Conservatives Without Conscience (16 page)

P
HYLLIS
S
CHLAFLY

The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress on March 22, 1972, and was sent to the states for ratification, with a seven-year deadline. Within the first year, it was quickly approved by twenty-two of the necessary thirty-eight states.
³⁰
Then came Phyllis Schlafly. Whether one agrees or disagrees with her politics, she is a remarkable woman.
*
She appears to have a moderately right-wing authoritarian personality,
but she does not carry much of the unpleasant baggage that many of these authoritarians do. Her authoritarianism is more akin to that of the strict schoolmarm.

With miraculous managerial skills, Schlafly assembled and trained women in key remaining states to block ratification of the ERA. In a standard authoritarian ploy, she relied on fear, claiming that the ERA would deny women the right to support by their husbands, that it would eliminate privacy rights and result in unisex public toilets, that it would mean that women would be drafted into the military and sent into combat, and that it would fully protect abortion rights and homosexual marriages. None of this was true, but her powerful propaganda got the attention of a lot of women who had never been particularly interested in politics. The authoritarian leader’s use of misleading information to gain control is a consistently successful technique for them. As a
New Yorker
profile observed of Schlafly’s style, “While Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham were still playing tea party, she recognized that deliberation was no match for diatribe, and logic no equal to contempt. She was, in this way, a woman ahead of her time.”
³¹

Schlafly did not just organize women, but also persuaded businesses (like the insurance companies) and various religious groups to join her effort.
³²
By 1980 Schlafly had successfully killed the ERA and had given birth to an antifeminist, so-called profamily movement that supported other social conservative causes. Schlafly’s activism evolved way beyond her allegiance to the “Goldwater-Reagan” (her term) school of conservatism (which she sums up as “lower taxes, limited government, fiscal integrity—and American military superiority, because everybody is safer that way”), and provided a corps of trained volunteers whose grassroots efforts have changed conservatism.

Not unlike Pat Buchanan, however, and notwithstanding her authoritarian conservatism, Phyllis Schlafly regularly takes issue with radical Republican proposals relating to domestic policy and foreign affairs. She also attacks the Bush/Cheney big-government policies and fiscal irresponsibility. Importantly, she remains a guardian of civil lib
erties at a time when other conservative authoritarians have willingly and unquestioningly trusted “the authorities’” claim that only the terrorists need worry. She has tried to correct abuses in the USA Patriot Act, explaining that “the problem that confronts America today is
foreign-sponsored
terrorism, and we must draw a bright line of different treatment between U.S. citizens and aliens. Our government should monitor the whereabouts of aliens, but
not
require U.S. citizens to relinquish our freedom”
³³
(bold emphasis is in her original). To oppose the extension of the Patriot Act, Schlafly joined with former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia and the ACLU in forming Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances. Schlafly’s example illustrates that authoritarians can be effective leaders without being social dominators.

P
AUL
W
EYRICH

The same cannot be said of Paul Weyrich, whose early work complemented that of Phyllis Schlafly in the development of social conservatism. Both Schlafly and Weyrich were once strident anticommunists, Hoover’s vigilant Americans. They continued the culture war that Agnew and Nixon had started, and their principal contribution was mustering the troops, working from the bottom up.

Weyrich has been described by friendly observers as “the Lenin of social conservatism—a revolutionary with a rare talent for organization,” and while his stature within social conservatism is waning, it remains significant.
³⁴
Weyrich is a master of the art of direct-mail fund-raising and is best known as the “funding father” of modern conservatism. He believed conservatives needed a Washington-based think tank comparable to the once liberal (now moderate) Brookings Institution, so along with a colleague from Capitol Hill, Edwin Feuler, Weyrich established the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Today Heritage is the wealthy granddaddy of conservative think thanks.
³⁵
These organizations have become the marketing arms of contemporary conservatism, providing various factions an imprimatur of scholarship,
and none more than social conservatives. Much of their “thinking” supports their particular “authority,” and in this sense they are efficient authoritarian tools. They devote significant resources, and intellectual firepower, to demolishing policies and programs on the liberal agenda.
³⁶

Barry Goldwater described Weyrich as “a bull-headed, stubborn, son-of-bitch,” and observed that “Weyrich doesn’t really understand how Washington works, but he thinks he does.”
³⁷
In his memoir he worried that Weyrich and other social conservatives were “pushing [their] special social agendas…at the risk of compromising constitutional rights,” an agenda that threatened to splinter Republicans. Weyrich “preached little or no spirit of compromise—[no] political give-and-take.” He “failed to appreciate that politics is the ordinary stuff of daily living, while the spiritual life represents eternal values and goals.” Goldwater added, “Public business—that’s all politics is—is often making the best of a mixed bargain.” Social conservatives, nonetheless, stressed “the politics of absolute moral right and wrong. And, of course, they are convinced of their absolute rightness.”
³⁸
The senator was addressing the second phase of Weyrich’s activism, when the latter helped organize the religious right. In a profile that recognized his authoritarian influence, the
Washington Times
noted that Weyrich “helped bring [conservatism] structure, discipline and, gradually, dominance” over the Republican Party.
³⁹
Weyrich may be a Double High authoritarian, and his authoritarianism is, at times, brutal.

Weyrich once admitted, and many believe only half in jest, that “to gather all of [his] enemies together” would require “RFK Stadium.”
⁴⁰
He calls himself a “cultural conservative,” and in doing so he explains that what is important to him is opposition to legal abortion, stricter divorce laws, and prayer in public schools.
Washington Post
reporter E. J. Dionne described Weyrich’s outlook as a “dour, almost medieval, pessimism.”
⁴¹
Not unlike many Christian authoritarians, Weyrich has not hidden his anti-Semitism. At the outset of the Bush administration, Weyrich published an Easter message in which he stated, “Christ was crucified by the Jews…. He was not what the
Jews had expected so they considered Him a threat. Thus He was put to death.”
⁴²
(It is impossible to believe that Weyrich, a deacon in the Melkite Catholic Church, does not know that the Romans crucified Jesus, and that his libel has been responsible for the persecution of Jews throughout history.)

During the 1980s and early 1990s the news media frequently turned to Weyrich for the conservative Catholic view of the religious right, and with typical authoritarian aggressiveness, mixed with much self-righteousness, he minced no words in denouncing conservatives who failed to live up to his standards.
⁴³
In 1995 the
New York Times
listed Weyrich in the top twenty-five individuals of the conservative “attack machine,” which it described as “specialists in bare-knuckle attacks on political opponents.”
⁴⁴
But his most significant influence on conservatism was the role he played in bringing fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics into the political arena. These Christian conservatives almost by definition are right-wing authoritarians.
*
Unhappy in the late 1970s, when the Heritage Foundation’s financial backers did not wish to get into social issues, Weyrich turned his organizing skills and energy to drawing Christian conservatives into the movement. He remains active in that effort to this day, and the Heritage Foundation later joined the fold.

The Religious Right: The Great Army
of Authoritarian Followers

“The Christian Right,” one scholar observed, “owe[s] its existence to two Catholics and a Jew. Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich and Howard Phillips…. They believed that…there were many socio-moral is
sues that could serve as the basis for an organized conservative movement”; accordingly, in 1979, they “persuaded Jerry Falwell, a popular fundamentalist Baptist preacher from Lynchburg, Virginia, to lead an organization they named the ‘Moral Majority.’”
⁴⁵
This was the birth of the modern religious right. It had not escaped the notice of Viguerie, Weyrich, and Phillips that in 1976 long-dormant Christian fundamentalists had been attracted to the presidential campaign of born-again presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, and their vote helped the former Georgia governor defeat the incumbent president, Gerald Ford. After having their beliefs ridiculed during the 1925 trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in the classroom in violation of a law fundamentalists had persuaded the Tennessee legislature to adopt, they had withdrawn from any and all political activity. Jimmy Carter’s evangelicalism kindled the interest of many of these fundamentalists, who like Carter called themselves evangelicals.

Following Carter’s election as president, the news media, struggling to understand the evangelical phenomenon, began blurring Christian fundamentalists with evangelicals, with neither group happy to be lumped in with the other. Considerable confusion still exists about the terms “Christian fundamentalist” and “evangelical Christian,” and even those who fall within these ranks use the terms loosely, and often interchangeably. In fact, not until the reelection of the second evangelical president did even religion scholars fully sort the matter out.
⁴⁶
In December 2004, after George Bush’s success the nonpartisan
National Journal
decided it was time to clarify a confusion that had gone on far too long, and they were successful in distinguishing the two, as explained below.

Fundamentalist Christians retreated from politics and much of modern life after the Scopes trial in 1925, but their children, when they reached adulthood in the early 1940s, wanted to return to a more active public existence. This new generation called themselves “neoevangelicals,” and in 1942, they founded the National Association of
Evangelicals, dropping the “neo.”
*
Unlike their parents, who “practiced extreme forms of separation, refusing to cooperate in common ventures with others who did not believe as they did,” the evangelicals “were bridge builders and were more willing to give some credit to, and treat with charity, those with whom they disagree.” The evangelicals, however, continued to share their parents’ tenets of faith. “Both believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible and hold that Christians must individually accept Christ and be born again, according to Christ’s words in John 3:5–8: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and [of] Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh; and that which is born of Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.’”
⁴⁷
Thus, in a broad sense, the term “fundamentalist” covers evangelicals, but evangelicals in fact distinguish themselves from fundamentalists, and vice verse. (Except as noted, I have distinguished them. I use the term “conservative Christians” or “Christian conservatives” to cover both Protestants and Catholics.)

By 1978 increasingly politically active evangelicals had grown disenchanted with Jimmy Carter, whom they had helped put in office. They did not like his progressive Democrat policies, in general, but, in particular, they were offended by a proposal by the Internal Revenue Service to deny tax-deductible status to
all
private schools, including private Christian ones. Carter’s apparent acceptance of the IRS proposal caused uproar within the evangelical community. Reverend Tim LaHaye, the best-selling Christian author and one of the founders of the Moral Majority, met with Carter at the White House to discuss the measure, along with other concerns conservative Christians had about his progressive policies. Following their meeting, LaHaye reportedly left the Oval Office, lowered his head, and prayed: “God, we
have got to get this man out of the White House and get someone in here who will be aggressive about bringing back traditional moral values.”
⁴⁸
That is exactly what conservative Christians did. They worked like bees—literally millions of them devoted themselves to this task—and by 1981 they had significantly helped to put Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office.

Today evangelicals comprise the core of the religious right, and white Protestant evangelicals, depending on the poll, range from a quarter to a third of the electorate. A Zogby poll reported that conservative Christians account for an astounding 58 percent of all Republicans.
⁴⁹
In 2000, 68 percent of white Protestant evangelicals voted for Bush and Cheney. In 2004 that statistic rose to 78 percent.
⁵⁰
But it is not at the presidential level that conservative Christians have their greatest impact. “The religious right’s power lies in the lower parts of the Republican machinery, in precinct meetings and the like,” the
Economist
reported.
⁵¹
Without the support of Christian conservatives Republicans cannot even get nominated to local, state, and national offices, because they have become the filter through which all Republicans must pass today. Christian conservatives have a virtual lock on state and local Republican politics, and have totally outmaneuvered their opposition. “In American politics,” wrote Joel Rogers of the University of Wisconsin, “who controls the states controls the nation. The right understands this, and for a generation has waged an unrelenting war to take over state government in America. It has succeeded, in large part because it hasn’t faced any serious progressive counter effort.”
⁵²