America's Right E-Book

Robert B. Horwitz

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 539

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Conservatism has been the most important political doctrine in the United States for nearly four decades. It has dominated the intellectual debate and largely set the policy agenda, even during years of Democratic electoral control.

But 21st century conservatism has moved far beyond even the Reagan Revolution of small government, lower taxes and a respect for tradition. The alliance of libertarians, neoconservatives, and the Christian right has launched anxious and angry attacks on the purported homosexual agenda, the “hoax” of climate change, the rule by experts and elites, and the banishment of religion from the public realm. In the foreign policy arena it has tried to remake the world through the cleansing fire of violence. Contemporary American conservatism practices a politics that is disciplined, uncompromising, utopian, and enraged, seeking to “take back our country.”

This is “anti-establishment conservatism,” whose origin can be traced back to the right wing that battled both the reigning post-World War II liberal consensus and the moderate, establishment Republican Party. This book examines the nature of anti-establishment conservatism, traces its development from the 1950s to the Tea Party, and explains its political ascendance.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1 INTRODUCTION

The scope of the book by chapter

2 ANTI-STATIST STATISM

3 RELIGION AND POLITICS

4 TWO GENERATIONS OF NEOCONSERVATISM

5 RICHARD HOFSTADTER’S “PARANOID STYLE” REVISITED

6 DOGMATISM, UTOPIANISM, AND POLITICS

INDEX

Copyright © Robert B. Horwitz 2013

The right of Robert B. Horwitz to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6429-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7049-2 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7050-8 (Single-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

PREFACE

Conservatism has been the most important political doctrine in the United States for nearly four decades. It has dominated the intellectual debate and largely set the national policy agenda, even during years of Democratic electoral control. But twenty-first-century conservatism has moved far beyond even the “Reagan Revolution” of small government, lower taxes, and a respect for tradition. Contemporary American conservatism practices a politics that is disciplined, uncompromising, utopian, and enraged, seeking to “take back our country.” An unlikely alliance of libertarians, neoconservatives, and the Christian right has launched anxious and angry attacks on the purported homosexual agenda, the “hoax” of climate change, the rule by experts and elites, and the banishment of religion from the public realm. In the foreign policy arena it has tried to remake the world through the cleansing fire of violence.

This is anti-establishment conservatism, whose origin can be traced back to the right wing that battled both the reigning post-World War II liberal consensus and the moderate, establishment Republican Party (also known as the Grand Old Party or GOP). This book examines the nature of anti-establishment conservatism, traces its development from the 1950s to the Tea Party, and explains its political ascendance.

Books on conservatism litter the journalistic and academic landscapes. Indeed, the treatment of conservatism has become somewhat of a scholarly cottage industry. What is different about this effort is its attention to both domestic and foreign policy, and the weaving of these two facets of anti-establishment conservative thought and action into one coherent narrative of change over time. America’s Right also revisits and reassesses some of the older, dismissed theoretical assessments of the conservative movement, most notably that of the mid-twentieth-century historian Richard Hofstadter. This revisit allows students of conservatism to circle back to the 1950s to see how public intellectuals and scholars like Hofstadter interpreted a moment of political ferment not unlike our own. America’s Right then applies and adjusts some of those interpretations to help make sense of the current conservative moment.

The book begins in the 1950s, when conservatism shifted from its pre-World War II isolationism to embrace a double “rollback”: of the New Deal and of international communism. Anti-establishment conservatism’s fusion of libertarian and traditionalist principles found its political expression in the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, GOP standard-bearer in the 1964 presidential election. Goldwater’s crushing defeat did not subdue anti-establishment conservatism; its political entrepreneurs built the institutions that served to channel the ongoing discontent with liberalism. America’s Right analyzes these institutions and how they helped facilitate the reemergence of anti-establishment conservatism in the late 1970s. It examines the two movements most responsible for this rejuvenation: the new Christian right and neoconservatism. The millenarian underpinnings of anti-establishment conservatism came to the fore after the 9/11 attacks, and informed the rationale for the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Finally, the book explores the most recent manifestation of anti-establishment conservatism: the Tea Party.

While America’s Right is broadly sourced, it is written for the general serious reader. I have tried hard not to use academic jargon or assume great familiarity with social and political theory. Where I employ big concepts – such as secularism, pre- or post-millennialism, American exceptionalism, and the like – I endeavor to define them simply and clearly. Where I explore a theory – such as Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” – I try to explain it straightforwardly and with rich context. The vast majority of the notes are bibliographic citations, although I do employ the occasional textual note where it aids in explaining an issue in the main body of the text. Readers who wish to see a comprehensive bibliography can go to my webpage on the University of California, San Diego Department of Communication website: http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/robert-horwitz.html.

Because of the topic and the writing pitch and style, I hope the book will have some general audience readership. As a synthetic overview of history and political sociology that spans the politics of the post-war period and ends with the Tea Party movement, this volume is, I think, of contemporary topical interest and will have a decent shelf life for students interested in a longer perspective on American politics.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people generously contributed to the formulation, writing, and final production of this book. I was fortunate to present two of the draft chapters to the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) Conservative Movements workshop, and received much advice and useful criticism. I taught pieces of the research in undergraduate and graduate courses as the research was unfolding, and thank those students for allowing me to explore. I especially thank three graduate students in the Department of Communication: Muni Citrin, Stephanie (Sam) Martin, and Reece Peck.

Several friends and colleagues read large parts or the entire manuscript in one of its draft forms, including Patricia Aufderheide, Amy Binder, Amy Bridges, Peter Dimock, John Evans, Michael Evans, Lew Friedland, Jeffrey Minson, and Michael Schudson.

Introduced to me by my mother-in-law, former professor of theology Jack Rogers generously and patiently gave me much-needed help in my sections on religion. Charles Drekmeier, my undergraduate mentor forty years ago and as sharp as ever, provided a critical reading of the early chapters.

Eliott Kanter of UCSD’s Geisel Library helped me track down many obscure references. Larry Gross got me in touch with John Thompson, editor extraordinaire of Polity Press. Justin Dyer provided inspired copy-editing. I thank you all.

I could not have written the book without the help of my dear friend and colleague Val Hartouni. She read the entire manuscript more times than I’m sure she cared to, offering engaged discussion, keen insight, comradely criticism, and encouragement. She is a treasure.

The final editing push and manuscript preparation could not have been done without the expert writing and editorial flourish of my wife, former bookkeeper, auto mechanic, newspaper journalist, and elementary school teacher Libby Brydolf.

1

INTRODUCTION

North Iowa Tea Party billboard, Mason City, Iowa, 2010.

The ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] has got to take a lot of blame for this [the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001]. And I know I’ll hear from them for this, but throwing God … successfully with the help of the federal court system … throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. … I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America … I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.

The Reverend Jerry Falwell, on the Christian Broadcast Network’s 700 Club television program (September 13, 2001)

Man-made climate change is “patently absurd … junk science … a beautifully concocted scheme … by the left … just an excuse for more government control of your life.

Former U.S. Senator and 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, on the Rush Limbaugh radio show (June 8, 2011)

I, ______, pledge to the taxpayers of the (______ district of the) state of ______ and to the American people that I will: ONE, oppose any and all effort to increase the marginal income tax rate for individuals and business; and TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.

Taxpayer Protection Pledge signed by 234 of 240 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and 40 of 47 Republican members of the U.S. Senate in 2011. Authored by Americans for Tax Reform, a lobbying group headed by Grover Norquist

What we might call the “anti-establishment” right wing now defines American conservatism. It has by and large taken over the Republican Party. A movement long in the making, with roots in the Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964, anti-establishment conservatism achieved major success with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It subsequently orchestrated the congressional opposition to the Clinton presidency in the mid-1990s, including shutting down the government and impeaching the president. Effectively securing the executive branch in the George W. Bush era, it helped drive the country to war in Iraq in 2003. During the years of the Obama presidency, anti-establishment conservatism has become the foremost face of the Republican Party, manifest in the populist rage of the Tea Party and the stunning obduracy of Republicans in Congress.

Instances of the anti-establishment right’s forthright positions are now legion. In debates involving matters of science, for example, anti-establishment conservatives, such as Rick Santorum in the epigraph above, consistently ignore the overwhelming consensus among climatologists that human activity and industry are largely responsible for the perilous warming of the planet. Many conservatives of this tendency still hold out against Darwin’s theory of evolution in favor of “creation science,” and make every effort to stop “God being thrown out of the schools” (to paraphrase the Reverend Jerry Falwell in our opening epigraph) by getting at least equal billing for creationism or intelligent design in high school biology classes. In foreign policy, anti-establishment conservatives pressed relentlessly for the invasion of Iraq without proper regard to the actual evidence of the existence of Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. The George W. Bush administration, epitomizing anti-establishment conservatism in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, insisted on the direct link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda long after the claim had been thoroughly refuted. By many credible accounts, the administration cooked highly equivocal intelligence to appear substantive and conclusive. It engaged in tortured legal logic to find that torture was not torture. And it fixed facts to support preconceived policy determinations in areas of particular interest to business and religious constituencies. Indeed, the administration effectively turned over certain government agencies or departments to select religious groups.

In our current moment, congressional Republicans engage in an unbending, mantra-like advocacy of tax cuts and deficit reduction in the face of any and all economic conditions – showing that they do not have a real economic policy, but rather a canonical system of political beliefs. As became evident in the fraught congressional brawl over raising the federal debt ceiling in the summer of 2011, the Republican agenda revealed itself as a weird cross between duplicity and self-delusion, with demands for severe deficit reduction and balanced budgets notwithstanding the enormous, and unopposed, deficits run up by recent Republican presidents. Republicans failed to defeat President Obama in the 2012 election in a campaign replete with intemperate flights of fancy on the right. The GOP also failed to retake the Senate. Some Tea Party movement supporters insisted that President Barack Obama was not an American citizen and was secretly a member of the Muslim faith. In their view the president was intent on ruining America through his “socialist” policies – with the North Iowa Tea Party even equating Obama’s “Democrat Socialism” with Hitler’s “National Socialism” and Lenin’s “Marxist Socialism” in the notorious billboard pictured at the opening of this chapter. One Tea Party-identified candidate for the Senate in 2012 declared that a woman could not become pregnant from “legitimate” or forcible rape because under such circumstances “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” During the debate over President Obama’s healthcare bill, Tea Party supporters exclaimed with urgent fury, “Keep the government out of my Medicare!” – apparently not comprehending that Medicare is a social insurance program administered by the U.S. government. At the same time, of all the political actors on the stage during the 2008 financial crisis, it was the Tea Party that possessed the political vocabulary capable of expressing the disgust of the class bias and unfairness of the government bailouts of the banks, insurance, and mortgage companies responsible for the financial collapse.