The write stuff: U.S. serial print culture from conservatives out to neo-Nazis

Neoconservatives The neoconservatives, according to PRA, believe the "egalitarian social liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s undermined the national consensus" and therefore "intellectual oligarchies and political institutions preserve democracy from mob rule." In terms of foreign policy, neoconservatives assert the "United States has the right to intervene in its perceived interests anywhere in the world" (PRA, n.d., Chart of Sectors; see also Gerson, 1997; Halper & Clarke, 2004). A leading neoconservative magazine is the glossy full-color Weekly Standard, which in 2001 and 2002 featured numerous covers promoting the idea that war in the Middle East was inevitable. (5) The Public Interest is in the format of a bound 6x9 journal, while First Things has a journal flavor in a bound 8x11 size. Commentary, from the American Jewish Committee, started with a liberal outlook, but morphed toward the right, following the political trajectory of the neoconservative movement, which the magazine helped create. This shift prompted the creation of Tikkun magazine as "the liberal alternative to Commentary" (Lerner, n.d.).

Religious

The religious right in the United States includes members of faiths other than Christian, but they are a tiny minority in this sector, and the focus here is on conservative Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists, and conservative Catholics, some of whom identify as evangelicals or "traditionalists." The Christian right is a social movement drawn from Christian conservatives, nationalists, and theocrats, many of whom are also apocalyptic.

Christian Conservatives After WWII a number of evangelicals were networked through a print and radio subculture that escaped the attention of many Americans except when the Rev. Billy Graham surfaced in news reports. "Evangelical publications were important" to this religiously based social movement, explains Diamond (1995), especially since "television had not yet become the dominant medium" (p. 98). Diamond singles out two serials as especially significant: Christian Economics and Christianity Today (pp. 98-99). Graham started Christianity Today in 1956 and it "quickly became the flagship publication of mainstream evangelicalism" (Martin, 1996, p. 42)

Christian Economics was founded in 1950 and sent free to some 175,000 ministers. It was published by the Christian Freedom Foundation (CFF), a significant precursor to the contemporary Christian right. The Pew family of Sun Oil wealth was the primary funder of the CFF, with J. Howard Pew himself launching the group with a $50,000 grant. Hundreds of thousands of dollars poured into CFF from the Pew family, topping $2 million by the end of the 1960s (Diamond, 1995, pp. 98-99; Forster & Epstein, 1964; Saloma, 1984, pp. 5.3-54). The Pew Memorial Trust went on to be one of the top funders of the new right (Covington, 1997, p. 35). In his classic study The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism (1905/2000), Weber (2000) explored the symbiosis between the two. In CFF rhetoric, social security is described as "the older generation stealing from the younger," the income tax is branded as "Communist doctrine," labor unions are described as "stemming from Socialism," and foreign aid is pilloried as subsidization of "Socialistic schemes and experiments" (Forster & Epstein, 1964, p. 267).