Despite the fact that Jean-Marie Le Pen was soundly defeated in France’s recent presidential elections, that he made the run-off and gained almost one-fifth of the vote set off alarm bells throughout Europe. Across the continent, grave public concern was expressed about the emergence of a dangerous far-right political current. Articles appearing in most of Europe’s major papers compared the relative strength of similar movements in each of the European Union’s countries.
It was in this context that a number of Arab friends have written asking me to describe the situation of the far right in the US. And since I have recently raised the issue of the role of what I have called the neo-conservative movement and the religious right wing of the Republican Party, questions have been asked about how those two currents compare with Europe’s far right political parties.
Since I have often referred to these two US currents as far-right and extremist, I felt that it would be important to better describe them and, in so doing, to shed more light on contemporary politics in the US.
It is important from the outset to note that neither the religious right nor the neo-conservative movement represents the extreme chauvinism or xenophobia of the Le Pen current. There are such tendencies in US politics but they are on the fringes of the political spectrum and have no home, at this time, in either of the two major American parties. There are, for example, hundreds of small white supremacist organizations and even militia groups in the US. They are loosely connected, but remain a threat and are closely watched by law enforcement. These groups, however, continue to exist, in part, because of the persistence of racism in many parts of the US.
On only a few of these occasions have these racist tendencies coalesced into an electoral force. David Duke, a former Nazi sympathizer and Ku Klux Klan leader, has run for office as a Republican in his home state of Louisiana capturing, at one point, about one-third of the vote. He was quickly denounced by the National Party and has, therefore, remained a marginal figure in national politics.
Similarly, when Pat Buchanan left the Republican Party to run for president on the Reform Party ticket in 2000, he moved to the far right on immigration and race issues, paralleling much of Le Pen’s message. His effort, however, failed to garner any significant support.
The neo-conservatives and the religious right were not identified, in the main, with any of these efforts, because neither racism nor anti-immigrant xenophobia are a part of their thinking. Let me describe what they are.
The neo-conservative movement is best characterized as an intellectual current espoused by a small but extremely influential group of writers, media commentators, political operatives and academics. It is not a mass-based movement, but because of the influence wielded by its advocates, it has been able to shape the policy debate within the Republican Party. The editorial pages of today’s newspapers and the talkshows on US television are dominated by neo-conservatives. They also hold some key policy posts within the Bush Administration.
The neo-conservative movement began in the 1960’s and 1970’s as a reaction by some Democrats to the policies of the Soviet Union. Some of the early founders of this current had even been Socialists, but were driven by anti-Communism, especially the USSR’s attitude to Israel and its own Jewish citizens, to seek more extreme ways of confronting that regime. As they became increasingly disenchanted with what they described as the Democrats’ "soft" attitude toward fighting the Cold War, many drifted to the Republican Party. When they were welcomed into the Reagan campaign in the late 1970’s, their transformation was complete.
Interestingly enough it was at this same time that the US neo-conservatives developed a relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Netanyahu had invited many of those influential writers and commentators to a working conference in Jerusalem to discuss how to end the Democrats’ "fixation on human rights" and replace it with a campaign against "terror" as the dominant theme in US foreign policy.
Though they embraced Ronald Reagan’s presidency and his no-holds-barred war against the "evil empire" and were, in turn, embraced by Reagan, the neo-conservatives never fully embraced the entirety of the conservative agenda. They were not social conservatives, nor were they, strictly speaking, economic conservatives. For example, they did not share the social conservatives’ abhorrence of abortion, and some neo-conservatives remained liberal in their economic policy and broader social policy. What brought them into the Republican Party was their aversion to the Soviet Union and, of course, their support for Israel.
This movement did not support the first George Bush presidency as enthusiastically as they had supported Reagan. Bush was a traditional conservative, more moderate in his foreign and domestic policies than his predecessor. And so for Bush’s four years in office and Clinton’s eight years, the neo-conservatives were out in the cold.
Today, however, they are back in key government posts and with their continuing influential roles in the print and electronic media, they are playing a powerful role in national politics.
The administration of George W. Bush is not as ideologically-based as that of Ronald Reagan. Many currents of thought are represented within its ranks. While these diverse views are sometimes at loggerheads, what helped to tip the scales, at least for a time, in the direction of the neo-conservatives, were the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The almost adolescent simplicity of neo-conservative thought formed a useful framework to mobilize public attitudes in favor of a war on "terrorism".
Neo-conservatism essentially sees the world in absolutist terms-good versus evil. It sees no possibility for compromise, since, they believe, any agreement with evil, in the end, only weakens the forces representing good. Therefore, neo-conservatism projects, as both desirable and inevitable, permanent confrontation between good and evil, until evil is defeated.
The rhetoric of this current can clearly be found in President Bush’s description of terrorists as "evil doers", or his characterization of an "axis of evil", or his warning to other nations "you are either with us or you are against us".
The danger, of course, is that despite the fervent desire of the adolescent ideologues of the neo-conservative movement, the world is not so black and white. The more mature recognition of the world’s complexity is what has created diplomacy-that is, the need to create structures of international relationships to protect interests in a complex world.
If the neo-conservatives were to win, all of the structures of diplomacy erected over the past several decades would be torn down in favor of a unilateral US confrontation with "evil". One can see the internal debate within the Administration play out as it moves between the politics of confrontation and the withdrawal from international conventions, treaties and conferences, then back to the pursuit of negotiations and diplomatic initiatives.
In this context, it is interesting to note the role played by the neo-conservatives in the media. At times, when their counterparts within the Administration are losing the internal battle for the ear of the president, neo-conservatives commentators will launch what appears to be a concerted campaign in public, in an effort to sway policy. They did so early on, for example, on the issue of Iraq, advocating a unilateral attack immediately following what they called the "victory" in Afghanistan.
More recently, the neo-conservatives ganged up in a public assault against President Bush’s April 4th speech pressuring Sharon to end his incursion into the West Bank. In both cases, they appeared to have some, though not complete, success in effecting Administration policy.
In short, the neo-conservatives are a potent, thought not always decisive force in shaping the policy of the Bush Administration. The President may use their rhetoric, but does not always follow their strict policy of confrontation.
While a small band of influential neo-conservatives has played a significant role in shaping the foreign policy outlook of today’s Republican Party, it is the religious right that has come to set that party’s domestic agenda.
It was during the Reagan administration (1981-1989) that these two currents came together in a new social and political movement that transformed the outlook of Republican politics.
Neo-conservatism is the secular political philosophy that defined the reaction of a group of former liberals to what they felt was the Democratic Party’s policy of appeasement toward the Soviet Union — most especially the USSR’s treatment of its Jewish population and its relations with the Arab world. They were a small but influential group of writers, commentators and government officials.
The movement of the religious right was also borne in reaction, but in this case, it was in reaction to the countercultural currents that rocked the US in the late 1960s and 1970s. As issues of women’s rights, etc., found a place in the agenda of the Democratic Party, many white middle-class family-oriented religious leaders led their congregations into a number of national organizations promoting "traditional values".
During the Reagan years, both political currents wielded substantial influence. The neo-conservatives transformed the national foreign policy orientation from a focus on human rights and democracy (as it had been in the Carter administration) to one focused on combating "Soviet-inspired terror" and confrontation with the "evil empire". For their part, the still emerging movement of religiously-oriented conservatives was able to set the national agenda on a wide range of social issues.
Under Reagan’s umbrella, these two upstart currents formed a sometimes uncomfortable coalition with the more traditional Republican groupings like the business-oriented "internationalists" and the libertarians who advocated small government and tax cuts. While these traditional Republicans also had a conservative orientation, they were more pragmatic and moderate than the two trends under discussion here.
Both the neo-conservatives and the religious right can best be characterized as fundamentalist movements. They are ideological and dogmatic. And they are confrontational and uncompromising. While this could always have been said about the neo-conservatives, the religious right was, in the beginning, an amorphous social movement.
It was during the 1988 presidential campaign that religious conservatives went from being a reaction against what they described as "moral decay", into a powerful political organization with a coherent ideology. In that election Pat Robertson, a television evangelist with a national following, was one of six Republicans to challenge Vice President George Bush for the Republican nomination for president.
Robertson’s success in mobilizing Christian conservative voters in that race inspired him to organize, after the election, a new political organization which he called the Christian Coalition. This group became the major vehicle for the religious right.
By the mid-1990s, this movement had succeeded in winning control of the Republican Party’s apparatus in 17 of the 50 states. In 24 others, they also wielded substantial influence. At its peak, the Christian Coalition, the leading organization of the religious right, claimed over ten million members and the ability to influence millions more.
What Robertson did was not only organize religiously-oriented conservatives into a political force, he and others also sought to imbue this movement with a broader political and theological agenda.
Their theology, which is an aberrant form of Christianity (rejected by most major Christian churches) teaches that the Old Testament prophecies were destined to be replayed in the modern world, leading to the Day of Judgment and the Final Battle of Armageddon as proclaimed in the New Testament.
According to this school of thought, the ingathering of the Jews into Israel in 1948 was part of God’s plan to bring on the Final Battle, in which the forces of Good (which fundamentalist Christians see as the US and its allies) would confront the forces of Evil (correspondingly seen as the Soviet Union and its allies — Arabs and Muslims). This battle would lead to the destruction of the Earth, which for this theology is a necessity before Jesus can return to save "the select, the believers".
This Christian fundamentalist view maintained that, although all Jews must ultimately be converted into Christianity in order to fulfill the prophecies, Israel must be supported at all costs. Hence the strong support given by the religious right to Israel. Although the neo-conservatives are secular (and oftentimes quite liberal in their social outlook) and the religious right is theologically-based, these two currents share a number of ideas:
o Both currents are Manicheistic, i.e., they see the world in absolute black and white, good and evil;
o Both currents define the forces of good as being led by the US and Israel and see the forces of evil (once defined as the Soviet Union and now see as "the axis of evil" states supporting terror) as including Arabs and Islam;
o Both currents are confrontational and uncompromising. They believe that there can be no accommodation made with those representing evil. Both, therefore, seek confrontation and conflict, not a resolution of tensions through negotiations; and
o Both currents are absolutist, since their ideology will allow only for total victory.
While the Republican sweep of congressional elections in 1994 brought many adherents of the religious right into congressional leadership positions, both the neo-conservatives and the religious conservative movement would not be satisfied until they felt that they had won back the White House. Neither current was comfortable with George Bush senior’s presidency. He was, for them, a moderate and accommodationist Republican. Despite Bob Dole’s efforts to win them over, neither grouping trusted him either. But in George W. Bush, both movements hoped they had found a champion. President Bush has appointed prominent neo-conservatives and religious right leaders to important posts in the White House and in the Defense and Justice Departments. While the organization of the Christian Coalition is now in a state of decline, one leading religious conservative was recently quoted in an influential political magazine, saying "The organization is not so important now that we have the White House and the Congress." A leading American Jewish political science professor, Steven Spiegel, recently noted, "If you just focus on the power of the ... Jewish groups, you’re missing the boat. The Christian right has had a real influence in shaping the view of the Republican Party toward Israel."
This was in evidence most recently in two distinct efforts: The pressure exerted on President Bush in mid-April when it appeared that he was leaning too hard on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the passage in Congress last month of one-sided pro-Israel resolutions. Both efforts were the work of the combined forces of the religious right and the neo-conservatives.
It is important to note that in these dark days, some Arab-American leaders and groups around the US are meeting with American Jewish leaders to attempt a common approach to peace. At the same time, the major Christian churches in the US, representing the majority of US Catholics and Protestants, have issued appeals for peace and Palestinian rights.
But even with these positive and commendable efforts, it is, thus far, the organized forces of the religious right and their neo-conservative allies who are still defining the course of the US-Middle East policy debate.
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