- The Right-Wing Conspiracy and Class Warfare Come Out of the
Closet : Strategy and History Described by Executive Editor of
Governing Magazine During Speech at Neoconservative American
Enterprise Institute Think Tank
- by James Pyland
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- OpEdNews.com
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- On November 3, the Executive Editor of Governing Magazine, Alan
Ehrenhalt, gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
entitled, “The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and How it Grew.”
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- In his speech, Ehrenhalt discussed the neoconservative efforts to
dominate the media, saying, “If you're talking about religion,
abortion, social issues, sure there’s a liberal media elite.”
However, Ehrenhalt noted, “by 1996 I would say the
intellectual left had been neutralized on economics and foreign
policy….there wasn't much organized support for…left positions of
any kind. There was a pretty impressive organized right. Some of which
is in this room,” referring to the attendees of Ehrenhalt’s
speech, part of a series called the AEI Bradley Lecture Series.
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- The American Enterprise Institute was founded in 1943 and
concentrates on promoting free market ideology. It provides a continuous stream of editorials to over 100
newspapers, and its “experts” appeared on television news programs
throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, usually without having their
conservative free market agendas mentioned on air.
Members of the group sometimes identify themselves as
“Democrats” on public affairs shows so that the message to viewers
is completely controlled. In
one year alone, the Institute published over 40 books and over 400
articles and “research” papers.
The Institute has advocated military operations, such as
Reagan’s attack on Grenada, while it or its members have received
grants from for the U.S. Foundation of Peace. The Institute allied
with corporate directors from American Cynamid, Dow Chemical, and
Chase Manhatten Bank to support the pro-apartheid government of South
Africa.
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- Ehrenhalt said that the Republican Party, and neoconservatives
specifically, had learned how to use the “white middle class
resentment of the Great Society.”
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- Ehrenhalt said that Hillary Clinton’s phrase “vast right-wing
conspiracy” did not adequately describe the lack of “organized
support for things he [Bill Clinton] wanted to do.”
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- “If she had said, ‘We're up against an elaborate and
sophisticated conservative network,’ I'm not sure that that would
have been all that controversial or debatable a statement. It's pretty
clear that something exists,” Ehrenhalt noted.
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- Ehrenhalt described the plight of Bill Clinton in terms of the
challenges faced by the early neoconservative founders: “By 1996
Bill Clinton was sounding like Paul [Weyrich] sounded in the early
1970s: We don't have the intellectual fire power and we don't have the
people writing the papers and giving the speeches and doing the
lobbying.”
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- Paul Weyrich is a neoconservative activist who founded the Heritage
Foundation with funding provided by the Adolph Coors Foundation.
In John Soloma’s 1984 book, Ominous Politics, Weyrich is
quoted as saying, “We are different from previous generations of
conservatives…We are no longer working to preserve the status quo.
We are radicals, working to overturn the present power
structure of this country.” Weyrich
also once wrote in a 1987 Washington Post article: “If we are going
to be a serious nation, we need a serious system for selecting our
leaders and advisors. We need some type of shadow government, in which
leaders and top advisors can be identified and developed….”
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- The Heritage Foundation produced Ronald Reagan’s Mandate for
Leadership, and has produced over 1000 policy “publications,” and
has aggressively lobbied to roll back New Deal initiatives.
The organization has campaigned for the privatization of
federal highways, social security, the postal system, and the
elimination of funding for special education programs.
It provided over 5,000 resumes of hard-right candidates for
government office in the Reagan and Bush administrations.
The group has also recommended covert military actions against
“communist” insurgents in nine foreign countries.
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- Ehrenhalt discussed the Reagan presidency’s success at joining the
big business elites and the fundamentalist right through the rhetoric
of anti-communism. “These people only had one thing in common. They
hate communists. That's what they had in common. What would they ever
do without the communists?”
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- “It was not known at that time that the Baathist Party could be
used as an effective substitute.”
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- “But in 1992 we found out what happened when there were no
communists. Republicans fight with each other, and they lost the
election.”
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- Ehrenhalt discussed the emergence of the aggressive right-wing,
populist voice during the Clinton era, saying, “One other crucial
development of the mid-1990s that a lot of you probably know more
about than I do is the emergence of what I would call the
"republican megaphone": talk shows, think tanks.”
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- In addition to saturating television, radio and newspapers with the
neoconservative agenda, the last decade also saw efforts to destroy
left-liberal political organizations. The Wall Street Journal called
the campaigns “A G.O.P. effort to cripple advocacy groups with whom
they [party leaders] have ideological differences.”
“Contract with America” strategist Grover Norquist was even
more direct, saying, “We will hunt [these liberal groups] down one
by one and extinguish their funding sources.”
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- Near the end of his speech, Ehrenhalt speculated on methods that
Democrats might use to attack the Bush presidency.
“I wonder if next year we’ll get people talking about Iraq,
Enron, and arrogance?”
- Ehrenhalt’s speech may be found at:
- http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.19478,filter./news_detail.asp
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- Also see People for the American Way’s report, “Buying a
Movement,”
- http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/dfiles/file_33.pdf
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- An excellent source for anti-right information is at
- http://www.publiceye.org/research/policy.html
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- James Pyland jpl89@hotmail.com
is an emerging activist who lives and (still) works in Houston, Texas
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