• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 358 0

of persecution increased. They turned up their attacks on powerful liberal “elites” and invented a new victim class that fused whites, Christians, and the working class into a loose affiliation they called “conservatives,” “traditionalists,” or “real Americans.” The formation of the new victim class precipitated the widespread fear and paranoia that exploded after Obama’s election and spawned the Tea Parties; the Tea Parties then inherited the mantle of persecution politics. To see how this happened, we will need to return once more to the beginning of the story.

The New Right

Once upon a time, rare and exotic creatures lurked in the fetid swamps of the District of Columbia and urban jungles of the northeastern seaboard. The scientific name for the species was Republicanus liberalus, but most people called them Rockefeller Republicans after Nelson Rockefeller, a prominent Republican governor from New York who expanded his state’s universities, parks, welfare programs, and housing projects. Rockefeller Republicans were pro-business capitalists who often espoused liberal principles on gun control, welfare, women’s rights, affirmative action, abortion, education, and environmentalism. True believers in the “party of Lincoln,” they also wanted nothing to do with the new Southern strategy initiated by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. According to legend, these strange Republicans were known for civility, pragmatism, and human decency (though some cynics dismiss the possibility that such wondrous beasts ever existed).

The species was relatively plentiful in the 1960s but went into steep decline in the late 1970s and was virtually extinct by the end of the 1980s. Their disappearance coincided almost exactly with the alleged onslaught of secular humanists, gay militants, jackbooted thugs, and other early villains of persecution politics. The timing was not coincidental. The two men credited with leading the purge against liberal Republicans happened to be the same two who mobilized the right wing to battle the secular humanists at the IRS. We’ve previously discussed Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and the architect of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. During the 1970s, he and Richard Viguerie, an ambitious, talented, and extremely conservative political fundraiser, initiated a grassroots movement to remake the Republican Party. It was called the New Right.cu

After President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, Vice President Gerald Ford assumed the presidency. When Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller vice president, conservative Republicans went apoplectic. Richard Viguerie wrote:

Nelson Rockefeller—the high-flying, wild-spending leader of the Eastern Liberal Establishment. As a conservative Republican, I could hardly have been more upset if Ford had selected Teddy Kennedy.3

The day after Ford’s announcement, Viguerie organized a meeting with some fifteen conservative friends, including Weyrich, to discuss strategies for thwarting the Rockefeller appointment. While Viguerie ultimately concluded that they couldn’t stop it, the meeting spurred him to launch an initiative to challenge Republican leadership and empower the right wing.

The New Right of Weyrich and Viguerie bore much in common with today’s Tea Parties. Its adherents were extremely hostile to liberals and intolerant of any dissent from conservative principles. They were suspicious of government and emphasized social issues, like abortion and school prayer. And they practiced persecution politics. Weyrich, for example, described the conflict between the Christians and the secular humanists as “the most significant battle of the age-old conflict between good and evil, between the forces of God and the forces against God, that we have seen in our country.”4 Viguerie deliberately exploited hostility toward secularists and homosexuals in his direct mail campaigns to white Christian voters. “People are motivated by anger and fear much more so than positive emotions,” he explained in a 2005 interview. He defended his negative campaigns by alluding