How is the attack on Clinton proof that "elites can covertly manipulate events and change history." The attack on Clinton was public and hardball politics, hardly generated by one conservative author, although the Brook articles certainly played a part. There was no "vast right-wing conspiracy" against Clinton. There was a broad, loosely coordinated political project involving many conservative groups. In fact, it was the conspiracism embraced by these conservative groups that allowed for the circulation of the most absurd conspiracy theories about Clinton. Conspiracism is often used as a political tool to distract attention from the underlying poewr struggles, especially intra-elite power struggles.
There is a whole chapter in our book Right-Wing Populism in America on how conspiracism on the right lubricated the attack on Clinton. That's conspiracism, the febrile ideas that Clinton was part of a vast liberal conspiracy, not so much actual conspiracies conducted by the right, although there were clearly some back-door planning going on. There is an excerpt from an earlier article I wrote on the Clinton attacks below. The whole article is online at:
http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/clinton/Clinton2_TOC.htm#TopOfPage
By dismissing the anti-Clinton campaign as a secret conspiracy by mysterious elites, we miss the actual power struggle that was going on, and how its leaders attempted to mobilize mass sentiment against Clinton, while using legal and administrative procedures to tie his hands to slow down his perceived liberal agenda (as yucky as that was)..
-Chip Berlet
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Hakki Alacakaptan
> Sent: Saturday, March 23, 2002 4:49 AM
> To: Lbo-Talk
> Subject: The great Whitewater scandal that never was
>
>
> Another one of those damn conspiracy theories that distract
> us from the
> broad forces of history by putting forth the view that elites
> can covertly
> manipulate events and change history.
>
> Hakki
>
= = = Clinton, Conspiracism, and the Continuing Culture War by Chip Berlet The Public Eye
The roar was visceral. A torrent of sound fed by a vast subconscious reservoir of anger and resentment. Repeatedly, as speaker after speaker strode to the podium and denounced President Clinton, the thousands in the cavernous auditorium surged to their feet with shouts and applause. The scene was the Christian Coalition's annual Road to Victory conference held in September 1998-three months before the House of Representatives voted to send articles of impeachment to the Senate.
Former Reagan appointee Alan Keyes observed that the country's moral decline had spanned two decades and couldn't be blamed exclusively on Clinton, but when he denounced Clinton for supporting the "radical homosexual agenda," the crowd cheered and gave Keyes one of his several standing ovations. Republican Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire attacked Clinton's foreign policies, stating that the "globalists of the New World Order" must not be allowed to sell out American sovereignty.
Most attacks on Clinton highlighted his sexual misconduct and subsequent cover-up as proof that he was unfit to remain President, but the list of complaints was long. When the American Conservative Union distributed a National Impeachment Survey with the type of loaded question typical of the direct-mail genre. It asked:
"Which Clinton Administration scandal listed below do you consider to be `very serious'?"
The scandals listed were:
Chinagate, Monicagate, Travelgate, Whitewater, FBI `Filegate,' Cattlegate, Troopergate, Casinogate, [and] Health Care-gate..."
In addition to attention to scandals, those attending the annual conference clearly opposed Clinton's agenda on abortion, gay rights, foreign policy, and other issues.
Several months later, much of the country's attention was focused on the House of Representatives "Managers" and their pursuit of a successful impeachment of Clinton in the Senate. Few people understood the vast right-wing political machinery that was mobilized to pressure the managers to fight on and never give up.1 Those gathered at the Road to Victory Conference are naturally inclined to oppose Clinton, but they were "educated" by a large number of relatively unknown right-wing groups and individuals to see Clinton as the embodiment of evil¾not just a liberal, but corrupt, immoral, and even a murderer. They are the foot soldiers in the "Culture War," the backlash launched by the political right against the Post-WWII social liberation movements. It has replaced communism as the right's major unifying focus.
Today's Culture War is, in part, a continuation of the right's long-standing campaign against the ideas of modernity and even the enlightenment. Some openly support the Culture War as part of the age-old battle against forces aligned with Satan.
Demonization is central to the process. Essayist Ralph Melcher notes the "venomous hatred" directed toward the entire culture exemplified by the President and his wife succeeded in making "Bill and Hillary into political monsters," but represented the deeper continuity of the right's historic distaste for liberalism.2 As historian Robert Dallek of Boston University puts it, "The Republicans are incensed because they essentially see Clinton...as the embodiment of the counterculture's thumbing of its nose at accepted wisdoms and institutions of the country."3
Liberals are demonized for tolerating godless moral relativism and sinful immorality-especially in the form of abortion and gay rights. Liberals also are demonized for supporting a strong federal government, aggressive regulatory oversight, and global interdependence-seen as subversive collectivism that undermines sovereignty and the spirit of free enterprise.
The Christian Coalition audience's palpable hostility to Clinton and all he represents illustrates the zeal of the foot soldiers mobilized in the crusade for God and country. We should not discount the political impact of these activists, who are motivated by deep ideological, theological, and emotional commitments. While the Senate voted not to sustain the charges sent over by the House of Representatives, there is no truce in the Culture War. Bill and Hillary Clinton continue to serve as high profile targets.
Much of the original constituency for the impeachment battle came from the Christian Right, but the Christian Right does not act alone or in isolation. Right-wing attacks on President Clinton flow from a large and diverse network of individuals and organizations. This is not so much a secret conspiracy against President Clinton as a loosely-knit pre-existing coalition among several sectors of the political right that share an anti-Clinton agenda, despite wide differences in political outlook and style. As analyst Russ Bellant explains, "different sectors on the right didn't have to agree on the person they would choose to replace Clinton; all they had to do was agree that they wanted Clinton to go."4 It is this convergence of anti-Clinton sentiment across sectors of the right that accounts for the fervor and drive of the anti-Clinton campaign.
<<SNIP>>
The conspiracist wing of the Republican right had been pushed back following the disgrace of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his reign of error and false accusation in the 1950s, and again after the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, where their alarmist charges about Lyndon Johnson and liberalism helped doom Goldwater's candidacy.6 This conspiracist wing, rooted in nativism, took the movements built to support Goldwater (and later, right wing populist George Wallace) and built the "New Right." A conspiracist worldview undergirded this movement. According to Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy:
"Former congressman Vin Weber, an early and active member of the "movement conservative" Republican faction on Capitol Hill, recalled that "people on the right were absolutely convinced that there was a vast, left-wing conspiracy" that had to be mimicked and countered with new conservative organizations that were "philosophically sound, technologically proficient and movement-oriented." This became a mantra for the new conservative activists."7 (Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy, "How Scaife's Money Powered a Movement," Washington Post, 5/2/99, p. A10, online.)
Academic studies have shown that some conspiracist groups on the right, such as the John Birch Society, are not "marginal" to the electoral process, but have members with above-average income, status, and education, who often are long-term activists within the Republican Party.8 As the political scene has shifted to the right over the past twenty years and the culture of conspiracism spread into television's prime time news and commentary outlets, the apocalyptic prophets of the right-wing paranoid style have reintegrated themselves into the Republican Party.9