A cold and rather nasty wind is blowing through the Republican Party. That was probably the main lesson to be drawn from its August convention in Dallas, Texas. It is, however, not a new wind. In fact, as it wafts across the country it carries the unmistakable odor of some of the oldest and worst tendencies in U.S. political history, like McCarthyism, nativism, and robber baron social Darwinism.
The first gale at the convention came with Jeane Kirkpatrick's opening night address in which she banished whole chunks of the population from the community of loyal citizens, especially those who disagree with the Reagan foreign policy on Central America or nuclear weapons, or who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the Grenada "rescue mission." According to Kirkpatrick, we shouldn't be taken seriously, or perhaps even tolerated because we "always blame America first." None of the on-site pundits bothered to note that the Catholic bishops, whose counsel the GOP so eagerly welcomes on abortion, were joining those implicitly accused of disloyalty on Central America.
Another less obvious but equally vicious example of the mean spirit among the Republicans was the pervasive and apparently innocuous appeal to optimism in their rhetoric: those who persist in worrying about the poor, homeless, or unemployed are just a bunch of naysayers and whiners who are psychologically incapable of accepting the fact that we are all happy and prosperous now.
But the timing was a little off in this regard. Vice President Bush was proclaiming that poverty had lessened during the Reagan era ("and that's a fact") the same week that a non-partisan government report was showing the percentage of Americans under the poverty line increasing for the first time in almost 20 years. Like foreign policy dissenters, the poor and those who are concerned about social justice have been banished from Reagan's America. America may be "back" as the president says, and it may even be "standing tall," but it is also becoming a lot narrower in the process.
Less surprising but certainly noteworthy was the Republicans' consistent glorification of the martial virtues. According to them, perhaps the greatest achievement of the last four years has been the United States' renewed willingness to bloody itself and others in battle at the slightest real or imagined provocation.
If these themes were taken up with fire and brimstone from the convention podium, they were also presented with a candy coating in what has now gone down in political history as "The Film." The 18-minute pseudo-documentary of the first Reagan term that preceded the president's acceptance speech. Like the shorter television spots already aired by the Reagan campaign, the film was produced in the style of the Pepsi commercials, and others that have come in their wake, that are designed to make you feel good about yourself and associate that feeling with the advertised product. In this case the product is the strong, grandfatherly image and reassuring voice of Ronald Reagan. Political content, even on issues like inflation that work in the president's favor, is kept to a minimum, but all the right emotional buttons are pushed.
If the film represented the slick, high-tech, Hollywood side of the Republicans' ill wind, its human face may be that of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Helms is considered the perfect politician by the extreme New Right forces, and those forces are clearly in ascendancy in the GOP.
Helms has become a national figure through his championing of far-right causes that more conventional conservatives usually shun. His reputation also owes much to his unusually vicious, and even to many senatorial colleagues, obnoxious tactical style. Helms was the man who stood alone against the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday bill with a racist filibuster vilifying King as a communist. He has also become infamous as a chief sponsor of Salvadoran death-squad chieftain Roberto D'Aubuisson's above-ground political career. Senator Helms has a long history of not just tolerating, but actively promoting, the apartheid regime in South Africa.
In the first weeks of September, Helms was again in the Washington headlines, this time for obstructing Senate ratification of the United Nations treaty against genocide. The treaty, signed by President Truman in 1948, makes the mass killing of a national, ethnic, religious, or racial group a crime under international law. More than 90 countries, including the Soviet Union, have signed the treaty, but it has never passed the United States Senate because of pressure from the far Right. Helms says he opposes the treaty because it might allow international bodies to meddle in the United States' internal affairs.
Admittedly Helms is a worse case than even most of his New Right colleagues. But there was a time when many sane and perceptive people thought Ronald Reagan was too much of a right-wing ideologue to ever be elected president, or that he would shed his ideology once in office.
It is no longer unreasonable to fear the rise to power of the New Right forces epitomized by Jesse Helms. And when you add up the combination of racism, association with murderous right-wing forces abroad, anti-communist fervor that justifies any horror in the name of stemming "the red tide," and the financial support of a segment of the corporate ruling class, there is a great deal to be feared. Repeatedly in this century, similar forces have opened the way for the destruction of political liberties and the persecution of minority political, ethnic, and religious groups. Historically this danger has been especially great during times of protracted economic crisis and cultural drift.
For us in the Christian community, the most disturbing aspect of the rise of the far right has been its blessing by many evangelical or fundamentalist religious figures. In fact it must be admitted that avowedly Christian forces have so far been near the vanguard of the New Right. This, too, has happened before.
Perhaps the rest of us can learn something from our friends in South Africa's "confessing church" movement. In South Africa state power is held by far-right racist politicians who justify their policies on religious grounds and enjoy the blessing of what amounts to an unofficial state church. Christians there who are trying to remain faithful to the biblical principles of justice, human dignity, and equality have given a name to this phenomenon. They call the political policies, quite simply, "sin." With equal precision they have named church theological justification for those policies "heresy."
Danny Duncan Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!