Just posting this to the last message.
I think Weyrich is right, and have long advocated something of the sort he now advocates for social conservatives. I think social conservatives should abandon the Republican Party just as the left wants. I think they should nearly abandon the culture, allowing it to do as it pleases to itself.
I do not think social conservatives should simply allow themselves to be abused by the government. I in fact think they should use the government viciously, culling their resources to themselves with the aim to destroy or nurture the institutions of government strictly for their own protection. They should do this without thought of supporting the Republican or Democrat parties. And they should no longer view America as their country.
As they work, they should build themselves a new country within America, building their own intellectual and social institutions and struggling to make them as impervious as they can to the influences of the larger culture. They should aim to grow their country from its solid foundations until it over time consumes the larger culture. The germs of this new country are already in place. All that is needed is the willingness to establish new ground rules for active cooperation -- a new Constitution, if you will.
Homeschoolers understand the tactic well. We are only a relative few people but we are well organized and have many resources to protect ourselves from the hindrances of the culture. We grow almost exponentially because our system works better than that of the culture. When my family first arrived in our current area, we were the only homeschoolers. Now eight families homeschool, this as a direct result of my family. Many of these families have begun to experience intimacy they never thought possible. As they have thanked us, they have become open to other of our ideas, including our religious beliefs. Some now regularly attend our church, and a few of these are becoming more and more socially conservative. As this process is duplicated over the next century, social conservatives will win the culture with undeniable finality and power.
It will take discipline and vision, but these are natural strengths of social conservatives. Certainly they will lose power for a number of years, several decades even, but there is no doubt in my mind they will win in the long run.
I do not support the Republican party, have not supported it for quite sometime. I work to demolish my opponents purely for my own protection. If government will leave me alone to increase my production and power, then I will allow the left to pervert itself to death without any challenge whatever.
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Social Conservatives' Ties to GOP Fraying
By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 28, 1999; Page A01
A man in Washington, a private citizen, recently wrote a letter expressing his disillusionment with politics.
Big deal, right?
Lots of powerful Republicans certainly hope it's no big deal. They hope it's not a sign that the alliance of religious conservatives with the Republican Party is in danger of coming apart.
But these are times of great uncertainty in the Republican Party. In the wake of a disastrous congressional election, with President Clinton seemingly defying known laws of political gravity, the marriage of low-taxers and old-school moralists is rockier than ever.
In these times, it is a spicy question -- Paul Weyrich: crank or prophet? On Feb. 16, Weyrich -- a founder of modern social conservatism -- widely dispersed a letter in which he announced that "politics has failed." That "we probably have lost the culture war," that "what we have been doing for thirty years hasn't worked," and that "I no longer believe that there is a moral majority."
The Weyrich letter counseled supporters of his Free Congress Foundation to separate themselves from the ever-widening sewer that is American popular culture -- "while I'm not suggesting that we all become Amish or move to Idaho . . . we need some sort of quarantine." He urged them to stop expecting big things from the ballot box.
That one man has lost faith in the power of party politics is no big deal as long as it's just one man. But Weyrich has a proven knack for making his personal views, notions and brainstorms into significant facts of conservative life.
As much as any one man -- Ronald Reagan excluded -- Weyrich stitched social-issue conservatives into the fabric of the Republican Party. If he isn't the architect of the New Right, he is surely its electrical engineer, the man who designed the wiring.
Some 30 years ago, Weyrich latched on to the idea that conservatives needed a think tank to match the liberal Brookings Institution. In 1972, he started the Heritage Foundation.
A few years later, Weyrich coined the phrase "moral majority" and handed it to the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Soon afterward, he and some friends hatched the notion of a conclave of social conservatives to coordinate strategies. The secretive and influential Council for National Policy was born. Weyrich was in on the creation of the Christian Coalition, and after its rocky start he helped steer the highly effective young strategist Ralph Reed into running the organization.
In the days since his letter, Weyrich has heard from friends begging for a retraction. He has heard from enemies saying good riddance. Among the general run of GOP gossip, he has been dismissed as a tired old warrior, a classic "cranky con," in the words of one much younger right-winger. "It's a little like Sinatra toward the end," says a key member of the new generation of party leaders. "He's lost his voice, but there's still a large reservoir of affection and gratitude so people keep buying the tickets and going to the concerts."
"I don't think practically speaking it means much," says yet another Republican thinker, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. "The social conservatives I know are out there fighting." Paul Weyrich's latest brainstorm, it is widely asserted, matters only to Paul Weyrich.
And it's true that Weyrich has never been a happy warrior in the Republican Party. Even in the fullness of the Reagan years, he complained about Christian conservatives being taken for granted.
Still, there is something very current about his warning that "the marriage" of social conservatives and the GOP "is in deep trouble, because one party has taken advantage of the other. The doormat housewife is starting to realize she is being abused. The day when Christian conservatives are willing to do all the work, but stay in the back of the bus, is frankly over with."
The links holding Weyrich's comrades to the party are under enormous tension; Weyrich is not the only one groaning. James Dobson, head of the Focus on the Family empire, is threatening to bolt the GOP. Conservative columnist Cal Thomas hails the Weyrich letter: "This marriage between political parties and the church is a bad marriage. Church leaders have been seduced by the Republican Party."
Republican turnout in 1998 was dismal. The social conservatives blame a gutless party leadership while the leaders point fingers at the religious right. In a remarkable effort to tame party dissent, the Republican establishment is rallying forcefully and very early around Texas Gov. George W. Bush for president. Through strength, they hope to dictate terms to the social conservatives.
Here's a leading party strategist extolling Bush: "He's not going to pander to the conservative base of the party. He wants to have an adult relationship with the base -- he'll tell them on core issues 'I'm with you but I'm not going to say everything just the way you want me to. I'm not going out on a limb with you.' "
And Weyrich is saying in response: Don't look for us out on your limb, either.
Right after he issued his letter, Weyrich heard from stricken friends, he says. His old comrade on the social-issue right, Gary L. Bauer, called. Bauer is pondering a run for president, and will be sunk if conservative Christians lose their ardor for politics. Say it ain't so, he told Weyrich.
To which Weyrich recalls saying, "even if you got elected" -- a possibility Weyrich considers highly remote -- "even you couldn't push through our agenda."
Weyrich speaks perfect and precise sentences in the orotund voice of a '60s radio announcer, which he was. Never a relaxed man, he now sits even more stiffly in his office two blocks behind Union Station, the result of a three-year-old back injury that is gradually draining the feeling from his feet and legs.
"When you step back and you look at what effort we have expended," he begins wearily. " . . . Take the '96 Republican Party platform. Gary Bauer and Phyllis Schlafly" -- another giant of the Christian right -- "spent most of a year organizing to affect that platform. They spent the time, the money. They got the right people elected to the right committees. They got a good platform.
"And then Bob Dole undid it all with one sentence." That would be the sentence in which the Republican presidential nominee said he had never read the platform and certainly didn't feel bound by anything in it.
Another example: In 1994 Republicans captured the House of Representatives for the first time in more than 40 years. They held the Senate too. And what did the Christian conservatives get out of it?
"The National Endowment for the Arts, a piddling agency with a relatively tiny budget -- they didn't even eliminate that," Weyrich says. "Seventy-five Republicans defected on that. And I remember at the time sitting with a group of wealthy Republicans and the wives were actually defending the filth supported by the NEA. 'It's art,' they were saying."
Mainstream Republicans have never loved the religious conservatives, and vice versa, and both sides know it. Weyrich is, by their lights, a zealot and a meanie. Years later, people still remember him in 1989 denouncing John Tower -- the former senator from Texas who was President George Bush's nominee to be defense secretary -- as a drunk and womanizer. They remember him threatening former Joint Chiefs chairman Colin L. Powell in 1996 with a withering examination if he dared run for president.
But the party has nourished itself on the energy of the social-issue right. Passionate about their causes -- antiabortion, anti-gay rights, pro-religion -- the social conservatives have raised money, recruited ground troops, compiled mailing lists, dispatched millions of letters and phone calls. They have been the GOP's most reliable voters since 1980. In ways they have become to the Republicans what labor unions are to the Democrats.
"And what did that expenditure get us?" Weyrich asks. "Compare that to the influence home schoolers have had. Those parents have simply separated themselves from the public schools. And now a million young people are growing up with decent values. Had their parents stayed in the battle to reform the public schools, they would have lost."
Weyrich is not exactly calling for social conservatives to give up on politics. They should keep voting, he says, as a defensive measure, to prevent government becoming actively hostile to their causes.
But a social conservative who has a choice between campaigning for an antiabortion candidate or volunteering at antiabortion "crisis pregnancy center" should hustle over to the center, Weyrich says. "Even if Washington were to pass legislation outlawing abortion, in this culture you would create such an enormous underground you'd make Prohibition seem paltry."
One might say that Weyrich is coming late to a basic understanding of life and politics. As columnist Thomas puts it, morality "bubbles up" rather than "trickles down. . . . If you really want to change the culture at the top you have to work at the bottom."
And a good many Republicans believe Weyrich's disillusionment is an inevitable price of the Clinton years, when conservatives pushed all their chips onto the losing wager that Americans would find the president as appalling as they do.
Party leaders with ice in their veins look at Weyrich and feel confident that, after all the tempest and protest, he and all social conservatives will vote Republican because they have nowhere else to go. They liken the Republican situation today to the condition of the Democrats in 1992. Bill Clinton angered virtually every liberal bloc in his effort to show the American people he was a man of the middle, but the liberals nevertheless rallied around him because they wanted to win.
"Conservatives feel on a very primordial level that they are standing on the brink of an abyss," says one right-winger in the Bush camp. "If we lose the White House in 2000 we will lose the House, too, and that would be a disaster."
All this sounds familiar to Paul Weyrich. "Those are the reactions of the political elite," he says, a faint smile playing over his lips. "The reactions of the grass roots has been entirely different. This letter has touched a chord like nothing else I've ever done. People keep writing to say that I've put into words something they have been thinking for a long time."
The great networker says he'll use his foundation to create a clearinghouse to disperse ideas for grass-roots conservative action.
It's snowing outside. Weyrich is running late for his next meeting. But as his interviewer pulls on an overcoat, Weyrich recalls that they once sat together on a panel discussing the then-ascendant Christian Coalition. It was the summer of 1994, the eve of the conservative takeover of the Congress. After years of work, the Republicans were going to be making the laws. Who could foresee that the party would soon split into warring tribes?
Weyrich, for one. "You asked when the social conservatives and the economic conservatives might split up," he says. "Do you remember?
"And my answer: 'As soon as we have a chance to govern.' "
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