Note: This is Part II of a three-part series intended as a broad rather than deep overview of the Christo-Fascist Right's rise to near-domination of US government. Each of its links leads to a world of other links from which the range of individuals, families, businesses, and organizations which comprise it can be identified and explored. The reach and power of the Christo-Fascist Right should horrify every sentient American. See Part I. Part III. The series will be updated and revised as time and information are available.
Turns out it wasn’t drugs, sex, or hair that galvanized powerful stakeholders in a full-scale, brilliant, long-term reactionary war. It was, above all, what was framed as the new generation's “frontal assault on free enterprise”―ironically an assault grounded, among other sources, in profound regard for the US Constitution.
In the 1970s, two camps emerged, each bitterly opposed to the nation’s movement toward its constitutional potential—a Liberal society with at least some of its most cannibalistic and plutocratic capitalist tendencies at least somewhat constrained by tax and regulatory policy.
Among early leader/thinkers representing the secular conservative establishment were
Lewis Powell, later Nixon’s appointee to the US Supreme Court, and economist
Milton Friedman, father of Neo-conservative "free market" economics (see
The Shock Doctrine).
Among early leader/thinkers representing hard-core cultural and theological dissidents were the members of a strategy-coordinating body called the
Coalition on Revival (COR), headed by
Christian Reconstructionist minister
Jay Grimstead, then a
Young Life regional leader trained at Fuller Theological Seminary. Its 60-member steering committee includes or included multimillionaire
Left Behind series author Tim LaHaye, his wife, Beverly, founder of
Concerned Women for America,
home schooling pioneer and fundamentalist
Patrick Henry College Chancellor
Michael Farris, Dee Jepsen, board chair of Pat Robertson’s
Regent University, and
Don Wildmon of the
American Family Association.
Significantly, COR members including
Gary North and Tim LaHaye are also founders of the rightwing
Council for National Policy, an ultra-secretive and ultra-powerful strategy organization of Republican strategists, activists, and financiers.
Another
major player in the US and global Relgious Right is
Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, international arms merchant, and owner of the rightwing
Washington Times newspaper empire.
A good part of the back story of the intense secular effort to reverse the “liberalization” of the country can be found at
MediaTransparency. Its centerpiece is a
memorandum from then corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to a colleague at the US Chamber of Commerce. The Powell memorandum laid out a comprehensive, coordinated strategy for a militantly conservative takeover of law, business, economics, government, and media, and to put a stop to such self-restraint as there was on the part of most US corporations.
The story of the Coalition on Revival is a placeholder in a sense.
It is a heads-up briefing intended to call attention to the wealth and power of the numerous direct and indirect allies and offshoots of Grimstead and his formative biblical Reconstructionist organizers. Because of the secrecy and sheer extent of parts of the “Religious Right” movement in the US, the full story is harder to get at, and certainly won’t be found here.
However, much of the story has been gradually exposed by folks like
Frederick Clarkson,
Skipp Porteous,
Sara Diamond,
Theocracy Watch, MediaTransparency,
Americans United for Separation of Church and State,
Cursor.org,
RightWeb,
The Public Eye,
People for the American Way, and others, to whom I am (we are all) hugely indebted.
At its center is a comprehensive strategic plan to transform the United States from a constitutional democracy to a theocracy governed by Mosaic law as presented in the “Old Testament” of the Christian Bible, King James translation. These strategic documents emerged in the mid-1980s. Critical to its growth and influence has been our determination not to take it seriously. We blind ourselves to it by dismissing the Christian Right as just a “lunatic fringe,” thereby becoming its greatest asset.
Actually, it turns out that what many regard as merely ad hoc attacks on “liberalism” was actually a huge movement coordinated and focused by the steering committee of COR. COR's
17 Worldview Documents are, for us, a roadmap for deciphering the enormity and coordination of numerous legislative, judicial, executive branch, domestic and foreign policy, and cultural developments that have occurred in the US in the last 20 years. Clearly, as important as the strategy itself was the covenant sworn among its members to fulfill it, even to the point of martyrdom.
From these strategic deliberations--usually unknown to the rank and file evangelical-charismatic-fundamentalist churchgoer--eventually came hugely influential, richly funded for-profit and nonprofit projects in such spheres as media acquisitions/operations, music, entertainment, fiction, video games, fundraising, public relations, political organizing, political action, social networking, church-building, education, science and medicine, the family, and, of course, in the Republican Party. On balance, the constitutional democracy that we know has been under attack from every direction for more than 20 years, with great effect.
The most significant political development stemmed, ironically, from the failure of the Moral Majority to put Pat Robertson in the White House in 1988. It was a highly successful, brilliant strategy to
take over the Republican Party secretly, from the grassroots up, and was engineered by men like
Ralph Reed, the deceptively baby-faced pal of recently convicted GOP operative
Jack Abramoff and the then Executive Director of the
Christian Coalition of America, successor to the Moral Majority. The rest of us first noticed it in 1991-1992, following what is now known as the
San Diego Stealth Initiative. This strategy and its “fifteen percent solution” gave the “Christian Right” ownership of the Republican Party.
Today, entities like
The Federalist Society, the
Madison Project, and the Council on National Policy, among other conservative oligarchs, determine who will candidate for our appellate courts, the Supreme Court, and other high public office.
About the Federalist Society,
Theocracy Watch reported:
The Federalist Society formed twenty years ago in reaction to the powers the Supreme Court was granting the federal government. It is a network of lawyers, elected officials and scholars who want to free corporations from government regulations. It is hostile to civil rights, environmental protections, worker safety laws, a separation between church and state and more.
Some prominent leaders of the Religious Right play a dominant role in the Federalist Society. For example former President of the Christian Coalition, Donald Hodel is a board member. Twenty four of President Bush's top cabinet members and most of his court nominations are members of the Federalist Society. The list includes John Ashcroft, Attorney General; Spencer Abraham, Secretary of Energy; Gail Norton, Secretary of the Interior; and Theodore Olson, Solicitor General. Other notable members are Justices Scalia and Thomas, Orrin Hatch, Kenneth Starr.
People for the American Way prepared an in-depth report. The Federalist Society: From Obscurity to Power
The Christian Coalition, Phyllis Schlafly's
Eagle Forum,
Focus on the Family, and dozens more obviously well-funded organizations deliver millions of charismatic, evangelical, and fundamentalist voters to the Republican Party, aided by thousands of small and large churches in flagrant defiance of tax law. Naturally, this criminal enterprise is ignored by the Republican Party, which prefers to focus its tax watchdogs on progressive churches.
Meanwhile, these and hundreds more—think tanks like the
Heritage Foundation, political action organizations, media behemoths like the
Christian Broadcasting Network, and even BlackwaterUSA, a private mercenary army--many of which are or have been funded by the Coors family, Richard Mellon Scaife, Erik Prince, the Texas Hunt family, and other super-wealthy scions or dynasties—exist for one overarching purpose: to ensure that the rest of us--religion and
Constitution notwithstanding--live according to their fundamentalist interpretation of the
Bible and the
Constitution, by force if necessary.
How are they doing? It has taken 30 years, vast resources, brilliant strategizing, and dogged effort, but today George W. Bush is in the White House. Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia sit on the US Supreme Court. Senators, congressmen, state governors and legislators too numerous to mention belong to this movement. The right of choice is about to go away and the right of privacy is in the gunsights. Thousands of public documents have been and are being hidden by Adminstration operatives, and the President and Vice President and BlackwaterUSA and Scooter Libby reside in a realm above the law. Gay and lesbian people—-not to mention Democrats and liberals-are being demonized systematically by techniques developed in pre-War Germany. Our President speaks only to Republicans while using our tax dollars, and as we've seen recently, Republicans speak mostly only to white people. Far-right conservatives--many Christian conservatives--have extensive involvement in the armaments industry and in the US intelligence apparatus. George H.W. Bush was CIA head before he was Reagan's Vice President and, later, President.
Colleges like Patrick Henry, Liberty U., and Regent are training cadres of lawyers every year, and now contribute phalanxes of interns to the White House, the Justice Department, Health and Human Services, State, Education, and Defense. Media such as Fox, Trinity Broadcasting Network, and Clear Channel determine FTC media ownership policies and decide what a generation of Americans will hear and see. Young Life and similar powerful campus-based propaganda ministries flourish, and the attack on public schools is visible in the home schooling movement mostly coordinated by centralized Christianist curriculum and materials, the voucher program,
No Child Left Behind, and a national war on teachers. Government scientists are gagged on subjects like women’s reproductive health, global warming, stem cell research, environmental destruction, genetic engineering, food safety and the global practices of agribusiness. Creationism is being taught in our schools as serious science. Our military academies are being evangelized, and our military are evangelized and used by white supremacists as training camps.
These are, of course, also partly due to the influence of secular conservative corporate interests, because there is enormous overlap between the secular Right and the Religious Right, as the person of BlackwaterUSA’s Erik Prince and the Coors and Hunt families and others illustrate.
But wait, there’s more. What in the sixties had begun to be a productive dialog between corporations and progressive Americans has become a multinational monolog, a one-way, top-down, like-it-or-lump it frenzy of profit making without social accountability or, increasingly, regulation. That’s the free market way. (See Naomi Klein's
The Shock Doctrine.)
From USAID, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank bringing destitution to a country near you, to the blatant corruption associated with Halliburton, KBR, BlackwaterUSA, and other war profiteers, to the erosion of constitutional rights and fundamental freedoms brought by
The Patriot Acts, to the control of healthcare by pharmaceuticals and for-profit hospitals, insurors, and providers, to the manufacture of genetically altered crops that exterminate natural counterparts just by being planted, to the privatization of water itself, to the outsourcing of US jobs, to the systematic suppression of US labor rights, to the orchestrated dumbing-down of the public by TV and radio that give 24/7 coverage to trivia and propaganda but ignore (suppress) news that might damage the Right’s agenda, to energy policy set by big oil--all this and more can be traced, directly or indirectly, to Lewis Powell’s brilliant coordinating strategy for reinstituting unregulated “free enterprise,” and to the toxic influence of the Religious Right.
This summary sketch is merely an overview. Daunting as it is, there is also good news. The truth always outs, the majority of the American people want none of this, and, as we have begun to see in the last two years, over-reaching movements have a way of falling.
Not least, as the Right learned from the Left in the seventies, strategy per se is not partisan. It can be adopted by the opposition. The Left could do worse than pursuing media ownership and well-designed,
coordinated political organization, voter registration, and grassroots Party change models pioneered by the Right, while keeping its eyes, mind, and heart fixed firmly on the Constitution and the safety and wellbeing of the commonwealth.
Posts
