Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [67]
But Paul Weyrich and other architects of the Moral Majority played down the significance of these issues in the founding of the religious right. As we noted previously, Christian persecution politics bloomed with the IRS action against the seg academies. White persecution politics began even earlier with George Wallace’s stand against desegregation. In both cases, as discussed in chapter 5, the distinguishing emotion that the paranoid leaders expressed was not anger but fear: fear of powerful enemies who sought to oppress white Christians. So when we ask why right-wing persecution politics bloomed in the late twentieth century, we won’t find the answer by listing the issues that made conservatives angry.
Yet we’ve also seen that the fear was self-generated, based on obviously fabricated or exaggerated threats. People sought out and opened themselves to scary stories because the fear felt so good; it absolved their guilt, resolved their cognitive dissonance, and produced that “mellow buzz of the moral high ground.” So we won’t find the answer by listing the threats that made conservatives scared either.
Once again, Festinger’s hypothesis can help. He and his colleagues infiltrated the UFO cult to prove the hypothesis that cognitive dissonance would produce a frenzy of proselytizing as cult members sought to affirm their rationalizations for the failed prophecy. He even hinted that the world’s great religions might have been spawned by just such bursts of evangelism (precipitated, for example, by the untimely execution of a promised messiah and his failure to bring about the prophesied end of the world).
But Festinger laid out fairly stringent conditions for cognitive-dissonance-induced proselytizing. Some of these do not apply to the type of social phenomena we’ve been discussing. For instance, he stipulated that the believers must take some important action that is difficult to undo, such as quitting their jobs or exhausting their savings, and that there must be some real world event that produces undeniable evidence to contradict their beliefs.
While it would be impossible to set up, in a political context, the kind of eloquent, well-defined demonstration that Festinger captured in the UFO scenario, there might be enough parallels to draw valid comparisons and present a sufficiently plausible explanation. For example, prior to the civil rights movement, the nation’s commitment to racial inequality and intolerance was certainly substantial. Discriminatory segregation was a way of life in the South that pervaded every element of society. In 1928, the famous historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips called Southerners’ commitment to preserving white dominion “the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history.”11 And even in other parts of the country, segregation was common in schools, workplaces, and communities.
Yet in little more than a decade, racial intolerance evolved from an accepted and officially sanctioned practice to a shameful and officially forbidden activity. The new racism taboos must have shocked and overwhelmed people who grew up knowing no other way. Another distinguished historian, C. Vann Woodward, observed in 1968:
Since the last World War, old racial attitudes that appeared more venerable and immovable than any other have exhibited a flexibility that no one would have predicted. One by one, in astonishingly rapid succession, many landmarks of racial discrimination and segregation have disappeared, and old barriers have been breached . . . Increasingly the South is aware of its isolation in these attitudes, however, and is in defense of the institutions that embody them. They have fallen rapidly into discredit and under condemnation from the rest of the country and the rest of the world. Once more the South finds itself with a morally discredited Peculiar Institution on its hands.12
Similarly, George Wallace’s biographer described how the world looked to white Southerners in the early 1960s