As for the economy—it depends on what you mean by the word economy. Thomas Frank, in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas, nimbly navigated the conservative scene on the ground in Kansas, but slipped when he implied that people in the White working class who vote against their apparent economic self interest did so because they didn’t really understand the complex issues, or were easily swayed by fundamentalist preachers and opportunistic politicians. Some, we are led to believe, are simply addled.

There is no evidence that White evangelicals are any more stupid or crazy then the rest of us—at least in terms of percentages of the populations being studied. Nor are they simply the manipulated puppets of a Karl Rove strike force. Large groups of White evangelicals are mobilized through the rhetorical style of right-wing populism. Jean Hardisty refers to this process as mobilizing resentment.”

Common styles and frames use by right-wing political organizers include:

• Dualism
• An Apocalyptic Style
• Conspiracism
• Populist Antielite Rhetoric
• Authoritarian Assertion of Dominance

All of these appear across wide segments of the Christian Right.

Populist antielitism as a rhetorical style often takes the form of attacks on liberals, secularists, intellectuals, the news media, and Hollywood. Allegations that these elites are part of a vast conspiracy against the common people are frequently interwoven into the fabric of the stories that are told—sometimes with references to Satanic End Times plots tied to prophecies in the book of Revelation. Linda Kintz, discussing dualistic apocalypticism argues the “resonance of traditionalist conservatism, both religious and secular, is the apocalyptic narrative, whose influence on the myths of American history is not new,” and she adds it “depends on fear, and because fear is undependable, it must be sustained.”

Right-wing populism often is based on racialized, patriarchal, and heterosexist narratives that buttress a sense of privilege and entitlement among a targeted audience of straight White Christian men. It tends to frame economic questions in terms of hard working producers pitted against parasites above and below. This technique was used to mobilize poor and working class Whites against newly-freed Black former slaves after the Civil War. It was utilized by George Wallace in his first Presidential Campaign, and later borrowed by Richard Nixon and the Republican Party to create the “Southern Strategy.” It exists in stories of “welfare queens” where race need not be mentioned. Ironically, today antielite populist rhetoric is used by Republicans to invert the historical account and claim that the Democratic Party is the enemy of true civil rights.

There is also a natural historic congruence between the Calvinist-based theology of many White evangelicals, and the ideology of Free Markets and less government regulation fostered by the Republican Party. Doug Henwood points out that despite accurate criticisms of some of his overly-broad conclusions, the work of historian Richard Hofstadter helps explain this connection:

Hofstadter underscores the radical departure of the New Deal from the individualist roots of historic American social and political movements for something much more collective. That kind of collectivism, which lasted into the 1970s, is exactly what the New Right has been trying to reverse all along, and they’ve accomplished a good bit of the task.

Hofstadter’s emphasis on the individualism of American white Protestantism is highly relevant now - it illuminates what’s the matter with Kansas, since American white Protestants love “The Market” as an instrument of reward and discipline. That love is not some recent confidence trick perpetrated by Karl Rove, but has deep roots.

Margaret R. Somers and Fred Block identify this as part of the growth of “ market fundamentalism” as an ideology promoted by conservatives. They studies two examples of legislation—in 1834 and 1966—in which “existing welfare regimes were overturned by market-driven ones.” They concluded that “Despite dramatic differences across the cases, both outcomes were mobilized by “the perversity thesis”—a public discourse that reassigned blame for the poor’s condition from “poverty to perversity.”

…[S]tructural blame for poverty is discredited as empiricist appearance while the real problem is attributed to the corrosive effects of welfare’s perverse incentives on poor people themselves—they become sexually promiscuous, thrust aside personal responsibility, and develop longterm dependency. This claim enables market fundamentalism to delegitimate existing ideational regimes, to survive disconfirming data, and to change the terms of debate from social problems to the timeless forces of nature and biology.

Many White working class voters, and even White middle class voters can be persuaded at times to vote against their arguable economic self interest, by appealing to their sense of morality by casting “family values” and “moral values” in terms of societal struggles over issues such as gay rights, gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, and pornography.

In any election, sometimes social issues trump economic issues sometimes economic issues trump social issues—and how Republicans and Democrats are perceived by Christian evangelical voters who are weighing the pull of those two sets of issues can determine the outcome of an election.

According to sociologist S. Wojciech Sokolowski:

What is at stake here is not reason vs. irrationality or stupidity but different cognitive frames that manifest themselves, among other things, by a preference for bucolic rural life or for urban diversity. Both are pre-rational, that is, they frame and direct the rational thought process.

So if we drop the charge of irrationalism, Hofstadter’s thesis that traditional American culture tends to be anti-urban and rather local, with all the accoutrements of that localism—navel gazing, suspicion of outsiders, suspicion of high culture, suspicion of big organizations and government, love of small business, religiosity, etc.—still stands.

Sokolowski stresses the interplay of factors with a basic right wing frame, the “perception of imminent danger,” which creates a need to organize for “safety and protection.” According to Sokolowski, this fear factor activates a strong response when added to the constellation of other beliefs of the right: “the Manichean dualism of good and evil, right and wrong, us and them; the vision of apocalyptic battle between good and evil; the need for vigilance and unquestioned support of ‘our’ side and a militant posture toward ‘them.’” Sokolowski explains that “only within the context of their perception of an imminent threat do their activities and rhetoric appear as rational defensive reactions rather than wanton aggression.”

And it is this very unique way of perceiving the world that drives the Christian Right to engage in a guerilla culture war against mainstream society—seen as increasingly sinful, secular, cynical, and threatening.

---

This post is adapted from: Running Against Sodom and Osama: The Christian Right, Values Voters, and the Culture War in 2006

by Chip Berlet and Pam Chamberlain

---

References

Michael A. Fletcher, “‘Values’ Decline As Issue In Ohio’: Economic Woes Boost Democrats,” Washington Post, October 11, 2006, A01.

For examples, see Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? pp. 160-161, 205, 213, 226, 238-251.

Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America , pp. 1-18. See also Margaret Canovan, Populism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

Hardisty, 1999, Mobilizing Resentment.

Chip Berlet, “Mapping the Political Right: Gender and Race Oppression in Right-Wing Movements” in Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism, ed. Abby Ferber ( New York: Routledge, 2004), pp.19-47, list from pp. 24-25. See also, Joanne Ricca, no date, “Politics in America: The Right Wing Attack on the American Labor Movement,” Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, http://www.wisaflcio.org/political_action/rightwing.htm; Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, pp. 6-13.

To trace the chronological evolution of the idea of populism as a style of politics, see: Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: NLB/Atlantic Highlands Humanities Press, 1977); Canovan, Populism; Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); Hans-Georg Betz, Radical Right-wing Populism in Western Europe (New York: St. Martins Press, 1994); Kazin, The Populist Persuasion; Hans-Georg Betz and Stefan Immerfall, eds., The New Politics of the Right: Neo-Populist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America .

Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America; Chip Berlet, “When Alienation Turns Right: Populist Conspiracism, the Apocalyptic Style, and Neofascist Movements,” in Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium: The Evolution of Alienation, ed. Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin Fishman (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 115-144; Brenda E. Brasher and Chip Berlet, “Imagining Satan: Modern Christian Right Print Culture as an Apocalyptic Master Frame.” Paper presented at the Conference on Religion and the Culture of Print in America, Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, University of Wisconsin–Madison, September 10-11, 2004; Chip Berlet, “Dances with Devils: How Apocalyptic and Millennialist Themes Influence Right Wing Scapegoating and Conspiracism,” The Public Eye, Fall 1998, pp. 1, 2-22.

Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions that Matter in Right-Wing America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 8-9; citing O’Leary.

Canovan, Populism, pp. 54-55; Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, pp. 35-36, 52-54, 143-144; Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) , pp. 15-86; Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, pp. 4-6.

Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000), pp. 4-6, 109-114, 153.

Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991). See also Clarence Y. H. Lo, Small Property Versus Big Government: Social Origins of the Property Tax Revolt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

Lucy A. Williams, Decades of Distortion: The Right’s 30-year Assault on Welfare (Somerville, MA: Political Research Associates, 1997), http://www.publiceye.org/welfare/Decades-of-Distortion.html.

Bill Fletcher, Jr., “Race, the Democratic Party, and Electoral Strategy,” The Black Commentator 201 ( October 12, 2006),http://www.blackcommentator.com/201/201_cover_race_dems_fletcher_ed_bd.html.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcot Parsons (New York: Routledge, [1930] 1999). See also, Chip Berlet, “Calvinism, Capitalism, Conversion, and Incarceration,” The Public Eye, Political Research Associates, (Winter 2004): pp. 8-15, http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v18n3/berlet_calvinism.html.

Interview with Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer (LBO), based on comments made on LBO listserve, October 16, 2006.

Margaret R. Somers and Fred Block, “From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate,” American Sociological Review 70(2), (April 2005): 260-287. See also, Alexander Hicks, “ Comment on Somers and Block, Free-Market and Religious Fundamentalists versus Poor Relief,” American Sociological Review (71)3, (June 2006): 503-510; Margaret R. Somers and Fred Block, “Reply to Hicks: Poverty and Piety,” American Sociological Review 71(3), (June 2006): 511-513.

Interview with S. Wojciech Sokolowski, based on comments made on LBO listserve, October 16, 2006.

---

Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates

The Public Eye: Website of Political Research Associates
Chip's Blog

---