Politics of Fear

How Republicans Use Money, Race and the Media to Win

Manuel G. Gonzales, Richard Delgado

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317253914
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism

"Lucidly written, widely informed, and uncompromisingly honest -- a valuable expose." Michael Parenti "Documents the stunning success of a network of wealthy donors and corporations in creating and sustaining a set of think tanks, legal action groups, and media strategies." Gary Orfield, Harvard University What explains the electoral success of Republicans, particularly of the ascendant neoconservatives who now dominate the Party? Based on a thorough and up-to-date examination of the New Right over twenty-five years, The Politics of Fear proposes some provocative answers, including globalization, new technologies, and a far-reaching network of right-wing think tanks and foundations. As the authors show, all have opened the doors to a new politics of fear successfully waged by the neoconservatives. By manipulating insecurity, the New Right has created an extraordinarily successful populist conservative movement. Utilizing extensive documentation, the authors argue convincingly that the fear of immigrants and racial minorities has served as the most effective tactic in the GOP arsenal, while their approach also implicates gays, feminists, and terrorists. The book explains why Americans have willingly supported a party that promises them security, just as it delivers greater economic and political insecurity. The authors argue that, despite their striking political successes, neoconservatives have delivered to voters a set of policies harmful to working Americans in the way of regressive tax measures, military exploits, tort reform, deregulation, and environmental destruction.

CHAPTER ONE

THE NEW RIGHT

Birth of a Movement

The early sixties found American conservatism in the throes of a crisis; “the liberal consensus,” the late historian John A. Andrew III recalls, “appeared to reign supreme.”¹ Under President John F. Kennedy, the Democrats, with their liberal ideology, seemed to be the party of the future. Democrat-backed programs—the Great Society, the welfare state, the civil rights movement—threatened to permanently alter the political and social landscape of the republic, particularly after 1964, when the party registered spectacular electoral victories. In that year, when Lyndon Johnson won the presidency with a whopping 61 percent of the popular vote, “an ascendant liberalism reached its postwar zenith.”² More than twice as many Americans registered as Democrats than as Republicans,³ yet the promise of long-term ascendancy by the Democrats never came about.

President Johnson and his party, despite Herculean efforts, were unable to resolve the intractable problems of the inner cities. Their efforts to create the Great Society suffered a further setback when the war in Vietnam dragged on. Disillusionment was most profound among the middle class. Perfectly willing to wave the flag so long as the battles were fought by the nation’s poor people—blacks, Latinos, southern whites—middle-class patriots underwent a sudden change of heart after the termination of college deferments in 1969, when they and their sons were ordered to the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to protect the American Way. Of the three million soldiers who served in the war, only 20 percent came from the ranks of middle- and upper-class families.⁴ The elites, of course, were never in much danger: Of the 29,701 men who graduated from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton in the years from 1962 to 1972, only twenty died in Vietnam.⁵

The civil rights movement and the attempt to create the Great Society inspired fear among the propertied classes, as efforts to challenge the status quo always do.⁶ But they also created a near-panic among some working- and middle-class males, who saw their prerogatives slipping away. The assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy in the turbulent sixties are a testimony to this fear. (In the United States, it seems, the haves are much more likely to employ violence to preserve their privileges than the have-nots are willing to pursue insurrection to abolish those privileges.)

Thus, the election of Richard Nixon (1913–1994) in 1968 and Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) twelve years later signaled the reemergence of conservatism as the dominant political ideology. The early rise of the New Right, generally dated about 1973–1974, was both a cause and a reflection of this ideological triumph.⁷ Ensconced in the Republican Party from the very outset, the New Right (a term coined by Lee Edwards, a movement activist who later became a professional historian) was a broad coalition composed of disparate elements. The core of the movement consisted of a generation of youthful discontents who emerged from the probusiness elements that had controlled the GOP since the time of Reconstruction. The immediate roots of the emerging consensus, however, date back to the post–World War II conservatives whose formative experience was the Cold War. The New Right evolved naturally out of the Old Right; the sociologist Jerome L. Himmelstein rightly concludes that no sharp break separated the two.⁸

The chief organ of the older mainstream conservatives—themselves divided into a number of factions—had been the National Review, the influential journal founded in 1955 and edited for the next thirty-five years by William F. Buckley (b. 1925). The Yale graduate and ex-CIA agent received able assistance from a small but dedicated staff, including publisher William Rusher (b. 1923), a college classmate. James Burnham (1905–1987) and Frank S. Meyer (1909–1972), both renegades from Marxism, were two other key contributors to the publication.⁹

During this early period, Roman Catholics, as the historian George Nash points out, were heavily represented in the ranks of American conservatism, ¹⁰ with anticommunism as a dominant thread.¹¹ A devout Catholic, Buckley was representative of this alliance. “The Cold War may be over,” a friend noted in 1999, “but it remains Buckley’s foremost political preoccupation.”¹² Buckley is the godfather of the New Right, the “paterfamilias,” as one student of the movement aptly describes him, the link between the old and new conservatism.¹³ “Bill Buckley,” Godfrey Hodgson concluded, “is probably the most important single figure in the whole history of the revival of conservatism in late twentieth-century America.”¹⁴

It was a younger generation of Catholics, however, who provided the primary impetus for the new brand of conservatism that budded in the sixties, before blossoming into a full-fledged movement in the mid-1970s.¹⁵ Reacting to the excesses of the counterculture, these young activists were influenced as much by Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) as they were by Buckley.¹⁶ The most committed of these youthful conservative Catholics were Houston lawyer Richard A. Viguerie (b. 1933); Wisconsin journalist and radio news director Paul Weyrich (b. 1942); and John T. (Terry) Dolan (1950–1986), who came from a fiercely conservative Irish American background (his brother Tony became President Reagan’s chief speechwriter). Together with Howard Phillips (b. 1941), a secular Jew who converted to Christianity in the mid-1970s, these Catholic militants would provide dynamic leadership for the emerging New Right. Ultimately, Viguerie, who pioneered the techniques of direct-mail fund-raising, would easily become the most influential of these ambitious firebrands. Decades of untiring efforts on behalf of the cause earned him widespread recognition among his colleagues as “the symbolic leader of the New Right.”¹⁷

In addition to its more dynamic leadership, the New Right is distinguished from the Old Right, according to Himmelstein, by strategy and organization.¹⁸ Although repelled by the methods of the radical civil rights activists, the generation that came of age in the seventies was quick to use these tactics for its own ends.¹⁹ New Right leaders realized that, like their opponents, they needed to mobilize mass support. If the Republican Party was ever going to successfully challenge the Democratic Party for power and stem the liberal tide, it needed to shed its country club image by creating a popular base, a lesson that gained force from the enormous support elicited by the insurgent third-party presidential candidacy of George Wallace in 1968. The GOP, these strategists determined, needed to attract both working-class ethnics and white southern constituencies.

This conservative revolution began with the creation of a multitude of associations. In the beginning, the most important of these were Phillips’s Conservative Caucus (TCC) and Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC), both established in 1974.²⁰ Dolan’s National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), another key organization, sprang up a year later. And the American Conservative Union was created during this period as well.²¹

Funding the New Right

To win back America from the forces that, from their perspective, threatened to destroy it, the Young Turks needed benefactors with deep pockets. They found them in the corporate community. As mentioned earlier, business interests had formed the backbone of Republicanism since Reconstruction. During the post–World War II boom, however, corporate political donations to both major parties had been rather modest. This changed dramatically in the mid-seventies, when the U.S. economy, after thirty years of prosperity, underwent a precipitous decline.²² While its share of the world gross national product (GNP) stood at about 40 percent in the fifties, by the seventies the United States’ share had dropped to less than 30 percent.²³ Deindustrialization hurt traditional industries, especially in the northern Rust Belt metropolitan centers, where both unemployment and underemployment soared. Double-digit inflation eroded purchasing power and discouraged investment throughout the country. Both the trade and the federal deficits ballooned.

When economic dislocations continued into the eighties, many businessmen blamed the government for the downturn. Panicked, they were now willing to contribute large sums to the coffers of the GOP and its affiliates. “The most important element of the big-business mobilization,” one scholar avers, “was the flow of corporate money to expand existing conservative research organizations and create a host of new ones.”²⁴ William E. Simon Sr. (1927–2000), an archconservative Wall Street entrepreneur, played the key role in getting the corporate community to open up its wallets and contribute to the GOP beginning in the late seventies. The alliance between wealthy businessmen and New Right operatives is epitomized by the well-documented relationship between Paul Weyrich and multimillionaire beer mogul Joseph Coors (1917–2003). These men maintained close personal and ideological ties from the time they met in Colorado in the early seventies until the powerful philanthropist’s death.²⁵

Funding also came from individual contributions. New Right operatives were awash in these donations. This was especially true of Richard Viguerie, whose smashingly successful direct-mail fund-raising provided the economic foundation for many of the key institutions of the movement.²⁶ Tagged “the Funding Father” of the revitalized conservative movement by protégé Morton Blackwell (b. 1939), the tireless Viguerie has mailed some two billion letters soliciting political contributions.²⁷ Individual and corporate contributions to the GOP soon reached staggering proportions as the rich in America became richer. Globalization and the new information and communication technologies—notably the computer and the Internet—developed toward the end of the twentieth century boosted American economic production to unprecedented levels, with the wealthiest segments of the population monopolizing most of the profits.²⁸ From 1986 to 2001, according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), total personal income expanded by more than $3.8 trillion, of which more than $2 trillion went to the richest 10 percent.²⁹

New Recruits

Meanwhile, the Republican Party and the movement that was coming to dominate its apparatus were benefiting not only by a massive infusion of money but by an influx of new recruits, especially from the South. The genesis of this trend antedated the rise of the New Right. Beginning during the Vietnam War, Republican ranks swelled with ex-Dixiecrats (the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party that sprang up briefly after 1948), who found the Democrats’ progressive stance on civil rights unpalatable.³⁰ “For a substantial segment of the white South,” recalled Thomas Byrne Edsall, the veteran Washington Post reporter, “conservatism became a cloak with which to protect racial segregation.”³¹ In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond (1902–2003) became a key convert when he switched parties in order to support Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency. (The Arizonan was one of only eight GOP senators to vote against the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.)

Conservatives were only too glad to encourage these defections—even if it meant sanctioning racism. In 1962, Young Americans for Freedom, a right-wing student group, awarded Thurmond, a champion of white supremacy, its “Freedom Award.”³² This alliance proved a fortuitous event. “In fact,” the journalist Sanford D. Horwitt recalled, “Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of the white vote” in the Old South.³³ Today the Republican Party enjoys its staunchest support in the Sun Belt and more particularly in the old Confederacy. Ronald Brownstein, a liberal columnist, discov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The New Right: Birth of a Movement
• 2 Conservative Foundations
• 3 Right-Wing Think Tanks
• 4 Conservatives and the Mass Media
• 5 Modern Conservatism: Ideology and Agenda
• 6 Conservatism and the Politics of Fear
• 7 Democracy for the Few
• Conclusion: A Well-Oiled Machine
• Appendix A: Major New Right Organizations
• Appendix B: Media Commentators, 2004: Political Orientation
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors