The right rides high.

The Religious Right has come to dominate the Republican Party in at least ten of the fifty states. As part of its aggressive grass-roots campaign, the Religious Right is targeting electoral races from school boards to state legislatures, as well as campaigns for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. It is a social movement that uses a pious and traditionalist constituency as its mass base to pursue the political goal of imposing a narrow theological agenda on secular society.

Along with the Religious Right, two other significant right-wing political movements threaten democracy: Regressive Populism, typified by diverse groups ranging from members of the John Birch Society to followers of Ross Perot, and Racial Nationalism, promoted by Pat Buchanan and his shadow, David Duke of Louisiana, and increasingly influential in conservative political circles closer to the mainstream.

Finally, there is the militant, overtly racist Far Right that includes the White Supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and armed right-wing revolutionaries. Although numerically smaller, the Far Right is a serious political factor in some rural areas, and its propaganda promoting violence reaches into major metropolitan centers where it encourages alienated young people to commit hate crimes against people of color, Jews, and gays and lesbians, among other targets. The electoral efforts of Buchanan and Duke serve as a bridge between mainstream conservatives and these Far Right movements.

All four of the right-wing movements are antidemocratic in nature, promoting in various combinations and to varying degrees authoritarianism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, nativism, racism, sexism, homophobia, demagoguery, and scapegoating. There are constant differences and debates within the Right, as well as considerable overlap along the edges. The relationships are complex: The Birchers feud with Perot on trade issues, even though their other basic themes are similar, and the Religious Right has much in common with Regressive Populism, though the demographics of their respective voting blocs appear to be remarkably distinct.

Despite the differences, however, one goal has united the various sectors of the antidemocratic Right in a series of amorphous coalitions since the 1960s: to roll back the limited gains achieved in the United States by the civil-rights, antiwar, feminist, environmental, and gay-rights movements.

Each wing of the Right has a slightly different vision of the ideal nation:

[paragraph] The Religious Right's ideal is a theocracy in which Christian men interpret God's will as law in a hierarchy where women are helpmates, children are property of their parents, and the Earth must submit to the dominion of those to whom God has granted power. People are basically sinful, and must be restrained by harsh punitive laws. Social problems are caused by Satanic conspiracies aided and abetted by liberals, homosexuals, feminists, and secular humanists. These forces must be exposed and neutralized.

Newspaper columnist Cal Thomas, a longstanding activist in the Religious Right, recently suggested that churches and synagogues take over the welfare system "because these institutions would also deal with the hearts and souls of men and women." The churches "could reach root causes of poverty"--a lack of personal responsibility, Thomas wrote. "If government is always there to bail out people who have children out of wedlock, if there is no disincentive for doing for one's self, then large numbers of people will feel no need to get themselves together and behave responsibly."

[paragraph] For Regressive Populism, the ideal is economic Darwinism, with no regulations restraining entrepreneurial capitalism. The benevolent despot rules by organically expressing the will of the people. Social problems are caused by corrupt and lazy government officials who are bleeding the common people dry in a conspiracy fostered by secret elites, which must be exposed and neutralized.

Linda Thompson, a latter-day Joan of Arc for the New Patriot movement, represents the most militant wing of Regressive Populism. She has appointed herself "Acting Adjutant General" of the united militias that have formed armed cells across the United States. Operating out of the American Justice Federation of Indianapolis, Thompson's group warns of secret plots by "corrupt leaders" involving "Concentration Camps, Implantable Bio Chips, Mind Control, Laser Weapons," and "neuro-linguistic programming" on behalf of bankers who "control the economy" and created the illegal income tax.

[paragraph] The Racial Nationalists' ideal oscillates between brutish authoritarianism and vulgar fascism in service of white male supremacy. Unilateral militarism abroad and repression at home are utilized to force compliance. Social problems are caused by uncivilized people of color, lower-class foreigners, and dual-loyalist Jews, who must all be exposed and neutralized.

Samuel Francis, the prototypical Racial Nationalist, writes columns warning against attempts to "wipe out traditional white, American, Christian, and Western Culture," which he blames on multiculturalism. Francis's solution: "Americans who want to conserve their civilization need to get rid of elites who want to wreck it, but they also need to kick out the vagrant savages who have wandered across the border, now claim our country as their own, and impose their cultures upon us. If there are any Americans left in San Jose, they might start taking back their country by taking back their own city.... You don't find statues to Quetzalcoatl in Vermont."

[paragraph] For the Far Right, the ideal is white revolution to overthrow the corrupt regime and restore an idealized natural biological order. Social problems are caused by crafty Jews manipulating inferior people of color. They must be exposed and neutralized.

The Truth at Last is a racist Far Right tabloid that features such headlines as JEWS DEMAND BLACK LEADERS OSTRACIZE FARRAKHAN, CLINTON CONTINUES MASSIVE APPOINTMENTS OF MINORITIES, and ADOPTING BLACKS INTO WHITE FAMILIES DOES NOT RAISE THEIR IQ, which concluded that "only the preservation of the white race can save civilization.... Racial intermarriage produces a breed of lower-IQ mongrel people."

All of these antidemocratic tendencies are trying to build grass-roots mass movements to support their agendas. Across the Right one hears calls for a new populist revolt. Many people presume that all populist movements are naturally progressive and want to move society to the left, but history teaches us otherwise. Populism can move to the left or right. It can be tolerant or intolerant. In her book, Populism, Margaret Canovan defined two main branches of Populism: agrarian and political.

Agrarian populism worldwide has three categories: movements of commodity farmers, movements of subsistence peasants, and movements of intellectuals who wistfully romanticize the hard-working farmers and peasants. Political populism includes not only populist democracy, championed by progressives from the LaFollettes of Wisconsin to Jesse Jackson, but also politicians' populism, reactionary populism, and populist dictatorship. The latter three antidemocratic forms of populism characterize the movements of Ross Perot, Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan, three straight White Christian men trying to ride the same horse.

Of the hundreds of Religious Right groups, the most influential is the Christian Coalition led by televangelist and corporate mogul Pat Robertson. Because of Robertson's smooth style and easy access to power, most mainstream journalists routinely ignore his authoritarianism, bigotry, and paranoid dabbling in conspiracy theories. Robertson's gallery of conspirators parallels the roster of the John Birch Society, including the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.

In Robertson's book The New World Order, he trumps the Birchers (their founder called Dwight Eisenhower a communist agent) by alluding to an anti-Christian conspiracy that supposedly began in ancient Babylon--a theory that evokes historic anti-Jewish bigotry and resembles the notions of the fascist demagogue Lyndon LaRouche, who is routinely dismissed by the corporate media as a crackpot. Robertson's homophobia is profound. He is also a religious bigot who has repeatedly said that Hindus and Muslims are not morally qualified to hold government posts. "If anybody understood what Hindus really believe," says Robertson, "there would be no doubt that they have no business administering government policies in a country that favors freedom and equality."

Robertson's embrace of authoritarian theocracy is equally robust: "There will never be world peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world. How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?"

Mainstream pundits are uncertain about the magnitude of the threat posed by the Religious Right. Sidney Blumenthal warned recently in The New Yorker that "Republican politics nationally, and particularly in Virginia, have advanced so swiftly toward the Right in the past two years that [Oliver] North's nomination [for the U.S. Senate] was almost inevitable." But just a few years ago, after George Bush was elected President, Blumenthal dismissed the idea that the Religious Right was a continuing factor in national politics.

"Journalists like Blumenthal are centrists who believe that America always fixes itself by returning to the center. They have the hardest time appreciating the danger the Right represents because they see it as just another swing of the political pendulum," says Jean Hardisty, a political scientist who has monitored the Right for more than twenty years. "As the McCarthy period showed, however, if you let a right-wing movement go long enough without serious challenge, it can become a real threat and cause real damage. Centrists missed the significance of the right-wing drive of the past fourteen years as it headed for success."

The Right has now managed to shift the spectrum of political debate, making conservative politics look mainstream when compared with overt bigotry, and numbing the public to the racism and injustice in mainstream politics.

When, for example, Vice President Dan Quayle was asked by ABC what he thought of David Duke, Qualyle sanitized Duke's thorough racism and said: "The message of David Duke is ... anti-biggovernment, get out of my pocketbook, cut taxes, put welfare people back to work. That's a very popular message. The problem is the messenger. David Duke, neo-Nazi, ex-Klansman, basically a bad person."

The pull of the antidemocratic Right and its reliance on scapegoating, especially of people of color, is a major factor in the increased support among centrist politicians for draconian crime bills, restrictive immigration laws, and punitive welfare regulations. The Republican Party's use of the race card, from Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy to the Willie Horton ads of George Bush's 1988 campaign, is made more acceptable by the overt racism of the Far Right. Racist stereotypes are used opportunistically to reach an angry white constituency of middle- and working-class people who have legitimate grievances caused by the failure of the bipartisan status quo to resolve issues of economic and social justice.

Scapegoating evokes a misdirected response to genuine unresolved grievances. The Right has mobilized a mass base by focusing the legitimate anger of parents over inadequate resources for the public schools on the scapegoat of gay and lesbian curriculum, sex education, and AIDS-awareness programs; by focusing confusion over changing sex roles and the unfinished equalization of power between men and women on the scapegoat of the feminist movement and abortion rights; by focusing the desperation of unemployment and underemployment on the scapegoat of affirmative-action programs and other attempts to rectify racial injustice; by focusing resentment about taxes and the economy on the scapegoat of darkskinned immigrants; by focusing anger over thoughtless and intrusive government policies on environmental activists, and by focusing anxiety about a failing criminal-justice system on the scapegoat of early-release, probation, and parole programs for prisoners who are disproportionately people of color.

Such scapegoating has been applied intensively in rural areas, and there are signs of an emerging social movement of "new patriots" who are grafting together the conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society with the ardor and armor of the paramilitary Right.

These Far Right forces are beginning to influence state and local politics in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain states through amorphous sovereignty campaigns, county autonomy and "posse" movements, and some portions of the antienvironmentalist "wise use" effort. The same regions have seen contests within the Republican Party on the state level between mainstream Republicans and the Religious Right. The political spectrum in some states now ranges from repressive corporate liberalism on the "left" through authoritarian theocracy to nascent fascism.

Spanning the breadth of the antidemocratic Right is the banner of the Culture War. According to current conspiratorial myth, liberal treachery in service of godless secular humanism has been "dumbing down" schoolchildren with the help of the National Education Association to prepare the country for totalitarian rule under a "One World Government" and "New World Order."

The idea of the Culture War was promoted by strategist Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation. In 1987, Weyrich commissioned a study, Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda, which argued that cultural issues provided antiliberalism with a more unifying concept than economic conservatism. Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice followed in 1991.

Earlier, Weyrich had sponsored the 1982 book The Homosexual Agenda and the 1987 Gays, AIDS, and You, which helped spawn successive and successful waves of homophobia. The Free Congress Foundation, founded and funded with money from the Coors Beer family fortune, is the key strategic think tank backing Robertson's Christian Coalition, which is building a grass-roots movement to wage the Culture War.

For Robertson, the Culture War opposes sinister forces wittingly or unwittingly doing the bidding of Satan. This struggle for the soul of America takes on metaphysical dimensions combining historic elements of the Crusades and the Inquisition. The Christian Coalition could conceivably evolve into a more mainstream conservative political movement, or--especially if the economy deteriorates--it could build a mass base for fascism similar to the clerical fascist movements of mid-century Europe.

John C. Green is a political scientist and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute at the University of Akron in Ohio. With a small group of colleagues, Green has studied the influence of Christian evangelicals on recent elections, and has found that contrary to popular opinion, the nasty and divisive rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and Marilyn Quayle at the 1992 Republican Convention was not as significant a factor in the defeat of Bush as were unemployment and the general state of the economy. On balance, he believes, the Republicans gained more votes than they lost in 1992 by embracing the Religious Right. "Christian evangelicals played a significant role in mobilizing voters and casting votes for the Bush-Quayle ticket," says Green.

Green and his colleagues, James L. Guth and Kevin Hill, wrote a study entitled Faith and Election: The Christian Right in Congressional Campaigns 1978-1988. They found that the Religious Right was most active--and apparently successful--when three factors converged: (1) the demand for Christian Right activism by discontented constituencies; (2) religious organizations who supplied resources for such activism, and (3) appropriate choices in the deployment of such resources by movement leaders. The authors see the Christian Right's recent emphasis on grass-roots organizing as a strategic choice, and conclude that "the conjunction of motivations, resources, and opportunities reveals the political character of the Christian Right: much of its activity was a calculated response to real grievances by increasingly self-conscious and empowered traditionalists."

How did we get here? The current right-wing avalanche began when a group of conservative strategists decided to brush off the flakes who had burdened the unsuccessful 1964 Goldwater Presidential campaign. Such activists as Phyllis Schlafly and John Stormer had helped engineer Barry Goldeater's nomination at the Republican convention. Schlafly was a convention delegate in 1964, and went on to found the Eagle Forum, which fought the Equal Rights Amendment. Stormer wrote a book called None Dare Call It Treason. Their aggressive anticommunist militarism worried many conventional voters, and their conspiracy theories of secret collusion between corporate Republican leaders and the communists--Schlafly called them the "secret kingmakers" in her pro-Goldwater book, A Choice Not an Echo--brought the Far Right out of the woodwork as Goldwater supporters, which also cost votes.

Most influential Goldwater supporters were not marginal Far Right activists, as many liberal academics postulated at the time, but had been Republican Party regulars for years, representing a vocal reactionary wing far to the right of many persons who usually voted Republican. This reactionary wing had an image problem, which was amply demonstrated by the devastating defeat of Goldwater in the general election.

If reactionaries wanted to dominate the Republican Party, they had to face their image problem. This meant creating a "New Right" that distanced itself (at least publicly) from several problematic sectors of the Old Right. Overt white supremacists and segregationists had to go, as did obvious anti-Jewish bigots. The wild-eyed conspiratorial rhetoric of the John Birch Society was unacceptable, even to William F. Buckley Jr., whose National Review was the authoritative journal of the Right. While the Old Right's image was being modernized, emerging technologies and techniques using computers, direct mail, and television were brought into play to build the New Right. Richard Viguerie built the first right-wing directmail empire by computerizing the list of Goldwater contributors. And to reach the grass-roots activists and voters, right-wing strategists openly adopted the successful organizing, research, and training methods that had been pioneered by the labor and civil-rights movements.

When Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968, his campaign payoff to the emerging New Right included appointing such right-wing activists as Howard Phillips to Government posts. Phillips was sent to the Office of Economic Opportunity with a mandate to dismantle social programs allegedly dominated by liberals and radicals. Conservatives and reactionaries joined in a "Defund the Left" campaign. As conservatives in Congress sought to gut social-welfare programs, corporate funders were urged to switch their charitable donations to build a network of conservative think tanks and other institutions to challenge what was seen as the intellectual dominance of Congress and society held by such liberal think tanks as the Brookings Institution.

Since the 1960s, the secular, corporate, and religious branches of the Right have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a solid national right-wing infrastructure that provides training, conducts research, publishes studies, produces educational resources, engages in networking and coalition building, promotes a sense of solidarity and possible victory, shapes issues, provides legal advice, suggests tactics, and tests and defines specific rhetoric and slogans. Today, the vast majority of "experts" featured on television and radio talk shows, and many syndicated print columnists, have been groomed by the right-wing infrastructure, and some of these figures were first recruited and trained while they were still in college.

Refining rhetoric is key for the Right because many of its ideas are based on narrow and nasty Biblical interpretations or are of benefit to only the wealthiest sector of society. The Religious Right seeks to breach the wall of separation between Church and State by constructing persuasive secular arguments for enacting legislation and enforcing policies that take rights away from individuals perceived as sinful. Matters of money are interpreted to persuade the sinking middle class to cheer when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Toward these ends, questionable statistics, pseudoscientific studies, and biased reports flood the national debate through the sluice gates of the right-wing think tanks.

Thus, the Right has persuaded many voters that condoms don't work but trickle-down theories do. The success of the Right in capturing the national debate over such issues as taxes, Government spending, abortion, sexuality, child-rearing, welfare, immigration, and crime is due, in part, to its national infrastructure, which refines and tests rhetoric by conducting marketing studies, including those based on financial response to direct-mail letters and televangelist pitches.

But corporate millionaires and zealous right-wing activists can't deliver votes without a grass-roots constituency that responds to the rhetoric. Conveniently, the New Right's need for foot-soldiers arrived just as one branch of Christianity, Protestant evangelicalism, marched onward toward a renewed interest in the political process. Earlier in the century, Protestant evangelicals fought the teaching of evolution and launched a temperance campaign that led to Prohibition. But in the decades preceding the 1950s, most Protestant evangelicals avoided the secular arena. Their return was facilitated by the Reverend Billy Graham, perhaps the best known proponent of the idea that all Protestants should participate in the secular sphere to fight the influence of Godless communism at home and abroad, and others ranging from the international Moral Re-Armament movement to local pastors who helped craft theological arguments urging all Christians to become active in politics in the 1950s and 1960s.

A more aggressive form of evangelicalism emerged in the 1970s, when such right-wing activists as Francis A. Schaeffer, founder of the L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland and author of How Should We Then Live?, challenged Christians to take control of a sinful secular society. Schaeffer (and his son Franky) influenced many of today's Religious Right activists, including Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and John W. White-head, who have gone off in several theological and political directions, but all adhere to the notion that the Scriptures have given dominion over the Earth to Christians, who thus owe it to God to seize the reins of secular society.

The most extreme interpretation of this "dominionism" is a movement called Reconstructionism, led by right-wing Presbyterians who argue that secular law is always secondary to Biblical law. While the Reconstructionists represent only a small minority within Protestant theological circles, they have had tremendous influence on the Religious Right (a situation not unlike the influence of Students for a Democratic Society or the Black Panthers on the New Left in the 1960s). Reconstructionism is a factor behind the increased violence in the anti-abortion movement, the nastiest of attacks on gays and lesbians, and the new wave of battles over alleged secular humanist influence in the public schools. Some militant Reconstructionists even support the death penalty for adulterers, homosexuals, and recalcitrant children.

The Coalition on Revival has helped bring dominionism into the Religious Right political movement. Militant antiabortion activist Randall Terry writes for their magazine, Crosswinds, and has signed their Manifesto for the Christian Church, which proclaims that America should "function as a Christian nation" and that the "world will not know how to live or which direction to go without the Church's Biblical influence on its theories, laws, actions, and institutions," including opposition to such "social moral evils" as "abortion on demand, fornication, homosexuality, sexual entertainment, state usurpation of parental rights and Godgiven liberties, statist-collectivist theft from citizens through devaluation of their money and redistribution of their wealth, and evolutionism taught as a monopoly viewpoint in the public schools." Taken as a whole, the manifesto is a call for clerical fascism in defense of wealth and patriarchy.

While dominionism spread, the numbers of persons identifying themselves as born-again Christians was growing, and by the mid-1970s, rightists were making a concerted effort to link Christian evangelicals to conservative ideology. Sara Diamond, author of Spiritual Warfare, assigns a seminal role to Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ, but traces the paternity of the New Right to 1979, when Robert Billings of the National Christian Action Council invited rising televangelist Jerry Falwell to a meeting with right-wing strategists Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Richard Viguerie, and Ed McAteer. According to Diamond, "Weyrich proposed that if the Republican Party could be persuaded to take a firm stance against abortion, that would split the strong Catholic voting bloc within the Democratic Party." Weyrich suggested building an organization with a name involving the idea of a "moral majority."

While Falwell's Moral Majority began hammering on the issue of abortion, the core founding partners of the New Right were joined in a broad coalition by the growing neoconservative movement of former liberals concerned over what they perceived as a growing communist threat and shrinking moral leadership. Reluctantly, the remnants of the Old Right hitched a ride on the only electoral wagon moving to the Right. The New Right coalition was built around shared support for anticommunist militarism, moral orthodoxy, and economic conservatism, the themes adopted by 1980 Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.

The first attempt to build a broad Religious Right movement failed in part because Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, with its Baptist roots and pragmatic fundamentalist Protestant aura, had only a limited constituency; it failed to mobilize either the more ethereal charismatic and Pentecostal wings of Christianity or the more moderate branches of denominational Protestantism. Apart from the abortion issue, its appeal to conservative Catholics was microscopic.

But as early as 1981 Falwell, Weyrich, and Robertson were working together to build a broader and more durable alliance of the Religious Right through such vehicles as the annual Family Forum national conferences, where members of the Reagan Administration could rub shoulders with leaders of dozens of Christian Right groups and share ideas with rank-and-file activists. This coalition-building continued through the Reagan years.

When the scandals of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker rocked televangelism and Pat Robertson failed in his 1988 Presidential bid, some predicted the demise of the Religious Right. But they overlooked the huge grass-roots constituency that remained connected through a Christian Right infrastructure of conferences, publications, radio and television programs, and audiotapes. Robertson lost no time in taking the key contacts from his 1988 Presidential campaign and training them as the core of the Christian Coalition, now the most influential grass-roots movement controlled by the Religious Right.

The genius of the long-term strategy implemented by Weyrich and Robertson was their method of expanding the base. First, they created a broader Protestant Christian Right that cut across all evangelical and fundamentalist boundaries and issued a challenge to more moderate Protestants. Second, they created a true Christian Right by reaching out to conservative and reactionary Catholics. Third, they created a Religious Right by recruiting and promoting their few reactionary allies in the Jewish and Muslim communities.

This base-broadening effort continues, with Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition writing in the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review about the need for the Right to move from such controversial topics as abortion and homosexuality toward bread-and-butter issues--a tactical move that does not reflect any change in the basic belief structure. Sex education, abortion, objections to lesbian and gay rights, resistance to pluralism and diversity, demonization of feminism and working mothers--these will continue to be core values of the coalition being built by the Religious Right.

Most Christian voters who had previously voted Democratic did not switch to Reagan in 1980. But by 1984, the New Right had persuaded many traditionally Democratic but socially conservative Christians that support for prayer in the schools and opposition to abortion, sex education, and pornography could be delivered by the Republicans through the smiling visage of the Great Communicator. Reagan did try to push these issues in Congress, but many mainstream Republicans refused to go along.

During Reagan's second term, some key New Right leaders, including Viguerie and Phillips, began denouncing Reagan as a traitor, especially over his negotiations with the Soviet Union. The New Right saw Bush as an Eastern elite intellectual, and even his selection of Dan Quayle as his running mate to pacify the Republican Right was not enough to offset what they perceived as Bush's betrayal over social issues.

Still, the Religious Right kept its ties to the Bush White House through chief of staff John H. Sununu, who worked closely with the Free Congress Foundation and even sent a letter on White House stationery in July 1989 thanking Weyrich for his help and adding, "If you have any observations regarding the priorities and initiatives of the first six months or for the Fall, I would like to hear them." The Bush White House also staffed an outreach office to maintain liaison with evangelicals.

The strongest glue that bound together the New Right pro-Reagan coalition was anticommunist militarism. Jewish neoconservatives were even willing to overlook the longstanding tolerance of racist and anti-Jewish sentiments among some in the Old Right who dubbed themselves paleoconservatives. This led to some strange silences, such as the failure to protest the well-documented presence of a network of emigre reactionaries and anti-Jewish bigots in the 1988 Bush campaign. The neocons could not be budged to action even when investigative writer Russ Bellant revealed that one aging Republican organizer proudly displayed photos of himself in his original Waffen SS uniform, and that Laszlo Pasztor, who had built the Republican emigre network, was a convicted Nazi collaborator who had belonged to the Hungarian Arrow Cross, which aided in the liquidation of Hungary's Jews. (Pasztor is still a key adviser to Paul Weyrich.)

However, the New Right alliance eventually collapsed. That became clear during the Gulf War, when Buchanan's bigotry was suddenly discovered by his former allies in the neoconservative movement. Now, neoconservatives who championed the anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan contras are offered posts in the Clinton Administration. And Barry Goldwater, toast of the reactionaries in 1964, has lambasted the narrow-minded bigotry of the Religious Right, which owes its birth to his failed Presidential bid.

If the left of the current political spectrum is liberal corporatism and the right is neofascism, then the center is likely to be conservative authoritarianism. The value of the Culture War as the new principle of unity on the Right is that, like anticommunism, it actively involves a grass-roots constituency that perceives itself as fighting to defend home and family against a sinister threatening force.

Most Democratic Party strategists misunderstand the political power of the various antidemocratic right-wing social movements, and some go so far as to cheer the Religious Right's disruptive assault on the Republican Party. Democrats and their liberal allies rely on short-sighted campaign rhetoric that promotes a centrist analysis demonizing the "Radical Right" as "extremists" without addressing the legitimate anger, fear, and alienation of people who have been mobilized by the Right because they see no other options for change.

That there is no organized Left to offer an alternative vision to regimented soulless liberal corporatism is one of the tragic ironies of our time. The largest social movements with at least some core allegiance to a progressive agenda remain the environmental and feminist movements, with other pockets of resistance among persons uniting to fight racism, homophobia, and other social ills. Organized labor, once the mass base for many progressive movements, continues to dwindle in significance as a national force. It was unable to block the North American Free Trade Agreement, and it has been unwilling to muster a respectable campaign to support nationalized health care. None of these progressive forces, even when combined, amount to a fraction of the size of the forces being mobilized on the Right.

"It's a struggle between virtual democracy and virulent demagoguery," says author Holly Sklar, whose books on Trilateralism document the triumphant elitist corporate ideology implemented in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Trilateralist belt-tightening policies have caused material hardships and created angry backlash constituencies. The Right has directed these constituencies at convenient scapegoats rather than fostering a progressive systemic or economic analysis. Ironically, among the right-wing scapegoats is a conspiratorial caricature of the Trilateralists as a secret elite rather than the dominant wing of corporate capitalism that currently occupies the center and defends the status quo.

Suzanne Pharr, an organizer from Arkansas who moved to Oregon to help fight the homophobic initiative Measure Nine, is especially concerned that even in states where the Religious Right has lost battles over school curricula or homophobic initiatives, it leaves behind durable right-wing coalitions poised to launch another round of attacks. Pharr says, "Progressives need to develop long-term strategies that move beyond short-term electoral victories. We have to develop an analysis that builds bridges to diverse communities and unites us all when the antidemocratic Right attacks one of us."

Obviously, individuals involved with the antidemocratic Right have absolute constitutional rights to seek redress of their grievances through the political process and to speak their minds without Government interference. At the same time, progressives must oppose attempts by any group to pass laws that take rights away from individuals on the basis of prejudice, myth, irrational belief, inaccurate information, and outright falsehood.

Unless progressives unite to fight the rightward drift, we will be stuck with a choice between the nonparticipatory system crafted by the corporate elites who dominate the Republican and Democratic parties and the stampeding social movements of the Right, motivated by cynical leaders willing to blame the real problems in our society on such scapegoats as welfare mothers, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and people of color.

The only way to stop the antidemocratic Right is to contest every inch of terrain. Politics is not a pendulum that automatically swings back and forth, left and right. The "center" is determined by various vectors of forces in an endless multidimensional tug of war involving ropes leading out in many directions. Whether or not our country moves toward democracy, equality, social justice, and freedom depends on how many hands grab those ropes and pull together.