The American Academy of Religion Meeting 2019 - San Diego, CA
Establishments and Their Fall: Direct Mail, the New Right, and the Remaking of American Politics
In a 2006 article in the New York Times titled, “Defunders of Liberty,” historian and cultural critic Thomas Frank examined the somewhat sordid career of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff in light of his indictment and subsequent sentencing. In January of that year, Abramoff had pleaded guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud. Despite these somewhat crass commercial dealings, Abramoff’s body of work in American politics since the early 1980s resembled that of an intellectual visionary more than it did the resume of a common criminal. In no uncertain terms, Frank saw Abramoff as nothing less than “a sort of young Robespierre of the Reagan Revolution.” Frank was also taken, if not disturbed, by one of Abrahoff’s more common quotes found in stories about his work and legacy within conservative circles. “It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left,” Abramoff explained during his time as the College Republican leadership. “Our job is to remove them from power [PAUSE] permanently.” For Los Angeles Times reporter Jonathan Chait, Abramoff’s behavior was indicative of “the new breed of partisan lobbyist who advanced the GOP cause even as he enriched himself.”
The Revolution that had produced both the Reagan presidency and Abramoff’s career in Washington shared a common through-line: the success of each depended upon an unwavering commitment to ideological principle and a ruthless pragmatism in the public square. In other words, the Revolution succeeded because those who were apart of it did what was necessary to challenge “the establishment” as they understood it by identifying its myriad weaknesses. Frank emphasized this point in his New York Times piece. Abramoff’s comment about “liquidating the left” reflected nothing less than “the essence of the emerging conservative project.” “You don’t just argue with liberals,” Frank wryly observed, “you damage them.” Franks’ observations drew his readers’ attention not only to the brutality of conservatice grand strategy, but also to a level of ideational consistency rarely seen in American public life.
Since the mid-1960s, conservatives of various sorts, including the likes of William Buckely, William Rusher, and Richard Viguerie, had been thinking about how best to adapt the GOP to the changing cultural times, to shifts in socio-economic sentiment, and to oftentimes volatile encounters between “the people” and the proverbial “powers that be.” For these particular social actors, the East Coast had become too much of a symbol of an establishment presence within the Republican Party- a sign of its inertial stagnancy. For Rusher in particular, the party needed a spark- one that could energize new voters while strengthening the commitment of those already within the proverbial fold. Rusher's little known text, The New Majority Party published in 1975, would provide the blueprint necessary to remake the GOP as he and his supporters saw fit. What would become “the New Right” in American public life largely emerged from this collective reconsideration of how best to make conservaive ideas palatable to the American people in the midst of Watergate, Vietnam, and the Civil Rights Movement.
In the midst of a crumbling New Deal Order, how would conservatives advertise their message to the broadest yet most productive audience possible? The content of this message mattered to be sure, but what I would like to suggest today is that the ways in which such content was disseminated would be even more so. “What the young conservatives of those days understood was that slogans are cheap, but institutions are not,” Frank observed in his 2006 piece. “Once broken or bankrupted, they do not snap back to fight another day.” My present work and research suggests that Direct Mail would be both the paint and canvas against which this “New Majority Party” masterpiece would be painted. It would also be the implement of choice used to systematically “DEFUND THE LEFT” by New Right marketing and advertising strategists during the 1970s. This approach to politics was as pragmatic as it was ruthless in its attempts to topple establishments in both the conservative and liberal wings of the American political landscape. It is to this set of tactics and practices that I now turn in my presentation. How did Rusher, Richard Viguerie, and others understand Goldwater’s failures? What did they learn from his record keeping and mailing list collections? And most importantly, what had animated Goldwater’s campaign in the first place?