard right forces
> such as dogmatic religious movements, regressive populism, and White
racial
> nationalism also are attacking democratic values in our country.

More unsubstantiated crap.

wm...@att.net
For discussion of Education, Political &Tax Reform
http://home.att.net/~wmech

[BeBop]

BILL wrote:

> Nobody <No...@nowhere.com> wrote in message
> news:mfr%2.12046$8m5....@newsr1.twcny.rr.com...

> > Theocracy & White Supremacy:
> > Behind the Culture War to Restore Traditional Values
> >
> > "We are America, they are not America."
> > --GOP Party Chief Rich Bond
> > As the United States slides toward the twenty-first century, the major
> mass
> > movements challenging the bipartisan status quo are not found on the left
> of
> > the political spectrum, but on the right. The resurgent right contains
> > several strands woven together around common themes and goals. There is
> the
> > electoral activism of the religious fundamentalist movements; the militant
> > anti-government populism of the armed militia movement; and the murderous
> > terrorism of the neonazi underground--from which those suspected of
> bombing
> > the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City appear to have
> crept.
>

> Your showing your basic dishonesty right at the beginning. The objective
> evidence indicates that the motive for the Oklahoma City bombing was to get
> back at the government forces that caused the deaths of men, women and
> children at Waco - NOT some phantom Neo-nazi group. The Nazis had nothing
> to do with it!
>

> > It is easy to see the dangers to democracy posed by far right forces such
> as
> > armed militias, neonazis, and racist skinheads. However, hard right forces
> > such as dogmatic religious movements, regressive populism, and White
> racial
> > nationalism also are attacking democratic values in our country.
>

> More unsubstantiated crap.

Don't worry. He's a Nobody.