Passion of the Right, The uses of persecution.

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1123/

 

Features > October 5, 2004

 

 

Passion of the Right

The uses of persecution

By Dave Mulcahey

 

The pitchforks are out in the swing states. Direct-mail pieces are

showing up in West Virginia warning the faithful that dark things are

in store if the hated " liberal agenda " prevails in November. " Vote

Republican to protect our families, " the letter admonishes. A photo of

the Bible appears, stamped with the word " BANNED. " Another photo

pictures a homosexual on his knees placing a ring on the finger of his

man-spouse. This scene bears the legend " ALLOWED. "

 

A bit surprisingly—but, then again, not—the letter's return address is

given as the Republican National Committee.

 

Certainly, the piece falls short of the best work Republicans are

capable of. Jesse Helms' creative team set the bar pretty high years

ago when it warned North Carolina voters, " Your tax dollars are being

used to pay for grade school education [that] teaches our children

CANNIBALISM, WIFE-SWAPPING and the MURDER of infants and the elderly

are acceptable behavior. "

 

With a month to go before the election, the West Virginia letter is

bound to be surpassed by even grosser appeals to fear and loathing. It

happens every election cycle, a torrent of ads and direct-mail appeals

explaining to the white voter of small-town and suburban America the

ways he is victimized by liberal treachery. The way the liberal elite

mocks his piety and his patriotism. The way liberal government taxes

him and uses the proceeds to poison " the culture. " The way liberal

doves shrink before America's enemies, because they too are the

enemies of Americans.

 

When such pandering makes its inevitable appearance in campaigns,

liberals just as inevitably register their shock and incredulity. Do

people really buy this crap? Can it be that, in 2004, the center-left

is still paying a political price for supporting civil rights and

protesting against the Vietnam War? How much longer can the

Republicans possibly ride the wave of white lumpen resentment?

 

The answers, respectively, are yes, yes and forever. The conservative

backlash that began 40 years ago with the candidacy of Barry Goldwater

has never been healthier or more productive. Its prospects for growth

and expansion into hitherto unexploited markets are excellent—even,

perhaps especially, if John Kerry is elected president. I only wish I

could buy stock in it.

 

Some observers see what they hopefully regard as a counter-backlash

gaining steam on the left. " Bush hatred, " as the right-wing

controversialists call it, has indeed garnered the Democratic Party a

bit of the fire, youthful energy and populist appeal it has lacked for

more than a generation. Moreover, it finally appears to have dawned on

the limousine class of liberal that the Republicans now occupy the

commanding heights of political power and are preparing to shell the

hell out of what remains of the New Deal, the Great Society—and,

indeed, what remains of the Democratic Party. In other words, the

limousine liberals are stuck with us in Sarajevo.

 

So we're all pulling together in 2004. Call it a popular front. A

movement, however, it ain't.

Rage displaced

 

To understand how much work progressives have to do in the United

States, one need only look back on the stupendous revolution pulled

off by the conservative movement. Its signal achievement—and one that

continues to baffle deep thinkers of the center and left—was to win

the hearts and minds of vast numbers of Americans who ought to have

been, by the standard calculations of the time, easy marks for

economic populism.

 

The closer one looks at the backlash, the more brilliant this

achievement seems. Consider the two red-letter years for conservative

militancy, 1978 and 1994. The first saw the advance party of new-style

conservative populists—Newt Gingrich, to name only one—ushered into

Washington. The latter marked their conquest of the U.S. Congress.

Each of these events took place against a backdrop of deep economic

troubles for the country's working and middle classes. Indeed, the

late 1970s and the early 1990s were pretty much defined by the deep

discouragement of working stiffs and their resentment of the economic

elite. How, then, did these times give us Gingrich?

 

The New Right understood that for their party to succeed in adverse

times, it had to—in the words of tax rebel Howard Phillips— " organize

discontent. " John Dolan, an early conservative political action

committee operative echoed this sentiment, boasting that he conceived

his mission to " stir up hostilities. We are trying to be divisive. ...

The shriller you are the better it is to raise money. " Not just to

raise money, of course, but to build a movement. Direct-mail mavens

like Richard Viguerie, himself the son of the Midwestern working

class, understood how to work their humble brethren into a lather

about issues with largely symbolic significance to the majority of

voters—affirmative action, abortion, gun control. Political power, the

New Right understood, grows out of the mailbox of a pissed-off gun owner.

 

One of the bizarre contradictions of the nascent reactionary movement,

as historian Christopher Lasch noted, was that the target audience for

these backlash solicitations was anything but a natural constituency

for conservatism. Polling data at the time of California's great

property-tax revanche indicated that the movement's adherents tended

actually to favor such unconservative ideas as the redistribution of

wealth.

 

Moreover, the New Right grasped that many of the so-called social

issues were in fact class issues—that the high-minded principles

axiomatic among educated, well-off liberals could be distorted beyond

recognition when viewed through the prism of class. Decriminalizing

abortion, for example, to its proponents meant freeing women from the

" destiny " of biology, or alleviating the burden of poor women and

families. To a great many with working-class attitudes or

dispositions—what today's political jargon calls " values " —abortion was

a moral horror. It took little to convince such people that the only

ends abortion could possibly serve were the extreme self-centeredness

of the rich or the coddling of the poor.

 

It took little to convince them, in other words, that abortion—and

busing, and affirmative action, and criminal justice reform, and a

host of other issues—were antithetical to their way of life. Liberal

moral vanity had been foisted on them against their will.

 

And so flowered the trope of displaced class rage, where the liberal

stood in as a proxy for the boss. The deindustrialization of the '80s

and early '90s continued to produce a healthy surplus of discontent,

and the bright young operators of the conservative movement continued

to organize and channel it to the Republican Party's ends.

 

Now, many have observed that the New Right could not have worked these

wonders without the benefit of regular and staggering subsidies

remitted to its campaign funds, PACs and think tanks by the heirs of

several industrial and financial fortunes. Again, however, one can

only stand in awe of the political acumen at work. While assiduously

attacking the academy for its liberal slant and declining standards,

conservative benefactors set up think tanks as rival sources of

authority in public discourse (free, incidentally, from the burdensome

professional standards of the academy, such as peer review). Loudly

bewailing the hopelessly liberal bias of the media, conservative money

men funded magazines, newspapers, television programs, cable TV

networks, university chairs and symposia, and made sure that every

college in the land had some version of the Dartmouth Review operating

on campus.

Poor little rich guys

 

All these enterprises were investments in an ambitious rhetorical

project. Here was a party remaking the American political system

according to the dictates of the monied interests, all the while

presenting itself as the standard-bearer for the humble and neglected.

Consumed by power lust, the conservative movement continually played

the martyr, spoke of its persecution at the hands of a liberal

overlord class. Amazingly, people bought it. The investment paid off.

 

Not only did the conceit sell, it assumed the dimensions of folklore.

What was Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, for example, but a

retelling of the backlash myth with biblical scenery? The publicity

campaign was carefully planned and executed to make sure that all the

usual suspects—the New York Times, the liberal church folk, the PC

crowd, the Jews—could scourge poor Mel in plain view of the nation's

fundagelicals. They repaid him seven times sevenfold for his trouble.

 

No, the backlash narrative no longer needs to be explained. We take it

in like the air we breathe. The millions of fans of Bill O'Reilly,

Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, the Christians who hold vigils for

fetuses and agitate for school prayer, the proud displayers of flags

and yellow ribbons, all share this common refrain: We are victims, and

we deserve our revenge.

 

If the Bush administration is returned to power, will the great

founding myth of the backlash lose its luster? Perhaps. After all,

Newt Gingrich rode high as an outsider, but he met his Waterloo when

he actually had to make policy. (On the other hand, as Grover

Norquist, the Ratko Mladic of Republican strategists, suggests, it may

just be an opportunity to annihilate the Democratic Party.)

 

John Kerry hopes to squeak out a close victory by holding to the

center. The Republicans, meanwhile, are sticking to the strategy that

built their movement: Divide and conquer.

 

Perhaps, this year, the center will hold, giving Kerry the win. But

what the Democrats need to do is build a movement of their own. So

far, there's no sign of it.