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Learning From the Cultural Conservatives,

Part III: Taking It To The Street
By Sara Robinson

Part I
Part II
The conservative worldview has succeeded so wildly -- and is still holding such tenacious
sway over the ways Americans approach their current stack of problems -- because the
conservatives started out 30 years ago with a focused plan that put promoting their
model of reality at the center of every other action. Over the past two posts, I've been
mining the specific strategies that early planners like Paul Weyrich used to advance the
conservative worldview, in the hope that we might gain some insight that will help us
engage them directly on this deepest, most important territory.
Progressives will not be able to implement their vision of the future until we're able to
supplant the conservative worldview with our own. We won't win until we take control of
the discourse, offer Americans new ways to make meaning and evaluate and prioritize
events, and get them to abandon conservative assumptions about how reality works.
I'd like to thank Bruce Wilson at Talk2Action [3]again for turning me onto Eric Huebeck's
2001 document [4] that summarized, updated, and refocused the original Weyrich
strategies. In this final piece, we'll look some of the specific ways the conservatives
structured their campaign to take their worldview to the streets, and ultimately replaced
long-held democratic assumptions about government, economics, and society with the
deadly and wrong-headed assumptions that now drive the thinking of the entire nation.
Capture Cultural Institutions
Thanks to David Brock, Joe Conason, Chris Mooney, Michelle Goldberg, and many others,
more and more of us are becoming aware of the ways that conservatives have quietly
moved in to take over almost every public and private institution in America. From
churches to university faculties to public broadcasting to the Boy Scouts, the vast
network of institutions that once taught people how to live in a liberal democracy and
reinforced those values across society has been shredded to the point where it no longer
functions. In its place is a new network of institutions -- some of them operating within
the co-opted shells of the old ones, others brand new -- that reinforce the conservative
worldview at every turn.
This takeover of the very insitutional fabric of the nation was a central part of the
conservative plan from the very beginning. Weyrich understood that to change the
discourse, you had to capture and control the institutions that were most directly
responsible for promoting and sustaining it. And the rising conservatives pursued that
goal with a vengeance.
The basic strategy was to build parallel organizations that shadowed the official ones
until they could legitimately assume power within their domains. In some cases these
were national institutes, professional organizations, formal committees and expert policy
groups; in others, they were simply ad hoc groups of conservative citizens who showed
up at all the meetings, studied the domain, wrote letters, and eventually became expert
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in all the same topics and issues the official authorities dealt with. Either way, over the
course of a decade or two, there was hardly an influential institution in America that
wasn't operating without a gaggle of conservatives standing by to criticize every decision
and thwart every attempt at action.
In some cases, such as government agencies, these self-appointed shadow officials hung
around long enough, and demonstrated enough interest and expertise, that they
eventually eased themselves into official positions from which they began to enact the
conservative agenda. They joined public boards, got themselves appointed to
commissions, and inflitrated local offices. In cases where they couldn't directly take over,
they set themselves up as the determined and loyal opposition, acting as political leg
weights that hobbled and slowed down every aspect of goverment business for decades
on end as they looked for opportunities to press their issues and impose their will. The
official policymakers still held sway, but the constant resistance made them far less
effective. In time, people would get frustrated with the inaction, and look for other
leaders to get the job done. Too often, the people who'd created the resistance in the
first place were the first ones tapped to take over.
Massive funding put up by conservative foundations also gave the movement clout over
the country's great non-profits, from which they insinuated themselves into research,
health care, social services, education, and the arts. Pressure from investors, advertisers,
and avid letter-writers narrowed the range of acceptable narratives in every kind of
media. Shadow "professional" groups were established to challenge the basic
Enlightenment-era premises of law, medicine, banking, teaching, pharmacy, and other
essential professions.
All of this effort was in the service of one goal -- to take over these institutions and
eventually use them to promote conservative values and worldview. They understood
that when you control these institutions, you control the culture -- and ultimately, you
will also control the very discourse by which everyone inside the culture interprets
reality. We're coming up against the success of this strategy every time a Federalist
Society judge comes up for confirmation, every time a hospital refuses to perform
abortions, every time the police commission gets a brutality complaint and looks the
other way, and every time we try to get a birth control prescription filled.
Huebeck was very clear that none of this about "reform." He wrote: "We will not reform
existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We
will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every
opportunity." The conservatives knew that of all the various fronts in the war for
American hearts and minds, seizing control of the country's institutional core was is the
one that mattered most.
And, unfortunately, we liberals left them to it. Throughout the 1960s, the Boomers had
been challenging the authority of the old institutions, which they (often rightly) found
stultifying, socially confining, and too often downright criminal. But there was a serious
downside to this. When they abandoned the field, they left foundational American
institutions (which had been dominated by GI-era rationalists from both parties) wide
open for right-wing takeover -- and the result is our lives are now dominated by the
authority emanating from a new establishment that is far more stultifying, restrictive,
and criminal that the 1960s rebels could have ever imagined.
It's becoming obvious to more and more of us that we will not win until we start taking
these institutions back. We've made a good start at creating progressive media
networks, organizing our own political infrastructure, and defending education at all
levels from conservative incursions. We're having our say in the marketplace,
particularly when it comes to agriculture and low-emissions vehicles. Science is not going
gently into the ideological good night.
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But it's all just drops in the bottom of a large and leaking bucket. There are vast sectors
in which the takeover proceeds unchallenged -- and will remain so until we come back
with the same pervasive intensity they brought to the job. We need thousands of those
same small cadres of dedicated people who make it their business to target one
institution, study it, become expert in it, and eventually mount a public challenge to its
authority or move in and take it over. We need local MoveOn groups providing those
scoutmasters, and local progressive churches taking strong stands against religious right
school boards, and teams of local letter-writers who keep our issues on the op-ed pages
of the weekly paper. We need professional organizations in every field that stand up to
the ideologues and restore the rule of reason. We need to be as pervasive a presence in
the life of conservative institutions as they have been in liberal ones.
It took them over 20 years to effect this takeover, so we also need to expect to be in this
one for the long haul.
Don't Trust the Democratic Party
Huebeck noted ruefully that movement conservatives "shot ourselves in the foot by
expecting too much from the Republican Party." It's a feeling that's becoming all too
familiar to progressives assessing their relationship with the Democrats.
We're tempted to forget that Progressives are not necessarily Democrats, any more than
movement conservatives were necessarily Republicans. In each case, they are a
separate movement that often finds its interests in consonance with those of a certain
political party. But in both cases, they stand to lose tremendous amounts of power if
they allow themselves to become co-opted and turned into an appendage of that party.
In the end, many conservatives -- especially the religious right -- lost track of that
boundary, and forgot to consider their interests apart from the party. Without enough
daylight between the two entities, it was easy for the GOP to start taking their
Evangelical base for granted. With every passing election, it seemed, the party relied
more and more on the religious conservatives for organization, money, and votes -- and
gave them less and less in return. This year, the conservative churches are in full fury
over this betrayal. If the GOP loses, Evangelical disappointment will be at the heart of
their defeat.
This is a special problem during election season, while progressives and the party work
especially closely together to take back the White House and ensure a Democratic
Congress. But, even as we fight the good fight together, progressives need to remember
they are not us; and we are not them. Our movement must never forget that its an an
entity apart from the Democratic party, with different interests and expectations of a
different future. If we allow ourselves to be co-opted by the party, and are diverted into
channeling all of our actions into activities that further the Democrats instead of our own
progressive agenda, we'll very quickly end up in the same place Evangelical
conservatives are in right now -- used, abused, and tossed aside.
It's basic physics: Holding ourselves at a little more distance gives us extra leverage,
forces them to work a little harder for our votes, and ultimately gives us more power to
create the changes we seek.
Invest in our own members; grow our own leaders
Political leaders of all stripes like to expand their territory and hoard their power.
Weyrich understood that personal empire-building is a selfish indulgence no successful
movement can afford -- first, because it leads people to put their own interests ahead of
the movement, which should never be tolerated; and second, because it stunts the
growth of new leaders and inhibits the transmission of leadership skills.
That's why the early conservatives insisted that leadership should actively seek out
leadership talent, nurture it, and groom it to assume power on its own. The more well-
trained leaders the movement has, the bigger it can get, the more it can get done, and
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the faster its agenda will be adopted. Success depends on building a culture in which
leaders are evaluated not by how much territory they control, but by the number and
quality of new leaders emerging from underneath their wings.
Furthermore, giving people the chance to learn new skills and offering them new
opportunities for personal growth is the most powerful way to bond them emotionally,
socially, and even economically to the movement. In a time when people aren't often
given the chance to grow to their potential on the job, political work can provide a far
more engaging and satisfying outlet for their ambitions. "Every member [must] be given
the support to reach his maximum potential," wrote Huebeck, who also observed that
when we raise each others' personal confidence and skill, it increases the confidence and
skill of the movement as a whole.
This was the clause in the plan that launched a thousand wingnut welfare programs,
stocked a hundred think tanks, and catapulted countless Young Republicans to positions
of real power. But this lesson is far older than that. Earlier progressives understood the
role that unions, churches, and civic organizations played in bringing along people who
could become local, regional, and eventually national leaders. This isn't something that
happens just inside the Beltway. Finding and grooming emergent talent everybody's job;
and those who do it well have earned their place among our most esteemed leaders.
Ask people to invest in return
Changing the world is not a spectator sport. The early conservatives weren't afraid to ask
their members for incredible investments of time, energy, and money -- investments that
were essential if their perceived life-or-death struggle for the hearts and minds of
America was to be won.
The money, in particular, matters. The conservatives realized that they would need to
fund the the early years of their movement themselves until they racked up enough wins
to attract foundation support. We progressives are short on corporate white knights;
instead, we've built our movement on small donations from millions of Americans. Those
people are making investments in us -- and with every PayPal transfer they send, they
are deepening their emotional bonds to our cause.
However, the problem with a lot of progressive fundraising is that it's too often aimed at
winning short-term battles. Pass or defeat this legislation. Win this election. Fund this
organization for another year or two. Once that milestone has passed, groups have to
conjure a new reason to get people to pony up. Donors figure that the battle's won, and
they can slack off now. Or it wasn't won, and there's no point in continuing to give. Either
way, it doesn't take long for donor fatigue to set in.
The conservatives largely avoided that problem by setting out one huge long-range goal
that provided the all-in-one justification for an entire lifetime of generous giving. They
were in it for nothing less than a total cultural transformation. Every smaller battle was
just another step in the long war, which they expected to outlast their lifetimes. The
leaders kept up their high expectations that their members would make enormous
sacrifices -- not just in the early years, but for decades on end until that transformation
was complete. Nobody was allowed to slack off -- and few wanted to. As the victories
racked up and the stakes grew higher, the atmosphere got positively giddy -- and the
money pile kept getting bigger as people got more and more excited about the
movement's momentum.
We need to remind the progressive donor base that they play the deciding role in a
battle that we, too, can expect to be fighting for the rest of our lives -- and which will
probably be the most important work of all of our lives. As such, we will continue to
expect their full support until the job is done. And the more we win, the more we'll prove
that we deserve it.
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Think nationally. Organize locally.

The original progressive movements drew on (and helped build up) a vast network of
local political gathering places. By the 1920s, there wasn't a county or town in the nation
that didn't have a permanent progressive hangout -- a place where people came
together for news, education, organizing, good times, and help when they needed it.
Most of these places were union and grange halls; some were civic clubs, Democratic
party offices, lodges, churches, pubs, or just some old place the local folks bought and
fixed up for their own use.
The collapse of this physical infrastructure is one of the biggest losses we've sustained in
the conservative attack on American institutions. Even as the country's last union and
grange halls were being emptied out by Republican labor and farm policies, the rising
conservative movement was busy building a shadow network of its own. The religious
right's biggest contribution to the cause may have been the ready-made national chain
of conservative meeting halls it provided in every small hamlet and burg. Every
Evangelical church in the country was a potential nucleus around which a revolutionary
cell could form. (Using churches is dicey business, but ministers were taught where the
lines were, and the IRS often enough looked the other way. Besides, the broad "cultural
transformation" frame meant that a lot of the most important work wasn't political at all,
but rather social and cultural, and therefore entirely appropriate to a church setting.) The
GOP money guys still met (as always) at the exclusive downtown and country clubs; but
the churches provided a place where conservatives of all classes could gather for social
support, education, training, and coordinated local action in service of their revolution.
We've suffered mightily by not having that same ubiquitous network of public outposts
from which to run our ground game. MoveOn.org has been our biggest boon in re-
creating this: it took the lead in using the Internet to help local progressives find each
other, and helped them begin to form permanent organizations in remote parts of the
country. (Until MoveOn and the Dean meetups brought them together, many rural
liberals had spent years believing they were the only ones in town.) The 50-State
Strategy is also seeking to correct this, by opening Democratic party offices in as many
towns and counties as possible across the country. But, though these are two good
starts, we need to stay focused on the task of making sure there isn't a village in
America that doesn't have a permanent space that progressives can call home. Once we
restore our place as an integral part of the country's physical landscape, becoming a
natural and accepted part of its cultural landscape will follow on naturally.
Don't just talk. ACT.
Huebeck's definition of political action is pointed and narrow. Action is "1) the subversion
of leftist-controlled institutions, or 2) the creation of our own institutions of civil society,
whose sole purpose is outreach to, and the conversion of, non-traditionalists." All action
needs to have direct results, and should also deepen the skills of the members who
engage in it. And it's an important way of bonding people to the movement: "Action in
the world encourages the identification of the member with, and dedication to the
group."
"For example, we will go to public lectures given by leftists and ask them 'impolite' and
highly critical questions. We must, of course, be fully prepared beforehand for these
sorts of excursions, and we must also be prepared to embarrass ourselves, especially at
first," wrote Huebeck. He also advises local groups to do charity work that will both build
esprit de corps and generate good PR. "Bonding with others in one's generation or
society is the means by which values are strengthened and perpetuated. It is vitally
important that we bond in such a way that the values perpetuated are our own."
In other words: Our actions need to be good for the movement's long-term goal of
cultural change; good for the community; good for our group's reputation; good for our
own internal cohesion; and good for us as individuals. It's an excellent set of criteria, and
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one that we might want to borrow as a sturdy yardstick for the essential worthiness of
every activity we plan.
Concentrate on students and young adults
Conservatives capitalized handsomely on the energy of their youngest members.
Weyrich and the rest of the early planners carefully nurtured the small handful of
disaffected conservative students remaining on the nation's campuses. They gave them
enormous roles at very young ages, while they still had high enough energy and few
enough encumbrances to work crazy hours under insane conditions. They also richly
funded conservative college newspapers and journals; granted scholarships to promising
students with a conservative bent in law, politics, media, and business; and opened their
social and business networks to graduates looking for high-paying work. In a very real
sense, they found these kids in their cradles, and promised to look after them to their
graves.
They made this investment because they realized that if you get them while they're
young, they'll stay with you for life. Thirty years later, looking at Washington's middle-
aged conservative True Believers, it's obvious that this investment in nurturing the
party's most promising young sprouts paid off for them many times over.
We have our moment now, with the vast numbers of young voters who are rushing to the
Democrats this election. But the conservative success with an earlier generation of
young voters tells us that we need to be very proactive about bringing these kids into
the process, giving them some real power and some serious training, and returning their
loyalty by attending well to their individual futures using every means available to us. If
we want to build a progressive nation that will stand for the next 50 years, it's not too
early to start cultivating solid careers for those who will take over for us when we're
gone.
Be there for each other -- especially when the pressure builds
Many of the above strategies -- from creating permanent physical structures and solid
career paths to establishing reliable internal funding flows -- reflects the conservative
battlefield mentality. They were determined to be self-sustaining and self-sufficient,
beholden to no one in the liberal world. Another piece of this was social independence:
Weyrich knew that conservatives had to learn to rely on each other, not the larger
culture, for their social and emotional validation.
People creating change take a lot of flak from those profiting handsomely from the
status quo. The more you start to win, the stronger and uglier this resistance gets.
Movements often crack under this pressure -- often when they're right on the cusp of
winning all the marbles, and the opposition is at its most intense.
But the founders of movement conservatism knew that people can withstand almost
anything if they have the firm support and acceptance of their peers. They strengthened
their followers against this pressure by teaching them not to give two hoots about what
the rest of us think. To them, the only people who matter are the ones who believe as
they do -- the ones they trust to actually have their backs, look after their kids, and
throw their bail when the opposition takes out after them with ugly intent.
The changes we seek now will eventually create equally tectonic shifts as we set the
country back to right. The money and power is all lined up behind the conservatives; and
they've already demonstrated their willingness to use it to viciously punish progressives
who dare to challenge it.
We will only survive this if we learn to be equally self-sufficient. We cannot care what
they think, do, or say about us. We need to make a point of being there for each other
when the heat is on, and the cons come after one or another of us, hoping to pick us off.
And that kind of defiance comes a lot easier when we make a point of looking to each
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other for validation, and building bonds of trust that will hold us tightly together when
trouble comes.
Don't Ever Give Up. We're In This for The Long Haul.
Movement conservatism first started chipping away at the dominant liberal culture in the
early 1970s. The strategies in these three articles were largely formulated in the decade
that followed; and they've been the basic principles governing conservative behavior
ever since.
From the very beginning, they realistically viewed their goal of cultural domination as a
multi-generational fight. Those who started it didn't expect to live to see the end of it --
and they were right. The people who first plotted strategy and tactics 30 years ago are
now passing into death and retirement; their movement is now in the hands of a
carefully-nurtured second generation, and a third is already coming of age. The
humiliations of the Bush era are sending them back to their local gathering spots to take
stock and regroup; but just because they vanish from the scene for a few years, we
mustn't ever delude ourselves that they've finally gone away. They will be back -- and,
no doubt, their comeback will be largely constructed out of these same strategies.
Weyrich and Huebeck warned the faithful about just these kinds of setbacks. "We will not
hunker down and wait for the storm to blow over. Our strategy will be to bleed this
corrupt culture dry." They told conservatives that good efforts and good intentions count
for nothing, because losing is not an option for them. "The real question is: if the fight is
winnable, why have we not won it? If it is not, why are we diverting our efforts
elsewhere?"
It's one last thing to bear in mind, a final challenge from the conservative movement's
master strategists. If the fight is winnable, why have we not won it? If it is not, then why
are we diverting our efforts elsewhere? This struggle for America's heart and soul and
mind has gone on from the beginning, and it will never end. Being progressive means
committing our entire lives to the work of promoting America's founding Enlightenment
worldview, building a thriving movement that will outlast us, and raising up people who
will carry on when we're gone. As long as conservative culture warriors are out there
trying to undermine the very model of reality that defines American democracy, we're
going to need to be out there resisting their incursions and reminding the country why
that foundation matters. We, too, are in this for the long haul.