Many Americans are fearful of crime. They are distressed by rising taxes and double-digit inflation. Still others worry that their schools will be destroyed by busing. The list of code words that refer to the object of their fears seems endless: forced busing, abortion, gun control, permissiveness, gay rights, women's lib, the surrender of the Panama Canal, reverse discrimination, and on and on. . . .

        Rising to address—and exploit—these anxieties is a new set of self-appointed leaders, men and women of the New Right. One Republican political professional estimated in 1977 that the New Right now constitutes the "fourth most powerful political force in America," behind the two major parties and organized labor.  These leaders and the organizations they represent seek radical social and political change, and, unlike previous radicals of the Right, they have built a political and  rganizational network through which to further those aims. . . .

        By the 1970s, the Right had been transformed into an institutionalized, disciplined, well-organized, and well-financed movement of loosely knit affiliates. Collecting millions of dollars in small contributions from blue-collar workers and housewives, the New Right feeds on discontent, anger, insecurity, and resentment, and flourishes on backlash politics. Through its interlocking network, it seeks to whatever it perceives to threaten its way of life—busing, women's liberation, gay rights, pornography, loss of the Panama Canal—and promotes a beefed-up defense budget, lower taxes, and reduced regulation of small business. Moreover, the New Right exploits social protest and encourages class hostility by trying to fuel the hostilities of lower-middle-class Americans against those above and below them on the economic ladder. Wholly bipartisan, though predominantly Republican, the New Right network supports whoever shares its desire for radical political change and its resentments of the status quo. As such, the New Right is anything but conservative.

The clout of the New Right is a result of their expertise in the field of direct-mail solicitation, an art they have .been refining for years and have only recently employed for specifically political purposes. "Direct mail has allowed conservatives to by-pass the liberal media, and go directly into the homes of the conservatives in this country," Richard Viguerie said to the 1977 Conservative Political Action Conference. "There really is a silent majority in this country, and the New Right now has learned how to identify them and communicate with them and mobilize them." "It's our best way to offset the unions' lavishly financed political organizations," Huck Walther of the National Right to Work Committee told Conservative Digest, explaining his group's reliance on direct mail. Since 1978, the conservative PACs have actually been raising vastly more money than organized labor.

        Having already amassed a small fortune from his advertising Business, Viguerie now maintains a staff of 300 nonunion employees in the offices of the Richard A. Viguerie Co. (RAVCO) in Falls Church, Virginia, a Washington suburb.  His apparatus sends out 100 million pieces of mail a year from some 300 mailing lists that contain the names of 25 million Americans. His inner sanctum is guarded by two different security systems, and even Viguerie himself must produce proper identification before guards will let him in. In his office are 3,000 reels of magnetic computer tape containing the names and addresses of more than 10 percent of the population of the United States. Two giant computers leased for $2,700 per month, operate twenty-four hours a day; high-speed printers and tape units churn out the letters, which are packaged and mailed from various Viguerie businesses in northern Virginia.

        The mailing lists accumulated by the fundraisers and their clients are often exchanged—usually bought or sold but sometimes loaned. In 1977, for example. State Senator John Briggs of Orange County, California, crusader against homosexuals, used the mailing list built by Anita Bryant's fundraiser to support Proposition 6, his anti-gay rights ballot measure. As Marvin Leibman told me: "Ever since (the direct-mail business] took off, there's been an entire army of hustlers emerge—list brokers, public affairs consultants, copywriters, mailing house operators . . . an entire army!" George Will has referred to the right-wing pen pals as "quasi-political entrepreneurs who have discovered commercial opportunities in merchandising discontent. . . ."

        The key to all of these appeals is anger and fear. As Terry Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee told me, his organization's fund-raising letters try to "make them angry” and "stir up hostilities." The "shriller you are," he said, the easier it is to raise funds. "That's the nature of our beast," he explained. The fund-raising letters of the New Right groups depict a world gone haywire, with liberal villains poised to destroy the American Way of Life. After reciting a list of horrors about to be perpetrated, the signatory—often a prominent right-wing activist or politician—asks for "help" from the recipient, frequently requesting his participation in a survey or poll; then he is asked to contribute and told how his $5 or $10 contribution will be used to further the counterattack on the liberals. In the case of a political campaign, almost invariably launched to defeat some "radical" incumbent, the donor is told that his $10 will be used, for example, to maintain a phonebank for a given period of time. The more specific they can be, the fundraisers have learned, the more likely they will be to receive a contribution. They try to get the donor involved—or at least get him to feel that he is involved.

        From Americans for LIFE signed by Ohio state representative Donald E. "Buz" Lukens:

Dear Friend:
        Please take a second right now to look at the outrageous proabortion political propaganda I've enclosed.
        And then help me STOP THE BABY KILLERS by signing and mailing the enclose-d anti-abortion postcards to your U.S. Senators.  (You'll find a list of all U.S. Senators on the back of that sickening baby killer propaganda.)
       These anti-life Baby Killers are already organizing, working and raising money to re-elect pro-abortionists like George McGovern, South Dakota . . . Congressman Robert Drinan, Massachusetts . . . Senators John Culver, Iowa . . . Frank Church, Idaho . . . Birch Bayh, Indiana. . . ,men who apparently think it's perfectly OK to slaughter unborn by abortion . . . .
        Abortion means killing a living baby, a tiny human being with a beating heart and little fingers . . . killing a baby boy or girl with burning deadly chemicals or a powerful machine that sucks and tears the little infant from its mother's womb.

        At stake, as they see it, is nothing less than the future of society itself and the values that will prevail in it. On one side, threatening traditional values, are the feminists, the liberals, the university communities, minorities, residents of the urban centers, and the media. On the other — side of the angels — are the "pro-family” forces, the leadership of the New Right and its disgruntled constituents, plus a growing political movement of fundamentalist evangelical ministers speaking from their television and radio pulpits in support of right-wing politics. Both sides arc competing for the soul of America.

        The New Right women, with the help of the fundamentalist ministers, are determined to reassert control of the culture, to further not only specific political goals, but to assure that the values they believe in are allowed to survive—and prevail. No better summary of their fear exists, perhaps, than this fund-raising letter from Christian Voice, a fundamentalist political lobby:
 

THIS LETTER WILL MAKE YOU ANGRYl
But I'm Going To Tell
You The Truth About. . .
. . . Militant gays
. . . Liberal Educators
. . . Cruel Atheists
. . . And Godless Politicians

Dear Friend:
I am rushing you this urgent letter because the children in your neighborhood are in danger.
How would you feel if tomorrow your child . . .
. . . was taught by a practicing homosexual?
. . . was bused 20 to 30 miles away to school every morning?
. . . was forced to attend classes in a school where all religion is
banned?
If you think this could never happen . . .
. . . you are in for a shockl

The rest of the letter, signed by the Reverend Robert G. Grant, head of Christian Voice, said that the drive for homosexual rights, busing, the ban on prayer in public schools, and other related issues arc "just a fraction of a master plan to destroy everything that is good and moral here in America.”

        This "master plan" is orchestrated by "godless militant gays, liberal educators and vicious atheists" who — unless stopped — "will tell you how your children will be educated." They will, that is, determine America's future by shaping the minds and hearts of youth, by undermining the values instilled in the home. . . .

        The Equal Rights Amendment perhaps most of all is viewed by the New Right women as an attempt to undermine the family by withdrawing privileges that keep the family together by protecting the woman in her traditional role within the family, and without which the family — they believe would disintegrate.

        The revolt of the New Right women is, clearly, a rear-guard action to arrest the society's growing acceptance of views more liberal than their own. It is, in this sense, a status revolt, growing out of deep anxieties on the part of those Americans who, in Ben Wattenberg's words,  are "unyoung, unpoor and unblack," "middle-aged, middle-income and middle-minded," who fear that the culture is being controlled, more and more, by "new morality" liberals. These Americans resent the fact that many of the relevant social questions are being resolved by others. They sense a loss of their own social status, resulting in attitudes which Friedrich Nietzsche described in the late nineteenth century as ressentiment, a term now used to explain the social behavior of persons frustrated
by their roles in society.

Important allies of the New Right women in protecting hearth and home, school and community from the liberal onslaught are certain fundamentalist ministers who are becoming increasingly involved in right-wing politics.

        Their following is immense, and the power they wield from the television and radio pulpits may well make them a political force of enormous impact in the 1980s. Benefiting from the growth of the fundamentalist churches and the decline in membership in liberal Protestant churches—the Southern Baptist Convention alone gained almost two million members, from 10.77 million in 1965 to 12.51 million in 1974—these ministers represent a revolt against the move toward "relevance" and "secularism" in the churches. As the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the most prominent of the new right-wing evangelists, said of his own militancy: "Jesus was not a pacifist.  He was not a sissy.” Falwell, a fundamentalist from Lynchburg,Virginia, services his growing flock from his Old Time Gospel Hour, which airs on 325 television stations and 300 radio stations each week, netting roughly $1 million to the coffers of his Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg and its affiliated colleges and schools.
During the days of the civil rights movement, Falwell spoke out against clergymen who were involved in politics, a position he has since reversed, on the grounds that the church is now being "assaulted" and "attacked." The result is his far-reaching "Clean Up America Crusade" and a political organization. Moral Majority. As Falwell explained in a Capitol Hill rally in April 1979, the time has come to "fight the pornography, obscenity, and vulgarity, profanity that under the guise of sex education and 'values clarification’ literally pervades the literature" that children read in the public schools. Falwell is alarmed also by homosexuality and bids his followers to send their dollars to fight these and related evils. "We are very much trying to create emotional involvement in these issues,” he said. . . . "We are going to single out those people in government who are against what we consider to be the Bible, moralist position, and we're going to inform the public. . .."

        Other right-wing fundamentalist ministers also owe much to “the electronic church," the vast radio and television operations run by the fundamentalists. It is immense, with thirty-six wholly religious television channels, 1,300 religious radio stations, and dozens of gospel television shows that buy time on commercial stations, reaching an estimated 100 million Americans each week. The flagship of the new evangelical talkshows is the “700 Club" of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which operates out of a $20 million facility in Virginia Beach. "700 Club" host Pat Robertson, a genial graduate of Yale Law School and son of a U.S. senator, in 1979 spoke out against "the humanistic/atheistic/hedonistic influence on American government," which he said was the result of control by the "Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations," also a bogeyman of the John Birch Society. Of growing stature is the Reverend James Robison, a fiery Dallas evangelist who was dropped from a local commercial station in Dallas but reinstated after 12,000 fans turned out to express their support for a controversial sermon against homosexuality which had temporarily cost Robison his air-time.

        Their constituency is estimated to consist of roughly 50 million "born-again" Christians, mostly Protestant, plus 30 million "morally conservative" Roman Catholics and a few million Mormons and Jews. As Pat Robertson put it. "We have enough votes to run the country. And when the people say, 'We've had enough,’ we are going to take over. . . ."

        Like Carl Mcintyre and other right-wing evangelists of the 1950s and 1960, the “electronic churchmen" of the 1970s and 1980s are stressing political concerns, determined, as Falwell put it, to “turn this into a Christian nation." One manifestation of the close association between the fundamentalists’ and the right-wingers’ shared anxieties over school busing and textbooks is the emergence of hundreds of Christian private schools, estimated by The Wall Street Journal to be a $2-billion-a-year industry. Supporters include Senators Helms of North Carolina. Paul Laxalt of Nevada, Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, and Congressman Robert K. Dornan of California —all of whom attended Falwell's Capitol Hill rally.

        The growing political clout of the "born-again" lobby was felt in 1978, as the "moral majority" constituency claimed credit for blocking the Equal Rights Amendment, for denying election to liberal Iowa Senator Dick dark, and for repealing, by referenda, gay rights ordinances. Politicians are beginning to pay heed. In mid-1979, Republican presidential hopeful John Connally held a private meeting at his ranch with top religious broadcasters and activists, including Falwell and Billings, and as one participant told U.S. News and World Report, "At the end of the meeting, some of those guys were ready to carry Connally out of there on their shoulders." A second presidential aspirant, Illinois Congressman Philip Crane, a "born-again" Christian, was asked to appear on the "700 Club."

The cherished goal of the New Right, repeated throughout its literature, is to forge a "new majority," a grand coalition which, no longer encumbered by sentimental allegiances to such presumably outmoded institutions as the Republican and Democratic parties, can sweep the New Right to power. There exist, the Right contends, millions of Americans who are New Rightists by instinct, waiting for the opportunity to be liberated from their traditional loyalties and ignorant of the choice for freedom the Right offers.  Much of the New Right's activities in the late-1970s were devoted to forging this "new majority."

        New Rightists had already made inroads in the traditional conservative domain of the GOP. Key to the new effort is the invasion or infiltration of the Democratic party.

        The right-wing constituency is those whom political scientist Donald Warren has called "the Radical Center"—those "alienated." “forgotten,” “angry,” “troubled” Americans who are ripe to engage in backlash politics, and distinguished from the rest of society by their suspicion and distrust of it, by the belief that others are engaged in a conspiracy against them.  These are Americans uniquely unable to make common cause within the established system, ill-equipped to engage in the give-and-take politics of cooperation and compromise that coalition-building requires, more attuned to social protest than to the complex process of governing, deeply distrustful of the very nature of coalitions. They put "principle above party." But if the alienated can become the society the core becomes the majority. So New Right leaders hope.

        The "new majority" has been described by William Rusher as a union of economic conservatism, "the dominant secular faith of the American middle class,” and of social conservatism, “predominantly a movement of the lower middle class and portions of what would be the American ‘proletariat’ if its behavior warranted that Marxist term."

        The implications of this transition on the Right from Republicans to Democrats (or democratists) are immense. What is at stake is nothing short of what kind of democracy is to prevail in America. The constitutional democracy as envisioned by the Founding Fathers — and here there was little disagreement between Hamilton and Jefferson, Adams an dMadison – is at issue. As conceived by the Founders, democracy was limited, restrained by a complex system of safeguards and restrictions. The work of government would be carried forth regularly, routinely, and calmly by constitutionally designated agencies, each as important as the next, each restrained yet accountable to the citizens. The Congress would be a deliberative body, a representative assembly, and on few occasions, indeed, were the people — in the sense of a mass — to become directly involved in the governing process. These included regular election of representatives and constitutional conventions. But even in the latter, the people would work their will through designated representatives.

        The checks and balances of the American system are intended to preserve the process of translating the popular will into public opinion and public policy; representative bodies, dealing  with issues by protracted negotiation, filter the popular voice, which ensures that moral issues are not frivolously decided, especially by the whim of some majority of the moment. If one tried to govern a country by the decisions in referenda, that country would be in a ceaseless state of moral strife and indignation.

A country in which highly sensitive questions are settled by continual referenda would be one of constant moral contention. The New Rightists seem to prefer the fanatics and demagogues — the Anita Bryants, Howard Jarvises, and John Briggses — to the reasoned, responsible leadership associated with classic conservatism.  Already such sensitive personal questions as abortion and homosexual rights 'are put to the public for its approval. We are entering a period when biological discoveries will force many difficult and vital decisions of public policy to be made by the society and the state. When the kind of fury that is aroused by busing or by homosexuality, or—sixty years ago—by Prohibition,

is let loose on issues of life and death, we will have reason to quail.  The thought of unfiltered popular voice playing around with genetics is terrifying. Then indeed we will be able to say that vox populi has become vox dei, the voice of the people has become the voice of God.