·
Origins: Recall that Richard Nixon, who
took cues from “McCarthy” Cold War red-scare period and racist appeals of
George Wallace, used “southern” strategy and polarization to win in 1968:
recognized he could win if he emphasized social issues that were polarizing
Americans:
·
campaigned against anti-war protestors and hippies
destroying American culture, abortion, prayer in school, feminism, for “law and
order” (meant to appeal to suburban and southern whites who wanted the
government to clamp down on black men), and for more defense spending in
southern states. Vice President Agnew was point-man for this. In 1972, he
charged that if George McGovern was elected, you would have “acid (LSD),
amnesty(for draft-evaders), and abortion” and black men would come to the
suburbs in a crime wave.
·
Campaign successful--for the next generation Republicans and
most Democrat Presidential candidates would look to this same
strategy—strategy of both Republican National Committee and Democratic National
Committee (elites of both parties)—was building a “popular” constituency by
appealing to southern whites and white suburbanites. Democrats more hampered by
this, because of presence of blacks in the Party.
·
Polarization builds “populist” theme—suggesting appeal to
“silent majority” and those who weren’t defined as “interest groups” (women,
Blacks, etc—though corporate interests weren’t discussed)
·
Unlike 19th century populism, elite is defined
not as the bankers and wealthy, but as Supreme Court, liberal media, Congress
and President who backs up “rights” of minority against the majority.
·
This continues through Reagan, famous for the totally false
stories of “welfare queens” who owned Cadillacs and who attacked affirmative
action
·
Social issues, not economic issues used as polarizing tools
(no appeals to class consciousness, as had 19th century populism )
IV. INFLUENCE OF “NEW RIGHT”
·
appeals to cultural and social conservatism and new
evangelical religious ferment
–see Viguerie, Reagan article as examples.
·
Viguerie started in 1974—saw the need to use organization to
build a new constituency for the Right in the Republican party—Jerry Fallwell,
Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly were important parts of the new group – credited
4 keys to success (see reading)
·
3 main organizing issues to develop new right-wing
organizers
1) Anti-elitism (ala George
Wallace, south, whites as victims of state control)
2) “Family” values coalition
·
antifeminism anti-homosexuality key here (funded Anita
Bryant’s campaign to get Miami, Florida
to repeal gay-rights ordinance in late 1970s
·
drew strength form Christian schools movement and broader
Christian right it ==anti-busing campaigns from Boston to California, attempts
to get their tax-emempt status revoked drew fire and caused more organization
among Christian schools
·
This last led to the founding of the Jerry Falwell’s “Moral
Majority” in 1979—organization played a key role in Ronald Reagan’s race for
presidency
3) ) Rejected thawing of cold war under Nixon, Ford, Kissinger, Carter; distrusted Chinese, opposed negotiation with Soviets; opposed arms control, favored military buildup; rejected giving up Panama Canal, (for Reagan, this a big issue) – this the least of the issues
· Coalition built by appealing to working class people on social issues, and building ideological assault on the idea of government. This campaign enormously successful.
·
New Right a major force
in U.S.policies 1970s-present
·
—credited with
influencing elections, passing state abortion restrictions, leading backlash
against social welfare spending and affirmative action programs;
·
self-described as “Pro-family”
movement—emphasizes social traditionalism over economic libertarianism and
militant anticommunism, the other definining issues of US conservative
ideology—see chapter on Conservatism in Sixties book;
Women a key constituency in New Right—used as “bridge” group
Groups: Concerned Women of America, Schlafly’s Eagle
Forum;
most women get involved in new right over abortion,
defense of traditional womanhood, but new right organizations have a larger
issue agenda than traditional womanhood; garnered women’s activism over these
issues as a way to use them as a bridge a broader conservative agenda;
·
in these organizations,
women are standardbearers of opposition to policies that promote gender equity,
a strategy that deflects criticism by pitting women against women, and uses
gender as a “socially acceptable proxy for race”;
·
ironically, women’s
continued marginality in society brought this constituency forward; by
attacking feminism as a symbol for all that is wrong with liberalism and by
using anti-feminism as a bridge for female mobilization to other right wing
issues— here working class women, even as they are the largest group
identifying with feminist issues, are used by these organizations for purposes
that harm their economic equity issues that poll after poll find them
supporting
Example:
Eagle Forum and CWA oppose state intervention to achieve equal employment
opportunity, discount importance of violence against women as a social problem.
·
Schlafly lobbied to
defund the Violence against Women act; denounced the resignations of US naval
officers in the wake of the infamous Tailhook incident as a “Feminist lynching”
made possible by a “bunch of wimps” among the military leadership
·
Schlafly argued that
the Violence against women agency would give women “free housing while you
accuse your husband of spousal ‘rape’ “; argued that female victimization is a
myth, while male victims of feminist excesses abound; that feminists are
responsible for divorce and are “bitter” women; these organizations argue that
they defends traditional homemaker against the gender-role changes advocated by
the feminist movement, but their typical policy solutions reflect mainstream
conservatism and business elite, including tax reforms to benefit
single-earner households and IRAs for nonemployed women; neither EF or CWA
argue that employment is root of evil, mainly because so many conservative
women work outside the home.
·
Rather, it is the erosion of male authority
and male absence that is identified as source of social ills, and feminists are
responsible for these ills—polarization is the key to success (recall feminism
meets terrorism article) ;
·
If one looks at Schlafly’s
career, feminism replaced Communism as targets of suspicion—like communists,
feminists said to arrogantly advocate a social experiment at odds with “human
nature”, “biology” and the Bible;
·
argue that the sexual
revolution turned morality on its head and rejected motherhood; use a divisive
rhetoric to demonize the opposition as anti-religious, encourage conspiratorial
explanation of political disputes (Rush Limbaugh the master of this actually)
New
Right rhetoric transforms almost every social issue into a moral question
derived from an errant feminist agenda.
–feminism replaced communism as the bogeyman of anti-modernism
Themes:
·
Crime could be
eradicated with better moral teachings in the home; the solution is a
two-parent family and a firm paternal hand.
·
Welfare is wrong
because it encourages illegitimacy and makes husbands dispensable; it is the
“prime example of the Irreligious Left imposting its lack of morals on the rest
of society.
·
The media, controlled by “moral perverts in
Hollywood and Broadway” influenced by feminisms agenda, ”promote carnality
among the young” (this is just the
reemergence of themes from HUAC in 1950s—same themes expressed there; here
feminists have promoted this (contrary to reality-many feminists have opposed
pornography, but have different explanation for its proliferation)
·
increased importance of
issues previously defined as ‘private” such as sexuality and reproduction,
which became the cornerstone of the “pro-family” agenda; New Right appealed to
these issues to attract a newly mobilized constitutency, especially women, who
even on the right appeared as new public actors;
·
used feminism as the
basis for moral attacks on liberal policies—used strategy of acquiring female
recruits for a broader New Right agenda through assaults on feminism; women
such as Hillary Clinton and other women appointees serve as a way of ridiculing
liberalism generally…. Negative sexual stereotypes encourages right wing
paranoia about feminist political conspiracies—continual reference to hidden
agendas and secret plans
V. CONSERVATIVE “THINK TANKS” AND FOUNDATIONS MAKE
IDEOLOGICAL ASSAULT ON THE IDEA OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY==back
what became known as Reaganomics and social polarization
·
Corporate and Elite Foundations fund organizations whose
primary purpose is to strengthen de-regulation, but also that seek a rejection
of sixties “multiculturalism “and target social issues to complete the right’s
electoral coalition
· Beginning in mid 1970s, corporate foundations started funding massive amounts of money to change ideology to reign in government regulation and calls for corporate and elite social responsibilty
– William Simon of Olin Foundation (money from chemicals, munitions—part of the military industrial complex) called for “books, books, and more books” to attack liberalism and to argue for deregulation, business tax relief
"Funds generated by business...must rush by the multimillions to the aid of liberty...to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty. [Business must] cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities who departments of economy, government, politics and history are hostile to capitalism." --William E. Simon, Time for Truth (1979)
· shift in media noticeable:
·
These foundations funded mostly by corporations and wealthy;
funded authors who agreed with their viewpoint; much of the key “intellectual”
arguments for the deregulated government come not from academics but from
“think tanks” funded by wealthy donors;
·
many of the key
arguments don’t hold up under rigorous academic scrutiny, but they have
“status” from the foundations that house these “scholars”—American Enterprise
Institute, Manhattan Institute, etc (see recommended article on conservative
foundations);
·
if you pay attention
to media, you will see that these organizations dominate current media
(contrary to notion that the media is the bastion of liberalism—another
argument funded by these think tanks that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny—see
recommended website on the myth of the liberal media)
·
key anti-affirmative action arguments, anti-regulation,
anti-government tracts are funded and legitimized by this foundation money.
·
Arguments are often not based on verifiable evidence, but
now permeate media and culture nonetheless
Main arguments, from philosophy to hard
sciences, funding for these ideological tenets:
·
Need to have lower taxes and less regulation for business,
allow “free market” to work.
·
Government is the source of all problems. Greed is good for
society.
·
Government solutions only hurt the people they were intended
to benefit, often the poor, or women--and that these will be helped most by
unfettered corporate capitalism.
·
Use distrust of government to argue for a return to a mythic
past
·
also use scapegoating of dangerous “Others”--like blacks,
welfare recipients, immigrants, feminists .
Example 1:
Jude Wanniski, The Way the World Works—the book that Reagan used to justify his economic policies
· Wanniski had no formal training in economics and no academic credentials, but got $50,000 to write the book from conservative foundation
· made a very simplistic argument on behalf of the now infamous supply side "Laffer Curve," (itself no more than a note written on a napkin) which argued that lowering taxes on the rich would lead to more government revenues
Example 2:
The Bell Curve (1994) by Charles Murray and
Richard Herrnstein (for more on Murray, see recommended article by Eric Alterman)
·
Cited research funded by by the Pioneer Fund, whose roots go
back to the anti-immigration promotion and Eugenics movement of the 1920s; had
ties to Nazis in 1930s; fund grew in 1970s, and money from wealthy
industrialists 1971-1992 gave $4.6 million to support work relating work to IQ.
Energized by reaction to Brown v. Board of Education decision; Pioneer gave
$770,000 to research attempting to prove the correlation between cranial size,
penis size and IQ (Black men had larger penises, smaller craniums, smaller IQ
than men)
·
Other funding for research from the Heritage Foundation,
Coors money
· Bell Curve argued that tests “proved” blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites. Social problems of minority groups, sucha s poverty, crime and teenage pregnancy, are attributable to low IQ and cannot be remedied by programs such as welfare or affirmative action
· Fueled, with seeming “academic” evidence, the debate to cut affirmative-action plans
· Seemed to give evidence that government was lifting up those who were “undeserving” above those who were “deserving”.
·
Merit replaced by liberal “do-gooderism” that harms the
poor, as they advance to a position they aren’t qualified for; this ultimately
harmed the people the programs were intended to help, as their lack of
qualification became evident; in general, society harmed because unqualified
people were attending college, law schools, getting jobs, over the more
qualified white candidate
·
In respect to intelligence, the Murray book argued, you
either have it or you don’t
·
However, the data was reexamined by many scholars, exposed
very quickly as a fraud. Using the same data as Murray, sociologists
and others have shown that the Bell Curve didn’t account for differences
in educational experiences before the subjects went to college.
o
It ignored a simple but crucial factor: how the quality of
elementary and secondary school education affects IQ scores.
o
During senior years in high school, white tend to outscore
blacks by as much as 15 IQ points. But if those same students graduate from
college, the IQ scores of blacks increase more than 4x as much as those of
their white classmates. Thus, education makes a huge difference, thus
implicating the uneven quality of the natioan’s educational system
o
These revisionist studies, without huge money to back them,
have not gotten the huge funding, so they have yet to enter the public arena as
credible arguments. The Bell Curve continues to be cited as though it’s data
holds up.
·
"My personal inclination is to believe that The Bell
Curve is not too far off the mark." remarked George W. Bush in the
2000 election campaign.
Example Three: More recently, the recent thesis about terrorism as the result of the “clash of civilizations” between the western and Muslim world emanated from funding by the Olin Foundation, which is tied to military industry money. (see Alterman article and media transparency site
· My point here is not that these ideas are not worthy of debate. But when funding elevates ideas and places books on best sellers list (often by buying huge numbers of books to give away to politicians, etc) to confirm their “popularity” it isn’t a “free” marketplace of ideas, but rather a loaded dice game.
·
Our ideas, thoughts and convictions are influenced by
ideological arguments, and if certain ideas are brought to the public arena
more easily by money and funding, then it is not a free exchange of ideas
anymore, but one in which the wealthy can load the marketplace with ideas
favorable to their interests.