Reagan repeatedly said that the nation’s difficulties could be blamed on the federal government: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” He praised repeatedly praised the American people, indicating that it was the Democrats, not the voters, who were responsible for government getting out of control. People responded positively to his optimistic gospel and to his contrasting of the absolute goodness of the American people with the pure evil of the Soviet empire. The Republicans had marketed themselves as the party of morality and traditional American principles, and they were fortunate in having a candidate who was thoroughly likeable and easy to portray as a man of character. Peggy Noonan, a Reagan speechwriter, was to spearhead the effort to convince the public that he was uniquely a man of character who exemplified American values. It did not matter that his relationships with his own children were not very good or that some of their close friends did not fit this pattern. He clearly possessed great personal charm, was unfailingly courteous, and he constantly spoke in moralistic terms. Americans learned to ignore any information that did not fit the myth.
A man of principles, he consistently cut taxes; they did not notice tax increases on his watch. As a man of principle, he was not expected to offer careful and detailed explanations for policy. Marshall Mc Luhan, the media philosopher, had warned, “Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.” Within the actor-president, persona triumphed over policy. Ronald Reagan was avuncular, charming, and charismatic. It was almost impossible for many to believe that such a man could make serious mistakes. Reagan and his handlers understood that especially in postmodern culture there was no difference between what was true and what was rhetorically seductive.
People in postmodern culture responded positively to what sounded good and were aesthetically pleasing. A charismatic storyteller, Ronald Reagan succeeded in persuading most of the voting public to accept positions they normally opposed, when presented in other terms. Postmodern culture places a high premium on electronic images. People who view someone on the silver screen or on television somehow can accurately discern that person’s character and inner being. If they approve of what they see, they develop an emotional tie with that person. Reagan and his handlers understood this, and it gave them an enormous advantage over his Democratic opponents, who saw him only as a “B” grade movie actor. In 1984, Lesley Stahl provided CBS television with a four-minute pictorial story about how Reagan visited institutions for the handicapped and old age homes, while simultaneously slashing the funding of programs for these people. Knowing that the pictures were worth far more than her commentary, the White House handlers thanked CBS for the favorable publicity.
Reagan began his campaign in Mississippi, defending states rights in language whites understood as being very critical of the civil rights revolution. While Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford courted the black middle class, Reagan went even farther than Nixon in wooing white conservatives and deliberately cut their ties to the African American middle class. As Michael Dawson of Harvard recalled, “Black elites were shocked to find that with Reagan and his advisers, there were no longer ‘good Negroes’ and ‘bad Negroes.’” Reagan’s hostility to the civil rights revolution also played well among white workers in the North. The Democrats had failed to win new voters or retain many old supporters with their ideas, while Reagan offered alternatives that won over some former Democrats.
In 1980, the Democrats lost many seats in the House and saw more than a few liberals support to liberal Republican John Anderson, who ran for the presidency in as an independent. Moderate Republicans who were uncomfortable in a party dominated by conservatives fueled the Anderson candidacy. By then, their numbers in Congress had dwindled to between fifteen and twenty “Gypsy Moths,” who fed off the leaves of the Republican tree but frequently voted with the Democrats. The Republican Senate victory was largely due to the organizational efforts of Terry Dolan’s National Conservative Political Action Committee. It had spent $4.5 million, $1.2 million of which went to purging liberal senators.
Showing posts with label Republicans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republicans. Show all posts
Monday, March 10, 2008
The Reagan REvolution, Part I
The election of Ronald Reagan and a Republican Senate in the election of 1980 was the first significant victory in the conservative’s sustained and successful drive to capture long-term control of the United States government. Its impact was so great that it has been called the “Reagan Revolution. “It marked a dramatic shift in policies, as Republicans began to make progress in rolling back the New Deal and successive Democratic domestic programs. Great progress was also made in reorienting tax policy by scaling back progressive taxation and providing generous tax cuts to the rich and corporate interests. In foreign affairs, Reagan’s rhetoric and Star Wars initiative foreshadowed what was to come under Reagan’s self-anointed heir, George W. Bush, a departure from traditional bipartisan foreign policy toward a very assertive, nationalistic, and unilateralist approach to world affairs. It was also a huge personal triumph for a Reagan whose likeable manner and ability instilled trust. His ability to communicate easily won many converts to conservative ideas. Many Americans came to identify modern Republicanism with this cheerful, likeable man whose eight years in the White House presented a generally positive advertisement for the party and conservatism.
It is possible that the Reagan Revolution went farther than the Gipper realized or intended. In retrospect, it is clear that the Republican Party in the Reagan years had accepted supply side economics and that many in its ranks ceased to worry about growing deficits. President Reagan used supply side rhetoric, but his diaries indicate that he disagreed with the most zealous supply-siders, such as Jack Kemp. It was also a period in which the New Right gathered enough influence to take over the party in the 1990s. Reagan employed their rhetoric because it was very effective in attracting support, but he privately worried that these people were extremists and even wrote that Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times is “becoming as R. Wing as the Post is L. Wing.”
Reagan urged Americans to “stand tall” and “dream heroic dreams,” and employed the slogan “Let’s make America great again.” His optimism was appealing and people wanted to believe that it was, as he insisted in 1984, “morning in America.” Reagan’s optimism tapped into a deep strain in the American character. Over time, Americans developed an ethic of cheerfulness, which emphasized individual self-worth and the notion that people are masters of their own destinies. Cheerfulness became a symbol of virtue. It included an aversion to tears, helplessness and grief. It became almost a prerequisite for getting hired and was expected of employees. Eventually advertisers who believed it encouraged spending that commodified it. Sociologist saw it as the handmaiden of Republican complacency. It was an attitude consistent with Republican insistence that little was wrong with America and its capitalistic system. This outlook certainly appealed to people tired of Democratic worrying about social and economic inequalities.
It is possible that the Reagan Revolution went farther than the Gipper realized or intended. In retrospect, it is clear that the Republican Party in the Reagan years had accepted supply side economics and that many in its ranks ceased to worry about growing deficits. President Reagan used supply side rhetoric, but his diaries indicate that he disagreed with the most zealous supply-siders, such as Jack Kemp. It was also a period in which the New Right gathered enough influence to take over the party in the 1990s. Reagan employed their rhetoric because it was very effective in attracting support, but he privately worried that these people were extremists and even wrote that Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times is “becoming as R. Wing as the Post is L. Wing.”
Reagan urged Americans to “stand tall” and “dream heroic dreams,” and employed the slogan “Let’s make America great again.” His optimism was appealing and people wanted to believe that it was, as he insisted in 1984, “morning in America.” Reagan’s optimism tapped into a deep strain in the American character. Over time, Americans developed an ethic of cheerfulness, which emphasized individual self-worth and the notion that people are masters of their own destinies. Cheerfulness became a symbol of virtue. It included an aversion to tears, helplessness and grief. It became almost a prerequisite for getting hired and was expected of employees. Eventually advertisers who believed it encouraged spending that commodified it. Sociologist saw it as the handmaiden of Republican complacency. It was an attitude consistent with Republican insistence that little was wrong with America and its capitalistic system. This outlook certainly appealed to people tired of Democratic worrying about social and economic inequalities.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Rush Limbaugh, Key Figure in Republican Information Machine
Conservative talk radio has had an even greater impact than conservative television. Rush Limbaugh, a benefactor of Scaife’s largess, began his radio broadcast in 1988 on WABC in New York. By 1998 he was reaching 20,000,000 listeners a week on 643 radio stations. Back in the Nixon days, Vice President Spiro Agnew had talked about a biased, liberal, media, but it was Limbaugh who made this an important national issue. He harps on this theme in every broadcast, thus fanning dissatisfaction with the mainstream media and improving the market for his product. With this argument he created a standard around which cultural embattled cultural conservatives could rally. They were encouraged to believe they were a put-upon minority even after they had won the control of the national government and a majority of the states. This approach was most appealing to white males, who became the largest part of conservative talk radio’s audience. They were attracted by the rudeness and crudeness of these commentators. Even Gordon Liddy’s urging followers to kill ATF agents was acceptable; “Head shots, head shots...kill the sons of bitches.”
California’s John Zeigler’s locker room talk seems to satisfy some basic male needs, and his claim that Gray Davis was human waste that needed to flushed resonated with his audience. The right wing hosts are popular because they push people’s buttons and stimulate primal impulses such as fear of the “Other” and play to intense my- country- right- or- wrong nationalism. They encourage an intense comradeship, similar to that found in an army barracks. People who telephone these hosts fall all over themselves about being honored to talk to these shock jocks. Limbaugh’s followers call themselves “ditto heads.” Much grumbling and whining marks the comradeship of the right wing radio broadcast. Appeals are made to fairly primitive mass feelings., and the same simplistic arguments are repeated over and over again. Any idea that could disturb their collective self-satisfaction was belittled.
Limbaugh’s chief mission seemed to be the demonization of Democrats and liberals, and he repeatedly warns listeners that the evil liberals are plotting to destroy American culture and undermine the nation’s strength. He appeared unable to differentiate between liberals and Democrats. Though seldom mentioning God, he embraces the agenda of the Christian Right, and constantly attacks feminists, environmentalists, and homosexuals. His attacks upon Bill Clinton’s personal life were unceasing. Even Clinton’s daughter Chelsea was not spared Limbaugh’s nasty comments, as he called her “the White House dog.” Another major theme was his contempt for the poor and his belief that the nation could not afford the money spent on welfare. His willingness to air unsubstantiated charges and clear falsehoods have spawned a number of web sites devoted to correcting his statements.
He has been praised for playing a central role in giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress in 1995, and Speaker Newt Gingrich said they shared the same goal: to “make Bill Clinton the enemy of normal Americans.” To a significant extent they succeeded. Limbaugh did so by constant discussion of Clinton’s personal life, but the broadcaster had almost nothing to say about revelations about the personal lives of Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and other Clinton tormentors. Limbaugh has a brother who is also in the anti-liberal information industry and who claimed in Prosecution “liberals are waging war against Christianity.”
Even after the Republican victory of 2002, Rush found it necessary to refer to the NAACP as “the enemy” and warn listeners about how successful liberals are at launching personal attacks against Republican leaders. He suggested that though the liberals had sustained a defeat, they might launch a counter-attack as the Nazis did in the Battle of the Bulge. When Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s plane crashed, Grant said he thought Brown might have survived “because at heart I’m a pessimist.” Brown was an African American, a race Bob Grant called “subhumanoids” and “screaming savages.” It was also about race. He once asked his audience of “dittoheads” why composites of criminals often look like Jesse Jackson and was heard to tell a caller, “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” Limbaugh is anti-gay and anti- environmentalist, often using the term “environmental wackos.” Limbaugh also mined the theme that “bleeding-heart” liberal judges were responsible for a perceived increase in crime
Limbaugh began broadcasting nationally in 1988 and had at least 14.5 million listeners per week by December 2002. He captured the hearts and minds of millions with a mix “of mirth with a radio preacher’s urgency and a demagogue’s viciousness.” His great success has inspired many imitators. Together, Rush and Rush wannabes, have had a great impact upon the American political landscape and have done much to make the Republican base larger, angrier, and less inclined to civil dialogue.” Arousing anger was an important function of the right-wing talk shows, but creating a sense of belonging and association with successful, productive people was also important. Limbaugh’s “ditto heads” come to see themselves as part of a noble and enlightened fraternity battling the unspeakable evil of liberalism. Theirs is a noble cause, they believe, because they are fighting to remove government restrictions from capable and productive people like themselves. From Limbaugh, Mike Gallagher, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and others they learn that they are superior in every way to those who expect help from government or are working to expand it and defile traditional values. Rush and the other conservative radio commentators were unable to turn away even briefly from generating anger and paranoia after their election triumph in 2002. They almost immediately took to creating anger against and fear of Nancy Pelosi, the new leader of the diminished Democratic minority in the House of Representative. Even if she led a cohesive party, the fact is that minority leaders have very little clout in today’s House. In a news conference on November 20, 2002, Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle acknowledged that Rush Limbaugh and the many other right-wing talk show hosts give the GOP a great edge in elections, and he attributed the Democratic defeat in 2002 partly to their influence. He noted that their shrill rhetoric generates an extraordinary emotional fervor that energizes many people and gets them to work hard in elections.
The same rhetoric results in making life much more difficult for Democratic politicians because they are often confronted and threatened by people who believe all the charges made on talk shows. Limbaugh’s attacks were supplemented by newspaper advertisements calling Daschle an ally of Saddam Hussein because the senator opposed drilling oil wells in the Anwar reserve. American Renewal, a Christian Right organization, funded the advertisements. Daschle noted that when he was being attacked as an obstructionist he and his family had to face many more unpleasant confrontations and threats than under normal conditions. He twice used the word “pray” in relation to his concern that this kind of rhetoric could eventually do long term damage to American political institutions. Limbaugh responded to this complaint by running a skit that mocked Daschle for complaining that his family was receiving telephoned death threats, claiming Daschle was lying and making the charge for political reasons. Democratic criticism of Limbaugh led the mainstream press to grant him extended interviews on television, thus elevating him to respectable status among political commentators. He was given long and respectful interview on Tim Russert’s CNBC program and on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
Matt Drudge’s web page was also very effective cog in the Republican attack machine, and many GOP publicists like to draw material from it. On August 10, 1997, Drudge found it necessary to retract a story he circulated that White House aid Sid Blumenthal was a wife-beater. The admission did not reduce Drudge’s star/hero status among the New Right one iota. Perhaps they assumed that all Clinton assistants must be deeply depraved people. Not satisfied with the retraction, the Blumenthals went to court for satisfaction. It developed that the story began at a 1994 dinner where a Wall Street Journal publicist bragged that the paper had legal documents proving that Blumenthal regularly beat his wife. Blumenthal denied feeding Drudge the information. Drudge, financed indirectly by Richard Mellon Scaife, refused to name his source. It turned out there were no police reports or documents. The press largely ignored Blumenthal’s litigation. It was covered by the Austin Chronicle and the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. By 2004, the Drudge web site was getting 6.5 million hits a day. Among those consulting this site are radio hosts--not all of them conservative- who are looking for material to discuss on the air.
A New York Times/CBS poll in 1988 demonstrated the success of the Republican information machine. It revealed that 20% of Americans thought Republicans were fair to all classes and 64% believed the GOP was mainly concerned with helping the rich. Despite these beliefs, the GOP had succeeded by then in selling itself as the party of the disaffected. This was done through effective manipulation of cultural issues and directing random anger toward liberals. In that year, George H.W. Bush successfully identified Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis with Willie Horton, a black convicted murder who raped a white woman on a weekend furlough. Bush also denounced the Massachusetts governor as a “card-carrying member” of the American Civil Liberties Union. By 2003, conservatives dominated political discussion and frequently set the tone of political reporting. They accomplished this by aggressively marketing their ideas through a large and well-financed network of foundations. Many of their newspapers and political pundits make no pretense of doing anything more than propagandizing their side of political issues, and in this way they play an important role in setting the agenda for political discussion.
Mainline journalists, who are essentially committed to fairness and evenhandedness, must take into account the spin the conservative journalists place on the news. Likewise, in an effort to avoid charges of media bias, they have given space to unproven and outrageous charges developed by some of the conservative media’s less respectable members. The clearly biased Fox News has captured a large share of the cable news audience and has forced the other cable operations to hire a large stable of one-sided commentators, thus making cable news, particularly in the evenings, a vast echo chamber for right wing views. Finally, a large array of right wing national talk show hosts, together with their innumerable local counterparts, daily fill the airwaves with political propaganda and anger against liberals. Their influence will grow as the market share of the three main networks decreases and as smaller numbers of people read newspapers. Fewer than 20% of young adults read the news. If this tendency continues, what little an ever-growing proportion of American voters know about current events will come from the right-wing information network, which includes a multitude of well-done right-wing blogs.
So long as the shock of rapid social and economic change buffet
s American culture, the conservative information machine is likely to be successful in recruiting and retaining a substantial base for the Republican Party. Despite the many economic insecurities facing voters who were not college educated, 77% of those earning between $30,000 and $40,000 a year think they are doing well and do not seem very worried about their futures. For the future, many seem to “put their trust in the state lottery system.” They have learned that they cannot and should not “look to the federal government or labor unions to throw them a lifeline.” They are more concerned about how the sexual come-ons and violence of contemporary culture threaten their families, and they identify Democrats with the libertine values that menace their families. Even demographic tendencies cooperate with the conservative information machine. In the Europe and the United States, progressive secularists are much likely to have childless or small families than cultural conservatives. The fact that cultural conservatives are considerably more fertile helps “explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism.” The states carried by George W. Bush in 2004 had 11% higher fertility rates than those carried by Democrat John Kerry. Some fear this will eventually spell the “death of the [influence of the] Enlightenment.” This is probably an exaggerated fear, but it does not bode well for progressives.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
California’s John Zeigler’s locker room talk seems to satisfy some basic male needs, and his claim that Gray Davis was human waste that needed to flushed resonated with his audience. The right wing hosts are popular because they push people’s buttons and stimulate primal impulses such as fear of the “Other” and play to intense my- country- right- or- wrong nationalism. They encourage an intense comradeship, similar to that found in an army barracks. People who telephone these hosts fall all over themselves about being honored to talk to these shock jocks. Limbaugh’s followers call themselves “ditto heads.” Much grumbling and whining marks the comradeship of the right wing radio broadcast. Appeals are made to fairly primitive mass feelings., and the same simplistic arguments are repeated over and over again. Any idea that could disturb their collective self-satisfaction was belittled.
Limbaugh’s chief mission seemed to be the demonization of Democrats and liberals, and he repeatedly warns listeners that the evil liberals are plotting to destroy American culture and undermine the nation’s strength. He appeared unable to differentiate between liberals and Democrats. Though seldom mentioning God, he embraces the agenda of the Christian Right, and constantly attacks feminists, environmentalists, and homosexuals. His attacks upon Bill Clinton’s personal life were unceasing. Even Clinton’s daughter Chelsea was not spared Limbaugh’s nasty comments, as he called her “the White House dog.” Another major theme was his contempt for the poor and his belief that the nation could not afford the money spent on welfare. His willingness to air unsubstantiated charges and clear falsehoods have spawned a number of web sites devoted to correcting his statements.
He has been praised for playing a central role in giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress in 1995, and Speaker Newt Gingrich said they shared the same goal: to “make Bill Clinton the enemy of normal Americans.” To a significant extent they succeeded. Limbaugh did so by constant discussion of Clinton’s personal life, but the broadcaster had almost nothing to say about revelations about the personal lives of Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and other Clinton tormentors. Limbaugh has a brother who is also in the anti-liberal information industry and who claimed in Prosecution “liberals are waging war against Christianity.”
Even after the Republican victory of 2002, Rush found it necessary to refer to the NAACP as “the enemy” and warn listeners about how successful liberals are at launching personal attacks against Republican leaders. He suggested that though the liberals had sustained a defeat, they might launch a counter-attack as the Nazis did in the Battle of the Bulge. When Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s plane crashed, Grant said he thought Brown might have survived “because at heart I’m a pessimist.” Brown was an African American, a race Bob Grant called “subhumanoids” and “screaming savages.” It was also about race. He once asked his audience of “dittoheads” why composites of criminals often look like Jesse Jackson and was heard to tell a caller, “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” Limbaugh is anti-gay and anti- environmentalist, often using the term “environmental wackos.” Limbaugh also mined the theme that “bleeding-heart” liberal judges were responsible for a perceived increase in crime
Limbaugh began broadcasting nationally in 1988 and had at least 14.5 million listeners per week by December 2002. He captured the hearts and minds of millions with a mix “of mirth with a radio preacher’s urgency and a demagogue’s viciousness.” His great success has inspired many imitators. Together, Rush and Rush wannabes, have had a great impact upon the American political landscape and have done much to make the Republican base larger, angrier, and less inclined to civil dialogue.” Arousing anger was an important function of the right-wing talk shows, but creating a sense of belonging and association with successful, productive people was also important. Limbaugh’s “ditto heads” come to see themselves as part of a noble and enlightened fraternity battling the unspeakable evil of liberalism. Theirs is a noble cause, they believe, because they are fighting to remove government restrictions from capable and productive people like themselves. From Limbaugh, Mike Gallagher, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and others they learn that they are superior in every way to those who expect help from government or are working to expand it and defile traditional values. Rush and the other conservative radio commentators were unable to turn away even briefly from generating anger and paranoia after their election triumph in 2002. They almost immediately took to creating anger against and fear of Nancy Pelosi, the new leader of the diminished Democratic minority in the House of Representative. Even if she led a cohesive party, the fact is that minority leaders have very little clout in today’s House. In a news conference on November 20, 2002, Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle acknowledged that Rush Limbaugh and the many other right-wing talk show hosts give the GOP a great edge in elections, and he attributed the Democratic defeat in 2002 partly to their influence. He noted that their shrill rhetoric generates an extraordinary emotional fervor that energizes many people and gets them to work hard in elections.
The same rhetoric results in making life much more difficult for Democratic politicians because they are often confronted and threatened by people who believe all the charges made on talk shows. Limbaugh’s attacks were supplemented by newspaper advertisements calling Daschle an ally of Saddam Hussein because the senator opposed drilling oil wells in the Anwar reserve. American Renewal, a Christian Right organization, funded the advertisements. Daschle noted that when he was being attacked as an obstructionist he and his family had to face many more unpleasant confrontations and threats than under normal conditions. He twice used the word “pray” in relation to his concern that this kind of rhetoric could eventually do long term damage to American political institutions. Limbaugh responded to this complaint by running a skit that mocked Daschle for complaining that his family was receiving telephoned death threats, claiming Daschle was lying and making the charge for political reasons. Democratic criticism of Limbaugh led the mainstream press to grant him extended interviews on television, thus elevating him to respectable status among political commentators. He was given long and respectful interview on Tim Russert’s CNBC program and on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
Matt Drudge’s web page was also very effective cog in the Republican attack machine, and many GOP publicists like to draw material from it. On August 10, 1997, Drudge found it necessary to retract a story he circulated that White House aid Sid Blumenthal was a wife-beater. The admission did not reduce Drudge’s star/hero status among the New Right one iota. Perhaps they assumed that all Clinton assistants must be deeply depraved people. Not satisfied with the retraction, the Blumenthals went to court for satisfaction. It developed that the story began at a 1994 dinner where a Wall Street Journal publicist bragged that the paper had legal documents proving that Blumenthal regularly beat his wife. Blumenthal denied feeding Drudge the information. Drudge, financed indirectly by Richard Mellon Scaife, refused to name his source. It turned out there were no police reports or documents. The press largely ignored Blumenthal’s litigation. It was covered by the Austin Chronicle and the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. By 2004, the Drudge web site was getting 6.5 million hits a day. Among those consulting this site are radio hosts--not all of them conservative- who are looking for material to discuss on the air.
A New York Times/CBS poll in 1988 demonstrated the success of the Republican information machine. It revealed that 20% of Americans thought Republicans were fair to all classes and 64% believed the GOP was mainly concerned with helping the rich. Despite these beliefs, the GOP had succeeded by then in selling itself as the party of the disaffected. This was done through effective manipulation of cultural issues and directing random anger toward liberals. In that year, George H.W. Bush successfully identified Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis with Willie Horton, a black convicted murder who raped a white woman on a weekend furlough. Bush also denounced the Massachusetts governor as a “card-carrying member” of the American Civil Liberties Union. By 2003, conservatives dominated political discussion and frequently set the tone of political reporting. They accomplished this by aggressively marketing their ideas through a large and well-financed network of foundations. Many of their newspapers and political pundits make no pretense of doing anything more than propagandizing their side of political issues, and in this way they play an important role in setting the agenda for political discussion.
Mainline journalists, who are essentially committed to fairness and evenhandedness, must take into account the spin the conservative journalists place on the news. Likewise, in an effort to avoid charges of media bias, they have given space to unproven and outrageous charges developed by some of the conservative media’s less respectable members. The clearly biased Fox News has captured a large share of the cable news audience and has forced the other cable operations to hire a large stable of one-sided commentators, thus making cable news, particularly in the evenings, a vast echo chamber for right wing views. Finally, a large array of right wing national talk show hosts, together with their innumerable local counterparts, daily fill the airwaves with political propaganda and anger against liberals. Their influence will grow as the market share of the three main networks decreases and as smaller numbers of people read newspapers. Fewer than 20% of young adults read the news. If this tendency continues, what little an ever-growing proportion of American voters know about current events will come from the right-wing information network, which includes a multitude of well-done right-wing blogs.
So long as the shock of rapid social and economic change buffet
s American culture, the conservative information machine is likely to be successful in recruiting and retaining a substantial base for the Republican Party. Despite the many economic insecurities facing voters who were not college educated, 77% of those earning between $30,000 and $40,000 a year think they are doing well and do not seem very worried about their futures. For the future, many seem to “put their trust in the state lottery system.” They have learned that they cannot and should not “look to the federal government or labor unions to throw them a lifeline.” They are more concerned about how the sexual come-ons and violence of contemporary culture threaten their families, and they identify Democrats with the libertine values that menace their families. Even demographic tendencies cooperate with the conservative information machine. In the Europe and the United States, progressive secularists are much likely to have childless or small families than cultural conservatives. The fact that cultural conservatives are considerably more fertile helps “explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism.” The states carried by George W. Bush in 2004 had 11% higher fertility rates than those carried by Democrat John Kerry. Some fear this will eventually spell the “death of the [influence of the] Enlightenment.” This is probably an exaggerated fear, but it does not bode well for progressives.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Republican Victories in Cable TV
Conservative Victories in the Battle for Cable Television
In October 1996 Rupert Murdock, a committed Neo Conservative who owns newspapers around the world, created the FOX News Channel, which set new standards for reporting with a conservative bias Murdock is a committed Neo Conservative who has boasted, “ Our reach is unattached around the world. We are reaching people from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep.” The work of creating the network was left to Roger Ailes, a veteran Republican political operative who had been president of CNBC. The Fox News Network’s strident conservative bias has attracted millions of devoted viewers who can accept no criticism of it. FOX New’s coverage was so slanted that even a few of its own people laughted about it. Scott Norvell, the networks’s London Bureau chief, admitted, “ Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly.” The University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy attitudes found that watching Fox News tended to make people more misinformed. Another study found that in 2004, 13% of Fox panelists had something good to say about John Kerry while 50% strongly backed Bush.
When the producer of the television series “Boston Legal” attempted to criticize Fox News for offering something close to “hate speech,” ABC ordered him to omit all references to Fox and its personnel from the script. Former Fox producer Charles Reina later reported that daily executive memos dictated how stories were to be covered. But he was most disturbed by the laziness of Fox personnel, who had little interest in checking facts or pursuing accuracy. In 2006, the network’s coverage of the Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which was strongly backed by the Bush administration, was so biased that two producers in the Beirut bureau felt it was necessary to protest the propaganda by resigning. In addition to the Fox networks, Murdock owns twenty-six television stations in the United States and has major interests in seven others. Murdock also owns the New York Post, The Chicago Tribune and the Weekly Standard, all influential right-wing publications. He publishes “over-the-top” type conservative commentary through Regan Books/ HarperCollins publications. In August 2007, Murdock added the Wall Street Journal to the list of the hundred newspapers he owns.
The Fox News Network is “an ideological animal” that caters to angry white male viewers and “represents the complete reversal of a conservatism once devoted to tradition, civic ideals, stewardship of natural resources, personal tolerance, and cultural aspiration--the quest for enduring, sustaining roots .” In 2004, Fox gave 48 more minutes ( 20%) coverage to the Republican National Convention than to the Democratic confab. Although it claimed to offer “fair and balanced” news, even conservative writer Andrew Sullivan said, “Fox News is obviously biased toward the right. It’s simply loopy to pretend otherwise.” .
A feature of the network is Brit Hume’s Special Report which is “so claustrophobically right-wing that anyone who appears on the panel contracts a slow-moving case of Stockholm syndrome.” After the Democrats were soundly drubbed in the Congressional elections of 2002, a self-satisfied Brit Hume claimed much of the credit for FOX News. He told Don Imus, “It was because of our coverage that it all happened. We’ve become so influential now that people watch us and take their electoral cues from us. No one should doubt the influence of Fox News in these matters.” When liberals complained about the bias reflected on FOX and the outright false information peddled by right-wing talk radio, the mainline press rushed to the defense of the conservative media and said that the liberals were “whining.” Previously, when conservatives made similar complaints, their conduct was characterized as “courageous.” Publishing clearly biased political stories is also profitable. Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard , commenting on the conservative media, declared that “it pays to be unobjective. ...It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket. I’m glad we found it.”
FOX News began to attract more viewers than CNN in 2001, and the gap between them reached 60% in 2003. The success of FOX rests upon its strategy of imitating right-wing talk radio. It claims to offer objective news, but its coverage is really confrontational and right-biased talk about news. Its slogan is “fair and balanced,” but its comment is , consistently conservative, and most of its personnel behave as though they are embarked upon a sacred mission to convert American to conservatism. When Paula Zahn signed with CNN several months before her contract expired, Fox fired her, and Fox commentators trashed her.. By 2003, FOX was the most watched cable outlet. Sociologist Tod Gitlin has noted that its “commercial motive dovetails beautifully with a politics of muscularity and resentment.” It features a phony objectivity, while airing Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Both offer even more distortions and simplistic reasoning than Rush Limbaugh. Hannity plays off liberal Alan Colmes, whose mild manner make him raw meat for Hannity to maul and chew up. Mark Levin, another right wing shock jock, specializes in name calling; he called Judy Miller a “rat,” Joseph Wilson and his wife “finks,” and Ted Kennedy, “a lifelong drunk.”
FOX News and the other news outlets owned by Rupert Murdock represent a purely commercial approach to news production. It denies that journalism is a particularly noble craft that has a high responsibility to the American public, in part because it enjoys special privileges under the first amendment. The Murdock ventures are purely commercial, geared to maximize profits and reflect the views of their owner. Murdock operatives still talk about offering balanced news, but it is likely that they will eventually become more forthright about what they are offering. Talk radio has already done this. Murdock is seen as a journalistic trend-setter, and it could well be that the greatest part of the press will eventually follow this lead and that American journalism will eventually mirror what it was in the early 1800s, highly partisan outlets that offered offered partial views of the news. The difference would be that the media is likely to be heavily conservative in orientation.
CNN founder Reese Schonfeld suggested that FNN’s popularity was due to the style of its personalities; “They’re fast, they’re funny, and they’re furious.” On the other hand, it could just be that cable news viewers are mostly conservative and want news that is consistent with their outlook.
The success of FOX’s conservative programming had the effect of moving the other cable news networks, particularly CNN, to the right in order to attract conservative viewers, who may be more inclined to be news junkies than other Americans. CNN became a distinctively conservative voice after it was acquired by AOL-Time -Warner in 2000. Prior to that, CNN focused on little but Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky for 13 months. By 2000, the network of conservative journalists, media outlets, and talk radio had become so successful that their unapologetically slanted information was leaching into the mainstream press. In 2001,CNN head Walter Isaacson tried to recruit Rush Limbaugh as the network’s political commentator, and he went to Capitol Hill to learn from New Right politicians how to attract more conservative viewer. In December he added ultra-conservative warrior Ann Coulter to its staff as a “legal commentator.” A Salon magazine report found that between the inauguration and September 10, 2002, CNN gave unprecedented coverage to the Bush administration, and another study found that the network had covered administration officials live 157 times in a three-month period in 2002, as compared to seven times for elected Democrats. There was anecdotal evidence that MSNBC and FOX coverage were similar. For whatever reason, there seemed to be many more conservative viewers of cable news than liberals. Perhaps this was why Phil Donahue, who briefly had a cable show, was told he could interview conservatives alone but could not have liberals on the air without someone to counterbalance their views.
MSNBC certainly has a better record than FOX but its token “liberal” is Chris Matthews, a registered Democrat who once questioned the patriotism of Michael Dukakis and seems to appeal to angry white men. Matthews was quite conservative when he first appeared on the air and moved close to the center when George W. Bush’s popularity seemed to wane. Initially, he expressed great admiration for Bush because he was clearly a “guy” who could throw a baseball. He also proclaimed that Bush “looks great in a military uniform.” Though he was too cool on Bush, he exhibited a consisten approval of Republicans who were self-styled machomen. He said McCain “deserved the presidency,” then decided that America’s mayor Rudy Guiliani deserved the office. He also noted that Mitt Romney has “a great chin. I’ve noticed.”
Fox-News, by openly appealing to them, became an instant success. And the other cable news channels had little choice but to woo those conservative viewers. Sometimes the effort to woo conservatives was all too obvious as in Kelly Wallace of CNN’s fawning coverage of George W. Bush. By 2001, media scholar Mark Crispin Miller claimed that a communications cartel has emerged that controls the nation’s entertainment and much of its news. Despite the persistent fiction about media bias, Miller claims the cartel has a vested interest in keeping the public half-informed and in not offending generally conservative corporate advertisers. ABC features right-wing John Stossel, whose reports have so twisted data and distorted academic study results that several of his producers have resigned in protest.
When a CNN program added very articulate liberal spokesmen, Republicans tried to bring it into line. In April 2002, CNN attempted to attract more viewers by changing the personnel on its “Crossfire,” its political debate program. Robert Novak and Tucker Carlson were to represent the Right, and James Carville and Paul Begela spoke for the Left. The leftist pair seemed to get the best of most arguments and CNN was flooded with letters and e-mail about their “unfair tactics.” The Republican National Committee and Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott’s office attempted to organize a boycott that would prevent prominent Republicans from appearing on the program. The boycott was partially successful for more than a year. After the boycott received some public attention, White Hours spokesmen said that a refusal to debate was not a useful approach because those who refused to debate made Republicans look “like a bunch of wimps.”
Involved in fierce competition among the cable networks to attract conservative viewers, CNN and MSNBC signed on more far-right commentators and were less inclined to offer news that offended conservatives. Even Don Imus, the MSNBC morning host, who is usually considered non-partisan was given to racist invective, calling an African American journalist a “cleaning lady,” a black writer a “quota hire,” and said he hired a producer because he wrote good “nigger jokes.” Founded in 1996, MSNBC struck on a strategy of offering balanced, highly professional newscasts during the day and competing with Fox at night by offering a parade of right-wing commentators. MSNBC even hired Michael Savage, who thought homosexuals were plotting to destroy “the white race” and also engaged in tasteless attacks on blacks. He referred to the “Turd World Nations” and “Million Dyke March” and “ghetto slime,” demanded that “You liberals should drop dead for what you’ve done to my country,” and told a gay who called “You should get AIDS and die, you pig.” The latter comment got him fired. The network also hired former Congressman Joe Scarborough, who defined himself as “a hawk’s hawk” and who shamelessly practiced slanted bookings and one-sided presentations of background information.
A 2003 poll found that only 16% of MSNBC and CNN viewers were conservatives in comparison to 40% who identified themselves as conservatives. Forty-six percent of Fox viewers were conservative, while 44% of Fox were conservatives. Viewers of the three major nightly newscasts were 41% conservative and 17% liberal. The impact of this information on the cable operations was clear. On the other hand, the older news services were clearly aware of viewer preferences and tended to offer some news in as inoffensive way as possible and large doses of “infotainment.”
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
In October 1996 Rupert Murdock, a committed Neo Conservative who owns newspapers around the world, created the FOX News Channel, which set new standards for reporting with a conservative bias Murdock is a committed Neo Conservative who has boasted, “ Our reach is unattached around the world. We are reaching people from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep.” The work of creating the network was left to Roger Ailes, a veteran Republican political operative who had been president of CNBC. The Fox News Network’s strident conservative bias has attracted millions of devoted viewers who can accept no criticism of it. FOX New’s coverage was so slanted that even a few of its own people laughted about it. Scott Norvell, the networks’s London Bureau chief, admitted, “ Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly.” The University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy attitudes found that watching Fox News tended to make people more misinformed. Another study found that in 2004, 13% of Fox panelists had something good to say about John Kerry while 50% strongly backed Bush.
When the producer of the television series “Boston Legal” attempted to criticize Fox News for offering something close to “hate speech,” ABC ordered him to omit all references to Fox and its personnel from the script. Former Fox producer Charles Reina later reported that daily executive memos dictated how stories were to be covered. But he was most disturbed by the laziness of Fox personnel, who had little interest in checking facts or pursuing accuracy. In 2006, the network’s coverage of the Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which was strongly backed by the Bush administration, was so biased that two producers in the Beirut bureau felt it was necessary to protest the propaganda by resigning. In addition to the Fox networks, Murdock owns twenty-six television stations in the United States and has major interests in seven others. Murdock also owns the New York Post, The Chicago Tribune and the Weekly Standard, all influential right-wing publications. He publishes “over-the-top” type conservative commentary through Regan Books/ HarperCollins publications. In August 2007, Murdock added the Wall Street Journal to the list of the hundred newspapers he owns.
The Fox News Network is “an ideological animal” that caters to angry white male viewers and “represents the complete reversal of a conservatism once devoted to tradition, civic ideals, stewardship of natural resources, personal tolerance, and cultural aspiration--the quest for enduring, sustaining roots .” In 2004, Fox gave 48 more minutes ( 20%) coverage to the Republican National Convention than to the Democratic confab. Although it claimed to offer “fair and balanced” news, even conservative writer Andrew Sullivan said, “Fox News is obviously biased toward the right. It’s simply loopy to pretend otherwise.” .
A feature of the network is Brit Hume’s Special Report which is “so claustrophobically right-wing that anyone who appears on the panel contracts a slow-moving case of Stockholm syndrome.” After the Democrats were soundly drubbed in the Congressional elections of 2002, a self-satisfied Brit Hume claimed much of the credit for FOX News. He told Don Imus, “It was because of our coverage that it all happened. We’ve become so influential now that people watch us and take their electoral cues from us. No one should doubt the influence of Fox News in these matters.” When liberals complained about the bias reflected on FOX and the outright false information peddled by right-wing talk radio, the mainline press rushed to the defense of the conservative media and said that the liberals were “whining.” Previously, when conservatives made similar complaints, their conduct was characterized as “courageous.” Publishing clearly biased political stories is also profitable. Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard , commenting on the conservative media, declared that “it pays to be unobjective. ...It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket. I’m glad we found it.”
FOX News began to attract more viewers than CNN in 2001, and the gap between them reached 60% in 2003. The success of FOX rests upon its strategy of imitating right-wing talk radio. It claims to offer objective news, but its coverage is really confrontational and right-biased talk about news. Its slogan is “fair and balanced,” but its comment is , consistently conservative, and most of its personnel behave as though they are embarked upon a sacred mission to convert American to conservatism. When Paula Zahn signed with CNN several months before her contract expired, Fox fired her, and Fox commentators trashed her.. By 2003, FOX was the most watched cable outlet. Sociologist Tod Gitlin has noted that its “commercial motive dovetails beautifully with a politics of muscularity and resentment.” It features a phony objectivity, while airing Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Both offer even more distortions and simplistic reasoning than Rush Limbaugh. Hannity plays off liberal Alan Colmes, whose mild manner make him raw meat for Hannity to maul and chew up. Mark Levin, another right wing shock jock, specializes in name calling; he called Judy Miller a “rat,” Joseph Wilson and his wife “finks,” and Ted Kennedy, “a lifelong drunk.”
FOX News and the other news outlets owned by Rupert Murdock represent a purely commercial approach to news production. It denies that journalism is a particularly noble craft that has a high responsibility to the American public, in part because it enjoys special privileges under the first amendment. The Murdock ventures are purely commercial, geared to maximize profits and reflect the views of their owner. Murdock operatives still talk about offering balanced news, but it is likely that they will eventually become more forthright about what they are offering. Talk radio has already done this. Murdock is seen as a journalistic trend-setter, and it could well be that the greatest part of the press will eventually follow this lead and that American journalism will eventually mirror what it was in the early 1800s, highly partisan outlets that offered offered partial views of the news. The difference would be that the media is likely to be heavily conservative in orientation.
CNN founder Reese Schonfeld suggested that FNN’s popularity was due to the style of its personalities; “They’re fast, they’re funny, and they’re furious.” On the other hand, it could just be that cable news viewers are mostly conservative and want news that is consistent with their outlook.
The success of FOX’s conservative programming had the effect of moving the other cable news networks, particularly CNN, to the right in order to attract conservative viewers, who may be more inclined to be news junkies than other Americans. CNN became a distinctively conservative voice after it was acquired by AOL-Time -Warner in 2000. Prior to that, CNN focused on little but Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky for 13 months. By 2000, the network of conservative journalists, media outlets, and talk radio had become so successful that their unapologetically slanted information was leaching into the mainstream press. In 2001,CNN head Walter Isaacson tried to recruit Rush Limbaugh as the network’s political commentator, and he went to Capitol Hill to learn from New Right politicians how to attract more conservative viewer. In December he added ultra-conservative warrior Ann Coulter to its staff as a “legal commentator.” A Salon magazine report found that between the inauguration and September 10, 2002, CNN gave unprecedented coverage to the Bush administration, and another study found that the network had covered administration officials live 157 times in a three-month period in 2002, as compared to seven times for elected Democrats. There was anecdotal evidence that MSNBC and FOX coverage were similar. For whatever reason, there seemed to be many more conservative viewers of cable news than liberals. Perhaps this was why Phil Donahue, who briefly had a cable show, was told he could interview conservatives alone but could not have liberals on the air without someone to counterbalance their views.
MSNBC certainly has a better record than FOX but its token “liberal” is Chris Matthews, a registered Democrat who once questioned the patriotism of Michael Dukakis and seems to appeal to angry white men. Matthews was quite conservative when he first appeared on the air and moved close to the center when George W. Bush’s popularity seemed to wane. Initially, he expressed great admiration for Bush because he was clearly a “guy” who could throw a baseball. He also proclaimed that Bush “looks great in a military uniform.” Though he was too cool on Bush, he exhibited a consisten approval of Republicans who were self-styled machomen. He said McCain “deserved the presidency,” then decided that America’s mayor Rudy Guiliani deserved the office. He also noted that Mitt Romney has “a great chin. I’ve noticed.”
Fox-News, by openly appealing to them, became an instant success. And the other cable news channels had little choice but to woo those conservative viewers. Sometimes the effort to woo conservatives was all too obvious as in Kelly Wallace of CNN’s fawning coverage of George W. Bush. By 2001, media scholar Mark Crispin Miller claimed that a communications cartel has emerged that controls the nation’s entertainment and much of its news. Despite the persistent fiction about media bias, Miller claims the cartel has a vested interest in keeping the public half-informed and in not offending generally conservative corporate advertisers. ABC features right-wing John Stossel, whose reports have so twisted data and distorted academic study results that several of his producers have resigned in protest.
When a CNN program added very articulate liberal spokesmen, Republicans tried to bring it into line. In April 2002, CNN attempted to attract more viewers by changing the personnel on its “Crossfire,” its political debate program. Robert Novak and Tucker Carlson were to represent the Right, and James Carville and Paul Begela spoke for the Left. The leftist pair seemed to get the best of most arguments and CNN was flooded with letters and e-mail about their “unfair tactics.” The Republican National Committee and Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott’s office attempted to organize a boycott that would prevent prominent Republicans from appearing on the program. The boycott was partially successful for more than a year. After the boycott received some public attention, White Hours spokesmen said that a refusal to debate was not a useful approach because those who refused to debate made Republicans look “like a bunch of wimps.”
Involved in fierce competition among the cable networks to attract conservative viewers, CNN and MSNBC signed on more far-right commentators and were less inclined to offer news that offended conservatives. Even Don Imus, the MSNBC morning host, who is usually considered non-partisan was given to racist invective, calling an African American journalist a “cleaning lady,” a black writer a “quota hire,” and said he hired a producer because he wrote good “nigger jokes.” Founded in 1996, MSNBC struck on a strategy of offering balanced, highly professional newscasts during the day and competing with Fox at night by offering a parade of right-wing commentators. MSNBC even hired Michael Savage, who thought homosexuals were plotting to destroy “the white race” and also engaged in tasteless attacks on blacks. He referred to the “Turd World Nations” and “Million Dyke March” and “ghetto slime,” demanded that “You liberals should drop dead for what you’ve done to my country,” and told a gay who called “You should get AIDS and die, you pig.” The latter comment got him fired. The network also hired former Congressman Joe Scarborough, who defined himself as “a hawk’s hawk” and who shamelessly practiced slanted bookings and one-sided presentations of background information.
A 2003 poll found that only 16% of MSNBC and CNN viewers were conservatives in comparison to 40% who identified themselves as conservatives. Forty-six percent of Fox viewers were conservative, while 44% of Fox were conservatives. Viewers of the three major nightly newscasts were 41% conservative and 17% liberal. The impact of this information on the cable operations was clear. On the other hand, the older news services were clearly aware of viewer preferences and tended to offer some news in as inoffensive way as possible and large doses of “infotainment.”
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Republican Propagandists
While Coulter is clearly a loose cannon among the New Right, William Kristol is considered a respectable intellectual spokesman for the Neo Conservatives. Yet, this editor of The Weekly Standard saw nothing wrong with printing all sorts of unsubstantiated rumors about President Clinton’s sex life. Among print and electronic journalists, few can exceed Robert Novak’s record for unabashedly taking a one sided view of the news. He came to sound so much like a paid spokesman for the GOP, that Al Hunt, a Wall Street Journalist, finally suggested on Capitol Gang that Novak was merely parroting the Republicans’ talking points for that weekend. Although Novak expressed outrage, he could find no evidence to claim his position differed from the official party line. Regular viewers of the program must have wondered why Hunt had not stated the obvious months before that.
Conservative writers are even known to consult with one another on how best to handle stories. The most successful example was when Bill Kristol persuaded the others to no longer refer to the medical care problem as a “ crisis” because that word gave the matter an urgency, which worked in favor of the Democrats. Republican strategist Grover Norquist admitted that the conservative press places politics above reporting: it “is self-consciously part of the team.” By 2005, conservative columnists seemed to almost never to deviate from the party’s talking points or to raise doubts about any Bush administration policies. William Raspberry noted that in the past he had looked to conservative columnists for useful information in shaping his views. He lamented that they are no longer “independent sources” and that these pundits have become “mere partisans for particular politicians.”
The so-called liberal journalists did not compare notes on how to handle a story or orchestrate their efforts to see that it got maximum exposure. Similarly, so-called liberal television journalists generally attempt to take into account both sides of a story, whereas the conservatives on Fox News make almost no effort to do so. Likewise, the non-conservative think tanks, with the exception of the Institute for Policy Studies, do not behave as though they had a special mission to beat the drums for a particular political philosophy.
John Fund
Wall Street Journal pundit John Fund made a career of attacking Clinton for his sleazy involvement with Monica Lewinsky. A reliable cog in the Right-Wing propaganda operation, he received many “leaks” from the Starr investigation. Fund joined the effort to use the Gary Condit case to demonstrate the immoral tendencies of Democrats. While cranking out this sort of salacious material, Fund was involved in a minor scandal of his own. He was sleeping with a mother and her daughter. Apparently he focused first on the mother, then the daughter, and then returned to the mother. When daughter found it necessary to have an abortion, the Right Wing columnist, who presumably was pro-life, did nothing to try to stop her. The mother released tapes in which she and Fund discussed the details of his sex with the girl. Perhaps because Fund was not a public official, the matter has had almost no coverage in the press, perhaps because Fund is not a public official. However, this information could help the public weigh the value of his pontificating about the morals of Democrats. Fund occasionally wrote speeches for George W. Bush, and became a commentator for the Christian Broadcasting Network. There was a substantial effort to call into question the charges against his character.
George Will and Other Conservative Pundits
Conservative journalists also became more numerous and prominent. Centrist pundits lost much of their following during the last days of the Vietnam War for they had supported the failed effort too long. Rightist writers like George Will and William Safire often took their places. By the 1990s, writers for The Nation and other publications were experiencing huge problems in getting syndicated as newspaper columnists. There was more and more pressure to give “op ed” pages a more conservative coloration by eliminating liberal writers and replacing them with conservatives. In 2005, even The Los Angeles Times succumbed to this pressure, firing a liberal and adding another conservative. It also scuttled Op-Ed page editor Michael Kinsley, whose views were moderate-to- liberal. He noted that people had come to see op ed pages in terms of grocery store shelf or counter space, they more you give to one side the more likely its views were to be accepted. He thought that view was fallacious, arguing that one well-written liberal column would be more persuasive than ten poorly done conservative columns. But the simple fact was that the shelf space approach seemed to be working.
For a time, George Will could occasionally offer objective commentary, but eventually he almost became just another right-wing propagandist. However, his columns charmed readers with learned references to literature and classical philosophers. Safire was a superb wordsmith and from the beginning an advocate, propagandist, and manipulator of information. The Rowland Evans-Robert Novak column, which often sought balance in the 1960s, shifted to the right in the 1970s. In the 1980s, media outlets sought conservative pundits so they could have people in tune with the voters who placed Ronald Reagan in the White House. George Will became the nation’s most prominent pundit, and he enjoyed the advantage of being a close friend of Reagan. He wrote Reagan speeches, prepared him for a presidential debate, and frequently entertained the Reagans in his Chevy Chase home. Will soon obtained Lippman-like prominence and played a major role in defining the public agenda that occupied political writers and talk shows. He collected $20,000 a speech. A talent agent noted that other pundits could collect $7,500 an hour if he or she were engaging, conservative, and a television talking head.
Charles Krauthammer, an apostate liberal, also gained in prominence, and Morton Kondracke also shifted to the conservative ranks. Fred Barnes was another New Republic Republican who gained television prominence. Patrick Buchanan, a Nixon-Agnew speechwriter also became a pundit celebrity and propagandist for the far right. John McLaughlin, who had formerly edited a religious magazine, became another prominent television figure and conservative advocate. His carelessness with facts never seemed to bother him or his viewers. As the weight of the punditocracy shifted to the right, centrists like Jack Germond and David Broder were seen as liberal. Likewise, centrist solutions to national problems came to be seen as liberal. David Broder, dean of the mainline commentators, deplored what had occurred during the Iran-Contra scandal, but he was quick to issue Ronald Reagan a pass. Moreover, he questioned the value of prosecuting the wrongdoers, asking if sending Oliver North to Allenwood prison would gain anything. The timidity of the press during the affair helped to make it a toothless watchdog when other abuses of power were to occur.
Some of the earliest complaints against liberal media bias occurred at the time of the Republican convention in 1964. Barry Goldwater complained about Walter Cronkite’s handling of the senator’s own words and said “I don’t think these people should be allowed to broadcast” some things. Cronkite later had to hire bodyguards. Angry delegates rocked the beams supporting the ABC broadcast booth. Later, conservatives objected to coverage of the Watergate scandal, too, and Norman Podhoretz called it a media coup d’etat. Outraged that CNN did not frame discussions of Cuba in terms of condemnation, Brent Bozell, III of the Media Research Center, called the network a megaphone for Castro. For three decades, the right has carried on an effective campaign of media-bashing, built around claims that the media had a strong liberal bias. It has had the effect of making “editors and producers look over their right shoulders and second-guess themselves.” In addition, the conservatives built the “Republican Party’s not-so-secret weapon: a 24-hour television, radio, and newspaper [political] advertisement” network that includes FOX News, numerous print and electronic commentators, and radio chains such as Clear Channel, which was owned by two active GOP contributors, Tom and R. Steven Hicks. What essentially occurred was that people and operations that considered political propagandizing far more important than adhering to journalistic standards of fairness infiltrated the media.
Even some Republican newspapers can be considered more a part of this propaganda apparatus than merely newspapers with a conservative orientation. A Kennedy School of Government study analyzed the editorial pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. It found that the two liberal and two conservative pages were about equally partisan in dealing with their opponents. However, the two conservative papers showed great reluctance to criticize “their side” while the Post and Times had no problem frequently rapping the Clinton administration and its policies. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal criticized the secrecy of Hillary Clinton’s health task force eight times but fiercely defended the secrecy of Vice President Cheney’s energy task force. The study found that the liberal papers held “a traditional view of journalism as detached, independent, and unaffiliated ( or at least less affiliated ) with a particular political party,” while the conservative papers were practicing a “ more activist-oriented journalism” and were much more closely aligned with a political cause.” This pattern, which appeared in the leading liberal and conservative newspapers is reflected in other newspapers and gives the Republicans a significant advantage.
The news reports offered by conservative foundations and journalists were often so clearly biased that there was no question about their orientation. On the other hand, the so-called liberal media stories usually did not slant one way nearly so ostensibly. Many conservative journalists justified the obviously conservative thrust of their stories with the claim that something had to be done to counterbalance the liberal media. With the exception of the talk show hosts, they usually claimed to be unbiased while also defending their conservative bias. Yet their work has often been accepted and recycled by the mainstream press. Mainstream journalists often praised David Brock, who later apologized for his work. He was able to peddle a hatchet job as careful investigative journalism to seduce the mainstream press into accepting it. Indeed, so-called liberal publications often praised the thoroughness of his work David Brock and many other talented young writers entered the movement for emotional and not political reasons. Brock said he wanted to fill the “emptiness inside me” and feel important by belonging to a powerful movement and experience success by driving an expensive car and dressing well, and associating with powerful people. He also wrote about the “psychic thrill of relentless partisan attack.”
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Conservative writers are even known to consult with one another on how best to handle stories. The most successful example was when Bill Kristol persuaded the others to no longer refer to the medical care problem as a “ crisis” because that word gave the matter an urgency, which worked in favor of the Democrats. Republican strategist Grover Norquist admitted that the conservative press places politics above reporting: it “is self-consciously part of the team.” By 2005, conservative columnists seemed to almost never to deviate from the party’s talking points or to raise doubts about any Bush administration policies. William Raspberry noted that in the past he had looked to conservative columnists for useful information in shaping his views. He lamented that they are no longer “independent sources” and that these pundits have become “mere partisans for particular politicians.”
The so-called liberal journalists did not compare notes on how to handle a story or orchestrate their efforts to see that it got maximum exposure. Similarly, so-called liberal television journalists generally attempt to take into account both sides of a story, whereas the conservatives on Fox News make almost no effort to do so. Likewise, the non-conservative think tanks, with the exception of the Institute for Policy Studies, do not behave as though they had a special mission to beat the drums for a particular political philosophy.
John Fund
Wall Street Journal pundit John Fund made a career of attacking Clinton for his sleazy involvement with Monica Lewinsky. A reliable cog in the Right-Wing propaganda operation, he received many “leaks” from the Starr investigation. Fund joined the effort to use the Gary Condit case to demonstrate the immoral tendencies of Democrats. While cranking out this sort of salacious material, Fund was involved in a minor scandal of his own. He was sleeping with a mother and her daughter. Apparently he focused first on the mother, then the daughter, and then returned to the mother. When daughter found it necessary to have an abortion, the Right Wing columnist, who presumably was pro-life, did nothing to try to stop her. The mother released tapes in which she and Fund discussed the details of his sex with the girl. Perhaps because Fund was not a public official, the matter has had almost no coverage in the press, perhaps because Fund is not a public official. However, this information could help the public weigh the value of his pontificating about the morals of Democrats. Fund occasionally wrote speeches for George W. Bush, and became a commentator for the Christian Broadcasting Network. There was a substantial effort to call into question the charges against his character.
George Will and Other Conservative Pundits
Conservative journalists also became more numerous and prominent. Centrist pundits lost much of their following during the last days of the Vietnam War for they had supported the failed effort too long. Rightist writers like George Will and William Safire often took their places. By the 1990s, writers for The Nation and other publications were experiencing huge problems in getting syndicated as newspaper columnists. There was more and more pressure to give “op ed” pages a more conservative coloration by eliminating liberal writers and replacing them with conservatives. In 2005, even The Los Angeles Times succumbed to this pressure, firing a liberal and adding another conservative. It also scuttled Op-Ed page editor Michael Kinsley, whose views were moderate-to- liberal. He noted that people had come to see op ed pages in terms of grocery store shelf or counter space, they more you give to one side the more likely its views were to be accepted. He thought that view was fallacious, arguing that one well-written liberal column would be more persuasive than ten poorly done conservative columns. But the simple fact was that the shelf space approach seemed to be working.
For a time, George Will could occasionally offer objective commentary, but eventually he almost became just another right-wing propagandist. However, his columns charmed readers with learned references to literature and classical philosophers. Safire was a superb wordsmith and from the beginning an advocate, propagandist, and manipulator of information. The Rowland Evans-Robert Novak column, which often sought balance in the 1960s, shifted to the right in the 1970s. In the 1980s, media outlets sought conservative pundits so they could have people in tune with the voters who placed Ronald Reagan in the White House. George Will became the nation’s most prominent pundit, and he enjoyed the advantage of being a close friend of Reagan. He wrote Reagan speeches, prepared him for a presidential debate, and frequently entertained the Reagans in his Chevy Chase home. Will soon obtained Lippman-like prominence and played a major role in defining the public agenda that occupied political writers and talk shows. He collected $20,000 a speech. A talent agent noted that other pundits could collect $7,500 an hour if he or she were engaging, conservative, and a television talking head.
Charles Krauthammer, an apostate liberal, also gained in prominence, and Morton Kondracke also shifted to the conservative ranks. Fred Barnes was another New Republic Republican who gained television prominence. Patrick Buchanan, a Nixon-Agnew speechwriter also became a pundit celebrity and propagandist for the far right. John McLaughlin, who had formerly edited a religious magazine, became another prominent television figure and conservative advocate. His carelessness with facts never seemed to bother him or his viewers. As the weight of the punditocracy shifted to the right, centrists like Jack Germond and David Broder were seen as liberal. Likewise, centrist solutions to national problems came to be seen as liberal. David Broder, dean of the mainline commentators, deplored what had occurred during the Iran-Contra scandal, but he was quick to issue Ronald Reagan a pass. Moreover, he questioned the value of prosecuting the wrongdoers, asking if sending Oliver North to Allenwood prison would gain anything. The timidity of the press during the affair helped to make it a toothless watchdog when other abuses of power were to occur.
Some of the earliest complaints against liberal media bias occurred at the time of the Republican convention in 1964. Barry Goldwater complained about Walter Cronkite’s handling of the senator’s own words and said “I don’t think these people should be allowed to broadcast” some things. Cronkite later had to hire bodyguards. Angry delegates rocked the beams supporting the ABC broadcast booth. Later, conservatives objected to coverage of the Watergate scandal, too, and Norman Podhoretz called it a media coup d’etat. Outraged that CNN did not frame discussions of Cuba in terms of condemnation, Brent Bozell, III of the Media Research Center, called the network a megaphone for Castro. For three decades, the right has carried on an effective campaign of media-bashing, built around claims that the media had a strong liberal bias. It has had the effect of making “editors and producers look over their right shoulders and second-guess themselves.” In addition, the conservatives built the “Republican Party’s not-so-secret weapon: a 24-hour television, radio, and newspaper [political] advertisement” network that includes FOX News, numerous print and electronic commentators, and radio chains such as Clear Channel, which was owned by two active GOP contributors, Tom and R. Steven Hicks. What essentially occurred was that people and operations that considered political propagandizing far more important than adhering to journalistic standards of fairness infiltrated the media.
Even some Republican newspapers can be considered more a part of this propaganda apparatus than merely newspapers with a conservative orientation. A Kennedy School of Government study analyzed the editorial pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. It found that the two liberal and two conservative pages were about equally partisan in dealing with their opponents. However, the two conservative papers showed great reluctance to criticize “their side” while the Post and Times had no problem frequently rapping the Clinton administration and its policies. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal criticized the secrecy of Hillary Clinton’s health task force eight times but fiercely defended the secrecy of Vice President Cheney’s energy task force. The study found that the liberal papers held “a traditional view of journalism as detached, independent, and unaffiliated ( or at least less affiliated ) with a particular political party,” while the conservative papers were practicing a “ more activist-oriented journalism” and were much more closely aligned with a political cause.” This pattern, which appeared in the leading liberal and conservative newspapers is reflected in other newspapers and gives the Republicans a significant advantage.
The news reports offered by conservative foundations and journalists were often so clearly biased that there was no question about their orientation. On the other hand, the so-called liberal media stories usually did not slant one way nearly so ostensibly. Many conservative journalists justified the obviously conservative thrust of their stories with the claim that something had to be done to counterbalance the liberal media. With the exception of the talk show hosts, they usually claimed to be unbiased while also defending their conservative bias. Yet their work has often been accepted and recycled by the mainstream press. Mainstream journalists often praised David Brock, who later apologized for his work. He was able to peddle a hatchet job as careful investigative journalism to seduce the mainstream press into accepting it. Indeed, so-called liberal publications often praised the thoroughness of his work David Brock and many other talented young writers entered the movement for emotional and not political reasons. Brock said he wanted to fill the “emptiness inside me” and feel important by belonging to a powerful movement and experience success by driving an expensive car and dressing well, and associating with powerful people. He also wrote about the “psychic thrill of relentless partisan attack.”
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
How Conservative Foundations Shape Public Opinion
As newspapers attempted to cut the cost of gathering news, conservative public policy foundations worked harder to provide the newspapers with information by way of position papers, briefings and books. The conservative foundations were well funded and were able to take the lead in doing this. The Heritage Foundation developed a program computerized program called Database 101 and provided short seminars to teach journalists how to use it. Heritage essentially offered to become the research department for newspapers. While much of the data it provided was necessarily neutral of any ideology, the more complex the information became, the more important the manner of interpretation became. Reporters learned how to use the database and how best to interpret the data. This aggressive conservative foundation insisted it was only helping reporters replace fact-based reporting for anecdote-based reporting, but it is fair to wonder if the data and analysis it provided ever led to conclusions that undermined conservative policies. Heritage spends a million dollars a year on this project.
Electronic and print news outlets are businesses, and many seek to maximize profits by relying more upon free research services provided by conservative outlets.. Funding less investigative journalism, especially, can also cut costs that which might produce information that would anger advertisers or conservative readers. To maximize audiences, many of them have overreacted to the ever-present complaint that the media has a liberal bias. Of courses there had always been many conservative newspapers, and their influence increased over time. By 2003, their flagship publications included the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary, The New Republic, and the Weekly Standard. The New York Sun, founded in 2007, was intended to influence opinion first and make money, possibly second. As late as 2007, it was losing $1 million a month, but it attracted the attention of conservative opinion leaders throughout the country. Conservatives also write many syndicated columns and contribute to many magazines. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, under Robert Bartley became a central cog in the Republican attack machine in the 1990s, lending respectability to all sorts of stories ginned out by Clinton haters. Bartley was particularly proud of the piece he printed which probably drove Vincent Foster to commit suicide. George W. Bush later honored Bartley as a great journalist, but David Kennedy of the Boston Phoenix was more accurate in calling him a “notorious scandalmonger” who did much to elevate sleazy journalism to respectability.
The efforts of Neo Conservative writers and activists most probably account for the decision of more voters to identify with conservative outlooks rather than liberal one’s. To the New Right, the Neo Conservatives were suspect because they were highly educated, eastern urban dwellers and intellectuals. Nevertheless, the NeoCons served the New Right well by exploiting religious and cultural issues and helping to bring the Christian Right into the conservative coalition. Rich Republicans also employed skilled writers who lacked the credentials of the Neo Conservatives but who cranked out effective attack literature that was circulated by the conservative press and usually found a place in the mainstream media. These attacks were frequently laced with hearsay, speculation, fabrications, and slander. Their effectiveness and that of the conservative media infrastructure was repeatedly demonstrated during the effort to remove Bill Clinton from office. It is estimated that Richard Mellon Scaife spent over $200,000,000 over twenty years in efforts to damage liberals and strengthen the right wing. Some suggest that over a lifetime he has spent $600,000,000 on right wing causes
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Electronic and print news outlets are businesses, and many seek to maximize profits by relying more upon free research services provided by conservative outlets.. Funding less investigative journalism, especially, can also cut costs that which might produce information that would anger advertisers or conservative readers. To maximize audiences, many of them have overreacted to the ever-present complaint that the media has a liberal bias. Of courses there had always been many conservative newspapers, and their influence increased over time. By 2003, their flagship publications included the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary, The New Republic, and the Weekly Standard. The New York Sun, founded in 2007, was intended to influence opinion first and make money, possibly second. As late as 2007, it was losing $1 million a month, but it attracted the attention of conservative opinion leaders throughout the country. Conservatives also write many syndicated columns and contribute to many magazines. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, under Robert Bartley became a central cog in the Republican attack machine in the 1990s, lending respectability to all sorts of stories ginned out by Clinton haters. Bartley was particularly proud of the piece he printed which probably drove Vincent Foster to commit suicide. George W. Bush later honored Bartley as a great journalist, but David Kennedy of the Boston Phoenix was more accurate in calling him a “notorious scandalmonger” who did much to elevate sleazy journalism to respectability.
The efforts of Neo Conservative writers and activists most probably account for the decision of more voters to identify with conservative outlooks rather than liberal one’s. To the New Right, the Neo Conservatives were suspect because they were highly educated, eastern urban dwellers and intellectuals. Nevertheless, the NeoCons served the New Right well by exploiting religious and cultural issues and helping to bring the Christian Right into the conservative coalition. Rich Republicans also employed skilled writers who lacked the credentials of the Neo Conservatives but who cranked out effective attack literature that was circulated by the conservative press and usually found a place in the mainstream media. These attacks were frequently laced with hearsay, speculation, fabrications, and slander. Their effectiveness and that of the conservative media infrastructure was repeatedly demonstrated during the effort to remove Bill Clinton from office. It is estimated that Richard Mellon Scaife spent over $200,000,000 over twenty years in efforts to damage liberals and strengthen the right wing. Some suggest that over a lifetime he has spent $600,000,000 on right wing causes
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Planting Conservatism on Campuses
Conservatives and their foundations invested large amounts of money building a conservative constituency on the college campuses. William Buckley played a key role in founding the Intercollegiate Institute, the first and best of the organizations devoted to encouraging conservatism on campus. It developed an impressive array of publications and seminars and encourages a scholarly approach to conservatism. Among other campus programs were the Leadership Institute, Young Americans for Freedom, the Collegiate Network, and Young America’s Foundation. They subsidized conservative student newspapers and provided funding of speakers’ series. In the eighties, their efforts nurtured activists Denish D’ Souza, Ann Coulter, and David Brock. These and other campus conservatives thought it necessary to breach decorum or what they thought was the “etiquette of liberalism” to subvert liberal campus culture by gay-baiting and very aggressive attacks upon affirmative action that liberals considered racist attacks. By the nineties, their tone became somewhat more polite, and they were more open to gay marriage and members who supported abortion rights. They sharply denounced political correctness and their claims that professors were set upon liberal indoctrination may result in closing some minds to new or different ideas.
Long before the term “political correctness” was coined, there were complaints about there being too many liberal professors. In God and Man at Yale (1951), a young William F. Buckley Jr. suggested that no freedom would be violated if socialist professors were given their walking papers as they would remain free to “seek employment at a college that was interested in propagating socialism.” In the McCarty era, there were many cries to fire communist and socialist professors. By the late 1990s, the unreliable professors were Democrats. Among the groups monitoring professors and sending observers into certain classes were Academic Bias and Students for Academic Freedom and Campus Watch. Students for Academic Freedom was founded by David Horowitz, a former leftist and brilliant sociologist, who has played a central role in designing the cultural assault on liberals. In the mid-nineties, conservatives founded the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization designed to exert pressure upon liberal professors whose views stray significantly from mainstream American opinion. It was founded by Lynne Cheney, but was also supported by New Democrat Joseph Lieberman. There were other conservative organizations dedicated to monitoring what was said on campus and harassing those who were critical of Israeli policies: Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Campus Watch, the David Project, Stand With US, and the Israel on Campus Coalition.
As the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress, most state governments, and the presidency, it became necessary to find new arguments to recharge their followers’ fear and sense of persecution, both functioning as catnip for their political instincts. Attacks on the alleged abuses of liberal academics filled this gap. Although conservative groups turned out numerous studies showing that there were many more registered Democrats than Republicans on college faculties, they were unable to demonstrate that the professors used their positions to unfairly proselytize. Often the “abuses” and “controversial material” they complained about were facts or alternate points of view that the conservatives believed should have been omitted. The attacks of 9-11 gave ACTA the excuse to go after professors who did not embrace Bush’s approach to dealing with terrorism. ACTA complained that some professors thought that respect for diversity and tolerance would be useful in combating terrorism. It singled out 115 unpatriotic comments that it deplored. University of New Mexico history professor Richard Berthold was forced to retire because of eleven words in which he joked about blowing up the Pentagon. At UCLA, a librarian was suspended for writing an e-mail note criticizing the invasion of Iraq; while at Johns Hopkins, a director was demoted after criticizing administration policy on Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. The list of this rich harvest of censorship cases is too long to provide here.
These successes set the scene for 17 state legislatures to consider enacting an Academic Bill of Rights, essentially a program that would mandate hiring conservative professors and justifying continual probes to identify and punish the expression of liberal opinion on campuses. In 2002, Daniel Pipes of Middle East Forum formed Campus Watch and immediately targeted campuses and professors who had the “wrong” views on Israel, and in 2003 Senator Richard Santorum introduced legislation to defund universities who permitted professors or students to criticize Israel. In 2003, when Drake University held a conference on the roots of terrorism, the federal government subpoenaed the records of the conference, and a judge issued a gag order forbidding Drake officials from discussing the subpoena.
The hysteria fanned by groups like ACTA created an atmosphere that encouraged witch-hunts. In 2005, there was a concerted effort to suppress “anti-American” dissent among Middle East scholars at Columbia University, where three professors were accused of mistreating Jewish students. An official inquiry found that one of the professors was testy when an Israeli student reminded him that the government of Israel sometimes gave warning before bombing residential areas and that he was also was discourteous to another Israeli in an off-campus situation. The professors received death threats and hate mail, and hecklers and surreptitious monitors infiltrated their classes. By the early Twenty-First Century, conservatives borrowed a page from the civil rights movement in demanding that colleges hire more conservative professors to insure that their viewpoint received equal representation.
The campus conservatives who emerged in the nineties and after had the advantage of dealing with student bodies that were becoming more conservative. They revered Ronald Reagan as a serious thinker and a shining symbol of better times. Their sponsors were making serious efforts to reach female students by sponsoring speeches by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Katherine Harris, Phyllis Schlafley, Ann Coulter, and Christiana Hoff Sommers, who wrote The War Against Boys and Who Stole Feminism.
Conservative foundations have also financed many right-wing campus newspapers, the well-known being the Dartmouth Review. The Collegiate Network, one of the organizations that fund and coordinate these journalistic ventures, spent $1,000,000 in 2002 alone. There are no comparable efforts on the other side partly because there is so little money for progressive causes. One of the Dartmouth Review’s accomplishments was outing a number of campus homosexuals without their permission.
Over more than two decades, the conservative think tanks have sponsored many important books and have honed “very big Republican ideas and many small one’s--school choice, welfare reform, enterprise zone’s, Social Security privatization.” A number of conservative foundations have aided that cause through litigation. The Washington Legal Foundation has played a leading role in defending George W. Bush’s rights to curtail civil liberties in times of crisis.
Conservative foundations funded a network of small journals, newsletters, and influential books. In addition, they provided start-up money for radio broadcasts that strongly influenced the opinions of millions of listeners. The Olin Foundation and Smith Richardson Foundation funded Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. Other non-profit foundations that fund conservative publications were Scaife Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, Bradley Foundation Other influential books produced by the conservative foundations were Milton Freidman, Free to Choose, Richard John Neuhaus, , The Naked Public Square, and Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare., Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, Dinesh D’Souza, , John E. Chubb aid Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets, and American Schools, and Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion
The Federalist Society
Some of the most important conservative ideas have been developed and promulgated by the Federalist Society, an organization founded in 1982 for right-wing lawyers dedicated to filling the bench with conservatives. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and Federalist Society lawyers accepted the theory of Gary Lawson of Northwestern University that the “the post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional.” In placing their people on the bench, they were not seeking to simply create a “balance” between liberals and conservatives or appoint “strict constructionists.” They sought to sharply reduce the power of the federal government, particularly in interventions in the economy and efforts to redress injustices or provide social services. Many members believed that the constitution had been bent out of shape after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and they were determined to restore the “constitution in exile” to its rightful place. Above all, they reject the idea that the constitution is an instrument for promoting democratic self-government.
When in 2002 the Federalist Society held a four-day conference after an election victory, there was far less rejoicing than rehashing old battles and venting anger against liberals. The 2002 election victory should have been particularly important to the Federalists, because it meant that President Bush would have little difficulty in appointing many conservative judges. Bush had already used the society to recommend candidates for the bench and had demonstrated intent to appoint their choices. Delegates were treated to the satirical song “Brennan, Marx, and Lenin” about a Supreme Court justice who had been dead five years. Young members were instructed in the details of “Travelgate” as though it represented a serious abuse of power and Bill Clinton were still in the White House. Federal appeals Judge Lawrence Silberman spoke about a Supreme Court plot to end the death penalty even though the high court had just upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, even when a 16 year old was the one condemned. Speakers ranted against James Jeffords, Bill Clinton, Barbara Streisand, James Carville, and Lanny Davis. It was as though they fed on anger and needed powerful enemies to sustain their political commitments. They did not seem to notice that most of their enemies had been vanquished, and that they were now firmly in the driver’s seat.
Its long-term strategy of shifting the courts to the right finally triumphed with the seating of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito in George W. Bush’s second term. Ronald Reagan had begun the process of appointing conservatives to the lower courts, and the Federalist Society, through branches in law schools, educational activities, and conferences had built up a substantial network of right-wing judges. It also developed means to steer young conservatives to prestigious clerkships. In February 2005, the Society began organizing to support the confirmation of conservative justices by briefing a network of lawyers on talking points, marshaling support --especially among Christian groups, preparing to put pressure on Democratic senators in the Bush states, and developing materials to flood the media with conservative arguments in favor of the nominees.
These efforts have led to many legislative hearings into the influence of liberals in colleges and universities. The hearings have produced no new legislation but have contributed to an atmosphere of fear on campuses. This is particularly true in respect to discussion of the Middle East and Israel. Critics of Israel have been fired in several leading universities, and the head of one institute has been removed.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Long before the term “political correctness” was coined, there were complaints about there being too many liberal professors. In God and Man at Yale (1951), a young William F. Buckley Jr. suggested that no freedom would be violated if socialist professors were given their walking papers as they would remain free to “seek employment at a college that was interested in propagating socialism.” In the McCarty era, there were many cries to fire communist and socialist professors. By the late 1990s, the unreliable professors were Democrats. Among the groups monitoring professors and sending observers into certain classes were Academic Bias and Students for Academic Freedom and Campus Watch. Students for Academic Freedom was founded by David Horowitz, a former leftist and brilliant sociologist, who has played a central role in designing the cultural assault on liberals. In the mid-nineties, conservatives founded the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization designed to exert pressure upon liberal professors whose views stray significantly from mainstream American opinion. It was founded by Lynne Cheney, but was also supported by New Democrat Joseph Lieberman. There were other conservative organizations dedicated to monitoring what was said on campus and harassing those who were critical of Israeli policies: Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Campus Watch, the David Project, Stand With US, and the Israel on Campus Coalition.
As the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress, most state governments, and the presidency, it became necessary to find new arguments to recharge their followers’ fear and sense of persecution, both functioning as catnip for their political instincts. Attacks on the alleged abuses of liberal academics filled this gap. Although conservative groups turned out numerous studies showing that there were many more registered Democrats than Republicans on college faculties, they were unable to demonstrate that the professors used their positions to unfairly proselytize. Often the “abuses” and “controversial material” they complained about were facts or alternate points of view that the conservatives believed should have been omitted. The attacks of 9-11 gave ACTA the excuse to go after professors who did not embrace Bush’s approach to dealing with terrorism. ACTA complained that some professors thought that respect for diversity and tolerance would be useful in combating terrorism. It singled out 115 unpatriotic comments that it deplored. University of New Mexico history professor Richard Berthold was forced to retire because of eleven words in which he joked about blowing up the Pentagon. At UCLA, a librarian was suspended for writing an e-mail note criticizing the invasion of Iraq; while at Johns Hopkins, a director was demoted after criticizing administration policy on Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. The list of this rich harvest of censorship cases is too long to provide here.
These successes set the scene for 17 state legislatures to consider enacting an Academic Bill of Rights, essentially a program that would mandate hiring conservative professors and justifying continual probes to identify and punish the expression of liberal opinion on campuses. In 2002, Daniel Pipes of Middle East Forum formed Campus Watch and immediately targeted campuses and professors who had the “wrong” views on Israel, and in 2003 Senator Richard Santorum introduced legislation to defund universities who permitted professors or students to criticize Israel. In 2003, when Drake University held a conference on the roots of terrorism, the federal government subpoenaed the records of the conference, and a judge issued a gag order forbidding Drake officials from discussing the subpoena.
The hysteria fanned by groups like ACTA created an atmosphere that encouraged witch-hunts. In 2005, there was a concerted effort to suppress “anti-American” dissent among Middle East scholars at Columbia University, where three professors were accused of mistreating Jewish students. An official inquiry found that one of the professors was testy when an Israeli student reminded him that the government of Israel sometimes gave warning before bombing residential areas and that he was also was discourteous to another Israeli in an off-campus situation. The professors received death threats and hate mail, and hecklers and surreptitious monitors infiltrated their classes. By the early Twenty-First Century, conservatives borrowed a page from the civil rights movement in demanding that colleges hire more conservative professors to insure that their viewpoint received equal representation.
The campus conservatives who emerged in the nineties and after had the advantage of dealing with student bodies that were becoming more conservative. They revered Ronald Reagan as a serious thinker and a shining symbol of better times. Their sponsors were making serious efforts to reach female students by sponsoring speeches by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Katherine Harris, Phyllis Schlafley, Ann Coulter, and Christiana Hoff Sommers, who wrote The War Against Boys and Who Stole Feminism.
Conservative foundations have also financed many right-wing campus newspapers, the well-known being the Dartmouth Review. The Collegiate Network, one of the organizations that fund and coordinate these journalistic ventures, spent $1,000,000 in 2002 alone. There are no comparable efforts on the other side partly because there is so little money for progressive causes. One of the Dartmouth Review’s accomplishments was outing a number of campus homosexuals without their permission.
Over more than two decades, the conservative think tanks have sponsored many important books and have honed “very big Republican ideas and many small one’s--school choice, welfare reform, enterprise zone’s, Social Security privatization.” A number of conservative foundations have aided that cause through litigation. The Washington Legal Foundation has played a leading role in defending George W. Bush’s rights to curtail civil liberties in times of crisis.
Conservative foundations funded a network of small journals, newsletters, and influential books. In addition, they provided start-up money for radio broadcasts that strongly influenced the opinions of millions of listeners. The Olin Foundation and Smith Richardson Foundation funded Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. Other non-profit foundations that fund conservative publications were Scaife Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, Bradley Foundation Other influential books produced by the conservative foundations were Milton Freidman, Free to Choose, Richard John Neuhaus, , The Naked Public Square, and Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare., Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, Dinesh D’Souza, , John E. Chubb aid Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets, and American Schools, and Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion
The Federalist Society
Some of the most important conservative ideas have been developed and promulgated by the Federalist Society, an organization founded in 1982 for right-wing lawyers dedicated to filling the bench with conservatives. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and Federalist Society lawyers accepted the theory of Gary Lawson of Northwestern University that the “the post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional.” In placing their people on the bench, they were not seeking to simply create a “balance” between liberals and conservatives or appoint “strict constructionists.” They sought to sharply reduce the power of the federal government, particularly in interventions in the economy and efforts to redress injustices or provide social services. Many members believed that the constitution had been bent out of shape after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and they were determined to restore the “constitution in exile” to its rightful place. Above all, they reject the idea that the constitution is an instrument for promoting democratic self-government.
When in 2002 the Federalist Society held a four-day conference after an election victory, there was far less rejoicing than rehashing old battles and venting anger against liberals. The 2002 election victory should have been particularly important to the Federalists, because it meant that President Bush would have little difficulty in appointing many conservative judges. Bush had already used the society to recommend candidates for the bench and had demonstrated intent to appoint their choices. Delegates were treated to the satirical song “Brennan, Marx, and Lenin” about a Supreme Court justice who had been dead five years. Young members were instructed in the details of “Travelgate” as though it represented a serious abuse of power and Bill Clinton were still in the White House. Federal appeals Judge Lawrence Silberman spoke about a Supreme Court plot to end the death penalty even though the high court had just upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, even when a 16 year old was the one condemned. Speakers ranted against James Jeffords, Bill Clinton, Barbara Streisand, James Carville, and Lanny Davis. It was as though they fed on anger and needed powerful enemies to sustain their political commitments. They did not seem to notice that most of their enemies had been vanquished, and that they were now firmly in the driver’s seat.
Its long-term strategy of shifting the courts to the right finally triumphed with the seating of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito in George W. Bush’s second term. Ronald Reagan had begun the process of appointing conservatives to the lower courts, and the Federalist Society, through branches in law schools, educational activities, and conferences had built up a substantial network of right-wing judges. It also developed means to steer young conservatives to prestigious clerkships. In February 2005, the Society began organizing to support the confirmation of conservative justices by briefing a network of lawyers on talking points, marshaling support --especially among Christian groups, preparing to put pressure on Democratic senators in the Bush states, and developing materials to flood the media with conservative arguments in favor of the nominees.
These efforts have led to many legislative hearings into the influence of liberals in colleges and universities. The hearings have produced no new legislation but have contributed to an atmosphere of fear on campuses. This is particularly true in respect to discussion of the Middle East and Israel. Critics of Israel have been fired in several leading universities, and the head of one institute has been removed.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Republican Foundations and Think Tanks
A network of foundations, publications, columnists, radio talk show hosts, religious organizations, professional fund-raisers, and think tanks accomplished the work of selling conservatism. Over three decades, Conservatives spent millions creating a national medial infrastructure that effectively got out their message and was able to set the agenda for national policy discussions. An impetus for creating the new foundations and think tanks was concern tumult of the 1960s had politically activated some previously passive sectors of American society, the elderly, minorities, youth, and women. Eminent social scientist Samuel Huntington yearned for an earlier time when “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers.” The Trilateral Commission’s study of the new activism dubbed it a “crisis of democracy.” Fearing what could happen when the public sought to enter the public arena, conservative elements created think tanks and foundations and greatly increased the number of lobbyists in Washington to assure control of legislation. Some scholars think these efforts have been so successful that by the early Twenty-First Century, democracy had been reduce to an empty form as the citizen participatory process lost real significance and the public had less of a role in determining social and economic development strategies. Noam Chomsky suggested that the United States was experiencing a “’serious democracy deficit,’” that made it very difficult to invest democratic institutions with real substance.
The conservative media infrastructure had the enormous advantage of appealing to the postmodern distrust of elites and experts. As Michael Wolfe noted, FOX and the conservative media are “about having a chip on your shoulder; it’s about us versus them, insiders versus outsiders, phonies versus neophonies, and, in a clever piece of postmodernism, established media against insurgent media.” On the other hand, Democrats and liberals spent almost nothing trying to create a media infrastructure and showed very little skill in getting out their message. The effective and ceaseless efforts of the FOX television network did not transform the majority of voters into conservative ideologues, but it did greatly enlarge the number of conservative ideologues and the Republican base. Of equal importance it made the border between the right and middle extremely porous. Exposed to constant information blaming liberals for almost every conceivable evil, people in the middle developed an inclination to drift to the right whenever they were very frustrated. The ability to exploit this “porous border between the right and the middle” was demonstrated in the California recall election of 2003. Largely unaware of this dynamic, Governor Gray Davis and his backers failed to understand the enormous political force that had been unleashed against them.
By 1963, a skeletal right-wing information network was in place. The newspaper Human Events reached 80,000 homes, and its organization’s radio program was on the air 343 times a day on 300 stations. In addition there were 70 foundations that together with 113 corporations and firms, 25 utilities, and 250 wealthy individuals were able to elect 74% of their 150 Congressional candidates. President Richard Nixon told intimates that the conservatives needed to create their own media operations to counter the work of the so-called liberal media establishment. While there is no evidence that Nixon made any progress in that direction, his Secretary of the Treasury, multimillionaire William Simon, took steps in this direction in 1978, when he was president of the John M. Olin foundation. Together with heads of other conservative foundations, he played the leading role in constructing the New Right’s think tank, media, and propaganda apparatus. Simon blamed the fall of Richard Nixon on a biased press and vowed to create a “counterintelligensia” to create a conventional wisdom more favorable to Republicans and conservatives. He used some of his ample funds but mainly found others, including foundations, to fund these conservative efforts.
Another impetus toward creating a vast Republican message machine occurred in August 1971 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce circulated Confidential Memorandum: Attack on the American Free enterprise System by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell .in which he called for long term, coordinated efforts to ensure the survival of free enterprise. Simon, Powell, and the other men who contributed the money to create this network of foundations and information outlets, saw themselves as the saviors of the nation, struggling to defend free enterprise and the American way of life. The network of think tanks they created and the long term plans for developing a Republican majority were to prove to be eminently workable and successful. In 2006, Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist, noted, “The Republicans are like the Chinese--they think in terms of like a 50 year plan....Their goal is permanent realignment...against a party that is hardly strategizing at all.” It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on funding this network of foundations and think tanks. From 1992 to 1994, the twelve most important foundations spent at least $210,000,000 pumping out information.
When Ronald Reagan took power, enough of this publicity machine was in place to enable the new administration to conduct a “public diplomacy” campaign by using news people that were tied to its media network. The conservatives’ media machine proved very effective in protecting the Reagan administration from criticism. This was especially true in respect to the Iran-Contra scandal and the administration’s support of reactionary military forces in Central America. Conservatives are convinced that the press was biased against Ronald Reagan, but James Baker said “ There were days and times and events we might have had some complaints [but] on balance I don’t think we had anything to complain about.” It is possible that there is some media bias in cultural matters, particularly against the pro-life movement, but it goes no further than that. Frequently conservative assertions were simply accepted as facts and knowledge, and many of these views went unchallenged in the electronic media, where concentrated wealth and the cries of “media bias” had the greatest impact.
When conservative think tanks are mentioned, huge and influential operations like the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute come to mind. However, there are smaller but also influential conservative tanks that turn out information on scientific topics. Two of the most important are the George C. Marshall Institute and the Discovery Institute. The latter is best known for its efforts on behalf of creationism, or Intelligent Design, as it is now known. Another is the American Council on Science and Health, whose head, Dr. Gilbert Ross, still insists that the verdict is out on whether secondary smoke is damaging to health. He had spent time in prison for Medicaid fraud. This network of think tanks has succeeded in politicizing science and has chalked up remarkable results by 2005. Their work perfectly illustrates the marriage of right-wing religion and corporate America as they defend abstinence education, claim condoms do not work, insist that abortions produce breast cancer and mental illness, and fight Darwinism and stem cell research and produce findings intended to emasculate environmental and regulatory law.
They have mightily battled the concept of global warming and have demanded that government rely upon research carried out by private industry. Based on their findings, the Bush II FDA refused to sanction the “morning after” contraceptive pill. George W. Bush’s White House also followed their advice in 2003 by editing an EPA study to eliminate references to a National Academy of Science report on climate change. In 2000, Republicans forced Clinton to accept the Data Quality Act, which makes it possible for private interests to endlessly challenge all new government science, which could lead to new environmental, safety, or other regulations. The principle of the act was extended in 2002 when the Office of Management and Budget was given the mandate to enforce “peer review” of all government science, meaning OMB would encourage challenges and decide the results. The work of these politically motivated research centers are held in contempt by mainstream science because their work has not been subjected to peer review. The conservative scientists respond that mainstream science is “junk science” which is unsound and not pure.
The oldest Republican think tank was the Hoover Institution, which existed long before the other elements of the message machine created after the early seventies. . Among the newer and more militantly conservative one’s are the Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. The National Center for Policy Analysis is located in Dallas and is so dependent upon contributions from highly partisan fat cats that it permits no criticism of George W. Bush by its employees. When Bruce Bartlett hinted that Bush was not a true conservative, he was forbidden to make similar comments in the future and was fired when he wrote a book that critiqued some Bush economic policies. He was told that his comments were objectionable because they reduced contributions, not because he was wrong.
The Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress was financed by Joseph Coors and was closely tied to Heritage. Some, like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, devoted their attention to supporting a strong national defense and promoting a conservative foreign policy agenda. In addition there were conservative operations like the Rutherford Institute and Landmark Legal Foundation, which used legal tactics learned from the ACLU and NAACP to derail liberal legislation and hound Bill Clinton. Founded in 1943 and reorganized in 1954, the American Enterprise Institute is the oldest of the major conservative think tanks and came to be dominated by Neo Conservatives. Among its stars were to be Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Robert Bork, Charles Murray, and Irving Kristol. In 1980, it reported assets of $35.8 million and took in $24.5 million. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, is the most important of them and is funded by wealthy conservatives who include the Coors family, the DeVoses and Van Andels of Amway and Richard Mellon Scaife. Coors, allied with political operatives Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich were active within the American Conservative Union and attempted to dominate it.
The conservative institutes and foundations that deal with foreign policy are too numerous to mention. Frequently they work with the US Central Command in various black operations. The International Republican Institute (IRI), led by Senator John McCain seems to specialize in helping right-wing regimes in Latin America. Working with the National Endowment for Democracy, the most important of these operations, it spread around money to bring down the Aristide regime in Haiti in 2004.
In 1971 Coors sent aide Jack Wilson to Washington to find an organization he could take over. Over two years, he gave $200,000 to Analysis Research Corporation and then started donating to the Robert M. Schuchman Foundation. The idea was to find a tax-exempt organization, and the ARC was having problems with the IRS. By 1974 the Schuchman Foundation was becoming dormant. With the help of Paul Weyrich, Coors founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973. This foundation played a major role in shaping the policies of the Reagan and George W. Bush Administrations. After 9/11 it had enough clout to kill legislation aimed at tracing the international movement of money, specifically the movement of terrorist funds. Heritage had no truck with them, but it did want to protect those who moved money to avoid U.S. taxes. Weyrich also founded the American Legislative Exchange Council, which counts hundreds of corporate sponsors and which has become the very effective corporate Trojan horse at the state level, seeing that economic legislation serves corporate interests.
Vast amounts of money were invested in building an efficient and effective Republican communications machine. Wealthy individuals such as Joseph Coors Richard Mellon Scaife, and Chicago financier Peter W. Smith, and many others. . The Neo Conservatives were to become analysts for conservative think tanks, cranking out material on foreign policy, economics, and studies that described how the liberals allegedly destroyed traditional American culture. In no time, they appeared to have forgotten that their former friends in the academy and among liberal intellectuals had often been the strongest critics of consumerism, hedonism, and materialistic values. Their new job was to manufacture materials blaming these and other problems on liberals, and they did it well. Although they fit the profile, NeoCons quickly became proficient in cranking out polemics against the New Class. The new conservative think tanks were established in order to create a “counter-establishment.” Over time they have succeeded in doing this, but they are not places where independent scholars can do their best to serve their country, regardless of party politics
Their work, and that of others in the conservative think tanks enabled Conservatives to present their ideas in a manner that made them appear new and attractive to voters. The triumph of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was partly attributable to their hard work on the ideological front. Very few voters have highly developed ideological perspectives, but there has been an increasing tendency for voters to locate themselves somewhere along the liberal/conservative spectrum.
A fourth generation heir to the Mellon fortune, Richard Scaife’s investments in building the New Right have been so great that some attribute the recent surge of political power to him. Scaife is not the typical conservative Republican; he is pro-life, opposes NAFTA and is not interested in the Christian Right, except as a very useful ally. He spent tens of millions building a network of think tanks, placing conservative academicians in university chairs, and subsidizing right-wing publications. He operated four foundations and spent at least $200 million between 1974 and 1992 while building up the conservative information infrastructure. He pursued the “Golden Rule,” which meant “whoever has the gold rules” and bought into the American Legislative Exchange Council in order to use its tax exempt status for pro-Reagan activities. Founded by Paul Weyrich, the ALEC provided state legislators with model draft legislation and took them to posh resorts for political indoctrination. It also groomed state legislators like Henry Hyde, Tommy Thompson, and John Engler for higher stations. By the eighties, it placing less emphasis upon cultural questions and emphasizing the economic questions that would attract big corporate donors.
Scaife also helped finance the Heritage Foundation, which produced a persuasive documentary called “Time to Repeal the Federal Death Taxes: The Nightmare of the American Dream,” a misleading documentary that left the impression that large numbers of Americans stood in danger of not being able to pass on their family farms or small businesses to their children. In fact, only 2% of estates were taxed in 1999.
The Heritage Foundation developed a program called Mandate for Leadership, which was almost a blueprint for the Reagan administration, which implemented about two-thirds of the document’s 2,000 recommendations. Heritage consistently pressed for tax cuts for industry and the wealthy and defense spending and a new missile defense. The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 in San Francisco and soon moved to Washington in 1982. Cato has a libertarian bias and sometimes complains about excessive corporate welfare. It emphasizes giving more force to the Tenth Amendment as a way of returning power to the states and dismantling the New Deal and the Great Society. In 2002, Cato had a budget of $16 million and Heritage had $28 million. Cato, with its libertarian in outlook, neither New Right nor Neo Conservative, but an important part of the conservative informational and communications infrastructure.: A late 2001 the libertarians at the Cato Institute were still working to convince the public that global warming was a hoax and nothing to be . On the West coast, the Milken Institute performs similar work on behalf of libertarian causes; however, it does not consistently support cultural conservatism.
The conservative foundations do not speak with one voice; they have different orientations. Nevertheless, they do not work at cross-purposes and almost invariably find ways to work together toward common goals. These conservative think tanks are very efficient in putting out position papers and making suggestions to Republican lawmakers on legislation before it ever reaches the committees for discussion and mark-ups. They also provide conservative columnists and talk show hosts with a great deal of grist for their opinion-shaping programs. They subsidized conservative television programs like William Buckley’s “Firing Line.” These partisan think tanks developed policy for the GOP, and their personnel were to occupy positions of power in Republican administrations. Evidence of their close ties to power is found in the efforts of officials of the George W. Bush administration to shield the Heritage Foundation from criticism. When Al Ross of the Institute for Democracy was scheduled to address an association for corporate anti-discrimination officers, the administration forced the association to withdraw the offer. It was expected that Ross would criticize the Heritage Foundation for working to weaken civil rights legislation. The association needed Labor Department support to get some grants, and pressure from people in that department and the Office of Management and Budget was enough to remove Ross from their program. By 1998, there were thirty-seven interlocked think tanks, whose budgets exceeded those of other think tanks by a factor of four.
Conservative foundations supported a shelf-full of magazines that employed a large stable of effective and often compelling conservative political writers, many of whom offered newspaper columns, appeared on television, and/or hosted talk radio programs. A study of US interpretive communities found one at the far right that obtained most of its news and information from the radio. It was comprised predominantly of white, Protestant males, who were “pro-individualism, pro-hierarchism, anti-egalitarian worldviews” anti-environmental, and, of course very Republican and conservative.” Talk radio helped create this interpretive community and is effective in enlarging it. Talk radio became particularly influential in the 1990s and set the tone for many cable commentary programs and even a number of print commentators. In 2000, 37% of the public listened to talk radio regularly or with some frequency, and only 12% of the listeners claimed to be Democrats. In 2007, the Center for American Progress and Free Press found that 91% of talk radio programs broadcasted on the five largest chains was conservative.
Fundraisers and Fundraising
. In 1992-1994, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy found that the 12 most important conservative foundations had spent $210,000,000. Conservative magazines, such as The American Spectator, The New Criterion, and Irving Kristol’s National Interest/Public Interest’ were important recipients. David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture received $3.2 million. Horowitz is a sharp and bitter critic of the Left and produces several publications. When Nancy Pelosi was elected minority leader of the House, he surnamed her “the Hammer and Sickle” and claimed that her opposition to China’s human rights record was a mere “fig leaf against accusations of being closer to red than red-white-and-blue.” The Center for Media and Public Affairs and Accuracy in Media were also given generous funding. Accuracy in Media, which monitors the media from a right-wing perspective, nurtured the growth of AM radio broadcasts such as those of Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and Oliver North. These right-wing talk show hosts were experts at clever but often dishonest spin and commentary and daily manufactured the rage that fortified millions of foot soldiers in the Republican base. Money was also provided to air on public television programs featuring the conservative views of Ben Wattenburg and William F. Buckley. Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Research and Education Foundation received money to found a conservative television network.
The efforts of the Republican information network were augmented by the highly effective work of New Right fund-raises who also played an important role in recruiting people to the New Right cause. Paul Weyrich, a deacon in the Melikite Church, played a major role in helping hundreds of thousands of working class Democrats feel comfortable voting Republican and adopting New Right views. Weyrich came from a Catholic blue-collar working background and understood that these people distrust country club Republicans and big business. To win them over, it was necessary to show them that the Democrats favored abortion and threatened their religious and cultural values. Gun control and abortion became early symbols of the Democratic assault on traditional values. Weyrich also opposed the civil rights movement and the heritage of the New Deal. He saw that blue-collar people “felt invaded by societal forces--liberal forces, future shock” and played on their fear and resentment until they began to vote Republican and even change parties. John McCain, an individualistic Arizona Republican, disapproved of the scorched earth tactics of the Far Right and called Weyrich “a pompous, self-serving son of a bitch.”
Weyrich was plugged into many conservative movements. He spent some time with George Wallace’s American Independent Party, and would found the Free Congress Foundation as a vehicle to mobilize resentment against people he accused of threatening “basic values.” With the help of Joseph Coors, he founded the Committee for a Free Congress in 1974, which worked to nominate and elect New Right Republicans. In time, it developed an extraordinary precinct organization and came to be a power in Republican politics. The National Conservative Action Committee, led by former Jesse Helms aide Charles Black, raised considerable amounts of money to replace moderate Republicans with New Right conservatives and battle “radicals” like Henry Jackson, Pat Moynihan, and Edmund Muskie. They did not knock off the latter three, but they were very effective nevertheless. Black was especially good at sending shrewd political and press operatives to help New Right Republicans.
Richard Viguerie was one of the most successful Republican fund-raisers and played a major role in developing means for vastly expanding the party’s contributor base to the point where it has far more ordinary people as donors than the Democrats. Operating out of Falls Church, Virginia, he excelled at building massive mailing lists. He was a committed Roman Catholic family man who sent his children to a fundamentalist school. Though he has been criticized for high administrative costs, he pointed out that he spent a great deal on voter education. In 1968, he was George Wallace’s fund-raiser. He was to assume responsibility for Wallace’s political debts in return for the candidate’s mailing list. Nine years later, his RAVCO raised $25,000,000 for conservative candidates. That was $ 5 million more than the Republican House and Senate campaign committees raised. Viguerie also founded the influential Conservative Digest.
Grover Norquist
Grover Norquist, leader of the Americans for Tax Reform is in a league by himself as major player in formulating Republican strategy and moving that party to the right. He calls bipartisanship “date rape” and openly works to give America permanent one party government. Much of the success of Republican efforts to thwart Clinton was the result of careful organization and smart politics, and the careful work of Norquist. The destruction of “Clintoncare” paved the way for Republican conquest of the House of Representatives in the elections of 1994. Norquist, a Lee Atwater protégé, and the Wednesday Club saw Clinton’s health care program as a deadly threat to their plans. After Clinton was elected, about 30 leaders of right-wing organizations met every Wednesday in the headquarters of Americans for Tax Reform The Wednesday Club coordinated attacks on the plan and successfully prevented Republicans from offering or supporting alternatives. The destruction of “Hillarycare” was the first of many exceedingly successful operations undertaken by a highly efficient network of conservative news and political information outlets. Democrats, who are divided into many factions and have a tradition of diversity, have no information mechanism worthy of the name.
These weekly meetings of conservative political activists were to continue into the second Bush administration. By 2005, the weekly strategy meeting has as many as 120 participants. A researcher represents right-wing columnist Bob Novak, and columnist Peggy Noonan may make a personal appearance. In addition to lobbyists, right-wing organs The National Review and Washington Times are represented After the meeting, the word goes out via fax, e-mails, and other means to pundits, propagandists, and others in the conservative information machine as to what issues are to be stressed and how they are to be handled in print and on the radio and television. Norquist argued that government should be reduced to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub; and the aspects of government operations he most had in mind were those that provided benefits and services to citizens.
Robert Novak has written that Norquist thinks “God put Republicans on earth to cut taxes.” Norquist thought Democrats kept seats in Congress because so many voters depended upon government largesse. Government spending tied bureaucrats and recipients of government largess to the Democratic Party. He argued that cutting taxes would defund the Democratic Party and cause it to lose power. Gaining power, he knew, depended upon efforts to market Republican ideas to the public. He had read Antonio Gramsci and took to heart the Italian Communist’s argument that a political movement cannot succeed until it has captured the culture. Writing in an Italian prison, Gramsci recognized that elites enjoy hegemony when they control culture through domination of important institutions and the press. He sought to counter this hegemony by developing other means of influencing opinion. Norquist and others have developed mechanisms to capitalize on the assets they already had. The development of talk radio and political cable shows as well as the rapid emergence of political religion may reinforce conservative hegemony and, in some ways, head off the alternative means of communicating that Gramsci described.
Founded in 1999, Stephen Moore’s Club for Growth (CfG) has an agenda similar to that of Norquist’s ATF. Its emphasis is tax cuts and supply side economics. In 2002, it became the largest funder of Republican campaigns, other than the party itself, contributing $10 million to conservative candidates. In 2004, CfG spent $2.3 million on Pat Toomey’s unsuccessful bid to unseat the moderate Arlen Specter. But the money was a good investment because it forced the remaining moderates in the GOP to consider very carefully how far they are willing to stray from the party line. After the election, Toomey replaced Moore as head of CfG.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
The conservative media infrastructure had the enormous advantage of appealing to the postmodern distrust of elites and experts. As Michael Wolfe noted, FOX and the conservative media are “about having a chip on your shoulder; it’s about us versus them, insiders versus outsiders, phonies versus neophonies, and, in a clever piece of postmodernism, established media against insurgent media.” On the other hand, Democrats and liberals spent almost nothing trying to create a media infrastructure and showed very little skill in getting out their message. The effective and ceaseless efforts of the FOX television network did not transform the majority of voters into conservative ideologues, but it did greatly enlarge the number of conservative ideologues and the Republican base. Of equal importance it made the border between the right and middle extremely porous. Exposed to constant information blaming liberals for almost every conceivable evil, people in the middle developed an inclination to drift to the right whenever they were very frustrated. The ability to exploit this “porous border between the right and the middle” was demonstrated in the California recall election of 2003. Largely unaware of this dynamic, Governor Gray Davis and his backers failed to understand the enormous political force that had been unleashed against them.
By 1963, a skeletal right-wing information network was in place. The newspaper Human Events reached 80,000 homes, and its organization’s radio program was on the air 343 times a day on 300 stations. In addition there were 70 foundations that together with 113 corporations and firms, 25 utilities, and 250 wealthy individuals were able to elect 74% of their 150 Congressional candidates. President Richard Nixon told intimates that the conservatives needed to create their own media operations to counter the work of the so-called liberal media establishment. While there is no evidence that Nixon made any progress in that direction, his Secretary of the Treasury, multimillionaire William Simon, took steps in this direction in 1978, when he was president of the John M. Olin foundation. Together with heads of other conservative foundations, he played the leading role in constructing the New Right’s think tank, media, and propaganda apparatus. Simon blamed the fall of Richard Nixon on a biased press and vowed to create a “counterintelligensia” to create a conventional wisdom more favorable to Republicans and conservatives. He used some of his ample funds but mainly found others, including foundations, to fund these conservative efforts.
Another impetus toward creating a vast Republican message machine occurred in August 1971 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce circulated Confidential Memorandum: Attack on the American Free enterprise System by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell .in which he called for long term, coordinated efforts to ensure the survival of free enterprise. Simon, Powell, and the other men who contributed the money to create this network of foundations and information outlets, saw themselves as the saviors of the nation, struggling to defend free enterprise and the American way of life. The network of think tanks they created and the long term plans for developing a Republican majority were to prove to be eminently workable and successful. In 2006, Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist, noted, “The Republicans are like the Chinese--they think in terms of like a 50 year plan....Their goal is permanent realignment...against a party that is hardly strategizing at all.” It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on funding this network of foundations and think tanks. From 1992 to 1994, the twelve most important foundations spent at least $210,000,000 pumping out information.
When Ronald Reagan took power, enough of this publicity machine was in place to enable the new administration to conduct a “public diplomacy” campaign by using news people that were tied to its media network. The conservatives’ media machine proved very effective in protecting the Reagan administration from criticism. This was especially true in respect to the Iran-Contra scandal and the administration’s support of reactionary military forces in Central America. Conservatives are convinced that the press was biased against Ronald Reagan, but James Baker said “ There were days and times and events we might have had some complaints [but] on balance I don’t think we had anything to complain about.” It is possible that there is some media bias in cultural matters, particularly against the pro-life movement, but it goes no further than that. Frequently conservative assertions were simply accepted as facts and knowledge, and many of these views went unchallenged in the electronic media, where concentrated wealth and the cries of “media bias” had the greatest impact.
When conservative think tanks are mentioned, huge and influential operations like the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute come to mind. However, there are smaller but also influential conservative tanks that turn out information on scientific topics. Two of the most important are the George C. Marshall Institute and the Discovery Institute. The latter is best known for its efforts on behalf of creationism, or Intelligent Design, as it is now known. Another is the American Council on Science and Health, whose head, Dr. Gilbert Ross, still insists that the verdict is out on whether secondary smoke is damaging to health. He had spent time in prison for Medicaid fraud. This network of think tanks has succeeded in politicizing science and has chalked up remarkable results by 2005. Their work perfectly illustrates the marriage of right-wing religion and corporate America as they defend abstinence education, claim condoms do not work, insist that abortions produce breast cancer and mental illness, and fight Darwinism and stem cell research and produce findings intended to emasculate environmental and regulatory law.
They have mightily battled the concept of global warming and have demanded that government rely upon research carried out by private industry. Based on their findings, the Bush II FDA refused to sanction the “morning after” contraceptive pill. George W. Bush’s White House also followed their advice in 2003 by editing an EPA study to eliminate references to a National Academy of Science report on climate change. In 2000, Republicans forced Clinton to accept the Data Quality Act, which makes it possible for private interests to endlessly challenge all new government science, which could lead to new environmental, safety, or other regulations. The principle of the act was extended in 2002 when the Office of Management and Budget was given the mandate to enforce “peer review” of all government science, meaning OMB would encourage challenges and decide the results. The work of these politically motivated research centers are held in contempt by mainstream science because their work has not been subjected to peer review. The conservative scientists respond that mainstream science is “junk science” which is unsound and not pure.
The oldest Republican think tank was the Hoover Institution, which existed long before the other elements of the message machine created after the early seventies. . Among the newer and more militantly conservative one’s are the Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. The National Center for Policy Analysis is located in Dallas and is so dependent upon contributions from highly partisan fat cats that it permits no criticism of George W. Bush by its employees. When Bruce Bartlett hinted that Bush was not a true conservative, he was forbidden to make similar comments in the future and was fired when he wrote a book that critiqued some Bush economic policies. He was told that his comments were objectionable because they reduced contributions, not because he was wrong.
The Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress was financed by Joseph Coors and was closely tied to Heritage. Some, like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, devoted their attention to supporting a strong national defense and promoting a conservative foreign policy agenda. In addition there were conservative operations like the Rutherford Institute and Landmark Legal Foundation, which used legal tactics learned from the ACLU and NAACP to derail liberal legislation and hound Bill Clinton. Founded in 1943 and reorganized in 1954, the American Enterprise Institute is the oldest of the major conservative think tanks and came to be dominated by Neo Conservatives. Among its stars were to be Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Robert Bork, Charles Murray, and Irving Kristol. In 1980, it reported assets of $35.8 million and took in $24.5 million. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, is the most important of them and is funded by wealthy conservatives who include the Coors family, the DeVoses and Van Andels of Amway and Richard Mellon Scaife. Coors, allied with political operatives Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich were active within the American Conservative Union and attempted to dominate it.
The conservative institutes and foundations that deal with foreign policy are too numerous to mention. Frequently they work with the US Central Command in various black operations. The International Republican Institute (IRI), led by Senator John McCain seems to specialize in helping right-wing regimes in Latin America. Working with the National Endowment for Democracy, the most important of these operations, it spread around money to bring down the Aristide regime in Haiti in 2004.
In 1971 Coors sent aide Jack Wilson to Washington to find an organization he could take over. Over two years, he gave $200,000 to Analysis Research Corporation and then started donating to the Robert M. Schuchman Foundation. The idea was to find a tax-exempt organization, and the ARC was having problems with the IRS. By 1974 the Schuchman Foundation was becoming dormant. With the help of Paul Weyrich, Coors founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973. This foundation played a major role in shaping the policies of the Reagan and George W. Bush Administrations. After 9/11 it had enough clout to kill legislation aimed at tracing the international movement of money, specifically the movement of terrorist funds. Heritage had no truck with them, but it did want to protect those who moved money to avoid U.S. taxes. Weyrich also founded the American Legislative Exchange Council, which counts hundreds of corporate sponsors and which has become the very effective corporate Trojan horse at the state level, seeing that economic legislation serves corporate interests.
Vast amounts of money were invested in building an efficient and effective Republican communications machine. Wealthy individuals such as Joseph Coors Richard Mellon Scaife, and Chicago financier Peter W. Smith, and many others. . The Neo Conservatives were to become analysts for conservative think tanks, cranking out material on foreign policy, economics, and studies that described how the liberals allegedly destroyed traditional American culture. In no time, they appeared to have forgotten that their former friends in the academy and among liberal intellectuals had often been the strongest critics of consumerism, hedonism, and materialistic values. Their new job was to manufacture materials blaming these and other problems on liberals, and they did it well. Although they fit the profile, NeoCons quickly became proficient in cranking out polemics against the New Class. The new conservative think tanks were established in order to create a “counter-establishment.” Over time they have succeeded in doing this, but they are not places where independent scholars can do their best to serve their country, regardless of party politics
Their work, and that of others in the conservative think tanks enabled Conservatives to present their ideas in a manner that made them appear new and attractive to voters. The triumph of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was partly attributable to their hard work on the ideological front. Very few voters have highly developed ideological perspectives, but there has been an increasing tendency for voters to locate themselves somewhere along the liberal/conservative spectrum.
A fourth generation heir to the Mellon fortune, Richard Scaife’s investments in building the New Right have been so great that some attribute the recent surge of political power to him. Scaife is not the typical conservative Republican; he is pro-life, opposes NAFTA and is not interested in the Christian Right, except as a very useful ally. He spent tens of millions building a network of think tanks, placing conservative academicians in university chairs, and subsidizing right-wing publications. He operated four foundations and spent at least $200 million between 1974 and 1992 while building up the conservative information infrastructure. He pursued the “Golden Rule,” which meant “whoever has the gold rules” and bought into the American Legislative Exchange Council in order to use its tax exempt status for pro-Reagan activities. Founded by Paul Weyrich, the ALEC provided state legislators with model draft legislation and took them to posh resorts for political indoctrination. It also groomed state legislators like Henry Hyde, Tommy Thompson, and John Engler for higher stations. By the eighties, it placing less emphasis upon cultural questions and emphasizing the economic questions that would attract big corporate donors.
Scaife also helped finance the Heritage Foundation, which produced a persuasive documentary called “Time to Repeal the Federal Death Taxes: The Nightmare of the American Dream,” a misleading documentary that left the impression that large numbers of Americans stood in danger of not being able to pass on their family farms or small businesses to their children. In fact, only 2% of estates were taxed in 1999.
The Heritage Foundation developed a program called Mandate for Leadership, which was almost a blueprint for the Reagan administration, which implemented about two-thirds of the document’s 2,000 recommendations. Heritage consistently pressed for tax cuts for industry and the wealthy and defense spending and a new missile defense. The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 in San Francisco and soon moved to Washington in 1982. Cato has a libertarian bias and sometimes complains about excessive corporate welfare. It emphasizes giving more force to the Tenth Amendment as a way of returning power to the states and dismantling the New Deal and the Great Society. In 2002, Cato had a budget of $16 million and Heritage had $28 million. Cato, with its libertarian in outlook, neither New Right nor Neo Conservative, but an important part of the conservative informational and communications infrastructure.: A late 2001 the libertarians at the Cato Institute were still working to convince the public that global warming was a hoax and nothing to be . On the West coast, the Milken Institute performs similar work on behalf of libertarian causes; however, it does not consistently support cultural conservatism.
The conservative foundations do not speak with one voice; they have different orientations. Nevertheless, they do not work at cross-purposes and almost invariably find ways to work together toward common goals. These conservative think tanks are very efficient in putting out position papers and making suggestions to Republican lawmakers on legislation before it ever reaches the committees for discussion and mark-ups. They also provide conservative columnists and talk show hosts with a great deal of grist for their opinion-shaping programs. They subsidized conservative television programs like William Buckley’s “Firing Line.” These partisan think tanks developed policy for the GOP, and their personnel were to occupy positions of power in Republican administrations. Evidence of their close ties to power is found in the efforts of officials of the George W. Bush administration to shield the Heritage Foundation from criticism. When Al Ross of the Institute for Democracy was scheduled to address an association for corporate anti-discrimination officers, the administration forced the association to withdraw the offer. It was expected that Ross would criticize the Heritage Foundation for working to weaken civil rights legislation. The association needed Labor Department support to get some grants, and pressure from people in that department and the Office of Management and Budget was enough to remove Ross from their program. By 1998, there were thirty-seven interlocked think tanks, whose budgets exceeded those of other think tanks by a factor of four.
Conservative foundations supported a shelf-full of magazines that employed a large stable of effective and often compelling conservative political writers, many of whom offered newspaper columns, appeared on television, and/or hosted talk radio programs. A study of US interpretive communities found one at the far right that obtained most of its news and information from the radio. It was comprised predominantly of white, Protestant males, who were “pro-individualism, pro-hierarchism, anti-egalitarian worldviews” anti-environmental, and, of course very Republican and conservative.” Talk radio helped create this interpretive community and is effective in enlarging it. Talk radio became particularly influential in the 1990s and set the tone for many cable commentary programs and even a number of print commentators. In 2000, 37% of the public listened to talk radio regularly or with some frequency, and only 12% of the listeners claimed to be Democrats. In 2007, the Center for American Progress and Free Press found that 91% of talk radio programs broadcasted on the five largest chains was conservative.
Fundraisers and Fundraising
. In 1992-1994, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy found that the 12 most important conservative foundations had spent $210,000,000. Conservative magazines, such as The American Spectator, The New Criterion, and Irving Kristol’s National Interest/Public Interest’ were important recipients. David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture received $3.2 million. Horowitz is a sharp and bitter critic of the Left and produces several publications. When Nancy Pelosi was elected minority leader of the House, he surnamed her “the Hammer and Sickle” and claimed that her opposition to China’s human rights record was a mere “fig leaf against accusations of being closer to red than red-white-and-blue.” The Center for Media and Public Affairs and Accuracy in Media were also given generous funding. Accuracy in Media, which monitors the media from a right-wing perspective, nurtured the growth of AM radio broadcasts such as those of Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and Oliver North. These right-wing talk show hosts were experts at clever but often dishonest spin and commentary and daily manufactured the rage that fortified millions of foot soldiers in the Republican base. Money was also provided to air on public television programs featuring the conservative views of Ben Wattenburg and William F. Buckley. Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Research and Education Foundation received money to found a conservative television network.
The efforts of the Republican information network were augmented by the highly effective work of New Right fund-raises who also played an important role in recruiting people to the New Right cause. Paul Weyrich, a deacon in the Melikite Church, played a major role in helping hundreds of thousands of working class Democrats feel comfortable voting Republican and adopting New Right views. Weyrich came from a Catholic blue-collar working background and understood that these people distrust country club Republicans and big business. To win them over, it was necessary to show them that the Democrats favored abortion and threatened their religious and cultural values. Gun control and abortion became early symbols of the Democratic assault on traditional values. Weyrich also opposed the civil rights movement and the heritage of the New Deal. He saw that blue-collar people “felt invaded by societal forces--liberal forces, future shock” and played on their fear and resentment until they began to vote Republican and even change parties. John McCain, an individualistic Arizona Republican, disapproved of the scorched earth tactics of the Far Right and called Weyrich “a pompous, self-serving son of a bitch.”
Weyrich was plugged into many conservative movements. He spent some time with George Wallace’s American Independent Party, and would found the Free Congress Foundation as a vehicle to mobilize resentment against people he accused of threatening “basic values.” With the help of Joseph Coors, he founded the Committee for a Free Congress in 1974, which worked to nominate and elect New Right Republicans. In time, it developed an extraordinary precinct organization and came to be a power in Republican politics. The National Conservative Action Committee, led by former Jesse Helms aide Charles Black, raised considerable amounts of money to replace moderate Republicans with New Right conservatives and battle “radicals” like Henry Jackson, Pat Moynihan, and Edmund Muskie. They did not knock off the latter three, but they were very effective nevertheless. Black was especially good at sending shrewd political and press operatives to help New Right Republicans.
Richard Viguerie was one of the most successful Republican fund-raisers and played a major role in developing means for vastly expanding the party’s contributor base to the point where it has far more ordinary people as donors than the Democrats. Operating out of Falls Church, Virginia, he excelled at building massive mailing lists. He was a committed Roman Catholic family man who sent his children to a fundamentalist school. Though he has been criticized for high administrative costs, he pointed out that he spent a great deal on voter education. In 1968, he was George Wallace’s fund-raiser. He was to assume responsibility for Wallace’s political debts in return for the candidate’s mailing list. Nine years later, his RAVCO raised $25,000,000 for conservative candidates. That was $ 5 million more than the Republican House and Senate campaign committees raised. Viguerie also founded the influential Conservative Digest.
Grover Norquist
Grover Norquist, leader of the Americans for Tax Reform is in a league by himself as major player in formulating Republican strategy and moving that party to the right. He calls bipartisanship “date rape” and openly works to give America permanent one party government. Much of the success of Republican efforts to thwart Clinton was the result of careful organization and smart politics, and the careful work of Norquist. The destruction of “Clintoncare” paved the way for Republican conquest of the House of Representatives in the elections of 1994. Norquist, a Lee Atwater protégé, and the Wednesday Club saw Clinton’s health care program as a deadly threat to their plans. After Clinton was elected, about 30 leaders of right-wing organizations met every Wednesday in the headquarters of Americans for Tax Reform The Wednesday Club coordinated attacks on the plan and successfully prevented Republicans from offering or supporting alternatives. The destruction of “Hillarycare” was the first of many exceedingly successful operations undertaken by a highly efficient network of conservative news and political information outlets. Democrats, who are divided into many factions and have a tradition of diversity, have no information mechanism worthy of the name.
These weekly meetings of conservative political activists were to continue into the second Bush administration. By 2005, the weekly strategy meeting has as many as 120 participants. A researcher represents right-wing columnist Bob Novak, and columnist Peggy Noonan may make a personal appearance. In addition to lobbyists, right-wing organs The National Review and Washington Times are represented After the meeting, the word goes out via fax, e-mails, and other means to pundits, propagandists, and others in the conservative information machine as to what issues are to be stressed and how they are to be handled in print and on the radio and television. Norquist argued that government should be reduced to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub; and the aspects of government operations he most had in mind were those that provided benefits and services to citizens.
Robert Novak has written that Norquist thinks “God put Republicans on earth to cut taxes.” Norquist thought Democrats kept seats in Congress because so many voters depended upon government largesse. Government spending tied bureaucrats and recipients of government largess to the Democratic Party. He argued that cutting taxes would defund the Democratic Party and cause it to lose power. Gaining power, he knew, depended upon efforts to market Republican ideas to the public. He had read Antonio Gramsci and took to heart the Italian Communist’s argument that a political movement cannot succeed until it has captured the culture. Writing in an Italian prison, Gramsci recognized that elites enjoy hegemony when they control culture through domination of important institutions and the press. He sought to counter this hegemony by developing other means of influencing opinion. Norquist and others have developed mechanisms to capitalize on the assets they already had. The development of talk radio and political cable shows as well as the rapid emergence of political religion may reinforce conservative hegemony and, in some ways, head off the alternative means of communicating that Gramsci described.
Founded in 1999, Stephen Moore’s Club for Growth (CfG) has an agenda similar to that of Norquist’s ATF. Its emphasis is tax cuts and supply side economics. In 2002, it became the largest funder of Republican campaigns, other than the party itself, contributing $10 million to conservative candidates. In 2004, CfG spent $2.3 million on Pat Toomey’s unsuccessful bid to unseat the moderate Arlen Specter. But the money was a good investment because it forced the remaining moderates in the GOP to consider very carefully how far they are willing to stray from the party line. After the election, Toomey replaced Moore as head of CfG.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Republicans as Masters of Information Management
By the end of the Twentieth Century, conservative political and economic thought had become the reigning worldview in the United States. In the days of Lyndon Johnson about three-quarters of Americans trusted government. By the 1990s, only one quarter did; many of the rest thought it was the source of their problems. Some maintain that US political opinion has usually been clustered in the center-right, but by 2006, it was decidedly so. There were more than two conservatives for every self-identified liberal, and almost a majority of Americans thought the Democrats were too liberal. British Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb once observed, “There is no such thing as spontaneous public opinion. It all has to be manufactured...” Conventional wisdom is a massive asset in political warfare. It cannot be completely shaped without “the participation of the media and the political establishment.” Republicans built their own media, and began to dominate the political establishment after 1995.
Republican strategists fully understood all this and, over three decades, succeeded in selling their policies to a majority of Americans. Liberals gave conservatives a huge opening to repackage and resell their ideas when they concluded that it was pointless to pursue arguments about ideology. At the Yale University commencement in 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced that “practical management of a modern economy” had trumped the “grand warfare of rival ideologies.” Speaking for Democrats, he seemed to be saying that if economic growth continued, there was no reason to pursue and refine ideological arguments. He was echoing Daniel Bell who had written about the end of ideology. Conservatives entered this ideological void, and with well-crafted arguments and “propelled by cascades of cash,” captured much of the ideological battlefield and “succeeded brilliantly.”
Advanced communications techniques were pioneered in the American advertising world and relied upon appeals to elemental emotions and messages and slogans that were endlessly repeated. Joseph Goebbels, The German master propagandist, claimed that he sold his party’s policies using American advertising techniques. The Republicans are far better financed than the Democrats, but a key to their success is deployment of advanced communications theory.
For thirty years, they have used “framing,” a structural approach to building concepts through continual repetition. It means that their spokesmen deliver the same message in the same words, when it comes to the central part of a message. In selecting words, they carefully neutralize concerns voters might have and make the weakness of their proposals sound like strong points. For example “The Clean Skies Act” actually stripped away many regulations that made air cleaner and reduced carbon content. “The Healthy Forests Act” actually threatens the environment by giving loggers the green light to cut down virgin trees on public lands they previously were forbidden to touch. Framing takes time, but continual repetition eventually works, building these frames into our psychological structures. If a nominee for the Supreme Court says enough times he has no worldview, we come to believe it even though everyone has some kind of worldview. “Deep framing” is the process of assigning an array of emotions to a word so that hearing that word instantly brings up the desired worldview. For example, the word “liberal” has processed in this way and evokes revulsion, fear, and contempt for so-called educated elitists. Another example is the term “liberal media.” This concept has been so effectively framed that people are given licenses to simply ignore any factual matter coming from the media that they do not want to consider.
The two greatest Republican accomplishments in framing were in redefining “liberal” to mean people who have a great variety of serious character defects. Equally important has been their ability to appropriate or co-opt the language of moral values so completely that many people who admit that Democratic policies are best for their economic well-being still vote Republican.
On the other hand, Democrats have yet to learn the simplest lessons about symbol manipulation and repetition.. Rhetoric is the “art of persuasion in the cause of victory,” and excellence in this art “ can too easily erode one’s devotion to truth” on the part of speakers and listeners alike. As Senator Ben Nelson lamented in 2005, the Democratic Party had been defined as wanting to “ban the Bible, burn the flag, promote same-sex marriage, rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance, and take away everybody’s guns and half a dozen other things that are typically to the left of most Americans.” More importantly, the Republican information machine has been very successful at “fundamentally misrepresenting the nature of its policy objectives.” Polling data consistently demonstrates that large majorities of Americans do not like most Republican policies, but the party’s propagandists have succeeded in masking their goals and selling policies as commodities that they are not. Some think this is the key to Republican success, rather than playing on the false consciousness generated by the cultural wars. The truth probably involves both.
Voters made angry and fearful by exploitation of cultural issues are not likely to see though the misrepresentation of economic policies that are likely to harm them. The same messaging machine, which includes a very healthy and assertive conservative press, has developed numerous effective ploys to intimidate the mainstream press into “me-too conformity.” Over time, mainstream journalists have learned “that their careers will be better served if they tilt right and avoid getting stuck with the ‘liberal’ label.” There is no doubt that the right is expert at intimidating the traditional press, but it is also possible that the press is sharply attuned to market forces and realizes that the conventional wisdom veers fairly far to the right.
Expertise in Framing the Message
Academicians and political theorists have repeatedly insisted that the success of democracy depends upon “omnicompetent” citizens who were well informed about public affairs. Unfortunately, there are few of these very desirable people. Bryan Caplan has shown that most people in democracies do not invest time in becoming politically informed or thinking about how public questions affect their life situations. Only half of Americans even know that each state has two senators and that a senator’s term is six years. Voters, he admits, have political views , but they are basically prejudices and ad hoc attitudes. Democracies falter and fail because people are persuaded to what those results through clever manipulation of their emotions and perceptions. Public opinion has come to be based on often-false images and mental maps that people have of the world around them. They make decisions in a “pseudo-environment” shaped by necessarily simplistic media reporting and by deliberate and very effective efforts to shape public opinion.
Marketing is most effective when it is “narrow casting” by focusing on hot button issues and arousing fear or anger. Assertions like “They will take your guns” “They will ban Bibles,” or “They will fund abortion” are certain to move voters. Marketing techniques created “post-factual,” “post-rational politics,” in which facts and reason were not the most important factors in influencing decisions. Stony Brook University scientist Charles Taber noted, “The Enlightenment model of dispassionate reason as the duty of citizenship is empirically bankrupt.” A neuroscientist would note that the problem is that the connections from the emotions to the cognitive systems of the mind are far stronger than visa versa. Those who know this and know how to manipulate the emotions are going to be successful in politics.
Because impressions created by marketers were all important, it was difficult to sell specific policies or positions. Candidates and political parties and cultural issues could be manipulated to enhance the appearances of both. Presidential politics became a branding exercise, in which the party and candidate were marketed like products. The images of candidates and parties were recreated in the manner of commercial brands with brand myths and histories. Like physical products they were founded in language and marketing claims. The way people feel about things is based on how they are named and described. The key to branding was continual repetition of the same themes. When dealing with clear non-sequiturs, it was necessary to go more slowly, be louder, and continue with the repetitions.
Democrats attempted to deploy these techniques, but they understood them imperfectly and would continue to focus too much on propositional arguments Republicans have developed remarkable expertise in messaging, while Democrats barely deserve the title neophyte. Republicans pioneered in applying marketing techniques to politics and assured the long-term effectiveness of their approach by building their own media machine which created and reinforced a purely artificial ideological world for a growing body of deeply committed supporters. Over time, much of the mainstream media came to cooperate by seldom challenging the output of this awesome propaganda machine.
Republican theorists and publicists had mastered the new discipline called “cognitive science,” which enabled them partly to decipher people’s mental maps. They learned that a great number of Americans thought in terms of Strict Father morality. For them, every human being was equipped with knowledge of absolute rights and wrong, and humans built character and virtue by self-discipline in overcoming their natural moral weakness. Basically, humans must be stimulated by rewards and punishments to conform to the universal moral order. The lack of personal character was at the root of societal problems, not the social and economic explanations offered by social scientists. It is a morality that prescribes strong medicines: stern punishments for illegal immigrants, long prison sentences, and even the death sentence.
Many adherents of this outlook go so far as to turn a blind eye to the torture of suspected terrorist detainees and might even believe orphanages are preferable for children of single mothers. Key elements of this outlook uphold the rights of a father to lead, provide for, and protect his family. Protecting gun ownership is seen as very important because the gun is the symbol of a father’s right to take care of the family. This emphasis on protecting the family against morally weak, evildoers also explains why these people believe it is nearly impossible to spend too much on the military. It is also important to protect the rich from unfair taxation and regulation because they are the ideal citizens, proving that the system works and provides role models for all others. This explains why the 1992 Republican National Convention went wild when Dan Quayle asked, “Why should the best people be punished?” People who oppose this moral vision must be evil, especially homosexuals, who threaten the leadership role of the father. These people lack the moral strength to resist their base impulses.
The conservative moral vision is a natural moral order that is more or less reflected in the nature of things as they are. Hence, men were expected to lead women. Many still believe that whites were destined to lead whites and that Christians were placed over Jews. This outlook is not complex, and political arguments are easily framed in these terms. On the other hand, liberals believe in nurturing family morality. They place more emphasis on reason and science and are more issue-oriented. They distrust framing most political questions in moral terms, and their sense of morality is more nuanced. All this means that it is far more difficult for liberals to frame their positions in terms that believers in strict father morality can understand. Fortunately, many people’s outlooks blend the two approaches to morality, but the conservatives have a great advantage in being able easily to tap into their beliefs in strict family morality.
Informed by the writings of Richard Hofstadter, historians have long understood the connection between this sort of moral reasoning and right-wing populism. But there has been a tendency to believe that outbursts of right-wing populism are intense and relatively short. However, a conservative information network has been able to build upon right-wing populism that began in the late 1970s and has gathered momentum for more than two decades. The success of this effort was partly due to using conservative churches as Republican political clubhouses. Revisiting Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression might explain why the current right-wing populism has had considerable longevity. Lorenz did not talk about strong father vs. nurturing morality, but his idealists vs. realists are quite similar. The idealists believe in higher causes and a universal moral system, and they somehow believe that accepting biological evolution or seeing scientific explanations for human behavior that they lose some freedom. To the extent that they lack freedom, they prefer to trust a higher being and natural law. It is even better to trust a benevolent ruler than scientific explanations or those that rely entirely on reason. Frequently they discard natural, scientific explanations for those that are awe-inspiring. When traditional cultural values and norms appear to be threatened, these “idealists” venerate them even more and become their zealous defenders. Reason has a way of curbing humans’s aggressive instincts, but the idealists are less curbed by reason and are more likely to become zealots and militant enthusiasts.
Lorenz adds that as trusters of simple universal truths, “idealists” are perennial optimists. Even if their circumstances are deteriorating, they believe that by adhering to traditional values things are sure to get better; they will go down with the ship. The most important point is that when a society’s culture and welfare is threatened, the number of embattled idealists will continue at the same level or even grow. This appears to have happened. Since the 1960s, many have believed that American culture has been under attack. After September 11, 2001 the welfare and well being of America seemed to be clearly under attack, and many Americans found it increasingly necessary to place more trust in the executive branch of government and even surrender to it important civil liberties.
This outlook can be linked to what Hannah Arendt and Studs Terkel have written about banality. The idealist is prone toward the trivial, trite, and relatively meaningless. He or she is comfortable with the conventional wisdom spewed by the conservative elite and is not likely to accept unpleasant realities or complex arguments. The outlook is an addition to banality and “lack of serious thought that leads to fascism.”
In 2003, Republicans controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress, in large part because they had persuaded enough voters to forsake the political outlook of the New Deal and embrace the new conservatism. Moreover, “New Democrats,” a significant Democratic faction, had adopted many of the views of the neoliberals, either out of conviction or the calculation that it was necessary to stand a chance of being elected. After almost three decades of very effective propagandizing, they had practically banished from the public arena the idea that the health of the economy depended upon maintenance of a regulatory structure formulated during the New Deal. Conservatives had managed to persuade people that discussions of economic policy must focus on how to get more money in the hands of the wealthy and great corporations. This belief became political orthodoxy and shaped discussions of labor policy, the environment, and how much could be done to assist the poor and helpless. Over time, conservatives have succeeded in projecting their constructs of various social questions in a manner that has framed the thinking process of a great number of people on these matters. A public mood was created that became more and more receptive to conservative views.
Much depended upon very effective packaging of the conservative product, but often astonishingly liberal ineptitude was important. The process of contextualizing and defining social problems represents a great part of the political debate, and Republican conservatives were to demonstrate time and again mastery of the process. Without this process of reconstructing social reality, the world would be “represented as a jumble of random and chaotic events” with no contexts to make them meaningful. When Republicans defended President Bush’s decision to spy on telephone conversations without warrant, they put it simply as looking at telephone calls initiated by Al Qaeda, even though it was not consistent with how the monitoring work in practice. It was restated so many times that it seemed non-threatening to most Americans, and Congress, in the summer of 2007, even extended the administration’s power to monitor international telephone and e-mail traffic that passed through the United States. Warrantless monitoring was legalized for any communication originating outside the United States and directed to a U.S. citizen. There were no provisions for accountability or monitoring the program. The likelihood that the techniques employed would sweep in many domestic calls did not appear to be a problem, and even sixteen Democratic Senators joined in supporting the legislation.
When Samuel Alito was introduced as President Bush’s nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a brilliant marketing plan was used. It was all about his parent’s immigrant origins and his and their pursuit of the American Dream. His arch-conservative views on many issues never registered with the public. As Frank Rich wrote, “The selling of Samuel Alito is a perfect illustration of how our world works...he’d be presented as a humble exemplar of American values too mainstream to be labeled ‘out of the mainstream’ by his opponents. The conservative information network continually worked effectively at framing questions in their terms and building patterns of cognition and interpretation of social experience that would underpin Republican arguments in the political debate. Over time, a form of conservative group-think emerged, building a disposition to simply to screen out most information that contradicted t he conclusions this mindset promoted. Liberals lacked anything that would approximate this network of information generators.
Roger Ailes demonstrated near genius in marketing the “New” Richard Nixon in 1968. Michael Deaver, Reagan’s communications’ wizard, demonstrated similar skills and excelled at arranging superb photo-ops for Ronald Reagan. In recent years, the most effective practitioner of framing political messages has been Republican pollster Frank Luntz. His basic message was a” compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.” Under his guidance, Republicans learned how to use warm phrases that score well with focus groups and to apply them in whatever way seemed useful. During the debate over the younger Bush’s plans to change social security, they began using the term “privatization,” then switched to “private accounts” and finally to “personal accounts.” Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro call the language built on polling and focus groups “crafted talk.” More often than not, it is designed to conceal and deceive rather than to inform.
Words became something to be used rather than as signifier of actual situations of facts. During the discussion of “bird flu,” administration spokesmen learned that it was effective to state with mild irritation that the US was the first government to begin stockpiling an antiviral drug, when the fact was it was among last in the industrialized world to do so. When a cabinet officer delivered this misinformation on CNN, there was no one to question his facts. Earlier, Vice President Cheney calmly told CBS’s Face the Nation that his energy plan was almost completely consistent with the Sierra Club’s plan and that his plan offered absolutely no subsidies to the gas and oil industry.
According to traditional conservative thinkers, conservatism should be more an outlook and approach, and the very “negation of ideology.” Nevertheless, what came to be considered conservatism by the 1980s had all the hallmarks of an ideology. It was more anchored in theoretical propositions than in pragmatic considerations and concrete realities, but adherents clung to it with a fervor and even ferocity that only ideology and religion seem to inspire. Coupled with this ideology was a critique of liberalism that, like the ideology, took on the dimensions of religious belief. Long after a case could no longer be made for claiming Republicans were fiscal conservatives while Democrats were spenders, these claims were ritualistically repeated in election campaigns and conservative pundits. Selling this ideology and the critique of liberalism was an awesome accomplishment, and laid the foundation for the political order of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries.
Even far right political thought, which had been on the “borderlines of conservatism” in the early 1970s, had moved to the center by the Reagan years and was slowly inching its way into mainstream political thought. Indeed, through the Reagan administration, the New Right and its neoliberal allies were setting the terms of public debate. . A little more than a decade later, the George W. Bush administration was locking their views into law as national policy.
These developments could not have occurred had the conservatives not mastered the art of persuasion. Liberals, on the other hand, often appear to use approaches that overlook the importance of cultural factors and the need for a coherent, simple message. In fashioning a majority ideology, the conservatives had been able to incorporate elements that speak to the longings of most people. A successful conservative ideology also needs to manipulate popular longing for social solidarity and community in a way that disguises and legitimizes exploitation and social domination. Portraying liberals as members of an elite who have contempt for common people and traditional culture successfully did this.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
Republican strategists fully understood all this and, over three decades, succeeded in selling their policies to a majority of Americans. Liberals gave conservatives a huge opening to repackage and resell their ideas when they concluded that it was pointless to pursue arguments about ideology. At the Yale University commencement in 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced that “practical management of a modern economy” had trumped the “grand warfare of rival ideologies.” Speaking for Democrats, he seemed to be saying that if economic growth continued, there was no reason to pursue and refine ideological arguments. He was echoing Daniel Bell who had written about the end of ideology. Conservatives entered this ideological void, and with well-crafted arguments and “propelled by cascades of cash,” captured much of the ideological battlefield and “succeeded brilliantly.”
Advanced communications techniques were pioneered in the American advertising world and relied upon appeals to elemental emotions and messages and slogans that were endlessly repeated. Joseph Goebbels, The German master propagandist, claimed that he sold his party’s policies using American advertising techniques. The Republicans are far better financed than the Democrats, but a key to their success is deployment of advanced communications theory.
For thirty years, they have used “framing,” a structural approach to building concepts through continual repetition. It means that their spokesmen deliver the same message in the same words, when it comes to the central part of a message. In selecting words, they carefully neutralize concerns voters might have and make the weakness of their proposals sound like strong points. For example “The Clean Skies Act” actually stripped away many regulations that made air cleaner and reduced carbon content. “The Healthy Forests Act” actually threatens the environment by giving loggers the green light to cut down virgin trees on public lands they previously were forbidden to touch. Framing takes time, but continual repetition eventually works, building these frames into our psychological structures. If a nominee for the Supreme Court says enough times he has no worldview, we come to believe it even though everyone has some kind of worldview. “Deep framing” is the process of assigning an array of emotions to a word so that hearing that word instantly brings up the desired worldview. For example, the word “liberal” has processed in this way and evokes revulsion, fear, and contempt for so-called educated elitists. Another example is the term “liberal media.” This concept has been so effectively framed that people are given licenses to simply ignore any factual matter coming from the media that they do not want to consider.
The two greatest Republican accomplishments in framing were in redefining “liberal” to mean people who have a great variety of serious character defects. Equally important has been their ability to appropriate or co-opt the language of moral values so completely that many people who admit that Democratic policies are best for their economic well-being still vote Republican.
On the other hand, Democrats have yet to learn the simplest lessons about symbol manipulation and repetition.. Rhetoric is the “art of persuasion in the cause of victory,” and excellence in this art “ can too easily erode one’s devotion to truth” on the part of speakers and listeners alike. As Senator Ben Nelson lamented in 2005, the Democratic Party had been defined as wanting to “ban the Bible, burn the flag, promote same-sex marriage, rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance, and take away everybody’s guns and half a dozen other things that are typically to the left of most Americans.” More importantly, the Republican information machine has been very successful at “fundamentally misrepresenting the nature of its policy objectives.” Polling data consistently demonstrates that large majorities of Americans do not like most Republican policies, but the party’s propagandists have succeeded in masking their goals and selling policies as commodities that they are not. Some think this is the key to Republican success, rather than playing on the false consciousness generated by the cultural wars. The truth probably involves both.
Voters made angry and fearful by exploitation of cultural issues are not likely to see though the misrepresentation of economic policies that are likely to harm them. The same messaging machine, which includes a very healthy and assertive conservative press, has developed numerous effective ploys to intimidate the mainstream press into “me-too conformity.” Over time, mainstream journalists have learned “that their careers will be better served if they tilt right and avoid getting stuck with the ‘liberal’ label.” There is no doubt that the right is expert at intimidating the traditional press, but it is also possible that the press is sharply attuned to market forces and realizes that the conventional wisdom veers fairly far to the right.
Expertise in Framing the Message
Academicians and political theorists have repeatedly insisted that the success of democracy depends upon “omnicompetent” citizens who were well informed about public affairs. Unfortunately, there are few of these very desirable people. Bryan Caplan has shown that most people in democracies do not invest time in becoming politically informed or thinking about how public questions affect their life situations. Only half of Americans even know that each state has two senators and that a senator’s term is six years. Voters, he admits, have political views , but they are basically prejudices and ad hoc attitudes. Democracies falter and fail because people are persuaded to what those results through clever manipulation of their emotions and perceptions. Public opinion has come to be based on often-false images and mental maps that people have of the world around them. They make decisions in a “pseudo-environment” shaped by necessarily simplistic media reporting and by deliberate and very effective efforts to shape public opinion.
Marketing is most effective when it is “narrow casting” by focusing on hot button issues and arousing fear or anger. Assertions like “They will take your guns” “They will ban Bibles,” or “They will fund abortion” are certain to move voters. Marketing techniques created “post-factual,” “post-rational politics,” in which facts and reason were not the most important factors in influencing decisions. Stony Brook University scientist Charles Taber noted, “The Enlightenment model of dispassionate reason as the duty of citizenship is empirically bankrupt.” A neuroscientist would note that the problem is that the connections from the emotions to the cognitive systems of the mind are far stronger than visa versa. Those who know this and know how to manipulate the emotions are going to be successful in politics.
Because impressions created by marketers were all important, it was difficult to sell specific policies or positions. Candidates and political parties and cultural issues could be manipulated to enhance the appearances of both. Presidential politics became a branding exercise, in which the party and candidate were marketed like products. The images of candidates and parties were recreated in the manner of commercial brands with brand myths and histories. Like physical products they were founded in language and marketing claims. The way people feel about things is based on how they are named and described. The key to branding was continual repetition of the same themes. When dealing with clear non-sequiturs, it was necessary to go more slowly, be louder, and continue with the repetitions.
Democrats attempted to deploy these techniques, but they understood them imperfectly and would continue to focus too much on propositional arguments Republicans have developed remarkable expertise in messaging, while Democrats barely deserve the title neophyte. Republicans pioneered in applying marketing techniques to politics and assured the long-term effectiveness of their approach by building their own media machine which created and reinforced a purely artificial ideological world for a growing body of deeply committed supporters. Over time, much of the mainstream media came to cooperate by seldom challenging the output of this awesome propaganda machine.
Republican theorists and publicists had mastered the new discipline called “cognitive science,” which enabled them partly to decipher people’s mental maps. They learned that a great number of Americans thought in terms of Strict Father morality. For them, every human being was equipped with knowledge of absolute rights and wrong, and humans built character and virtue by self-discipline in overcoming their natural moral weakness. Basically, humans must be stimulated by rewards and punishments to conform to the universal moral order. The lack of personal character was at the root of societal problems, not the social and economic explanations offered by social scientists. It is a morality that prescribes strong medicines: stern punishments for illegal immigrants, long prison sentences, and even the death sentence.
Many adherents of this outlook go so far as to turn a blind eye to the torture of suspected terrorist detainees and might even believe orphanages are preferable for children of single mothers. Key elements of this outlook uphold the rights of a father to lead, provide for, and protect his family. Protecting gun ownership is seen as very important because the gun is the symbol of a father’s right to take care of the family. This emphasis on protecting the family against morally weak, evildoers also explains why these people believe it is nearly impossible to spend too much on the military. It is also important to protect the rich from unfair taxation and regulation because they are the ideal citizens, proving that the system works and provides role models for all others. This explains why the 1992 Republican National Convention went wild when Dan Quayle asked, “Why should the best people be punished?” People who oppose this moral vision must be evil, especially homosexuals, who threaten the leadership role of the father. These people lack the moral strength to resist their base impulses.
The conservative moral vision is a natural moral order that is more or less reflected in the nature of things as they are. Hence, men were expected to lead women. Many still believe that whites were destined to lead whites and that Christians were placed over Jews. This outlook is not complex, and political arguments are easily framed in these terms. On the other hand, liberals believe in nurturing family morality. They place more emphasis on reason and science and are more issue-oriented. They distrust framing most political questions in moral terms, and their sense of morality is more nuanced. All this means that it is far more difficult for liberals to frame their positions in terms that believers in strict father morality can understand. Fortunately, many people’s outlooks blend the two approaches to morality, but the conservatives have a great advantage in being able easily to tap into their beliefs in strict family morality.
Informed by the writings of Richard Hofstadter, historians have long understood the connection between this sort of moral reasoning and right-wing populism. But there has been a tendency to believe that outbursts of right-wing populism are intense and relatively short. However, a conservative information network has been able to build upon right-wing populism that began in the late 1970s and has gathered momentum for more than two decades. The success of this effort was partly due to using conservative churches as Republican political clubhouses. Revisiting Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression might explain why the current right-wing populism has had considerable longevity. Lorenz did not talk about strong father vs. nurturing morality, but his idealists vs. realists are quite similar. The idealists believe in higher causes and a universal moral system, and they somehow believe that accepting biological evolution or seeing scientific explanations for human behavior that they lose some freedom. To the extent that they lack freedom, they prefer to trust a higher being and natural law. It is even better to trust a benevolent ruler than scientific explanations or those that rely entirely on reason. Frequently they discard natural, scientific explanations for those that are awe-inspiring. When traditional cultural values and norms appear to be threatened, these “idealists” venerate them even more and become their zealous defenders. Reason has a way of curbing humans’s aggressive instincts, but the idealists are less curbed by reason and are more likely to become zealots and militant enthusiasts.
Lorenz adds that as trusters of simple universal truths, “idealists” are perennial optimists. Even if their circumstances are deteriorating, they believe that by adhering to traditional values things are sure to get better; they will go down with the ship. The most important point is that when a society’s culture and welfare is threatened, the number of embattled idealists will continue at the same level or even grow. This appears to have happened. Since the 1960s, many have believed that American culture has been under attack. After September 11, 2001 the welfare and well being of America seemed to be clearly under attack, and many Americans found it increasingly necessary to place more trust in the executive branch of government and even surrender to it important civil liberties.
This outlook can be linked to what Hannah Arendt and Studs Terkel have written about banality. The idealist is prone toward the trivial, trite, and relatively meaningless. He or she is comfortable with the conventional wisdom spewed by the conservative elite and is not likely to accept unpleasant realities or complex arguments. The outlook is an addition to banality and “lack of serious thought that leads to fascism.”
In 2003, Republicans controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress, in large part because they had persuaded enough voters to forsake the political outlook of the New Deal and embrace the new conservatism. Moreover, “New Democrats,” a significant Democratic faction, had adopted many of the views of the neoliberals, either out of conviction or the calculation that it was necessary to stand a chance of being elected. After almost three decades of very effective propagandizing, they had practically banished from the public arena the idea that the health of the economy depended upon maintenance of a regulatory structure formulated during the New Deal. Conservatives had managed to persuade people that discussions of economic policy must focus on how to get more money in the hands of the wealthy and great corporations. This belief became political orthodoxy and shaped discussions of labor policy, the environment, and how much could be done to assist the poor and helpless. Over time, conservatives have succeeded in projecting their constructs of various social questions in a manner that has framed the thinking process of a great number of people on these matters. A public mood was created that became more and more receptive to conservative views.
Much depended upon very effective packaging of the conservative product, but often astonishingly liberal ineptitude was important. The process of contextualizing and defining social problems represents a great part of the political debate, and Republican conservatives were to demonstrate time and again mastery of the process. Without this process of reconstructing social reality, the world would be “represented as a jumble of random and chaotic events” with no contexts to make them meaningful. When Republicans defended President Bush’s decision to spy on telephone conversations without warrant, they put it simply as looking at telephone calls initiated by Al Qaeda, even though it was not consistent with how the monitoring work in practice. It was restated so many times that it seemed non-threatening to most Americans, and Congress, in the summer of 2007, even extended the administration’s power to monitor international telephone and e-mail traffic that passed through the United States. Warrantless monitoring was legalized for any communication originating outside the United States and directed to a U.S. citizen. There were no provisions for accountability or monitoring the program. The likelihood that the techniques employed would sweep in many domestic calls did not appear to be a problem, and even sixteen Democratic Senators joined in supporting the legislation.
When Samuel Alito was introduced as President Bush’s nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a brilliant marketing plan was used. It was all about his parent’s immigrant origins and his and their pursuit of the American Dream. His arch-conservative views on many issues never registered with the public. As Frank Rich wrote, “The selling of Samuel Alito is a perfect illustration of how our world works...he’d be presented as a humble exemplar of American values too mainstream to be labeled ‘out of the mainstream’ by his opponents. The conservative information network continually worked effectively at framing questions in their terms and building patterns of cognition and interpretation of social experience that would underpin Republican arguments in the political debate. Over time, a form of conservative group-think emerged, building a disposition to simply to screen out most information that contradicted t he conclusions this mindset promoted. Liberals lacked anything that would approximate this network of information generators.
Roger Ailes demonstrated near genius in marketing the “New” Richard Nixon in 1968. Michael Deaver, Reagan’s communications’ wizard, demonstrated similar skills and excelled at arranging superb photo-ops for Ronald Reagan. In recent years, the most effective practitioner of framing political messages has been Republican pollster Frank Luntz. His basic message was a” compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.” Under his guidance, Republicans learned how to use warm phrases that score well with focus groups and to apply them in whatever way seemed useful. During the debate over the younger Bush’s plans to change social security, they began using the term “privatization,” then switched to “private accounts” and finally to “personal accounts.” Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro call the language built on polling and focus groups “crafted talk.” More often than not, it is designed to conceal and deceive rather than to inform.
Words became something to be used rather than as signifier of actual situations of facts. During the discussion of “bird flu,” administration spokesmen learned that it was effective to state with mild irritation that the US was the first government to begin stockpiling an antiviral drug, when the fact was it was among last in the industrialized world to do so. When a cabinet officer delivered this misinformation on CNN, there was no one to question his facts. Earlier, Vice President Cheney calmly told CBS’s Face the Nation that his energy plan was almost completely consistent with the Sierra Club’s plan and that his plan offered absolutely no subsidies to the gas and oil industry.
According to traditional conservative thinkers, conservatism should be more an outlook and approach, and the very “negation of ideology.” Nevertheless, what came to be considered conservatism by the 1980s had all the hallmarks of an ideology. It was more anchored in theoretical propositions than in pragmatic considerations and concrete realities, but adherents clung to it with a fervor and even ferocity that only ideology and religion seem to inspire. Coupled with this ideology was a critique of liberalism that, like the ideology, took on the dimensions of religious belief. Long after a case could no longer be made for claiming Republicans were fiscal conservatives while Democrats were spenders, these claims were ritualistically repeated in election campaigns and conservative pundits. Selling this ideology and the critique of liberalism was an awesome accomplishment, and laid the foundation for the political order of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries.
Even far right political thought, which had been on the “borderlines of conservatism” in the early 1970s, had moved to the center by the Reagan years and was slowly inching its way into mainstream political thought. Indeed, through the Reagan administration, the New Right and its neoliberal allies were setting the terms of public debate. . A little more than a decade later, the George W. Bush administration was locking their views into law as national policy.
These developments could not have occurred had the conservatives not mastered the art of persuasion. Liberals, on the other hand, often appear to use approaches that overlook the importance of cultural factors and the need for a coherent, simple message. In fashioning a majority ideology, the conservatives had been able to incorporate elements that speak to the longings of most people. A successful conservative ideology also needs to manipulate popular longing for social solidarity and community in a way that disguises and legitimizes exploitation and social domination. Portraying liberals as members of an elite who have contempt for common people and traditional culture successfully did this.
Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum
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