Wild and Woolly Sects
Leftists are enthusiastic
sectarians. The most brutal internecine spats took place in New York City in
the 1930s. Dozens of tiny Marxist sects vied to launch the Revolution. Most of
these were personality cults, led by charismatic trade unionists and brainy
theorists: Fieldites, Lovestoneites, Weisbordites, Shermanites, Cochranites,
Schactmanites, and Oehlerites. The prize for best sectarian of the decade may
go to a Trostkyite named Karl Mienov. Mienov and his followers bolted from an
alliance with the Oehlerite faction, following a debate over which Leninist
strategy best suited the Spanish proletariat. "We are proud to have split with
such a centrist group," Mienov proclaimed. But within months of forming his own
party, the Marxist Workers League, Mienov purged all its members for a lack of
revolutionary zeal. He flamed one poor Mienovite in his party's journal,
Spark : "We can gage Comrade Stanford's sincerity, however, by the fact
that rather than give out leaflets for the revolution, he prefers to study for
exams at Brooklyn College." According to leftist apocrypha, Karl Mienov, now
the only Mienovite, developed multiple personalities and split with
himself.
In America, at least,
political activists of the right have generally eschewed minuscule parties and
bloody breaks. Recently, however, conservatives have become enthusiastic
sectarians. Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote recently about the rumbling between
libertarians and Christian conservatives over issues like the regulation of the
Internet. The New Republic carried a piece last month about how
neoconservative intellectuals have also started to condemn the
Christian-conservative rhetoric. But these are broad-brush disagreements. True
sectarianism requires more esoteric disputes.
In the last 20 years, hundreds of new groups have come on
the scene promoting right-wing agendas. There's the U.S. Taxpayer Party, the
National Taxpayer Union, the American Family Association, the Family Research
Council, the Christian Coalition, the Christian Action Network, and so on.
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, boasted in the
American Spectator last year that there are now more than 1,000 state
and local property-rights groups, and more than 1,500 taxpayer
organizations.
Through the late '70s,
the right took a Popular Front approach. The Popular Front was the American
Communist Party's attempt in the late 1930s to pool leftists into a grand
anti-fascist coalition. Groups like the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby,
and Young Americans for Freedom similarly suppressed their differences in the
service of anti-communism. Libertarians, evangelicals, segregationists, and
others put aside significant doctrinal disagreements.
Most of the new conservative groups, by contrast,
have particular ideological agendas. They fall into different camps. Some
examples: Buchananite populists (conservatives who are anti-tax and who are
social traditionalists, but who are also economic nationalists) can join the
U.S. Taxpayer Party or Gun Owners of America. Less radical populists (like the
Buchananites, but more committed to the Republican Party and without the
economic nationalism) fund interest groups like U.S. Term Limits Now, the
Institute for Justice, and Americans for Tax Reform. Libertarians have their
own party and organizations promoting the rollback of government, like the
Separation of School and State Alliance.
And then there are the
Christian conservatives--the Trotskyites of the right. Trotskyites believe they
actually have an obligation to undermine other leftist groups. They follow
their namesake's aphorism that revolutions are like birth: The forceps
shouldn't be applied too early. Only a vanguard party (their own, of course),
using the correct tactics at the correct moment, can instigate a revolution.
Christian conservatives have a similar sort of fixation on the purity of their
movement's strategy. Consequently, the religious right is riddled with tiny
groups, their very own Mienovites and Oehlerites, who believe they each have a
monopoly on midwifery techniques for bringing a Christian society into the
world.
Reconstructionists, for instance, follow the teachings of
Francis Schaeffer, an obscure theologian in Switzerland, and argue for an
Iran-like theocracy. Judgment Day, they reckon, has come and gone--so we are
headed to perdition, unless a vanguard of radical Christians reconstruct
society using Mosaic law as a blueprint. A truly Christian polis, they believe,
would deny nonbelievers citizenship and publicly stone or kill disobedient
children. Though they can't claim much of a following, their coterie is well
organized and well positioned. Reconstructionists dominate the pro-life group,
Operation Rescue. Howard Phillips, a well-known figure on the right and the
recent U.S. Taxpayer Party presidential candidate, belongs to their tribe.
Most other Christian conservative groups don't
preach such an extreme vision for their ideal society, but they similarly abhor
compromise. Take Focus on the Family, a "parental rights" activist group with a
mailing list of 3.5 million names, and its ally, the Family Research Council.
James Dobson and Gary Bauer, the leaders of the two groups, sing the old
leftist tune "Which Side Are You On?" Here, they describe their mission in
pretty stark terms: "Nothing short of a great Civil War of Values rages today
throughout North America. Two sides with vastly differing and incompatible
worldviews are locked in a bitter conflict." So if you give an inch in battle,
you lose.
There's a long list of
other groups with a fairly similar take. Many claim to have several hundred
thousand members: the Christian Action Network, Eagle Forum, Concerned Women
for America, and the Traditional Values Coalition.
These groups feel uncomfortable with the Christian
Coalition, the most powerful organization on the right and the one most
committed to reviving the popular-front approach. Executive Director Ralph Reed
explained the Christian Coalition's strategy last spring in his manifesto,
Active Faith . He called the approach "surfing the mainstream." Reed
argued that the religious right needs to retreat from the shrill language used
by Bauer and Dobson, and to abandon radical positions--such as their insistence
on a constitutional amendment banning abortion--in favor of more popular,
piecemeal solutions.
But the popular-frontish approach doesn't attract
the Dobson and Bauer crowd. They excoriate Reed. After Reed published Active
Faith and said friendly things about pro-choicer Colin Powell, Comrade
Dobson wrote him a seven-page letter condemning his soft politics. Dobson's
partner Gary Bauer took to the Sunday talking-head circuit, bad-mouthing Reed
for backpedaling on abortion. And, more recently, Christian conservative
leaders have blamed Reed for the debacle of the Bob Dole campaign. Reed, they
argue, quieted brawls between Christian conservatives and Dole that would have
forced Dole to pay more attention to the Christian movement and its issues. In
their view, that would have helped.
With all these new
groups competing for members and cash from the same pool of hard-core
conservatives, tension is unavoidable. Movement old-timers resent having to
share the microphone and money with so many upstarts. For instance, Phyllis
Schlafly, the original Goldwater girl and head of the Eagle Forum, complains
incessantly about new groups. In a series of letters, some of which were
republished this year in Roll Call , Schlafly blasted the populist group
U.S. Term Limits Now for advocating a constitutional amendment. A
constitutional convention, she argues, would be required to enact an amendment,
and it would give pro-choicers the chance to push through their own amendment
protecting abortion. She has also jumped into the anti-Reed fray, criticizing
him for not being tough enough on the abortion issue.
Or, there's the home-schooling movement, a player on the
right since the 1960s. Groups like the Separation of School and State Alliance
and the Home School Legal Defense Association hate the more recent conservative
obsession with vouchers. In its journal, Education Liberator , the
Separation of School and State Alliance calls voucher supporters both
"fascists" and "socialists." Vouchers, they argue, are simply a guise for the
"edu-welfare system" to cast its net over several million more families and
children. Just as the Daily Worker and New Masses , socialist
papers from the 1930s, were peppered with citations of Marx and Engels,
Educational Liberator is peppered with references to their libertarian
equivalents--Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.
Debates like the home schoolers vs. the vouchers, or
Reed vs. Dobson, seem irrelevant or impenetrable to onlookers, mere quibbles
over detail. But to people who believe the welfare state and abortion are
absolute evils, they are of the utmost importance. And, without the old
anti-communist battle and its institutions to suppress the differences,
differences have blossomed. It's the Goldwater rallying cry, "A Choice Not An
Echo," taken to a new extreme. There's too much choice and not enough echo.
