Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Former President Donald Trump gestures after speaking to the 2020 Council for National Policy Meeting, August 21, 2020, in Arlington, Virginia.
Regular Altercation readers will have noticed by now that one of this newsletter’s hobbyhorses is the manner in which the dangerous lunacy that currently rules the conservative movement has long been normalized as just one side in a “both sides” political debate in which truth (or even sanity) has no intrinsic value. I read a few MSM pieces this past week that offer some insight as to how we arrived at this benighted political moment.
The first is a fine investigation by Robert O’Harrow Jr., published by The Washington Post Magazine, of the extremely secretive—and extremely influential—Council for National Policy (CNP), a registered charity whose members currently include Mike Pence, Ralph Reed, L. Brent Bozell III (of the misnamed Media Research Center), and Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The council was started back in the ’80s by a group that included Tim LaHaye, author of the far-right Judgment Day “Left Behind” series, which would eventually sell more than 65 million copies, and also the man who is credited with convincing Jerry Falwell to create the Moral Majority. I’ve been researching LaHaye for my book on the debate over Israel-Palestine and here is a typical statement of his beliefs: “As long as there is an Israeli air force capable of nuclear retaliation,” LaHaye promised, “Russia will not attack the United States. Before they can suppress the world with their totalitarian ideology, they must first remove Israel … Thus Israel’s strategy and military strength are our own nation’s best interest for survival.”
The early group apparently also included Ed Feulner, the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation; right-wing entrepreneur Paul Weyrich, who, on his Wikipedia page, takes credit for having founded the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC); and infamous ERA foe Phyllis Schlafly. At one of its first meetings, O’Harrow reports, Oliver North told its members that Nicaragua and the USSR had as their “real target” the United States, and as a result, “This country is in great, great jeopardy from these people, who are truly godless communists.” With such speeches he was able to garner private funding for the Contras, which eventually led to the Iran-Contra scandal in which the U.S. sold arms to Iran at inflated prices in order to buy weapons for the Nicaraguan Contras, in clear violation of congressional restrictions. Another typical talk to the group informed its members that “activists on the left and the people who fund them are out to destroy everything you hold dear … Your families. Marriage. Your businesses. Your freedom of speech. Your freedom of religion. Everything.”
According to a 2015 CNP directory to which O’Harrow was privy, the group’s members at the time included Leonard Leo, then of the Federalist Society; Steve Bannon, then leader of Breitbart News and later chief executive of Donald Trump’s campaign; David Bossie, the head of the group Citizens United and later Trump’s deputy campaign manager; and Kellyanne Conway, who would become a White House counselor. CNP also launched a network of cooperative right-wing organizations called the Conservative Action Project (CAP) in which it coordinates its efforts with groups like the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, and Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition. (This is described in detail in Anne Nelson’s 2019 book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.) CAP claims a membership of over 100 groups “representing all major elements of the conservative movement—economic, social, and national security.”
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These people were primed for Trump, and he, of course, was primed for anyone who would support him for any reason. They’ve been notably active in questioning and subverting American elections. As O’Harrow reports, “In 2017, Trump announced a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which included two CNP members: Kenneth Blackwell, the former secretary of state of Ohio, and J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. In August 2019, Lisa Nelson, a CNP member and chief executive of the American Legislative Exchange Council, launched an initiative called the “ALEC Political Process Working Group,” according to an internal email. Among other things, the group was going to focus on “election law and ballot integrity.” Also, regarding the January 6 insurrection, “Ginni Thomas, then a CNP Action board member, praised rally-goers in tweets: “LOVE MAGA people!!!!”
Council for National Policy members have been at the forefront of perpetuating the lie of a stolen election.
Accordingly, CNP members have been at the forefront of perpetuating the lie of a stolen election. Something called the Election Transparency Initiative has argued that “the integrity of our electoral system was severely compromised in 2020 when pro-abortion Democrats—utilizing the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse—weakened state laws that ensure free and fair elections.” CNP members have also launched groups like the Center for Election Integrity and the National Election Protection Initiative to further undermine our democracy. In doing so, they are working not only for and with Trumpists but also Pence’s group, Advancing American Freedom. Roughly half of the 40-some people on the Pence group’s advisory board and its board of directors have been CNP members or guests in recent years, according to O’Harrow, as is Pence himself.
Keep in mind: This conspiracy—can you think of a better word for it?—to destroy our democracy on the basis of a bunch of crazy, paranoid, racist imaginary threats is being carried out under the auspices of tax-deductible charity.
A second useful injection of historical perspective comes from Laura Field’s piece on the Claremont Institute in The New Republic. Back when people were looking for some—any—hint of intellectual coherence in the Trump critique, they landed on an article published in September 2016 on the institute’s website. The “Flight 93 Election” essay argued that a Hillary Clinton victory in that year’s presidential election would effectively spell the end of civilization. Its author, Michael Anton, would later join Trump’s National Security Council, and now works for Hillsdale College, whose president, Larry P. Arnn, chaired President Trump’s stupid 1776 Commission Report, which argued for the promotion of “patriotic education.” Back then, Anton wrote that “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.” During the 2020 election, he and other Claremont denizens were promoting the beyond lunatic threat of a “Biden coup,” while John C. Eastman, the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, authored a six-point plan for Trump that spelled out how Pence could overturn the election on January 6 (in the event that Trump-supporting rioters and terrorists did not find him and kill him first).
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A third piece that helps to shed some light on the current moment is an article by Elisabeth Zerofsky in The New York Times Magazine, which, while overly indulgent to a great many specious intellectual claims in this view, offers useful information on the current vogue among conservative intellectuals for Viktor Orban, the man who is destroying Hungarian democracy as he builds up his autocratic leadership. I mentioned in a recent column the love showered on him by Tucker Carlson and Mike Pence, among others. Here again we hear crazy complaints like that of Rod Dreher, who imagines that “we’re at a point now where we have such cultural disintegration in the U.S. that the choice might actually be between an illiberal democracy of the left or an illiberal democracy of the right.” He is particularly concerned with how “incredibly destructive” U.S. universities “have been to American society … If you resist, you get targeted by a multibillion-dollar industrial complex that has the full support of the U.S. government, high and low culture, the legal establishment, the courts, etc.” Sadly, the Republican Party “seems to exist mainly to ratify whatever the Democrats were advocating about five years ago.”
The piece also quotes Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen, author of the book Why Liberalism Failed, and Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, who wrote in 2018 in American Affairs that the very logic of liberalism turned it into an “imperialist progressive” force that could destroy conservatism “at a moment’s notice.” Evidence? Same-sex marriage.
Remember, all this is coming from the right’s intellectuals. The right’s politicians and the pundits are much more vulgar about their claims. So if you were wondering how it was that a governor’s race in Virginia could turn on the horror of AP English students reading a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by a Nobel laureate (who—surprise, surprise—just happens to be a Black woman) as in this advertisement, well here is at least a partial answer. (Note also that the poor, traumatized fellow forced to read Toni Morrison’s Beloved grew up to be a lawyer at the National Republican Congressional Committee.) Oh, and if you want to play “Where’s Waldo” with the anti-Semitic George Soros dog whistle so evident in almost all Republican advertising these days, look no further than this crazy claim by the Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin about “George Soros-backed allies” in “the left, liberal-progressive movement. They’ve inserted political operatives into our school system disguised as school boards.”
If I had more space, I would tell you about the tribute I attended this past Sunday to Robert Caro at the New-York Historical Society, celebrating its purchase of his incredibly voluminous papers. But the people I work for here are tyrants when it comes to space (yes, even cyberspace). And so I will have to make do with recommending a short film about Caro that was shown at the proceedings as well as a visit to the exhibition to see how Caro’s world-historic sausages are made. Also, whether you can make it to NYHS, or even care about such things as historical sausage making, invest some time in Caro’s Master of the Senate (as Barack Obama did when he first became president). It gets my vote for the best nonfiction book of all time.
