With the presidential primaries come to a close and the general election only months away, it seems apparent that the ultra-right forces that have enjoyed unprecedented power and influence are about to taste the bitter fruit of defeat. While nothing is certain in politics (or in football, as those of us who thought the New England Patriots would surely beat the New York Giants can attest), many self-described conservatives are already willing to concede the November election to the Democrats.
Whether that defeat, should it happen, is a long-term development or a temporary respite from power for the ultra-right cannot be decided now. But it is worth considering how and why the conservative movement that dominated the latter part of the 20th century in US politics now finds itself in such utter disarray in the early part of the 21st century.
In general, my view is that the conservative movement collapsed under the weight of its ultra-right perspectives. In other words, the conservative movement's reaction was countered by the proaction of the left; the ultra-right became mired in mission, while the left concerned itself with vision.
BUCKLEY, NATIONAL REVIEW AND Y.A.F.
During the 35-year period between 1933 and 1968, the Democratic Party had a virtual cinch-lock on the White House with the exception of the eight year period of the Eisenhower presidency. In the 40 years since then, Democrats have held the White House for only 12 years.
The emergence of the modern conservative movement can, arguably, be traced back to the appearance in print of the book, "God and Man at Yale," by William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley had a mission, and that mission was to "rescue" anti-Communism from the political gutter in which it had found itself due to the demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. In furtherance of this mission Buckley, alongside a veritable rogues gallery of anti-and-ex Communists, founded the magazine, National Review.
The pages of the National Review were given over to attacks on liberals as well as treatises of various lengths on the virtues of limited government alongside its stock-in-trade anti-Communism. Buckley himself was a bit of a paradox. A man of keen intellect who occasionally blurred the lines between erudition and pompousness, Buckley was an unabashed rightist. And yet, he did not hesitate to condemn the anti-Semitism of the extremist John Birch Society (devoting an entire issue to an expose of that organization). He also welcomed liberals and social democrats, like the late author Michael Harrington, on "Firing Line," his television show that ran on PBS for many years – treating them with a dignity that is unknown to the ultra-right talking heads of today. Buckley also displayed a sense of humor, appearing on NBC's "Laugh In" because, he told hosts Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, the producer of the show "had promised to fly me from New York to Los Angeles on a plane with two right wings."
The influence of Buckley's magazine cannot be underestimated, counting among its early subscribers and supporters Ronald Reagan. It should be recalled that when National Review first hit the stands, the notion of an openly conservative magazine was rather a radical notion. By the early 1970's, National Review could be said to be the journal of choice for conservative intellectuals. (Filmmaker Woody Allen made reference to the magazine in two of his films: In "Bananas," a copy of National Review is seen in the center of a wall-sized rack of pornographic magazines. In "Annie Hall," Woody comes over to Annie's apartment to kill a spider and she hands him a copy of the magazine. "What are you…..? Are you dating a right-wing rock-and-roll star?" he asks her).
Perhaps less known today is Buckley's role in the formation of an explicitly right-wing youth organization, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). YAF's founding meeting took place at Buckley's estate in Sharon, Connecticut and adopted on September 11, 1960 that became known as "The Sharon Statement" and articulated a series of core beliefs that became a hallmark for conservatives: individualism over community, weakened government, states' rights, free market and free trade, anti-Communism, and unquestioning support for U.S. imperialism.
THE "REAGAN REVOLUTION"
It would be 20 years before the right succeeded in electing an avowed conservative into the Oval Office: The former actor-turned-California Governor Ronald W. Reagan.
Although the Republican Party emerged victorious in the presidential contest twelve years earlier with the election of Richard M. Nixon, with the benefit of historical hindsight it can be argued that Nixon, while more conservative than President Lyndon B. Johnson and certainly more conservative than his vanquished opponent Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, held no strong commitment to any ideological perspective. Nixon's presidency was about the man himself and his own ambitions to historic greatness; the GOP was little more than a vehicle for attaining those ambitions as was aptly demonstrated by Nixon's disastrous decision to operate a campaign and intelligence operation largely independent of the Republican National Committee.
Nixon's foreign policy departed from conservative norms in the form of détente with the Soviet Union and reproachment with the People's Republic of China. \Nixon himself claimed that no Democratic president would have dared take such steps. But in these matters as with others, Nixon was unconcerned with ideological perspectives, or in genuinely promoting world peace; his interests were in his own vision of himself as well as a desire to exacerbate tensions between the USSR and China by playing off one against the other.
The so-called "Reagan Revolution" was the product of a confluence of events that crystalized in Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974. The break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee by Nixon operatives in June of 1972 began a series of cover-ups that had little to do with the break-in itself. When these were ultimately exposed, aided and abetted by the fact that Nixon had secretly tape recorded virtually every meeting that took place in the Oval Office and his "hideway office" across the street in the Executive Office Building, Nixon was compelled to step down and the Republican Party was in a shambles.
By 1979, however, the Republican Party had started to rebound. A series of crises beset President Jimmy Carter. There was a shortage of gasoline that led to gas stations displaying signs proclaiming "No gas today." The US Embassy in Tehran, Iran had been seized by followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Conservatives seized on these events, and the inability of the Carter administration to force Soviet troops from Afghanistan – the US boycotted the summer Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980 over the issue while the Soviets did participate in the winter Olympics that year in Lake Placid, New York.
The resurgence of the Republican Party and the ultra-right had little to do with Reagan, whose stage persona was a melange of demagoguery and a sort of folksy geniality. Rather, GOP operatives skillfully manipulated a political atmosphere epitomized by what President Jimmy Carter had called "a crisis in the national confidence….a crisis of national will," exploiting perceptions that the US was in a financial slump at home and powerless abroad.
Although the National Review saw fit to hail Samuel Pierce Jr. as the "unsung hero of the Regan revolution" (Pierce was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the only cabinet member to serve the full eight years of the administration), the true heroes are without doubt those who envisioned and forged an alliance between the GOP and right-wing Christian fundamentalists. It is this alliance that rescued the GOP from its post-Watergate doldrums, provided the foot soldiers for the Reagan revolution, and put Rev. Jerry Falwell and his organization, the so-called "Moral Majority," on the political map.
Falwell, who died last year, was one of the architects of this alliance as well as a principal beneficiary. He worked hard for a marriage between the ultra-right segments of the GOP and Falwell's brand of evangelical Christianity; one that would blur the distinctions between ideology and theology and, in the finest traditions of "Christian marriage" make two into one.
The issue of abortion was the wedding band that cemented this bond. What is beyond doubt is that the issue gained traction in many segments of the population, and that many evangelicals began to shift their focus from the heavens to the halls of power in Washington, DC and state legislatures.
It can be debated whether Falwell or his allies genuinely believed that overturning Roe v. Wade would eliminate abortion in the United States. Its primary value was as a wedge issue: one by which the religious right could establish a base from which they could transform conservative politics from the traditional "less government=lower taxes=greater freedom" mindset advocated by people like Buckley and organizations like the YAF, toward a politics that blurred the lines between ideology and theology. And it must be admitted that this effort was extremely successful is resurrecting the GOP.
In the presidential campaign of 1960, John F. Kennedy faced the formidable task of winning the election as a Roman Catholic. Kennedy sought to make clear that, if elected, the decisions made by his administration would be made in Washington, not in Rome. Twenty years later, the separation between church and state avowed by JFK had been turned on its head not by the Pontiff in the Vatican, but by a movement led by a minister in Lynchburg, Virginia. The message of that movement was that the wages of sin were political death.
But sin, it appeared, was a matter to be narrowly defined. As the marriage of convenience between the ultra-right and religious fundamentalism succeeded in gaining influence in the Republican ranks, power operators emerged whose strategy and tactics owed more to the Nixon's "hatchet man" Charles ("When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow") Colson than to Aquinas, Calvin or Luther.
No one better embodied this trend than the late Lee Atwater. Atwater was a young man in a hurry who was hungry for power. As a consultant to the South Carolina Congressional campaign of Floyd Spence in 1980, Atwater made an issue of the fact that Tom Turnipseed had psychiatric treatment as a youngster (shades of the Nixon campaign's attack on Senator Thomas Eagleton, George McGovern's original running mate in the 1972 election), and used "push polling," in which efforts are made to influence the electorate under the pretext of conducting a poll. Atwater used this device to suggest that Turnipseed was a member of the NAACP. More recently, it was alleged that the Bush campaign used the same technique to hurt John McCain in 2000; Bush advisor Karl Rove is often described as an Atwater protégé.
And, of course, Atwater had no qualms with using race to divide and conquer. While the "Willie Horton" episode used against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1984 presidential election is well-known, operatives like Atwater were using it well before then as the NAACP reference in the above paragraph attests. In 1981, Atwater gave an off-the-record interview to Alexander P. Lamis for a book on the issue of southern strategy. Following Atwater's death from a brain tumor in 1991 at the age of 40, the book was reprinted with remarks attributed to Atwater:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'n----, n----, n-----. By 1968 you can't say 'n----' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now…. you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'N----, n----'."
The obvious contradiction between the low road electoral tactics of Atwater (who publicly apologized before his death) and the love-thy-neighbor message in the Gospels didn't seem to bother right-wing fundamentalists; they, like Atwater, clearly believed that the ends justified the means.
GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE AGONIES OF THE ULTRA-RIGHT
The 1992 presidential contest brought an end to twelve years of the GOP's control of the executive branch. The collapse of the Soviet Union had as one of its by-products the devaluation of anti-Communism that had been the right wing's stock in trade for decades. The exposure of the "Iran-Contra" affair in which arms were secretly sold to Iran in order to provide munitions to right-wing forces seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and a rather enemic campaign by President George H.W. Bush against Clinton – by most accounts one of the most skillful politicians to come to national prominence – were only two of the important elements in the election that year.
Within three years of the Clinton victory, however, the ultra-right came back like a Phoenix from the ashes to seize control of Congress, ending four decades of Democratic dominance there and electing Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House.
The ultra-right's ultimate goal, however, was to control both the Congress and the White House, and toward that end they embarked on a campaign to assail the Clinton administration. Their shock troops were right-wing radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and former FBI agent-turned-Watergate-conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, among others. They were inadvertently aided in their goal by the fact that Clinton's political skills were not matched by his fidelity as a husband, and this culminated in the appointment of Kenneth Starr as an "Independent Prosecutor" whose mandate to investigate questions associated with an Arkansas real estate transaction called Whitewater quickly morphed into an inquiry about President Clinton's relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. The hypocrisy in this was laid bare when, years later, Gingrich admitted that he, too, was hardly a paragon of marital virtue.
By 2000, the ultra-right had selected as their candidate George W. Bush, the ne'er do well son of the former president – a man who had failed in almost every business venture but who was at the time of his nomination the Governor of Texas. Bush, who the late Molly Ivins memorably dubbed "Shrub," won the election only through the disenfranchisement of wholesale segments of the Florida electorate (his brother, Jeb, was Governor) and the intervention of the US Supreme Court.
If the "Reagan revolution" represents the ascendency of the ultra-right then certainly it must be said that the presidency of George W. Bush represents both its apex and its nadir. The terrible and tragic events of September 11, 2001 – a scant nine months into the administration – created a tidal waive of anger, revulsion and fear that was skillfully parlayed into an ongoing US military intervention in Iraq that has enriched corporations beyond their wildest dreams of avarice. Halliburton, whose ties to Vice President Dick Cheney have been extensively documented, has benefited from a series of virtually "sweetheart" deals, as has Blackwater USA. And the oil companies are recording record profits.
KBR, a Halliburton spin off, has been named in allegations of widespread fraud and, more recently, sexual harassment and rape. The Defense Department's Inspector General declined to investigate the rape allegations, citing an ongoing Justice Department investigation. But in a Vanity Fair article on KBR that appeared last year, anti-fraud crusader Alan Grayson contended that the Justice Department, which had previously been responsive to fraud allegations was taking extraordinary steps to stand in his way when the issue was the Iraq war.
Today, the ultra-right finds itself in panic mode on the verge of a full-fledged political anxiety attack. The economy is veering toward recession; home foreclosures are at virtually unprecedented levels; the US military is mired in Iraq – and the only real and demonstrated surge has been Sen. Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic primaries.
And now Arizona Sen. John McCain has emerged as certain Republican nominee for the White House, much to the consternation of the ultra-right, who can sense they are about to lose in November.
There is only one conclusion that can be reached: George W. Bush, a failure in business has been a failure as the chief executive of the United States. As satirist Andy Borowitz might write, what a shocker.
But perhaps we should take a moment to reflect on the positive accomplishments of this administration.
* The Bush administration's actions have demonstrated that the only value the ultra-right holds dear is that ability of corporations to run amok and make record profits without regard to who gets hurt;
* The Bush administration's actions have shown that US military intervention abroad isn't supported by the majority of the American people, who have no taste for war and for its toll on human lives and on the economy;
* The Bush administration has discovered that while vast segments of the electorate do not want to experience another tragedy like September 11th, it is ultimately the politics of hope that will vanquish the politics of fear.
Last, and by no means least, courtesy of the Bush administration the electorate has woken up and gone to polls in unprecedented numbers. The political landscape in the United States is on the verge of a transformation that would have been almost unthinkable seven years ago. And that transformation is being driven not by Washington policy makers or the corporate board rooms of Manhattan, but by working women and men in other cities and towns, urban and rural, of all races and creeds. This is the majority. And they are not being silent.
Original Source : http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/7049/1/340/
