Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [28]
Likewise, modern conservatives also project undesirable impulses onto their enemies. Much as nineteenth-century conspiracy theorists accused Masons and Catholics of deviant sexual practices, many of today’s paranoid conservatives obsess over the wildly promiscuous and disturbing sexual behaviors that they attribute to gays and lesbians, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter.
But what really sets the modern paranoid style apart from that of Hofstadter’s anticommunists is the new right’s eagerness to project offenses like bigotry and intolerance onto its perceived enemies—the very offenses of which conservatives have been accused ever since the civil rights era. The great secular humanist conspiracy offers a perfect example: right-wing leaders represented secular humanism as an intolerant state religion that abridged the constitutionally protected civil rights of Christians, reversing the accusation that opponents had been leveling at religious fundamentalists. The Christians were not intolerant of secular beliefs, they argued; it was the fanatical secularists who were intolerant of Christian beliefs. We will see this pattern again and again as we continue our tour of right-wing persecution politics: affirmative action is “reverse racism;” secular Christmas greetings constitute “hate crimes;” gay rights “discriminates” against Christians; political correctness is “fascist;” and so on.
Conservatives have even translated their projections of liberal bigotry into another form of imitation by establishing their own institutions to protect the rights of the underprivileged and oppressed; that is to say, white Christian conservatives. These include the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission and the Christian Defense League (which mimic the Jewish Anti-Defamation League);ac the American Civil Rights Union and the American Civil Rights Institute (which mimic the ACLU), the National Association for the Advancement of White People (an NAACP imitator founded by ex-Klansman David Duke); and a couple of amalgamations, the Christian Civil Liberties Union and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.ad
Indeed, the modern promoters of the paranoid style surpassed their predecessors by inventing enemies who consist almost entirely of projected attributes. Previous conspiracy theories were at least founded on real organizations. An international society of Masons existed, and its members conducted politics and business in their lodges. The Roman Catholic Church is a powerful global institution that has historically sought to suppress Protestantism. Communism is a well-defined ideology, and many of its adherents, including Stalin, sought to export the revolution to the United States. But secular humanism had no lodges, no popes, no doctrines, and no members. It was a blank canvas on which conservatives could paint whatever they pleased. And so they painted a distorted replica of the ugly picture that modern society had so recently painted of them. They painted intolerance. What bound secular humanists together—atheists, socialists, feminists, homosexuals, civil rights activists, environmentalists, internationalists, and so on— was alleged hatred and intolerance for Christianity. Secular humanism’s so-called tenets, from evolution to moral relativism, were simply the means by which they persecuted the Christians they despised. Secular humanism was not an institution upon which Christian intolerance was projected; it was the very projection of Christian intolerance.
This counterattack demarcates the new paranoid style of modern conservatism from the old paranoid style that Hofstadter described. Of Bill O’Reilly’s three tactics, the slippery slope and the conspiracy theory were inherited from the previous generation of anticommunist conspiracists; but the third tactic, persecution, is new. It was born of and in reaction to the civil rights movement. Over the past forty years, right-wing conservatives have applied the new persecution rhetoric