– from the American Prospect (extract)
The Council for National Policy Tries
To Regroup by Living in the Past.
In the bowels of the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Washington last Friday, as the G20 met across town and the Republican Governors’ Association assembled in Florida, the activist elites of the conservative movement gathered to plot their resurgence. The Council for National Policy (CNP), founded in the early 1980s by the power brokers who brought together cold warriors, moral majoritarians, John Birchers, dispensationalists, anti-government libertarians, free-enterprise zealots, and national-security hawks under one roof, has long been the incubator for the conservative movement’s political strategy, and an essential stop for Republican presidential aspirants. At its last meeting, in August, the CNP blessed John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. At the time, the move was deemed prescient and brilliant, but the religious right was — as usual — blind to the notion that picking “one of us” from “real America” can be alienating to everyone else. While the CNP was trying to look to the future last week, it seemed hopelessly enamored of its aging leaders. When I arrived to meet Warren Smith, the conservative evangelical activist and journalist who had invited me to chat, we ambled past anti-evolutionist Ken Ham, who was holding court to a small but rapt audience in the hallway; eyed Left Behind author and CNP co-founder Tim LaHaye, who was shuffling in and out of the “CNP Networking Room;” caught a glimpse of Rick Santorum, who since being booted out of his Senate seat has led the charge against “radical Islam” from his perch at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center; and spotted the religious right’s anti-feminism doyenne Phyllis Schlafly, 84, who had earlier that day delivered a speech to the CNP Youth Council on how to “find your place in the conservative movement.” I wanted to ask LaHaye if he thought the end-times would happen during Obama’s presidency, but when I circled back to where I had seen him, he was gone. Rapture, anyone?
Can the Republican Party
Rebuild on the Religious Right?
Although the CNP’s meetings are closed to the press, Smith filled me in on some details: Conservative direct-mail entrepreneur Richard Viguerie, a patriarch of the modern conservative movement, rallied the troops by pointing to prior comebacks, from Reagan to Gingrich to Bush. Viguerie, Smith told me, “is saying that we need to fight for conservative ideas and conservative values and not worry about who embraces them.” Smith added that the group talked “about changing the culture, entertainment, media, TV” — a longtime goal of the religious right’s dominionism that it seeks to achieve by taking over social, cultural, and government institutions, much like religious-right figures are now plotting their new takeover of the Republican National Committee. “What I’m hearing is that there is no loyalty to the Republican Party,” said Smith, meaning no loyalty to the party as constituted but loyalty to one purged of insufficiently conservative members. “What Richard Viguerie talks about is not a third party but a third wave. Basically there needs to be a flowering of grass-roots conservative activism and local groups, local PACs. He’s basically saying you’ve got a Republican county commissioner in Buzzard’s Breath, Texas, and he’s not a conservative? Run a conservative against him.” That is exactly what has excised moderates from the Republican Party and led to its losses in 2006 and 2008. Of course, there aren’t really that many new ideas to run with if you believe that the Bible is God’s literal word that should dictate policy, and that government should be starved of funding and required to do as little as possible, unless it involves using military might to combat perceived threats to Western Civilization As We Know It. But the religious right is still steering the Republican ship, and the strategy of the emerging governors — Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, and Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who was just installed at the helm of the Republican Governors’ Association — will be to figure out a way to continue to endear themselves to the religious right while expanding the base. A tall order in the current political environment. […]
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