Falwell and Revisionist History

Compare Max Blumenthal's excellent account of the rise of Jerry Falwell to Jeffrey Bell's curious little piece at the Weekly Standard.

Bell observes the magnitude of the shift among evangelical voters from 1976 to 1984:

[T]he swing in terms of partisan margin among theologically conservative white Protestants was a breathtaking 87 points--from a Democratic margin of 25 points in 1976 to a Republican lead of 62 points in 1984. By way of comparison, the margin swing in the electorate as a whole was 20 points--from Carter-Mondale's 2-point victory in 1976 to Mondale-Ferraro's 18-point defeat in 1984.

These numbers might suggest that the entire GOP presidential gain between 1976 and 1984 could be accounted for by the striking change among the roughly 20 percent of the electorate classifiable as Bible-believing white Protestants. In pure statistical terms this is true, and much was happening in the campaigns of 1980 and 1984 to explain the shift in terms of social issues and the status of religion in American life.

So what, according to Bell, accounted for this shift? "Judicial elites" banning spoken prayer in school, for one thing. The hardening politics of abortion, too. And then there was the Carter administration's revocation of tax exemptions for "Bible schools."

Blumenthal points out that, whatever the politics of abortion after 1980, before founding the Moral Majority in 1979, Falwell had shown very little interest in the issue. What had motivated him was the loss of the tax exemption - not because it was an "attack" on Christians, but because it was aimed at eliminating public subsidy for segregationists like the good minister himself.

Falwell was a virulent racist who saw private education as a last refuge for white supremacists. It was the breach of that refuge that drove him to politics -- with the help of Paul Weyrich:

For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

There is, of course, none of this in Bell's piece. It takes a pretty tight tunnel vision to ignore the reality of Falwell's history, so we shouldn't be shocked when Bell's piece ends with a reference to "the pivotal role of 'values voters' in the 2004 presidential election." The fact that Bell is just about the last person on Earth to believe this canard is hardly surprising, given the myopia at work in his article generally.

But in another sense it is a little surprising to see such shallow analysis of the subject in a conservative intellectual journal. The question of Falwell's legacy is one of urgent importance to the right these days, as it's forced to decide how to negotiate its way between that legacy and a Giuliani-ized future. One would think that more clear-headed analysis was in order.

The Moral Majority was unpopular with significant portions of the intellectual and fiscal right during the early 1980s. Conservative elites knew Falwell's gang scared people -- scared them too, a little bit. Still, they managed to enter into a productive partnership. Now, though, the continued usefulness of that partnership is very much in question. A good time, one would think, to prefer sobreity to sentiment.

Labels: conservatives, Jerry Falwell, the Nation, Weekly Standard

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:00 PM 1 comments

  Falwell Dead; Conservatism Ailing

One could cut and paste today's New York Times headlines into a pretty instructive narrative about the state of American conservatism today. Something like this:

First, The death of conservative evangelicalism. Okay, not the death -- that's far too optimistic. But the passing of Jerry Falwell is symbolic of a shift in the politics of evangelical Christianity in the United States. Falwell, by founding the Moral Majority in 1979, founded the modern Christian right. Too often these days we forget that evangelical Christians have by no means always been a conservative force in American politics. In other eras they've been progressive forces -- even radically progressive; in still others they have simply been politically disengaged. The equation "evangelical=fundamentalist=right-winger" is very much a creation of Jerry Falwell and his allies. As the Times obit puts it, the Moral Majority's "very name drew a vivid line in the sand of American politics."

But now the line is blurring, as moderate evangelical leaders guide their flocks away from conservative dogma, and as the conservative movement's elites and intellectuals are emboldened to advocate for abandoning core Christian right priorities. It's more than cosmic coincidence that Falwell died only days after the frontrunning candidate for the GOP presidential nomination openly embraced a pro-choice, not-anti-gay line. So have you checked out the National Review lately? It's full of conservative pundits spinning away on Rudy's behalf. Falwell is dead; his movement may be going to the grave with him. What that means for the Republican Party is yet to be seen.

Second, Republican candidates cling desperately to war and terror. The conservative elites' eagerness to embrace Giuliani has much to do with the perception that his electability is based in the very issues that, in recent history's most operatic irony, have been both the GOP's greatest strength and its great downfall. War and terror are Republican specialities; if they do not own war and terror, they own very little in a country whose electorate moves inexorably into the progressive column on issues of government, economics, and teh gays. Having brought the public far more war and terror than anyone ever really wanted, along with their incompetence, their mendacity, and their cronyism, the Republicans can only hope to reinvigorate the brand. The various candidates' enthusiasm, during last night's debate, for more torture!, more war!, more Gitmo!, might be understood as rather confused efforts to do just this. But it was Giuliani who best defined himself, precisely as his supporters have hoped he would, as the Candidate of War and Terror -- But Better This Time!, when he seized an opportunity to blow-torch a straw man dressed up to look like the inimitable Ron Paul. We'll let the National Review's Byron York tell the tale:

It all started when Paul was asked how September 11 changed American foreign policy. “Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us?” Paul answered. “They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years…”

Questioner Wendell Goler, of Fox News, asked, “Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?”

“I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it,” Paul said. “They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there.”

Enter Giuliani. “May I comment on that?” the mayor said, interrupting the orderly flow of things for the first time in the debate. “That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.”

The audience loved it. As the applause built, Giuliani added, “And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”

Paul didn’t back down, but by cutting in, Giuliani had scored some of the best, and perhaps easiest, points of the night.... Giuliani’s aides seemed genuinely happy with his performance Tuesday night, in contrast to the way they seemed to be faking their happiness in California. “He was better,” said Jim Dyke, a top Giuliani adviser. “9/11 is very personal to the mayor. You can’t coach something like that.”

Giuliani, of course, "lived through" the attacks of 9/11 much as I "lived through" them -- by being in the city at the time. The idea that he was some sort of hero that day, or in the days thereafter, is a myth. But it's not the myth that matters here -- it's the conservatives' need to believe in it. It appears to be all they have. And for its sake, they'll abandon the coalition that made them what they are today (or at least, what they were before last November's elections).

Finally, the crony capitalism machine churns on. I mentioned this in a previous post, and I should continue to emphasize it. As giddy as we can be over all the various acts of immolation and cannibalism on the conservative side, let's not forget that, in perhaps its most essential function, their movement has continued to hum along quite efficiently. My own thesis, advanced many times, is that since conservative principles for government don't work, conservatives wind up governing without principles. And so you get things like this:

A senior lobbyist at the National Association of Manufacturers nominated by President Bush to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission will receive a $150,000 departing payment from the association when he takes his new government job, which involves enforcing consumer laws against members of the association.

[...]

As chairman of the commission, Mr. Baroody’s salary would be $154,600. With the severance payment and an additional lump sum of $44,571 for unused leave time, Mr. Baroody would receive $349,171 this year. That amount, which excludes Mr. Baroody’s pension and retirement payments, nearly matches the $344,607 salary that Mr. Baroody earned as the second-highest-paid executive at the association last year.

The nomination of Mr. Baroody, executive vice president at the association, has provoked heavy criticism from Democrats and consumer groups. He is the latest in a line of industry officials and lobbyists to be given senior jobs by Mr. Bush at federal safety agencies that oversee matters like workplace and mine safety and transportation as the administration has sought to roll back hundreds of regulations that businesses viewed as excessive.

Of course, you could argue that there is a principle at work here, and you wouldn't be wrong. There are more than one, I'd say. "Reward your friends, punish your enemies" is a principle that seems to crop up a lot in this administration. It's not much, as principles go, but it's a good general rule of thumb for, say, a street gang. On a larger level, there's "keep those meddling bureaucrats from messing with American business." That's a principle that could almost, if you argue it right (and conservatives are very good at arguing things right), derive from a legitimate philosophy, which is that "capitalism works better than government, so don't pollute capitalism with government." That's a numbingly foolish, short-sighted, and simple-minded philosophy, but it is a philosophy nonetheless.

So we can't say the Bush administration operates entirely without principles (and I won't delve here into a discussion of whether the president's devotion to his war counts as a principle or merely as evidence of insanity), though the few remaining principles in evidence seem to have almost nothing to do with an argument about the good society, and a lot to do with looting the Treasury and gutting the regulatory apparatus before the electoral hordes can finally break down the White House doors.

Modern Republican party conservatism isn't a pretty picture. Denuded of principle, fleshed by mutual purge attempts, insensately clinging to its once-fearsome reputation as the party best able to use violence and the threat of violence to further its own aims, it seems to hurtling toward some kind of reckoning. We can only guess how much of the public interest it will drag along toward that doom.

Labels: Bush administration, conservatives, Jerry Falwell, Rudy Giuliani, War on Terror

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:01 AM 1 comments

  Confession is Good for the Political Soul

So now that Newt Gingrich has admitted that the whole time he was tormenting Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky he was also cheating on his own wife, it appears that the evangelical brigade are giving him the green light. Jerry Falwell has praised Gingrich for coming clean, and invited the former speaker to appear at Liberty University:

"He has admitted his moral shortcomings to me, as well, in private conversations," Falwell wrote in a weekly newsletter sent Friday to members of the Moral Majority Coalition and The Liberty Alliance. "And he has also told me that he has, in recent years, come to grips with his personal failures and sought God's forgiveness."

It's all so formulaic, so ritualistic. Candidate X needs fundamentalist votes. Fundamentalist Blowhard Y wants to feel relevant. X offers the standard words of contrition to Y. Y publicly forgives X on behalf of God and the Moral Majority.

It's a political market in indulgences.

Labels: 2008, Jerry Falwell, Newt Gingrich, Presidential election, social conservatives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:25 AM 0 comments

  Days of Our Republican Lives

Two stories via TPM Cafe's Election Central:

The Politico's Jonathan Martin reports that Jerry Falwell has invited John McCain to attend - but not speak at - a reception during the National Religious Broadcasters Convention [Here's a very interesting Harper's article about a previous NRB Convention] next week in Orlando. Mitt Romney will also be there, but of course it's the McCain invite that's more notable. Falwell himself, however, is taking pains not to imply an endorsement:

Falwell's office at Liberty University, however, sought to downplay the event, saying that the pastor may not even show. "This is not Dr. Falwell's showing support for [McCain's presidential bid] at all," said Jessica Tucker, a spokeswoman for the pastor. "This is really just a name on the invitation. He was asked to be listed and he said yes."

Asked why Falwell wouldn't attend a reception on which he is listed as one of six co-hosts, Tucker pointed to the impending winter weather.

When further pressed, Tucker added that Falwell was also planning to wash his hair that night.

Meanwhile, Hotline reports that Mike Huckabee has picked up a couple of key endorsements in an early primary state: former South Carolina First Lady Iris Campbell and her son Mike, of the clan known as the "First Family of South Carolina Presidential Politics," have signed on; Iris will serve as Honorary State Chair of Huckabee's exploratory committee, while Mike will serve the campaign as a "Senior National Advisor."

The Hotline piece points out that "Since [1980], no Republican has won the nomination or the presidency without first winning in South Carolina and having Campbell family’s support."

Labels: 2008, Jerry Falwell, John McCain, Mike Campbell, Mike Huckabee, National Religious Broadcasters, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:18 PM 0 comments