Up the organization

Liberals often wonder how conservatives have managed to attract so many people with such an anti-people agenda. Virtually everything the modern right stands for is steadfastly opposed to the average American’s interests. Still, the movement thrives. How does it do it?

There are scads of contributing variables, of course -- some top-down, like demagoguery; some bottom-up, like popular ignorance -- and many a tome has been written on the subject. But you can boil much of it down to one key ingredient -- good organization.

This point was once again driven home by a lead article in Tuesday’s NYT entitled “Next Generation of Conservatives (By the Dormful).” The story detailed how “the capital’s premier conservative research group,” the Heritage Foundation, nurtures tomorrow’s ideological bomb throwers in a kind of homegrown madrassa. Each summer the foundation provides 64 interns a comfortable $2500 stipend and subsidized housing -- “complete with a fitness room” -- to study, ingest, and spread the roted word. As the Times noted, it’s an “example of the care the [conservative] movement takes to cultivate its young.”

In scope and financing there is no liberal equivalent of the Heritage Foundation’s operation, even though it was launched the same year as the foundation itself, 1973 -- a year of adolescence for the New Right, which has now lived on to maturity. That “new” conservative movement knew what it wanted and moved systematically to get it. It understood the power of organization. This was hardly a novel concept in politics; it’s just that the New Right applied the concept with a determination and professionalism that Democrats just can’t seem to muster.

Almost chilling now is to read some of the early New Right’s organizers quite openly announcing their vision, and to know from hindsight they’d succeed because of excellent organization and a feeble opposition. In 1981, for instance, the right’s direct-mail maven and strategic planner Richard Viguerie predicted that “the next few years will see a massive battle of conservatives and liberals to determine who governs the nation for the next three decades.” Then he dropped the bomb of justified self-satisfaction: “And we’ve got a head start of years on them.”

The habit of good organization began with the movement’s preschool training: the 1964 Goldwater campaign. Though Goldwater’s candidacy was one of politics’ greatest flops, for his diehard followers it was an educational incubator, an inspiration of what was possible. For example 44,000 individuals had given money to Nixon’s near win in 1960, yet by one estimate more than a million contributed to Goldwater’s sure loss. In addition to “cold-call” direct-mail appeals sent from brokered magazine and catalogue lists -- a truly innovative idea at the time -- Goldwater’s finance team, which later nestled into the New Right, tapped the Republican National Committee’s list of contributors who had given as little as ten dollars within the last three years. This expanded grassroots mining would provide the New Right a basis for its own individual-donor tracking for yet better organization-building and yet more cash.

The movement would need both if it was to expertly exploit America’s fears of so much change -- feminism, civil rights, gay rights, busing, no school prayer and legal abortion -- fears held chiefly by Christian evangelicals, hardcore Republicans and, among the best of opportunities, socially conservative Democrats. To reach these demographics the New Right employed, as mentioned, direct-mail innovators. It founded influential political action committees such as John Terry Dolan’s “Nickpack” and Paul Weyrich’s Survival of a Free Congress. It pulled in religious-right organizers such as the Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell. It launched self-financed media. And naturally it benefited from outspoken and focused politicos of the Newt Gingrich ilk.

Of even larger significance, however, the New Right operated not as the instrument of any one person or select group, but as a single, synergistic, message-disciplined organization.

You’re probably thinking all this is elementary. And you’d be right. Everyone knows that a disciplined organization is a cornerstone of effective politics. But there’s been one fundamental difference between the left and right over the last 40 years: The right has stuck to the basics.

The left hasn’t, hence is still eating the right’s dust. “They invested in young people,” Ralph Neas of the People for the American Way said of the Heritage Foundation. “We’re trying to catch up.”

Any day now would be nice. And even better, the uncoordinated left could try doing it as one.

Comments

[Kid Charlemagne]

Getting regressives organized is like trying to herd sheep. Getting progressives organized is like trying to herd cats. (Thanx to Molly Ivins for the latter simile.) Meow.

Would someone who succeeded in herding cats be "Chariman Meow"?---KC

[Kid Charlemagne]

"CHAIRMAN Meow", dammit!---KC

[lmwilker]

With the decline of communal life in favor of soulless, transient, suburbia and communal/fraternal organizations in the public sphere about the only place you will find a captive audience with like beliefs is in Church. There's the organizational key that has been behind repugs success.

[Marblex]

Yet, despite their big "investment" most of the youth vote is liberal and young people are orders of magnitude more tolerant than their parents. We are seeing the last gasp of the white man's exclusive club. Wishful thinking don't make it so and the fact is, the entire world is becoming progressive. These right wing extremists are still just a fringe minority, despite their "organization" "money" and for now, "power."

[JLo]

Excellent analysis, and not at all elementary so long as the central message isn't being heeded. This is the sort of message that tends to get torn to shreds when progressives begin discussing discipline, perhaps because the right has so thoroughly inhabited and owned the term "discipline".

I'd like to invite you to stop by publicorgtheory.com to see some similar ideas I've been floating about organization, and I'd welcome the opportunity to continue a dialogue here about the points you've made.

[Kid Charlemagne]

Marblex is correct that the hard right is a minority. As Michael Lind, among others, has pointed out, much of the reason that they exercise disproportionate power is that they have managed to control the low-population states--Gene Lyons called them "states with more cows than people"--which, thanks to the every-state-has-two-senators rule, exercise disproportionate power through the Senate and the Electoral College. These states tend to be more ethnically and religiously homogeneous than the USA as a whole. A change to a parliamentary system, if that could be done, would redress much of this problem.---KC

[Stephen Kriz]

Mr. Carpenter does an excellent job of analyzing the success of the right-wing, but I would add a couple of embellishments:

The right clearly set in place a very broad-based effort to control the political dialogue in this country after Goldwater's humiliating defeat in 1964, but the real impetus (that began in 1973, as Mr. Carpenter mentions in passing) was Watergate and the efforts of former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Richard Mellon-Scaife and the Olin family to fund these right-wing 'think tanks" (ha-ha) and to engage in "perception management". The Repubs were deathly afraid of another Watergate happening again and worked hard in acquiring media outlets (e.g. the Washington Times, FOX News, Limbaugh's EIB radio network) to manage the public's perception of the world. They realized that perception is reality and that propaganda, used properly, could sway large number of voters to vote against their own best interests. Robert Parry does an excellent job of analyzing this in his book, 'Secrecy and Privilege", in which he eviscerates the Bush family, which has benefitted enormously from this 'perception management'. How else can one rationally explain the election of 2000, where an alcoholic, cocaine-addled, neer-do-well, with the lengthiest criminal record of anyone who has ever been president, is viewed as a moral paragon by many people, while his opponent, an upstanding, distinguished public servant with no real warts on his record is viewed as a liar, a cheater and incompetent??? Truly amazing perception management.

Anyway, thanks again Mr. Carpenter for an insightful analysis of how we got where we are (God help us all....).