Retro-Calvinism, "Traditional Families", and Laissez-Faire - 1
Chip Berlet printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Mon Mar 19, 2007 at 09:30:21 AM EST
If the Retro-Calvinism branch of the “Austrian School” of economics had a slogan, it would be “Greed is Good--and Godly.” I’ve always imagined their symbol as a snarling gecko standing on a pile of gold and silver coins, clutching a Bible in one hand, and in their other hand a Mac 10 automatic weapon holding off those they have impoverished.

Since the invisible hand of the “Free Market” picks our pockets like an ephemeral inverted Robin Hood, we should take time to ponder the relationships among Laissez-Faire and “Austrian School” economic ideologues and the retro-Calvinist Christian libertarians and Supply Side evangelicals. It’s in our self interest. Take for an example the upcoming World Congress of Families in Poland and the homophobic Marriage Amendment in the United States. What's the connection?

The roots of both these events are in the 1970s network of right-wing think tanks, alternative media, and ideological trainings that forged the ideological basis for linking patriarchal and homophobic forms of neoCalvinism with the Economic Darwinism of Laissez-Faire economic theory.

I have returned to this topic several times, because I am in the middle of tracing the historic and ideological connections that have resulted in the sustained right-wing attack on Roosevelt’s New Deal policies of redistributive social welfare for the common good.   This overlaps with the research of others here on Talk2Action, including Bruce Prescott (aka Mainstream Baptist) who is working on a current series titled “Reprise: From Reconstructionism to Dominionism.” (See http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/3/16/95836/8242)

Mainstream Baptist is looking at the theological arguments of R. J. Rushdoony and Gary North, and their effect on the rise of the Christian Right and the Dominionist tendency. I am tracing how Rushdoony and North intersected with the economic libertarians. Both Rushdoony and North were early retro-Calvinist Christian libertarians who wrote for the “ Austrian School” Freeman magazine and other similar outlets. North worked for Rushdoony after a stint at the Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEE), publisher of the Freeman magazine

Gary North recalls his introduction to this milieu, which he dubs the "Misesians/Rothbardians" after the Austrian School  intellectuals Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. North explains:

I remember the lady who first handed me a copy of The Freeman. It was in 1958. She was an inveterate collector of The Congressional Record. She clipped it and lots of newspapers, putting the clippings into files. She was a college-era friend of my parents.

My main academic interest in 1958 was anti-Communism. In 1956, the lady had taken me to hear the anti-Communist Australian physician Fred Schwarz, when I was 14, in one of his first speaking tours in the United States.

I remember in the fall of 1958, when I was researching a 15-page, double-spaced term paper on Communism for a high school civics class, that the lady handed me my first copy of The Freeman. We got into a discussion about civil government. She was opposed to tax-funded education. I was amazed. She also did not trust the FBI, which she said was a national police force, which the U.S. Constitution did not authorize. I was even more amazed. It was then that I began my odyssey from anti-Communism to free market economics.

(Gary North, "It All Began With Fred Schwarz", http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north145.html, originally collected at Walter Block's Autobiography Archive.)

North and Rushdooony moved from anti-Communism to free market economics to the development of Christian Reconstructionism, the militant form of Christian Dominionism that influenced the creation of the Christian Right. As I have shown in other posts, Christian anti-communism’s linkage to Laissez-Faire economic theory traces back to the attacks on the type of federal government being constructed by Roosevelt’s New Deal. After the collapse of the Goldwater Presidential campaign in 1964, conservatives spent a decade regrouping. What happened then is outlined by Alan C. Carlson, founder and chairman of The World Congress of Families, in an article titled "Think Tanks: On The Intellectual Foundations Of The Marriage Amendment .” http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc.acc.051128.marriage.amendment.htm. The article is based on a paper “Prepared For The Marriage Commission Strategy Summit Winshape Retreat November 28-30, 2005,” and is posted on the website of The Howard Center for Family, Religion, & Society, which has Carlson as its president.

Carlson traces the history of the pro-family movement:

…1976 to 1978…were key years in fomenting a new pro-family, pro-marriage coalition.  Like me, many others were becoming aware that the traumas of the 1960’s had not been just some phase; they had done terrible and lasting damage to the American social fabric, to the American home.  New approaches were needed. 

Here is his brief chronology:

  • 1976, “we see Phyllis Schlafly raising the banner of home and family against the feminists, challenging the nearly-ratified Equal Rights Amendment.”
  • 1977, “James Dobson inaugurates a small operation called Focus on the Family.”
  • 1978, “the new Rockford College Institute holds the first national pro-family conference, “The Family: America’s Hope.” 
  • 1978 “the Free Congress Foundation launches the Library Court group, to organize a pro-family lobby in Washington.   It is soon publishing an idea journal, Family and Culture
  • 1978 “The American Family Institute, led by Republican strategists Carl Anderson and Bill Gribbin, [is] launched”
  • 1978 “I left the Lutheran Council at the end of 1978, and took a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute.  My main focus was coming to grips with the new turmoil in American life: how to understand our current situation. 

According to Carlson, the “main product of my intellectual struggle was an essay published in early 1980 by the idea journal, The Public Interest.  Entitled ‘Families, Sex, and the Liberal Agenda,’ it critically dissected the liberal concept of ‘family policy,’ showing in fact the true anti-family elements lurking beneath the surface.” Carlson states that these “anti-family elements” included “a false deference to so-called ‘new family forms’ and an embrace of the sexual revolution.”

Carlson reports that his paper had a significant “effect on the early pro-family movement …It also led me to take on this work, full time.  I joined The Rockford Institute, newly independent of the College, and we made family questions the centerpiece of our work.  Indeed, Family Questions became the title of my next book.”

The interaction of the various components of this network are stressed by Carlson:

Our Center on the Family in America organized in 1987, and we began publishing The Family in America, a monthly monograph series on family matters.  One early title was “The Retreat from Marriage” (copies also available).  Led by Jerry Regier, the Family Research Council emerged in Washington, DC, an offshoot of Focus on the Family.  So did Concerned Women for America.  Our conferences in Rockford during the 1980’s, including “The Retreat from Marriage,” “When Families Fail: The Social Costs,” and “The Family Wage,” involved (and sometimes introduced to each other) participants including community organizer David Blankenhorn, political scientists Jean Bethke Elshtain, sociologist Norval Glenn, psychologist Paul Vitz, and sociologist Steven Nock, and journalist Maggie Gallagher.  All would go on to found study centers that would focus on the marriage issue: The Institute for American Values; the Council on Families in America; the National Marriage Project; The Initiative for Marriage and Public Policy; and the Institute for Psychological Studies.

This network of “think tanks” is now fairly large: perhaps two dozen, depending on how you count.  The “Marriage Movement Timeline,” prepared for this event highlights many of the recent reports and initiatives.  An important new development is the emergence of a new generation of young scholars who have won places—tenured positions—in prominent academic settings.  Nurtured indirectly by the pro-family think tanks, they are beginning to reshape their disciplines.

(Carlson: "Think Tanks: On The Intellectual Foundations Of The Marriage Amendment .” http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc.acc.051128.marriage.amendment.htm).

Liberal and progressive foundations seldom fund alternative media, think tanks, or ideological training, proving that knowing how the Political Right strategically funded these sectors to help gain political power is no guarantee that this lesson has entered the consciousness of most funders on the Political Left in sufficient clarity to dramatically change funding patterns.

For how Carlson gets us from the Pro-Family Movement back to the Laissez-Faire “Austrian School” Free Marketeers, read next week's post.


Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates - Chip's Blog
Visit The Public Eye: Website of Political Research Associates



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Chip, I'd suggest that you put "Darwinism" in quotes.  Spencer is the person who came up with the phrase "survival of the fittest" and he is also the founder of "Social Darwinism", which Darwin himself rejected.  I regularly run into people who think Darwin himself was "to blame" for "Social Darwinism", but that is wrong.  We need to fight the distortions that dominionists regularly use- and the misunderstanding about "social Darwinism" is one of them.  In all reality, it should be "Social Spencerism".

The second comment is an observation I've had- many of the people I've heard talk like the people you quote all say that "America" went downhill during and after the '60's.  However, if you listen for a while, you realize that they're bigots, and want to return to the days of Jim Crow and when minorities were at best second class citizens.

As an anthropologist, I find those people to be disgustingly ethnocentric.

 

by ArchaeoBob on Mon Mar 19, 2007 at 11:34:00 AM EST

It's true, what you say, but hard to slip into a post without getting side-tracked.  Maybe the phrase:

economic Social "Darwinism"

would do the trick.

There is a lot of white backlash subtext in all of this, which the new book by Randall Balmer documents nicely.

_ _ _

Chip Berlet: Research for Progress - Building Human Rights
by Chip Berlet on Tue Mar 20, 2007 at 09:15:14 AM EST
Parent


Milton Friedman and his protege, Thomas Sowell from the Hoover Institute, provide the intellectual underpinning for the Free Marketeer talking points used nowadays by those actively dismantling Roosevelt's New Deal in America, promoting disastrous deregulation policies (read Savings & Loan scandal and the great Enron energy swindle), careless privatization, busting the union movement and promoting global 'Free Trade' policy, which enriches the corporate elite and investor class while impoverishing everyone else. Free Market ideology needs to be called out and exposed for what it is - mere abstract theory carelessly applied to the real world with disastrous results. The Economic Policy Institute is one of the few progressive 'think tanks' who challenge Friedmanism. See: http://www.epinet.org/ Also Professor Paul Krugman does a pretty good job debunking Friedmanian talking points in his NYT column.

by justintime on Mon Mar 19, 2007 at 12:52:02 PM EST
The Economic Policy Institute is a terrific resource, and I avidly read Paul Krugman. Totally love the term "Friedmania."
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Chip Berlet: Research for Progress - Building Human Rights
by Chip Berlet on Tue Mar 20, 2007 at 09:17:13 AM EST
Parent


Ralph Lord Roy has a useful chapter on "God and the Libertarians" in Apostles of Discord, going back to Spiritual Mobilization in 1935 and the financial backing from the likes of J Howard Pew.

On a more general note, the rhetoric of "libertarianism", whatever its actual virtues, has always been used as a refuge for the scoundrel - I've recently become aware of how the South African government of the 1980s was happy to finance "libertarians" who said they opposed apartheid, but that only the free market could end the injustice. The apartheid regime could easily cope with such a risible "opposition".

by Richard Bartholomew on Mon Mar 19, 2007 at 06:56:53 PM EST

I think I have that book in the library.  Was not aware of the chapter.  Thanks.  As soon as I get into the office I am making a beeline to the book.
_ _ _

Chip Berlet: Research for Progress - Building Human Rights
by Chip Berlet on Tue Mar 20, 2007 at 09:18:47 AM EST
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