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Contents
This Week on the Right | Tom Barry
What's New | Profiles: Michael Novak, George Weigel, Richard John Neuhaus, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Institute on Religion and Public Life, Ethics and Public Policy Center
This Week on the Right
In the Culture War: Neocons Down but Not Out
By Tom Barry
Are the neoconservatives finished? Political commentators would certainly have you believe so. This is the not first time that political pundits have written off the neoconservatives as political contenders. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Washington political commentators repeatedly concluded that the eras of the neoconservatives had come and gone.
There’s little doubt that the neocons are being forced to eat crow. Their ideological battle plan for restructuring the Middle East has met the reality of Arab nationalism and U.S. imperial ineptitude. But the neocons did achieve their stated goals of toppling the Saddam Hussein regime and of pulling the rug out from under five decades of politics as usual in the Middle East. What’s more, the Bush administration has not backed away from its support of the Likud Zionists in Israel--the foreign country that is central to the neocon worldview. Nor has the president, as top-dog neocon polemicist William Kristol has noted, backed away from the neoconservative ideology of U.S. redemptive mission in global politics.
But the failure of the U.S. occupation and the increased moral and political isolation of Washington in international politics have forced at least the foreign policy specialists of the neoconservative camp into retreat.
The neocons are a small clique of political ideologues who since the early 1970s have, working closely with other right-wing forces, relentlessly pursued their objective of toppling the liberal establishment and replacing it with an establishment of the radical right. The grand ambition of this rightist counter-establishment was to create an infrastructure of think tanks, policy institutes, and media outlets, both at the national and local levels, that would establish the dominant policy frameworks. In addition, the counter-establishment would promote a set of values drawn from Judeo-Christian orthodoxy that would shape the values, ethics, and morality of these new policy frameworks. The end goal was to control all branches and agencies of government.
Of course the neoconservatives are not the only ones to harbor the ambition to smash the “liberal establishment” and to turn back progressive policy reforms. But whether the arena is foreign policy, domestic policy, or social thought, the neocons have been the most successful faction of the multifaceted right-wing in establishing the ideological framework for new policy directions.
Having taken two steps forward, the Bush foreign policy team is now taking a step backward. As the election nears and as the neocons’ supremacist ideology is proving to be badly out of step with the realities of international relations, the few conservative realists in the administration, most prominently Condoleezza Rice, have gained new prominence.
But the death of neoconservatism has been greatly exaggerated. Not only have the foreign policy wing of the neoconservative camp demonstrated its ability to bounce back from what looked like certain death after the cold war’s end, but the leading neocon social conservatives continue to play a leading role in the ever-escalating culture war in the United States.
The neoconservative Institute for Religion and Democracy will, for example, be active behind the scenes at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA in Richmond, Virginia the last weekend in June as part of its longtime strategy to install conservative leadership in the mainline Protestant denominations, or to support conservative schisms.
Just as the neoconservatives now dominate most of the right’s leading think tanks--including the American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution, Hudson Institute, and the Manhattan Institute--they also control many of the most influential policy institutes active in the culture war. In addition to the Institute for Religion and Democracy, these include the Institute on Religion and Public Life, Empower America, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Although these and other neocon institutes are interlinked with the organizations that formulated the now discredited neocon foreign policy agenda--notably the Project for the New American Century and the American Enterprise Institute--their credibility and reputation remains largely intact among their constituencies. And they continue to move forward their own radical agendas. Similarly, such leading neocon theologians and religious philosophers as Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard Neuhaus continue to exert great influence among social conservatives.
It’s likely that these neocon social conservative figures and institutes will, at least over the short term, attempt to shed their public identity as neoconservatives. However, their ideology and goals--including their promotion of Judeo-Christian orthodoxy and supremacy--will remain largely unchanged.
(Tom Barry is Policy Director of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC), online at: www.irc-online.org.)
A Pledge to Make Us Proud
(Excerpted from a Right Web Analysis at:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0406pledge.php)
“One nation under God” will remain in the Pledge of Allegiance that U.S. schoolchildren recite at the start of each school day. The U.S. Supreme Court on June 14--Flag Day--declined to uphold a lower court ruling, which stipulated that the pledge violated the constitutionally mandated separation between church and state. The court based its decision on technicalities rather than on the constitutional merits of the argument, leaving the door open to future legal challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance.
A man of the cloth authored the pledge. But he didn’t see fit to mention God in this statement of civic values. In 1892 Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and educator, had a progressive political agenda when he penned the Pledge of Allegiance. As a Christian Socialist, Francis Bellamy was intent on pitting moral purpose (equality, liberty, and justice) against the prevailing power of the plutocrats and robber barons of his day.
The Progressive Era of the 1890s marked the beginning of a power shift in the United States, when populist movements of farmers, small business owners, and workers demanded that local, state, and federal government protect them from the depredations of big business, banks, and railroads. Francis Bellamy believed that the progressive cause would be well served if the values of equality, justice, and liberty would be inserted into the daily school routine.
What's New on Right Web
Featured Profiles
A Capitalist Theologian. More than any other neoconservative, Michael Novak has helped create a religious common ground for social conservatives, neoconservatives, and the Christian right. A Catholic theologian and longtime colleague of George Weigel, Novak has over the past three decades worked to bring Catholics into the neoconservative fold--and in the process has infuriated liberal and progressive members of the church.
As an American Enterprise Institute scholar for more than two decades, Michael Novak has attempted to bring together capitalism and social democracy within Catholicism, preaching concepts such as wealth accumulation and free market principles that the Vatican is opposed to. Along with David Jessup of the U.S.-government funded American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), Penn Kemble, and Richard John Neuhaus, Novak helped found the neoconservative Institute on Religion and Democracy.
Right Web Profile: Michael Novak
A Contra Catholic. In Weigel's view, the tendency for Christians--especially progressives he considers befuddled by Catholic liberation theology and the national bureaucracies of the Protestant churches--to view the morality of the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to foreign policy is not only bad theology but dangerous politics. During the Reagan administration, Weigel was associated with three institutions that gave him the opportunity to put into practice his political theology. He was president of the right-wing James Madison Foundation, which received funding from the federal government's U.S. Institute for Peace to monitor what it called “peace groups.” Weigel was also a principal at the Puebla Institute and an associate of the anticommunist World Without War Council, which promoted U.S. military action to secure Pax Americana. There he worked with Director Nina Shea, whose investigation of alleged Sandinista government religious persecution was carried out in close coordination with the CIA and its Contra directorate. The Puebla Institute received U.S. government funding channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy to the front group PRODEMCA. Like many of the Contra supporters in the 1980s, Shea returned to government during the Bush II administration as a member and vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, a permanent panel created in 1999 at the Republican Congress' behest with Elliott Abrams as its first president.
Right Web Profile: George Weigel
Subverting the Protestant Mainline. A major focus of IRD is reforming the mainline Protestant churches. According to the IRD, “Never has there been a greater need for strong churches as a crucial component of civil society. America and the world require a fresh impetus of Christian evangelization, transforming both individuals and cultures. Yet tragically, important segments of the American church are spiraling into deep decline as they retreat from this task. Particularly in the historic “mainline” Protestant denominations, but also in other churches, many leaders and institutions have lost their focus on the Gospel, the basis of their existence. They have turned toward political agendas mandated neither by Scripture nor by Christian tradition. They have thrown themselves into multiple, often leftist crusades--radical forms of feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, multi-culturalism, revolutionary socialism, sexual liberation and so forth.”
Right Web Profile: Institute on Religion and Democracy
“Inter-religious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public policy for the ordering of society.”Both the institute and its journal function, in large part, as the institutional vehicles for the conservative religious philosophy of Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and neocon stalwart. Neuhaus, like Michael Novak, became an outspoken advocate of “democratic capitalism” in which corporations have a virtuous role in public life. Neuhaus is best known for his thesis that the secular New Class and big government have crowded religion out of “the public square.” Since the late 1970s Neuhaus has argued that Judeo-Christianity should be reasserted back into the public square. He was an early proponent of faith-based policy initiatives and government intervention to promote Judeo-Christian values.
Right Web Profile: Institute on Religion and Public Life
Right Web Profile: Richard John Neuhaus
Neocon Ethics. The Ethics and Public Policy Center, founded in 1976, was the first institute to break ground in the new frontal attack on the secular humanists. It has been on the cutting edge of the neoconservative-driven culture war against liberalism and the associated effort to ensure right-wing control of the Republican Party. When he founded EPPC, Ernest Lefever said that part of the role of a “small ethically-oriented center” like EPPC was to “respond directly to ideological critics who insist the corporation is fundamentally unjust.” Lefever said he was motivated to start the organization because "U.S. domestic and multinational firms find themselves increasingly under siege at home and abroad. They are accused of producing shoddy and unsafe products, fouling the environment, robbing future generations, wielding enormous power, repressing peoples in the third world, and generally of being insensitive to human needs.”
Right Web Profile: Ethics and Public Policy Center
