The right rides high - dogmatism and religious fundamentalism in U.S. Republican Party - Cover Story

Progressive, The, Oct, 1994 by Chip Berlet

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?"

Mainstream pundits are uncertain about the magnitude of the threat posed by the Religious Right. Sidney Blumenthal warned recently in The New Yorker that "Republican politics nationally, and particularly in Virginia, have advanced so swiftly toward the Right in the past two years that [Oliver] North's nomination [for the U.S. Senate] was almost inevitable." But just a few years ago, after George Bush was elected President, Blumenthal dismissed the idea that the Religious Right was a continuing factor in national politics.

"Journalists like Blumenthal are centrists who believe that America always fixes itself by returning to the center. They have the hardest time appreciating the danger the Right represents because they see it as just another swing of the political pendulum," says Jean Hardisty, a political scientist who has monitored the Right for more than twenty years. "As the McCarthy period showed, however, if you let a right-wing movement go long enough without serious challenge, it can become a real threat and cause real damage. Centrists missed the significance of the right-wing drive of the past fourteen years as it headed for success."

The Right has now managed to shift the spectrum of political debate, making conservative politics look mainstream when compared with overt bigotry, and numbing the public to the racism and injustice in mainstream politics.

When, for example, Vice President Dan Quayle was asked by ABC what he thought of David Duke, Qualyle sanitized Duke's thorough racism and said: "The message of David Duke is ... anti-biggovernment, get out of my pocketbook, cut taxes, put welfare people back to work. That's a very popular message. The problem is the messenger. David Duke, neo-Nazi, ex-Klansman, basically a bad person."

The pull of the antidemocratic Right and its reliance on scapegoating, especially of people of color, is a major factor in the increased support among centrist politicians for draconian crime bills, restrictive immigration laws, and punitive welfare regulations. The Republican Party's use of the race card, from Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy to the Willie Horton ads of George Bush's 1988 campaign, is made more acceptable by the overt racism of the Far Right. Racist stereotypes are used opportunistically to reach an angry white constituency of middle- and working-class people who have legitimate grievances caused by the failure of the bipartisan status quo to resolve issues of economic and social justice.

Scapegoating evokes a misdirected response to genuine unresolved grievances. The Right has mobilized a mass base by focusing the legitimate anger of parents over inadequate resources for the public schools on the scapegoat of gay and lesbian curriculum, sex education, and AIDS-awareness programs; by focusing confusion over changing sex roles and the unfinished equalization of power between men and women on the scapegoat of the feminist movement and abortion rights; by focusing the desperation of unemployment and underemployment on the scapegoat of affirmative-action programs and other attempts to rectify racial injustice; by focusing resentment about taxes and the economy on the scapegoat of darkskinned immigrants; by focusing anger over thoughtless and intrusive government policies on environmental activists, and by focusing anxiety about a failing criminal-justice system on the scapegoat of early-release, probation, and parole programs for prisoners who are disproportionately people of color.