[stored as afdoc001.txt]
Subject: Buchanan & Fascism: A Serious Look
From: Chip Berlet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 1996/02/18
Message-Id: <APC&1'0'65d8b16b'[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Newsgroups: alt.politics.democrats.d
Buchanan & Fascism: A Serious Look
Some of the issues being raised in connection with Pat Buchanan are
complex. Guilt by association is not an appropriate standard by which
to judge a public figure. Yet there are serious questions about whether
or not some aspects of Pat Buchanan's philosophy can be seen as
promoting racism, antisemitism, sexism, and homophobia, even when he
and his campaign aides are genuinely willing to condemn these
phenomenon. There are many questions not being asked, or being answered
in ignorance.
What is the difference between reactionary racial nationalism and far
right race hate groups?
Why did Bill Bennet once say that Pat Buchanan flirts with fascism?
Why does Buchanan think the "Goals 2000" education reforms and Outcomes
Based Education are part of a secular humanist conspiracy?
Why does Buchanan seem so conservative on social issues but support
"Big Government" when it comes to protectionism and trade?
What does fascism look like as a mass movement?
The answers to these and other questions can be found in this text
file.
======================================================================
Selected excerpts from the book _Eyes Right!: Challenging the Right-
Wing Backlash_, (Anthology). Chip Berlet, ed. Boston: South End Press,
1995.
======================================================================
For a collection of the full text of these and other articles: URL
http://www.publiceye.org/pra/ Select the Gopher, then pick the Reports
menu.
======================================================================
Theocracy & White Supremacy
Behind the Culture War to Restore Traditional Values
(Selected paragraphs)
by Chip Berlet & Margaret Quigley
As the United States slides toward the twenty-first century, the major
mass movements challenging the bipartisan status quo are not found on
the left of the political spectrum, but on the right.
It is easy to see the dangers to democracy posed by far right forces
such as armed militias, neonazis, and racist skinheads. However, hard
right forces such as dogmatic religious movements, regressive populism,
and White racial nationalism also are attacking democratic values in
our country. Antidemocratic sectors of the hard right are distinct from
traditional conservatism and political libertarianism, although they
share some common roots and branches. Antidemocratic sectors of the
hard right are distinct from traditional conservatism and political
libertarianism, although they also share some common roots and
branches.
The best known sector of the hard right--dogmatic religious movements-
-is often called the "Religious Right." It substantially dominates the
Republican Party in at least 10 (and perhaps as many as 30) of the 50
states. As part of an aggressive grassroots campaign, these groups have
targeted electoral races from school board's to state legislatures to
campaigns for the US Senate and House of Representatives. They helped
elect dozens of hardline ultraconservatives to the House of
Representatives in 1994. This successful social movement politically
mobilizes a traditionalist mass base from a growing pious constituency
of evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, pentacostal, and orthodox
churchgoers.
The goal of many leaders of this ultraconservative religious movement
is imposing a narrow theological agenda on secular society. The
predominantly Christian leadership envisions a religiously-based
authoritarian society ; therefore we prefer to describe this movement
as the "theocratic right." A theocrat is someone who supports a form of
government where the actions of leaders are seen as sanctioned by God--
where the leaders claim they are carrying out God's will. The central
threat to democracy posed by the theocratic right is not that its
leaders are religious, or fundamentalist, or right wing--but that they
justify their political, legislative, and regulatory agenda as
fulfilling God's plan.
Along with the theocratic right, two other hard right political
movements pose a grave threat to democracy : regressive populism,
typified by diverse groups ranging from members of the John Birch
Society out to members of the patriot and armed militia movements; and
White racial nationalism, promoted by Pat Buchanan and his shadow,
David Duke of Louisiana.
The theocratic right, regressive populism, and White racial nationalism
make up a hard right political sector that is distinct from and
sometimes in opposition to mainstream Republicanism and the
internationalist wing of corporate conservatism.
Finally, there is the militant, overtly racist far right that includes
the open White supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members, Christian Patriot s,
racist skinheads, neonazis, and right-wing revolutionaries. Although
numerically smaller, the far right is a serious political factor in
some rural areas, and its propaganda promoting violence reaches into
major metropolitan centers where it encourages alienated young people
to commit hate crimes against people of color, Jews, and gays and
lesbians, among other targets. The electoral efforts of Buchanan and
Duke serve as a bridge between the ultraconservative hard right and
these far right movements. The armed milita movement is a confluence of
regressive populism, White racial nationalism, and the racist and
antisemitic far right.
All four of these hard right activist movements are antidemocratic in
nature, promoting in various combinations and to varying degrees
authoritarianism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, nativism, racism,
sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, demagoguery, and scapegoating. Each
wing of the antidemocratic right has a slightly different vision of the
ideal nation.
The theocratic right's ideal is an authoritarian society where
Christian men interpret God's will as law. Women are helpmates, and
children are the property of their parents. Earth must submit to the
dominion of those to whom God has granted power. People are basically
sinful, and must be restrained by harsh punitive laws. Social problems
are caused by Satanic conspiracies aided and abetted by liberals,
homosexuals, feminists, and secular humanists. These forces must be
exposed and neutralized.
Newspaper columnist Cal Thomas, a long-standing activist in the
theocratic right, recently suggested that churches and synagogues take
over the welfare system "because these institutions would also deal
with the hearts and souls of men and women." The churches "could reach
root causes of poverty --a lack of personal responsibility," Thomas
wrote, expressing a hardline Calvinist theology. "If government is
always there to bail out people who have children out of wedlock, if
there is no disincentive (like hunger) for doing for one's self, then
large numbers of people will feel no need to get themselves together
and behave responsibly."
For regressive populism, the ideal is America First ultra-patriotism
and xenophobia wedded to economic Darwinism, with no regulations
restraining entrepreneurial capitalism. The collapsing society calls
for a strong man in leadership, perhaps even a benevolent despot who
rules by organically expressing the will of the people to stop
lawlessness and immorality. Social problems are caused by corrupt and
lazy government officials who are bleeding the common people dry in a
conspiracy fostered by secret elites, which must be exposed and
neutralized.
Linda Thompson, a latter-day Joan of Arc for the patriot movement,
represents the most militant wing of regressive populism. She appointed
herself "Acting Adjutant General" of the armed militias that have
formed cells across the United States. Operating out of the American
Justice Federation of Indianapolis, Thompson's group warns of secret
plots by "corrupt leaders" involving "Concentration Camps, Implantable
Bio Chips, Mind Control, Laser Weapons," and "neuro-linguistic
programming" on behalf of bankers who "control the economy" and created
the illegal income tax.
The racial nationalists' ideal oscillates between brutish
authoritarianism and vulgar fascism in service of White male supremacy.
Unilateral militarism abroad and repression at home are utilized to
force compliance. Social problems are caused by uncivilized people of
color, lower-class foreigners, and dual-loyalist Jews, who must all be
exposed and neutralized.
Samuel Francis, the prototypical racial nationalist, writes columns
warning against attempts to "wipe out traditional White, American,
Christian, and Western Culture," which he blames on multiculturalism.
Francis's solutions:
Americans who want to conserve their civilization need to
get rid of elites who want to wreck it, but they also need to
kick out the vagrant savages who have wandered across the
border, now claim our country as their own, and impose their
cultures upon us. If there are any Americans left in San
Jose, they might start taking back their country by taking
back their own city....You don't find statues to Quetzalcoatl
in Vermont.
For the far right, the ideal is White revolution to overthrow the
corrupt regime and restore an idealized natural biological order.
Social problems are caused by crafty Jews manipulating inferior people
of color. They must be exposed and neutralized.
The Truth at Last is a racist far right tabloid that features such
headlines as "Jews Demand Black Leaders Ostracize Farrakhan," "Clinton
Continues Massive Appointments of Minorities," and "Adopting Blacks
into White Families Does Not Raise Their IQ," which concluded that
"only the preservation of the White race can save
civilization....Racial intermarriage produces a breed of lower-IQ
mongrel people."
There are constant differences and debates within the right, as well as
considerable overlap along the edges. The relationships are complex:
the Birchers feud with Perot on trade issues, even though their other
basic themes are similar, and the theocratic right has much in common
with regressive populism, though the demographics of their respective
voting blocs appear to be remarkably distinct. These antidemocratic
sectors of the hard right are also distinct from traditional
conservatism and political libertarianism, although they share some
common roots and branches.
All of these antidemocratic tendencies are trying to build grassroots
mass movements to support their agendas which vary in degrees of
militancy and zealousness of ideology, yet all of which (consciously or
unconsciously) promote varieties of White privilege and Christian
dominion. These are activist movements that seek a mass base. Across
the full spectrum of the right one hears calls for a new populist
revolt.
All of these antidemocratic tendencies are trying to build grassroots
mass movements to support their agendas which vary in degrees of
militancy and zealousness of ideology, yet all of which (consciously or
unconsciously) promote varieties of White privilege and Christian
dominion. These are activist movements that seek a mass base. Across
the full spectrum of the right one hears calls for a new populist
revolt.
Many people presume that all populist movements are naturally
progressive and want to move society to the left, but history teaches
us otherwise. In his book The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin
explains how populism is a style of organizing. Populism can move to
the left or right. It can be tolerant or intolerant. In her book
Populism, Margaret Canovan defined two main branches of Populism:
agrarian and political.
Agrarian populism worldwide has three categories: movements of
commodity farmers, movements of subsistence peasants, and movements of
intellectuals who wistfully romanticize the hard-working farmers and
peasants. Political populism includes not only populist democracy,
championed by progressives from the LaFollettes of Wisconsin to Jesse
Jackson, but also politicians' populism, reactionary populism, and
populist dictatorship. The latter three antidemocratic forms of
populism characterize the movements of Ross Perot, Pat Robertson, and
Pat Buchanan, three straight White Christian men trying to ride the
same horse.
Of the hundreds of hard right groups, the most influential is the
Christian Coalition led by televangelist and corporate mogul Pat
Robertson. Because of Robertson's smooth style and easy access to
power, most mainstream journalists routinely ignore his
authoritarianism, bigotry, and paranoid dabbling in conspiracy
theories.
Robertson's gallery of conspirators parallels the roster of the John
Birch Society, including the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati, the
Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. In
Robertson's book The New World Order, he trumps the Birchers (their
founder called Dwight Eisenhower a communist agent) by alluding to an
anti-Christian conspiracy that supposedly began in ancient Babylon--a
theory that evokes historic anti-Jewish bigotry and resembles the
notions of the fascist demagogue Lyndon LaRouche, who is routinely
dismissed by the corporate media as a crackpot. Robertson's homophobia
is profound. He is also a religious bigot who has repeatedly said that
Hindus and Muslims are not morally qualified to hold government posts.
"If anybody understood what Hindus really believe," says Robertson,
"there would be no doubt that they have no business administering
government policies in a country that favors freedom and equality."
Robertson's embrace of authoritarian theocracy is equally robust:
"There will never be world peace until God's house and
God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at
the top of the world. How can there be peace when drunkards,
drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of
Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money
changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and
homosexuals are on top?"
Despite its successes, the hard right felt that Reagan lacked a true
commitment to their ideology. In 1988, during Reagan's second term,
some key New Right leaders, including Weyrich, Viguerie, and Phillips,
began denouncing Reagan as a "useful idiot" and dupe of the KGB, and
even a traitor over his arms control negotiations with the Soviet
Union.
Under the Bush Administration, this branch of the right wing had less
influence. It was this perceived loss of influence within the
Republican Party, among other factors, that led to the highly
publicized schism in the late 1980s between the two factions of the New
Right that came to be called the paleoconservatives and the
neoconservatives.
Patrick Buchanan, who says proudly, "We are Old Right and Old Church,"
emerged from this fracas as the leader of the paleoconservatives. (The
term neoconservatives, once restricted to a small group of
intellectuals centered around Commentary magazine, came within this
context to refer to all conservatives to the left of the
paleoconservatives, despite substantial differences among them. For
example, traditional neoconservatives like Midge Decter were concerned
with a perceived deterioration of US culture, while the conventional
conservatives at the Heritage Foundation were concerned almost
exclusively with the economy.)
The paleoconservatives' America First policy supports isolationism or
unilateralism in foreign affairs, coupled with a less reverent attitude
toward an unregulated free market and support for an aggressive
domestic policy to implement New Right social policies, such as the
criminalization of sodomy and abortion.
The paleoconservatives are also more explicitly racialist and anti-
democratic than the neoconservatives, who continue to support
immigration, civil rights, and limited government.
After the election of Clinton, the New Right alliance eventually
collapsed. That became clear during the Gulf War, when Buchanan's
bigotry was suddenly discovered by his former allies in the
neoconservative movement. Neoconservatives who championed the anti-
Sandinista Nicaraguan contras were offered posts in the Clinton
Administration. And Barry Goldwater, toast of the reactionaries in
1964, lambasted the narrow-minded bigotry of the theocratic right,
which owes its birth to his failed presidential bid.
The 1992 Republican Party convention represented the ascendancy of hard
right forces, primarily the theocratic right. The platform was the most
conservative ever, and speakers called repeatedly for a cultural war
against secular humanism.
John C. Green is a political scientist and director of the Ray C. Bliss
Institute at the University of Akron in Ohio. With a small group of
colleagues, Green has studied the influence of Christian evangelicals
on recent elections, and has found that, contrary to popular opinion,
the nasty and divisive rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and
Marilyn Quayle at the 1992 Republican Convention was not as significant
a factor in the defeat of Bush as were unemployment and the general
state of the economy. On balance, he believes, the Republicans gained
more votes than they lost in 1992 by embracing the theocratic right.
"Christian evangelicals played a significant role in mobilizing voters
and casting votes for the Bush-Quayle ticket," says Green.
Green and his colleagues, James L. Guth and Kevin Hill, wrote a study
entitled Faith and Election: The Christian Right in Congressional
Campaigns 1978-1988. They found that the theocratic right was most
active--and apparently successful--when three factors converged:
***The demand for Christian Right activism by discontented
constituencies.
***Religious organizations that supplied resources for such
activism.
***Appropriate choices in the deployment of such resources by
movement leaders.
The authors see the Christian Right's recent emphasis on grassroots
organizing as a strategic choice, and conclude that "the conjunction of
motivations, resources, and opportunities reveals the political
character of the Christian right: much of its activity was a calculated
response to real grievances by increasingly self-conscious and
empowered traditionalists."
The Roots of the Culture War
Spanning the breadth of the antidemocratic hard right is the banner of
the Culture War. The idea of the Culture War was promoted by strategist
Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation. In 1987, Weyrich
commissioned a study, Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National
Agenda, which argued that cultural issues provided antiliberalism with
a more unifying concept than economic conservatism. Cultural
Conservatism: Theory and Practice followed in 1991.
Earlier, Weyrich had sponsored the 1982 book The Homosexual Agenda and
the 1987 Gays, AIDS, and You, which helped spawn successive and
successful waves of homophobia. The Free Congress Foundation, founded
and funded with money from the Coors Beer family fortune, is the key
strategic think tank backing Robertson's Christian Coalition, which has
built an effective grassroots movement to wage the Culture War. For
Robertson, the Culture War opposes sinister forces wittingly or
unwittingly doing the bidding of Satan. This struggle for the soul of
America takes on metaphysical dimensions combining historic elements of
the Crusades and the Inquisition. The Christian Coalition could
conceivably evolve into a more mainstream conservative political
movement, or--especially if the economy deteriorates--it could build a
mass base for fascism similar to the clerical fascist movements of mid-
century Europe.
For decades anti-communism was the glue that bound together the various
tendencies on the right. Ironically, the collapse of communism in
Europe allowed the US political right to shift its primary focus from
an extreme and hyperbolic anti-communism, militarism, and aggressive
foreign policy to domestic issues of culture and national identity.
Multiculturalism, political correctness, and traditional values became
the focus of this new struggle over culture. An early and influential
jeremiad in the Culture War was Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of
the American Mind.
But neither the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union, nor
the publication of Bloom's book accounts for the success of this
Culture War in capturing the high ground in popular discourse. Instead,
it resulted from the victory of hard-right forces within the New Right
(which helped lead to its demise as a coalition), and the concomitant
embrace by hard right activists of a nativist, theocratic ideology that
challenged the very notion of a secular, pluralistic democracy.
At the heart of this Culture War, or kulturkampf, as Patrick Buchanan
calls it, is a paranoid conspiratorial view of leftist secular
humanism, dating to the turn of the century and dependent upon powerful
but rarely stated presumptions of racial nationalism based on
Eurocentric White supremacy, Christian theocracy, and subversive
liberal treachery.
The nativist right at the turn of the century first popularized the
idea that there was a secular humanist conspiracy trying to steer the
US from a God -centered society to a socialist, atheistic society. The
idea was linked from its beginnings to an extreme fear of communism,
conceptualized as a "red menace." The conspiracy became
institutionalized in the American political scene and took on a
metaphysical nature, according to analyst Frank Donner:
The root anti-subversive impulse was fed by the [Communist]
Menace. Its power strengthened with the passage of time, by
the late twenties its influence had become more pervasive
and folkish.... A slightly secularized version, widely
shared in rural and small-town America, postulated a doomsday
conflict between decent upright folk and radicalism--alien,
satanic, immorality incarnate.
This conspiratorial world view continued to animate the hard right.
According to contemporary conspiratorial myth, liberal treachery in
service of Godless secular humanism has been "dumbing down"
schoolchildren with the help of the National Education Association to
prepare the country for totalitarian rule under a "One World Government
" and "New World Order." This became the source of an underlying theme
of the armed militia movement.
This nativist-Americanist branch of the hard right (or the pseudo-
conservative, paranoid right, as Richard Hofstadter termed it in his
classic essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics") came to
dominate the right wing of the Republican Party, and included Patrick
Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Pat Robertson's Christian
Coalition, the Rockford Institute, David Noebel's Summit Ministries,
and Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation and Institute for Cultural
Conservatism. Of more historical importance are the John Birch Society,
the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, and Billy James Hargis' Christian
Crusade, although the John Birch Society's membership doubled or
tripled since the Gulf War in 1991 to over 40,000 members. Despite some
overlap at the edges, reactionary hard right electoral activists should
be distinguished from the extra-electoral right-wing survivalists,
militia members, and armed White racists on their right, and from the
Eastern establishment conservative branch of the right wing represented
by George Bush on their left.
Secular humanism has been called the bogey-man of right-wing
fundamentalism ; it is a term of art, shorthand for all that is evil
and opposed to God. While historically there has been an organized
humanist movement in the United States since the mid-1800s, secular
humanism as a large religious movement exists more in the right's
conspiracy theories than in actual fact. Secular humanism is a non-
theistic philosophy with roots in the rationalist philosophies of the
Enlightenment that bases its commitment to ethical behavior on the
innate goodness of human beings, rather than on the commands of a
deity.
The conspiracy that the right wing believes has resulted in secular
humanism's hegemony is both sweeping and specific. It is said to have
begun in 1805, when the liberal Unitarians, who believed that evil was
largely the result of such environmental factors as poverty and lack of
education, wrested control of Harvard University from the conservative
Calvinists, who knew that men were evil by nature. The Unitarian drive
for free public schools was part of a conscious plan to convert the
United States from capitalism to the newly postulated socialism of
Robert Owen.
Later, according to the conspiracy theorists, John Dewey, a professor
at Columbia University and head of the progressive education movement
(seen as "the Lenin of the American socialist revolution"), helped to
establish a secular, state-run (and thus socialized) educational system
in Massachusetts. To facilitate the communist takeover, Dewey promoted
the look-say reading method, knowing it would lead to widespread
illiteracy. As Samuel Blumenfeld argued in 1984, "[T]he goal was to
produce inferior readers with inferior intelligence dependent on a
socialist education elite for guidance, wisdom and control. Dewey knew
it...."
For the hard right, it is entirely reasonable to claim both that John
Dewey conspired to destroy the minds of American schoolchildren and
that contemporary liberals carry on the conspiracy. As Rosemary
Thompson, a respected pro-family activist, wrote in her 1981 book,
Withstanding Humanism's Challenge to Families (with a foreword by
Phyllis Schlafly ), "[H]umanism leads to feminism. Perhaps John Dewey
will someday be recognized in the annals of history as the `father of
women's lib.'"
To these rightists, all of the evils of modern society can be traced to
John Dewey and the secular humanists. A typical author argued:
Most US citizens are not aware that hard-core pornography,
humanistic sex education, the `gay' rights movement, feminism,
the Equal Rights Amendment, sensitivity training in schools
and in industry, the promotion of drug abuse, the God-Is-Dead
movement, free abortion on demand, euthanasia as a national
promotion ... to mention a few, highly publicized movements
... have been sparked by humanism.
According to the right, by rejecting all notions of absolute authority
and values, secular humanists deliberately attack traditional values in
religion, the state, and the home.
The link between liberalism and treachery is key to the secular
humanist conspiracy. In 1968, a typical book, endorsed by Billy James
Hargis of the Christian Crusade, claimed, "The liberal, for reasons of
his own, would dissolve the American Republic and crush the American
dream so that our nation and our people might become another faceless
number in an internationalist state."
Twenty-five years later, Allan Bloom, generally put forth as a moderate
conservative, argued that all schoolteachers who inculcated moral
relativism in school children "had either no interest in or were
actively hostile to the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution."
The Culture War & Christian Theocracy
Most analysts have looked at the Culture War and its foot soldiers in
the traditional family values movement as displaying a constellation of
discrete and topical beliefs. These include support for traditional,
hierarchical sex roles and opposition to feminism, employed mothers,
contraception, abortion, divorce, sex education, school-based health
clinics, extramarital sex, and gay and lesbian sex, among other issues.
Traditional values also include an antipathy toward secular humanism,
communism, liberalism, utopianism, modernism, globalism,
multiculturalism, and other systems believed to undermine US
nationalism. Beliefs in individualism, hard work, self-sufficiency,
thrift, and social mobility form a uniquely American component of the
movement. Some traditional values seem derived more immediately from
Christianity: opposition to Satanism, witchcraft, the New Age, and the
occult (including meditation and Halloween depictions of witches). Less
often discussed but no less integral to the movement are a disdain for
the values of egalitarianism and democracy (derived from the movement's
anti-modernist orientation), and support for Western European culture,
private property, and laissez-faire capitalism.
This orthodox view of the traditional values movement as an aggregate
of many discrete values, however, is misleading, for it makes it appear
that Judeo-Christian theism is simply one value among many. Rather,
Judeo-Christian theism, and in particular Christianity, is the core
value of the traditional values movement and the basis for the Crusades
--like tone of those in the hard right calling for the Culture War.
Traditional values start from a recognition of the absolute,
unchanging, hierarchical authority of God (as one commentator noted,
"The Ten Commandments are not the Ten Suggestions") and move from there
to a belief in hierarchical arrangements in the home and state.
As Pat Robertson said at the Republican convention, "Since I have come
to Houston, I have been asked repeatedly to define traditional values.
I say very simply, to me and to most Republicans, traditional values
start with faith in Almighty God." Robertson has also said, "When
President Jimmy Carter called for a `Conference on Families,' many of
us raised strenuous objections. To us, there was only one family, that
ordained by the Bible, with husband, wife, and children."
In part, the moral absolutism implicit in the Culture War derives from
the heavy proportion of fundamentalist Christians in the traditional
family values movement. Their belief in the literal existence of Satan
leads to an apocalyptic tone: "The bottom line is that if you are not
working for Jesus Christ, then you are working for someone else whose
name is Satan. It is one or the other. There is no middle of the road."
The hard right activist, as Richard Hofstadter noted, believes that all
battles take place between forces of absolute good and absolute evil,
and looks not to compromise but to crush the opposition.
A comment by Pat Robertson was typical:
What is happening in America is not a debate, it is not a
friendly disagreement between enlightened people. It is a
vicious one-sided attack on our most cherished institutions.
Suddenly the confrontation is growing hotter and it just may
become all out civil war. It is a war against the family and
against conservative and Christian values.
Paul Weyrich sees the struggle today between those "who worship in
churches and those who desecrate them."
The root desire behind the Culture War is the imposition of a Christian
theocracy in the United States. Some theocratic right activists have
been quite open about this goal. Tim LaHaye, for example, argued in his
book The Battle for the Mind that "we must remove all humanists from
public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders."
Similarly, in Pat Robertson's _The New World Order: It Will Change the
Way You Live_ (which argues that the conspiracy against Christians,
dating back to Babylon, has included such traditional conspirators as
John Dewey, the Illuminati, the Free Masons, the Council on Foreign
Relations , and the Trilateral Commission), the question of who is fit
to govern is discussed at length:
When I said during my presidential bid that I would only
bring Christians and Jews into the government...the media
challenged me, `How dare you maintain that those who believe
the Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to govern
America than Hindus and Muslims?'
My simple answer is, `Yes, they are.' If anybody understood
what Hindus really believe,there would be no doubt that they
have no business administering government policies in a
country that favors freedom and equality.... There will never
be world peace until God's house and God's people are given
their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.
How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists,
atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists,
oppressive dictators, greedy moneychangers, revolutionary
assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?
The most extreme position in the Culture War is held by Christian
Reconstructionists who seek the imposition of Biblical law throughout
the United States. Other hard right activists, while less open or
draconian, share an implicitly theocratic goal. While it denies any
desire to impose a theocracy, the Center for Cultural Conservatism,
which defines cultural conservatism as the "necessary, unbreakable, and
causal relationship between traditional Western, Judeo-Christian
values...and the secular success of Western societies," breaks with
conservative tradition to call upon government to play an active role
in upholding the traditional culture which they see as rooted in
specific theological values.
The Culture War & White Supremacy
The theory of widespread secular subversion spread by proponents of
the Culture War was from the beginning a deeply racialized issue that
supported the supremacy of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. To the
nativist right, in the 1920s as well as now, the synthesis of
traditional values constituted "Americanism," and opponents of this
particular constellation of views represented dangerous, un-American
forces.
As John Higham argued in _Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American
Nativism 1860-1925_, subversion has always been identified with
foreigners and anti-Americanism in the United States, and particularly
with Jews and people of color. In the 1920s, subversion was linked to
Jews, and the immigration of people of color was opposed in part
because they were seen as easy targets for manipulation by Jews.
While antisemitism was never the primary ingredient in anti-radical
nativism, the radical Jew was nevertheless a powerful stereotype in the
"communist menace" movement. For example, some members of the coercive
immigrant "Americanization" movement adopted the startling slogan,
"Christianization and Americanization are one and the same thing."
Virtually any movement to advance racial justice in the US was branded
by the reactionary right as a manifestation of the secular humanist
conspiracy. The National Education Association's bibliography of "Negro
author s," foundation support for "Black revolutionaries," and the
enlistment of Gunnar Myrdal as an expert on the "American Negro" were
all framed in this way. Similarly, the African American civil rights
movement was from its beginning identified by the right wing as part of
the secular humanist plot to impose communism on the United States.
In 1966, David Noebel (then of Billy James Hargis' Christian Crusade,
now head of the influential Summit Ministries) argued, "Anyone who will
dig into the facts of the Communist involvement in the 'civil rights'
strife will come to the conclusion that these forces have no stopping
point short of complete destruction of the American way of life." (In
the preface, Noebel thanks Dr. R. P. Oliver, who is now perhaps best
known as a director of the Institute for Historical Review, which
denies that the Holocaust took place.)
In 1992, the civil rights movement is still seen in this light, as the
rightist Catholic magazine Fidelity makes clear:
It is no coincidence that the civil rights movement in the
United States preceded the largest push for sexual liberation
this country had seen since its inception.... The Negro was
the catalyst for the overturning of European values, which is
to say, the most effective enculturation of Christianity.
The civil rights movement was nothing more than the culmination
of an attempt to transform the Negro into a paradigm of sexual
liberation that had been the pet project of the cultural
revolutionaries since the 1920s.
The identification of sexual licentiousness and "primitive" music with
subversion and people of color is an essential part of the secular
humanist conspiracy theory, and one that has been remarkably consistent
over time. The current attacks on rap music take place within this
context.
In 1966, David Noebel argued that the communist conspiracy ("the most
cunning, diabolical conspiracy in the annals of human history ") was
using rock music, with its savage, tribal, orgiastic beat, to destroy
"our youths' ability to relax, reflect, study and meditate" and to
prepare them "for riot, civil disobedience and revolution." Twenty
years later, these views were repeated practically verbatim by Allan
Bloom, who wrote that rock music, with its "barbaric appeal to sexual
desire," "ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very
difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the arts and
thought that are the substance of liberal education."
The hard right's attack on multiculturalism derives its strength from
the right's absolutism, as well as from its White racial nationalism.
Samuel Blumenfeld was among the first to attack multiculturalism as a
new form of secular humanism's values relativism, writing in 1986 that
multiculturalism legitimized different lifestyles and values systems,
thereby legitimizing a moral diversity that "directly contradicts the
Biblical concept of moral absolutes on which this nation was founded."
Patrick Buchanan bases his opposition to multiculturalism on White
racial nationalism. In one article, "Immigration Reform or Racial
Purity?," Buchanan himself was quite clear:
The burning issue here has almost nothing to do with economics,
almost everything to do with race and ethnicity. If British
subjects, fleeing a depression, were pouring into this country
through Canada, there would be few alarms.
The central objection to the present flood of illegals is they
are not English-speaking white people from Western Europe; they
are Spanish-speaking brown and black people from Mexico, Latin
America and the Caribbean.
Buchanan explicitly links the issue of non-White immigration with
multiculturalism, quoting with approval the xenophobic and racist
American Immigration Control Foundation, which said, "The combined
forces of open immigration and multi-culturalism constitute a mortal
threat to American civilization. The US is receiving a never-ending
mass immigration of non-Western peoples, leading inexorably to white-
minority status in the coming decades [while] a race-based cultural-
diversity is attacking, with almost effortless success, the legitimacy
of our Western culture." The Free Congress Foundation's Center for
Cultural Conservatism disavows any racial nationalist intent while
bluntly arguing that all non-White cultures are inferior to traditional
Western cultures.
Race & Culture
The major split inside the right-wing crusaders for the Culture War is
based on whether or not race and culture are inextricably linked.
Buchanan and the authors of the Bell Curve argue for biological
determinism and White supremacy, while Weyrich and Robertson argue that
people of all races can embrace Americanism by adopting northern
European, Christian, patriarchal, values--or, in their shorthand:
traditional family values.
It's important to state clearly that neoconservatives, for the most
part, share Buchanan's distaste for multiculturalism. The American
Spectator, for example, has argued, "The preservation of the existing
ethnocultural character of the United States is not in itself an
illegitimate goal. Shorn of Buchanan's more unhygenic rhetoric, and
with the emphasis on culture rather than ethnicity, it's a goal many
conservatives share. If anything, a concern that the ethnocultural
character of the United States is being changed in unwholesome ways is
the quality that distinguishes the conservatism of Commentary and the
Public Interest from the more economically minded conservatism that
pervades the Washington think tanks."
In part, it is legitimate to argue that the distinction between the old
and new conservatives on the issue of race is slim. At the same time,
however, the distinction between the approaches the old and new
conservatives take on race is the distinction between White racism and
White racial nationalism. While systemic racism enforced by a hostile,
repressive state is dangerous, the massed power of racial nationalism,
as expressed in the activities of the racial nationalist, clerical
fascist regimes in Eastern Europe during World War I I, is vastly more
dangerous.
The embrace of White racial nationalism by the paleo-conservatives has
been extensive. Chronicles magazine wrote in July 1990:
What will it be like in the next century when, as Time magazine
so cheerfully predicts, white people will be in the minority.
Our survival depends on our willingness to look reality in the
face. There are limits to elasticity, and these limits are
defined in part by our historical connections with the rest of
Europe and in part by the rate of immigrations. High rates of
non-European immigration, even if the immigrants come with the
best of intentions in the world, will swamp us. Not all, I
hasten to add, do come with the best intentions.
In his distaste for democracy, Buchanan has explicitly embraced racial
nationalism. In one column, titled "Worship Democracy? A Dissent,"
Buchanan argued, "The world hails democracy in principle; in practice,
most men believe there are things higher in the order of value--among
them, tribe and nation, family and faith." In April 1990, he made a
similar statement: "It is not economics that sends men to the
barricades; tribe and race, language and faith, history and culture,
are more important than a nation's GNP."
Buchanan has also stated:
The question we Americans need to address, before it is
answered for us, is: Does this First World nation wish to
become a Third World country? Because that is our destiny if
we do not build a sea wall against the waves of immigration
rolling over our shores....Who speaks for the Euro-Americans,
who founded the USA?...Is it not time to take America back?
The basic thesis of White racial nationalism is expressed by David
Duke, who won 55 percent of the White vote in Louisiana while arguing:
I think the basic culture of this country is European and
Christian and I think that if we lose that, we lose America....
I don't think we should suppress other races, but I think if we
lose that White--what's the word for it--that White dominance in
America, with it we lose America.
It is difficult not to see the fascist undercurrents in these ideas.
The Hard Right's Disdain for Democracy & Modernity
In the 1920s, at a time, not unlike today, of isolationism, anti-
immigrant activism, and White racial nationalism, democracy was
seriously challenged. With its anti-elitist, egalitarian assumptions,
democracy did not appeal to the reactionary rightists of the 1920s, who
insisted that the US was not a democracy but a representative republic.
Today, Patrick Buchanan, Paul Weyrich, and the John Birch Society also
insist on this distinction, which can more easily accommodate the anti-
egalitarian notion of governmental leadership by an elite aristocracy.
As Hofstadter pointed out, the pseudo-conservatives' conspiratorial
view of liberals leads them to impugn the patriotism of their opponents
in the two-party system, a position that undermines the political
system itself.
While hard rightists claim to defend traditional US values, they
exhibit a deep disdain for democracy. Dismissive references to
"participatory democracy, a humanist goal," are common; Patrick
Buchanan titled one article, "Worship Democracy? A Dissent." Like many
hard rightists, Allan Bloom mixes distaste for humanism and democratic
values with elitism when he argues:
Humanism and cultural relativism are a means to avoid testing
our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are
really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic
prejudice.
More specific rejections of democracy are common currency on the hard
right these days. Paul Weyrich, for example, called for the abolition
of constitutional safeguards for people arrested in the drug war.
Murray Rothbard called for more vigilante beatings by police of those
in their custody. Patrick Buchanan has supported the use of death
squads, writing, for example:
Faced with rising urban terror in 1976, the Argentine
military seized power and waged a war of counter-terror.
With military and police and free lance operators, between
6,000 and 150,000 leftists disappeared. Brutal, yes; also
successful. Today, peace reigns in Argentina; security has been
restored.
Perhaps the most disturbing manifestation of antidemocratic sentiment
among the reactionary rightists has been their apparently deliberate
embrace of a theory of racial nationalism that imbues much of the
protofascist posturings of the European New Right's Third Position
politics. Third Position politics rejects both communism and democratic
capitalism in favor of a third position that seems to be rooted
historically in a Strasserite interpretation of National Socialism,
although it claims to have also gone beyond Nazism.
Third Position politics blends a virulent racial nationalism
(manifested in an isolationist, anti-immigrant stance) with a purported
support for environmentalism, trade unionism, and the dignity of labor.
Buchanan has endorsed the idea of antidemocratic racial nationalism in
a number of very specific ways, arguing for instance, "Multi-ethnic
states, of which we are one, are an endangered species" because "most
men believe there are things higher in the order of value [than
democracy ]--among them, tribe and nation." In support of this view,
Buchanan even cites Tomislav Sunic, an academic who has allied himself
with European Third Position politics.
Over the past several years, Third Position views have gained currency
on the hard right. The Rockford Institute's magazine Chronicles
recently praised Jorg Haider's racial nationalist Austrian Freedom
Party, as well as the fascist Italian Lombardy League. In a sympathetic
commentator's description, the Third Position politics of Chronicles
emerge with a distinctly volkish air:
Chronicles is somewhat critical of free markets and spreading
democracy. It looks back to agrarian society, small towns,
religious values. It sees modern times as too secular, too
democratic. There's a distrust of cities and of cultural
pluralism, which they find partly responsible for social decay
in American life.
Similarly, Paul Weyrich's Center for Cultural Conservatism has praised
corporatism as a social model and voiced a new concern for
environmentalism and the dignity of labor.
In the wake of the schism within the right wing, the formation of
coalitions is just beginning. Whether the US is indeed endangered
because it is multicultural may depend on whether mainstream
conservatives embrace a paranoid, conspiratorial world view that wants
a White supremacist theocracy modeled on the volatile mix of racial
nationalism and corporatism that escorted fascism to Europe in the mid-
century.
===========================================================
What is Fascism?
Some General Ideological Features
by Matthew N. Lyons
I am skeptical of efforts to produce a "definition" of fascism. As a
dynamic historical current, fascism has taken many different forms, and
has evolved dramatically in some ways. To understand what fascism has
encompassed as a movement and a system of rule, we have to look at its
historical context and development--as a form of counter-revolutionary
politics that first arose in early twentieth-century Europe in response
to rapid social upheaval, the devastation of World War I, and the
Bolshevik Revolution. The following paragraphs are intented as an
initial, open-ended sketch.
Fascism is a form of extreme right-wing ideology that celebrates the
nation or the race as an organic community transcending all other
loyalties. It emphasizes a myth of national or racial rebirth after a
period of decline or destruction. To this end, fascism calls for a
"spiritual revolution" against signs of moral decay such as
individualism and materialism, and seeks to purge "alien" forces and
groups that threaten the organic community. Fascism tends to celebrate
masculinity, youth, mystical unity, and the regenerative power of
violence. Often, but not always, it promotes racial superiority
doctrines, ethnic persecution, imperialist expansion, and genocide. At
the same time, fascists may embrace a form of internationalism based on
either racial or ideological solidarity across national boundaries.
Usually fascism espouses open male supremacy, though sometimes it may
also promote female solidarity and new opportunities for women of the
privileged nation or race.
Fascism's approach to politics is both populist--in that it seeks to
activate "the people" as a whole against perceived oppressors or
enemies--and elitist--in that it treats the people's will as embodied
in a select group, or often one supreme leader, from whom authority
proceeds downward. Fascism seeks to organize a cadre-led mass movement
in a drive to seize state power. It seeks to forcibly subordinate all
spheres of society to its ideological vision of organic community,
usually through a totalitarian state. Both as a movement and a regime,
fascism uses mass organizations as a system of integration and control,
and uses organized violence to suppress opposition, although the scale
of violence varies widely.
Fascism is hostile to Marxism, liberalism, and conservatism, yet it
borrows concepts and practices from all three. Fascism rejects the
principles of class struggle and workers ' internationalism as threats
to national or racial unity, yet it often exploits real grievances
against capitalists and landowners through ethnic scapegoating or
radical-sounding conspiracy theories. Fascism rejects the liberal
doctrines of individual autonomy and rights, political pluralism, and
representative government, yet it advocates broad popular participation
in politics and may use parliamentary channels in its drive to power.
Its vision of a "new order" clashes with the conservative attachment to
tradition-based institutions and hierarchies, yet fascism often
romanticizes the past as inspiration for national rebirth.
Fascism has a complex relationship with established elites and the non-
fascist right. It is never a mere puppet of the ruling class, but an
autonomous movement with its own social base. In practice, fascism
defends capitalism against instability and the left, but also pursues
an agenda that sometimes clashes with capitalist interests in
significant ways. There has been much cooperation, competition, and
interaction between fascism and other sections of the right, producing
various hybrid movements and regimes.
======================================================================
The full text of these and many other articles are in the book _Eyes
Right!: Challenging the Right-Wing Backlash_, (Anthology). Chip Berlet,
ed. Boston: South End Press, 1995.
======================================================================
For a collection of the full text of these and other articles: [1] URL
http://www.publiceye.org/pra/ [2] Select Gopher [3] Chose PRA Reports
from the Gopher menu.
======================================================================
A complete resource list of reports, bibliographies, books, and other
printed matter is available upon request by writing or calling:
Political Research Associates
617.661.9313
120 Beacon Street, Suite 202
Cambridge, MA 02143
======================================================================
Chip Berlet is senior analyst at Political Research Associates in
Cambridge, MA. Margaret Quigley was an analyst at PRA from 1987 until
her untimely death in 1993. She and Berlet had been working on this
manuscript, which Berlet completed. Portions of this chapter previously
appeared in the December 1992 issue of The Public Eye and the October
1994 issue of The Progressive. c 1995, Chip Berlet and the Estate of
Margaret Quigley.
Matthew N. Lyons is an independent scholar and freelance writer who
studies reactionary and supremacist movements. His articles have
appeared in the Progressive and other periodicals. These paragraphs are
adapted from _Too Close for Comfort: Right Wing Populism, Scapegoating,
and Fascist Potentials in US Politics_ (Boston: South End Press, 1996),
which Lyons co-authored with Chip Berlet. c 1995, Matthew N. Lyons.
Online posting of unaltered text is authorized and encouraged.
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
