Takeover (12 page)

At the beginning of the rise of the New Right and the election of Jimmy Carter, Evangelical Christians were not particularly active in politics. If anything, the “religious Left,” that opposed the war in Vietnam and supported the liberal social agenda was the dominant religious force in American politics.

That all changed when the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the 1973
Roe v. Wade
decision, and when President Carter’s IRS administrator issued an order stating that any religious school founded after the 1952
Brown v. Board of Education
Supreme Court school integration ruling was presumed to be created to circumvent the ruling, and integration.

This meant that any religious school founded after
Brown
would lose its tax-exempt status as an educational institution, unless it could in essence prove a negative through an arduous and expensive bureaucratic process at the IRS.

The response to the IRS order from religious educators of all faiths was swift opposition; but it set off what amounted to an atomic bomb in the middle of the hitherto apolitical Evangelical community and set the stage for the rise of the so-called Religious Right.

Although to my knowledge no scientific study is available to confirm this, a reliable analysis of the votes in the 1976 election indicates that millions of Evangelicals supported their fellow Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter—perhaps 5 to 7.5 million who had voted for Nixon in 1972 voted for Carter in 1976.

Jimmy Carter’s unprovoked attack on Evangelical schools politicized these millions of conservative Christian voters into a new force in American politics. Carter forced Evangelical Christians to confront the fact that to protect their children from state-sponsored secularism, and their institutions from an increasingly intrusive state, they were going to have to get involved in politics.

They realized that to undo the damage Carter wrought, and make sure it never happened again, the moral leadership that the clergy offered in their day-to-day ministries and Sunday morning sermons was needed.

As part of the campaign to preserve religious freedom, led in large measure by Evangelical pastors, more than five hundred thousand cards and letters opposing the IRS rule were received by the Carter White House. Unlike the Panama Canal fight, this is one where conservatives prevailed and Carter was forced to withdraw the IRS order.

Reverend Jerry Falwell, a well-known Southern Baptist preacher, used paid television and paid radio in his ministry. At one time his
Old Time Gospel Hour
was broadcast over as many as five hundred radio stations across the nation. But its message was entirely non-political until the 1973
Roe v. Wade
decision. Falwell determined that conservative and independent Christians had to get involved in politics—something most of them had previously shunned, or at least kept separate from their religious witness.

In a meeting in Lynchburg, Virginia, with Reverend Falwell, conservative leaders Paul Weyrich, Bob Billings, Howard Phillips, and Ed McAteer recognized that there was a natural synergy between the newly politicized Evangelical Christians and the national defense and economic conservatives that were the traditional conservative Republican base.

In that meeting, Weyrich made the case that there was “a moral majority” in American that opposed the social and political agenda of the Democratic Party and their secular liberal allies.

When Falwell heard the phrase “moral majority,” he said, “That’s it!” and in 1979 Reverend Falwell formed the Moral Majority to create a vehicle for translating the political energy of Evangelical Christians into political action at the ballot box.

As I noted before, and will say again throughout this book, Ronald Reagan and the wise party leaders who built the Reagan coalition, men such as Nevada senator Paul Laxalt, Lyn Nofziger,
Dick Allen, Ed Meese, Marty Anderson, Jeff Bell, Tom Ellis, and Judge William Clark, had the insight—perhaps
genius
is a better term—to welcome these newly politicized social conservatives into the Republican Party.

It also helped that Ronald Reagan actually shared the beliefs and concerns of social conservatives—most people have long forgotten that Ronald Reagan actually wrote and published a pro-life book while he was president:
Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation
, the only book to be published by a US president while he held office.

In welcoming social conservatives into the Reagan coalition, Reagan took the existing wobbly (and not politically effective) two legs of the conservative Republican base, added social conservatives, and created the more stable three-legged stool of economic conservatism, national defense conservatism, and social conservatism.

The importance of Reagan’s addition of social conservatives to the GOP coalition cannot be overstated. It took, as Jeff Bell insightfully put it in his book
The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism
, all three of the legs of the new conservative coalition to create a stable platform for victory: “When social issues came into the mix—I would date it from the 1968 election … the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections.”
⁴

Although Democrats went after liberal social issues hard in 2012 and 2013, the Democrats who won from 1968 to 2010, including even Barack Obama in 2008, did not play up social liberalism in their campaigns.

In 1992, Bill Clinton was a death-penalty advocate who promised to “end welfare as we know it” and make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” Social issues have come to the fore on the GOP side in two of the past six presidential elections—in 1988 (prison furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU) and 2004 (same-sex marriage). “Those are the only two elections since Reagan where the Republican Party has won a popular majority,” Bell says. “It isn’t coincidental.”

No one really knew if this marriage would work. The political power of a coalition of California free-market-oriented entrepreneurs,
anti-Communists, conservative defense intellectuals, and the socially conservative pastors and social commentators who led the Reagan coalition wasn’t obvious in the beginning.

Indeed, a few days after the 1980 election, I was invited to a press breakfast hosted by the late Godfrey Sperling, the chief Washington correspondent for the
Christian Science Monitor
and at that time one of the grand old men of the Washington press corps.

“Mr. Viguerie,” Sperling began, “Ronald Reagan was elected in a landslide last Tuesday, beating an incumbent president. Republicans took control of the Senate and had big pick ups in the House, in governors’ seats, and in the state legislatures. We had a political earthquake last Tuesday. No one saw it coming. What happened?”

My response was to tell the assembled inside-the-Beltway print journalists that they didn’t see it coming because they had zero interest in covering what conservatives, especially social conservatives, were doing. I then asked to see the hands of the reporters present who had ever heard of Rev. Pat Robertson. Only two or three of the twenty-five or so reporters assembled had ever heard of Rev. Pat Robertson, who hosted the
700 Club
on religious television and was an eight-hundred-pound political gorilla. Point made.

Looking back at the rise of the New Right—compared to, say, the gallons of ink and hours of TV time devoted to Occupy Wall Street (which had zero effect on public policy, I might add) seldom had a major political movement had such impact as the New Right, but been ignored by the elite media.

Naturally, the addition of social conservatives to the conservative coalition wasn’t welcomed by the Republican establishment—who are still quick to blame conservatives, and particularly social conservatives, every time a Republican candidate loses.

Of course, had it been up to the Republican establishment, Reagan would never have been chosen as the Republican nominee in 1980.

They were mostly for Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee (whose campaign was chaired by fellow establishment Republican senator Richard Lugar) or for former congressman and CIA director
George H. W. Bush, son of the old-time Eastern establishment Republican senator Prescott Bush; or Senator Bob Dole; or Congressman John Anderson.

Indeed Baker was held in such low regard by conservatives that my magazine,
Conservative Digest
, put out a special issue for the Republican National Convention with a picture of Senator Baker in a dunce cap on the cover—a clear signal that Baker would be unacceptable to conservatives as Reagan’s vice president.

The Republican establishment wanted nothing to do with the social issues that were and are important to social conservatives, even though the damage that is being done to our society by liberal social engineering was obvious even at that early date.

Establishment Republican candidates in the 1980 primaries, notably George H. W. Bush and John Anderson, did their best to distance themselves from social and economic conservatives.

Bush and Anderson ran as pro-choice candidates and were supportive of the
Roe v. Wade
Supreme Court case that legalized abortion on demand. They also opposed the idea of supply-side economics, with Bush famously referring to Reagan’s idea that cutting taxes would increase revenues as “voodoo economics” and Howard Baker ridiculing the 1981 tax cut as “a riverboat gamble.”
⁵

George H. W. Bush, John Anderson, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and other establishment Republicans all had one thing in common—they were creatures of the old ways Republicans did things in Washington.

They were perfectly content to “me-too” the Democrats on the social issues, to argue for a little less spending, but not to attack the reasons for spending, and to support the continuation of Nixon’s accommodationist policy with the Soviet Union.

In short, they were all for the policies that got Jerry Ford tossed out of the White House and Republicans on Capitol Hill consigned to “permanent” minority status.

Reagan took all the discontents
within the Republican Party
and molded them into a coherent conservative ideology and a winning
coalition that defeated the Republican establishment in the primaries and beat Jimmy Carter and John Anderson’s third-party run in a landslide carrying forty-four out of fifty states.

It is worth noting that this is exactly the opposite of what Mitt Romney and the Republican establishment did in 2012.

To the extent that Romney had an ideology, it was the same Big Government Republicanism that cost the Republicans control of the House in 2006 and left them neutered until the Tea Party came roaring to life in 2009 and ran against the Republican establishment and Obama in 2010.

Going into the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit, Reagan had the nomination sewed up, but the Republican establishment was not going to go quietly.

As the convention approached, there was a steady drumbeat of criticism of Reagan from the Republican establishment to the effect that Reagan’s nomination would split the Republican Party and that many establishment Republicans might stay home or bolt and support John Anderson’s third-party run.

This whispering campaign (in some cases it was the loudly-complaining-to-the-liberal-media campaign) wasn’t as harsh as the “Stop Goldwater” campaign had been in 1964, or as devious as the campaign to defeat Senator Bob Taft had been in 1952, but the objective was still the same—to make sure control of the Republican Party remained in the hands of the progressive-oriented Republican establishment.

Even before the Convention opened, many establishment Republicans were talking up the idea of “uniting the Party” by having former president Ford join Reagan on the ticket as vice president.

There was really no doubt that what they had in mind was not Ford playing second fiddle as Reagan’s vice president, but Ford taking the role of “copresident” and neutering the conservative agenda by usurping many of the responsibilities of the presidency.

The idea of Ford as “copresident” was destined to fail, but it came surprisingly close to putting Ford on the ticket with Reagan
because many of Reagan’s closest advisors became convinced that the establishment wouldn’t support him if they didn’t have one of their own on the ticket as vice president.

And thus the stage was set for Reagan to choose an establishment progressive Republican, who was opposed to practically everything he had campaigned for, to be his running mate.

The question was, which establishment Republican would it be?

Conservatives were dead set against establishment Republican senator Howard Baker, who was the face of the go-along, get-along Republican establishment on Capitol Hill and its many defeats and cave-ins to the liberal Democrats.

Conservatives had no enthusiasm for George H. W. Bush either, given his attacks on Reagan’s economic policies during the primaries and his family ties to the old Eastern Republican establishment. His pro-choice stance also alienated the newly energized social conservatives, but Bush had the second most delegates, and for many in Reagan’s inner circle, choosing Bush seemed like the best way to unite the party for what was expected to be a tough campaign against Carter and Mondale.

With the benefit of hindsight, Reagan’s first decision after claiming the GOP nomination may have been his worst, because the choice of George H. W. Bush as vice president proved to be a decision that would have a profound effect on the conservative movement, Republican Party, and American history to the present day—and not in a good way.

E
lection night, 1980. It seemed as though all of our efforts to build the conservative movement and our long fight to nominate and elect a conservative presidential candidate had finally been rewarded.

We had a big election night party at our office in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, at 7777 Route 7, that included several hundred happy conservatives, network TV cameras, and a bevy of national radio and print journalists to cover the celebration. It was an exciting night for all conservatives.