"Fire on the Right" by David Brock

[Michael Pugliese]

An absolutely fascinating article by conservative writer and activist
David Brock about the "intellectually bankrupt" hard-right and what to
expect from the Bush administration.

Dave Anderson
-----------------------------------------

"Fire on the Right" by David Brock
Appeared in the February 2001 edition of "Talk"
Magazine


George W. Bush's "new" Republican Party presented
itself to the 
national
convention last summer with much talk of unity,
consensus,
bipartisanship--even compassion.  Bush aides
carefully prescreened all
speeches, deftly removing the word *impeachment* from
each; you had to
strain to hear the word *conservative*.  Bush
lieutenants blocked the
Reverend Pat Robertson from speaking, replacing him
in the party 
pantheon
with General Colin Powell, who is reviled by members
of the extreme
right.  All in all it was an impressive show designed
to win support 
from
independent voters, like me, who had turned from the
party during the
fanatical Gingrich era.  Still, I wanted to ask Bush,
who did not
acknowledge the role his own party's leaders had
played in creating so 
much
rancor, exactly what he thought was wrong with the
old party.  And 
also:
Where did he think all those rancorous old
Republicans would go?  
Having
been in and around the conservative movement for 15
years, I knew how
unlikely it was that the party could transform itself
overnight.

It didn't take long for Republican loyalists to junk
the pretty 
bipartisan
rhetoric.  In the hours and weeks following Election
Day, a 
predictable
cast of extreme right-wing players, many of them
ex-associates and
ex-friends of mine, emerged from the woodwork where
they'd been 
hidden--or
had hidden themselves--during the presidential
campaign.  House 
Majority
Whip Tom DeLay, for example, organized what
conservative Wall Street
Journal columnist Paul Gigot approvingly called "a
bourgeois riot" in
Miami.  Rush Limbaugh exhorted millions of
Dittoheads, "We're fighting 
for
our lives!" Pundit Ann Coultier referred to the
justices of the 
Florida
Supreme Court as "aspiring Pol Pots." Former Newt
Gingrich strategist 
Tony
Blankley wrote of Gore supporters, "They are
Americans by birth, but 
they
might as well be Martian reptiles for all the moral
kinship they have 
with
us." Appellate superlawyer Ted Olson made sweetly
reasoned arguments 
before
the U.S. Supreme Court.  (When I worked at The
American Spectator he 
was
involved with the magazine's Arkansas Project, a
multimillion-dollar
dirt-digging operation against the Clintons, the very
hub of "the vast
right-wing conspiracy.") All over the down-channel
cable news shows,
gray-suited Republican lawyers who had helped me
attack Anita Hill a 
decade
ago droned on about law and victory.  Even Newt
Gingrich, whose
win-at-any-cost spirit seemed to animate the
Republicans' invective,
surfaced from seclusion and made righteous
appearances on television 
in the
days immediately following the election.

The Republicans' dramatic postelection display shows
how deeply 
ingrained
apocalyptic fervor, vitriolic rhetoric, and primal
rage are in both 
GOP
history and the psyche of its chief ideologists.  In
the aftermath of 
the
election it is clear that fury--if not blind
fury--will be shaping
discourse in Washington for some time to come whether
George W. Bush 
shares
in the Republican hyperthyroidism or not.

The vein-popping conservative backlash Americans
witnessed after the 
2000
election is rooted in the war over judicial nominees
that began in the 
late
1980s, when presidents Reagan and Bush, in an effort
to roll back 
decades
of socially progressive jurisprudence, endeavored to
confirm 
conservative
nominees to the nation's top courts.  "There really
is a line from 
Broward
County that goes all the way back to what *they* did
to [failed 
Supreme
Court nominee Robert] Bork: the attacks, and lies,
and 
misrepresentations,"
says former Delaware governor Pete DuPont. "Then they
almost did the 
same
thing to [Supreme Court justice] Clarence Thomas.  I
think this time
conservatives finally decided to stand tall."
Gingrich was in on the
tone-setting war from the start.  Writing shortly
after Bork's defeat, 
he
promised to fight the Democrats "with the scale and
duration and 
savagery
that is true only of civil wars."

It didn't take long to see that Gingrich and the
people around him 
weren't
conservatives in the original sense of the word; they
were 
power-hungry
radicals who consciously adopted the street-fighting
political style 
of the
'60s for their own ends.  In the early '90s
Gingrich's posse hung out 
at
the Capitol Hill row house of Grover Norquist, an
antitax lobbyist 
whom The
New Republic once called the "Che [Guevara] of the
Republican 
Revolution."
At Norquist's parties, where conservatives convened
to drink kegs and
grouse about the latest liberal outrages, I ran into
former Reagan and 
Bush
speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Weekly Standard editor
William Kristol,
conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, Wall Street
Journal editorial 
writer
John Fund, and many of the figures you saw kicking
and screaming on TV
about the "stolen" election.  The integrity of
ballots was the last 
thing I
ever thought this crowd could get worked up over. 
Norquist kept a pet 
boa
constrictor named Lysander Spooner, after a
turn-of-the-century 
anarchist;
a majestic portrait of Lenin graced Norquist's living
room
wall.  Incongruously for such a hard-right crowd,
Peter, Paul & Mary 
tunes
played on the stereo.  I asked Norquist about this
deviation once, and 
he
told me it was okay since the '60s left "is being
destroyed."

After the Cold War, Republicans made the destruction
of the left a 
central
mission.  Gingrich and company cannily recognized
that the Cold War's
demonizing "us versus them" paradigm had not outlived
its usefulness, 
and
they appropriated it for new use.  The GOP promptly
stigmatized its
domestic political opposition as unprincipled,
immoral, and
un-American.  The dramatic rhetorical shift from one
enemy to another
culminated at the divisive Republican National
Convention in 1992 in
Houston, where RNC chairman Rich Bond stood on the
convention floor 
and
said of the Clintons and their supporters, "We are
America.  Those 
other
people are not." As Marshall Wittmann, the Christian
Coalition's 
former
chief congressional lobbyist, told me, "Conservatism
only thrives when 
it
has an enemy.  Things really heated up in the
movement in 1993 and 
1994,
because the Clintons came to power."

Republicans have never forgotten that in 1992 the
ballots cast for 
Ross
Perot combined with those cast for George Bush
constituted a majority 
of
the electorate; in their minds the will of the people
clearly favored
conservative leadership.  On election night in 1992,
then-Senate 
minority
leader Bob Dole went on national television and
denounced the 
Clinton-Gore
ticket, which had won with 43 percent of the vote, as
illegitimate.  
That
made it possible to say and do anything to stop them.
And boy, did we
try.  (As part of its $2.4 million investment in the
Arkansas Project, 
for
example, The American Spectator sent me to Arkansas
to chase down
outlandish stories linking Clinton to drug-running
and murder.)

Riding a wave of anti-Clinton sentiment, the Gingrich
Revolution swept 
into
power in 1994.  In came a generation of right-wing
rabble-rousers 
whose
politics seem based more on raw emotion and invective
than 
conservative
ideals. "A horny hick" and "creepier and slimier than
Kennedy" were 
two of
many phrases conservative pundit Ann Coulter used to
describe
Clinton.  Beginning with a famous election night
party that Laura 
Ingraham
and I threw after George Bush senior was elected in
1988, my house in
Georgetown became the center of social life for the
revolution.  The
highlight of my dinner parties was always a dramatic
reading from 
Gennifer
Flowers's steamy book Passion & Betrayal.

When Gingrich's extreme antigovernment agenda fell
flat--notably when
Clinton outfoxed the GOP in the government shutdown
fiasco of 1995 and 
then
revived his fortunes by tracking to the
center--furious Republicans 
fought
back.  They deployed the scandalmongering technique
pioneered by 
Gingrich,
who called politics "war without blood." GOP
congressional 
investigation
staffers, together with friends of mine who worked
for Kenneth Starr,
quickly generated charges, countercharges, conspiracy
theories, and 
rumors
designed to depict the Clintons as criminals.  After
I introduced 
Paula
Jones to the world in the pages of The American
Spectator, I was one 
of the
right wing' golden boys, and I was in the thick of it
all.

Among Clinton's foes tempers boiled over, as the
promised indictments
failed to materialize and Clinton won reelection
handily.  Tired of 
running
down dead ends, I bailed out soon afterward, but the 
right--intellectually
bankrupt and on the ropes politically--never stopped
believing that 
the
Clinton-Gore administration was a depraved criminal
syndicate.  In the 
fall
of 1997, months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal
broke, I attended a
dinner given by The American Spectator.  The subject
of discussion 
that
evening was how to build support for an impeachment
resolution 
introduced
by Representative Bob Barr of Georgia.  Impeachment,
said The Wall 
Street
Journal's Fund, was "not a matter of law, but of
political will."

The Republicans saw their subsequent failure to
remove Clinton as a
historic defeat.  But they didn't blame themselves. 
As they had after 
the
failure to get Bork's nomination through Congress,
Republican 
stalwarts saw
themselves as the beleaguered victims of a malevolent
political force.  
In
their minds they had simply been outmaneuvered by the
oily 
Clinton-Gore
spin machine, tricky lawyers, and the liberal-leaning
media, and they 
would
do everything they could to ensure that nothing like
this ever 
happened 
again.

This is the untold political backdrop for Florida's
recent drama.  And 
it
explains why Republicans so quickly concluded that
Florida Democrats 
were
colluding with Gore to steal the election and why
they were so adamant
about drawing their line in the sand.  Speaking of
the Republican 
fighting
force that took to Florida's streets after the
election, Florida 
Republican
Congressman Mark Foley offers a thorough assessment,
"This all goes 
back to
1995," says Foley.  "No matter what we did, we got
punished in the 
court of
public opinion.  The Democrats kept beating us with
their half-truths 
and
inconsistencies.  If they say it often enough and
loud enough it's 
true,
and the media lets them get away with it.  That's how
we got beat at
impeachment. 'It's all about sex.' Give me a break. 
How about the 
rule of
law?  A lot of this is pent-up frustration over
that... You don't know 
how
crazy it makes us when time after time we just can't
make people 
understand
why we're doing what we're doing.  I used to sit home
quietly during 
these
things.  Then I hear *them*, of all people, talk
about the rule of law 
in
the Florida election, and I lost it.  I said to
myself, 'I'm not going 
to
let them get away with their lies this time.  I'm not
going to take it
anymore.  I'm going to fight back.  They're not gonna
steal it from 
us.'"

Public opinion polls showed that while 75 percent of
Democrats would 
have
accepted Bush as president, barely 60 percent of
Republicans would 
accept
Gore, suggesting that the Republican base shares
Foley's views.  The
numbers also suggest that for conservative
Republicans something more 
was
at stake than the election of Bush or Gore.  I think
that much of the
hysteria sprang from the Republicans' sense that the
right has lost 
ground
in the culture wars.  In an election in which the two
most reliable
indicators of a Republican vote were churchgoing and
gun ownership, 
social
conservatives responded to Bush's much-repeated
promise to revive a
tradition of moral leadership, "to renew our values
and restore our 
country."

Traditionalist supporters seemed to think a Bush
victory would provide 
a
powerful cultural emetic.  As The Weekly Standard's
Kristol observed, 
for
the right the election had always been about Bill
Clinton, the man The 
Wall
Street Journal announced on election day had
"Caligulized modern 
American
politics." Radio show host and columnist Dennis
Prager put it
differently.  In his view, the "chad revolt" was
fueled by 
conservative
anger over "attempts to destroy the Boy Scouts," and
"the war on the
'masculinist' culture of the military." In a Wall
Street Journal piece
under the headline GORE CARRIES PORN BELT, DuPont
noted that "Gore 
carried
the areas with the highest... percentage of sex
movies in the home 
video
market," suggesting a link between wayward Americans
and the 
Democratic 
Party.

For a while, anyway, Bush seems likely to enjoy a
honeymoon with the
party's conservative base, which sees him as a
conquering hero.  But
Marshall Wittmann sees "great irony" in the
"full-throated anger on 
the
right" regarding the election.  "The right will not
play a prominent 
role
in the administration," says Wittmann.  "The
Republican right is going 
to
be left out in the cold.  [Bush] won't be able to
nominate Marlo 
Thomas,
much less Clarence Thomas.  What Bush may not
understand is that the
Democrats don't want bipartisanship, they want to
stuff their 
legislation
down the administration's throat.  I see Eisenhower,
who accommodated 
all
the demands of the New Deal, as the model." At a
postelection briefing
Michael Berman, a longtime Democratic activist,
argued that Democrats 
may
be pleasantly surprised by Bush.  "The Bushes don't
talk to the Tom 
DeLays
or the Dick Armeys.  They're good people."

Former GOP senator Warren Rudman, who chaired Senator
John McCain's
presidential campaign, raises the possibility of a
kind of Clintonian
triangulation, in which Bush uses the right wing as a
foil.  "Whatever 
his
intentions were, he absolutely will have to govern as
a centrist," 
says
Rudman.  "He'll have cover, because anything that
comes out of the 
[more
conservative] House is dead on arrival in the Senate,
where moderates 
are
going to coalesce around John [McCain].  Bush could
build his 
governing
coalition that way, with conservative Democrats and
the mainstream
Republicans." Such a scenario isn't likely to play
with right-wingers, 
some
of whom are already beating the drums.  National
Review has attacked 
the
conservative bona fides of prospective White House
chief of staff 
Andrew
Card, and The Wall Street Journal has warned, "This
would hardly seem 
the
time to go all wobbly with gauzy visions of a
bipartisan future." 
Wittmann
thinks Bush can safely ignore such carping while
holding the 
Republican
right together, if only because their electoral fate
is not
intertwined.  Yet given that conservatives are
notorious for eating 
their
young, Wittmann wouldn't rule out a "primary
challenge from the right 
in
2004." So where will all that Republican road rage go
in the
meantime?  Pretty much where we came in: "To Hillary
Clinton," he 
says.

The preceding is a personal opinion.  Try not to post more than daily.

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