Jerry Landay
June 22, 2004

Simon Said

The Neocon Hothouse that William Simon Built

American democracy is in deep trouble. George Bush has brought into government a cabal of right-wing radicals who now control the Republican Party, and, through the party, dominate all three branches of the federal government. Their policies are drawn from a narrow ideology that bears no relevant connections to history, tradition, or common sense.

Journalists refer to these extremists as "conservatives." But they bear little resemblance to classical American conservatism. They only wish to conserve their own status, money, and power. These radicals are also generically referred to as "neoconservatives," (neocons) a term originally applied to a group of former communists and ex-liberals who soured on both their movements and the Democratic Party and signed on with a body of newly-formed right-wing think tanks and policy institutes, or with university departments of political science or policy studies. In most cases, these organizations were generously subsidized by funding from right-wing philanthropies established by wealthy industrialists or inheritors of family wealth.

With the selection of George W. Bush in 2000, the neoconservatives and their allies moved into the Federal government. Many received senior posts in the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department, and the White House Counsel's staff. Their names are not quite household words, but they appear whenever journalists investigate such Bush policy excesses as the flawed intelligence that fueled the Iraq War. Among them are Vice-President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Defense under-secretaries Douglas Feith and Steven Cambone, and under-secretary of State John Bolton. Also on the list are Richard Perle, head of the Defense Policy Board until his aggressive positions on the Middle East made him an embarrassment and he was forced to resign, and William Kristol, the influential editor-in-chief of the radical-right bible, The Weekly Standard.

As opposition to embedded neoconservatism grows within the body politic it's useful to review the origins of the political extremism that has lent its character to the destructive policies of the Bush administration. Many of the roots of "movement conservatism" can be traced to the core right-wing foundations that since the 1970s have consistently funded a cohort of activist organizations that has grown to 350 front operations today.

Together those funders and recipients have changed the nature of who we are as a nation. The neocons are responsible for launching the imperialist war on Iraq. Their distortions of conservative ideology have trumped the wisdom of history and tradition. Their six-gun mentality has propelled the country into a war of bloody self-indulgence and an (imagined) cosmic face-off with fundamentalist Islam. Their anything-goes machismo has corroded respect for America among friends and allies that took seven decades and two world wars to nurture. Their assaults on civil liberties in the name of security have begun to discourage foreign professionals from emigrating to the United States to swell our talent pool. In the field of medical science, equally talented American workers in stem cell research and other technical fields are finding better opportunities in other countries.

The radical right has polarized America into warring camps, demolishing the middle ground where the best of American politics was once played out. Their judges have rewritten established precedents in law to square with their beliefs. As agents provocateur, they have stirred the sectarian pot over social issues, dividing and diverting American society and threatening schisms within the Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. They have hijacked government to serve already bulging private purses. Their tight alliances with managerial corporatism have weakened republican democracy, substituting a form of plutocratic rule by the privileged. Their zealous faith in "free market" forces as the Legree who "guards" the public interest has weakened the safeguards of governmental oversight and regulation.

They wage vicious class warfare, diverting the American income stream from the lower and middle classes upward to an already affluent minority. They have created crises of healthcare and education, as well as growing impoverishment among workers and the poor. They are erecting a rigid social structure from which those at the bottom can no longer escape. Their aggressive marketing of school vouchers and advocacy of public school privatization at the expense of public-school viability endangers the entire American system. Their seizure of the commercial airwaves has muffled the spirited conversation of American civilization, and debased our cultural life. They like to be called conservatives, because it evokes a faux-kinship with great Republican spirits of the past - McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Taft.

But within the body of their ideology, the "new conservatives" have planted the seeds of decadence. Their nakedly self-interested actions have been concealed behind the smoke and mirrors of sloganeering and cheap propaganda, i.e. the Healthy Forest Initiative is a plan to permit more logging; the Clear Skies program actually erodes clean air standards, and will result in more pollution.

In Al Gore's words, they "are transforming the United States into a country that is more warlike, more brutal, less free, less just, less admirable, and much less appealing than the nation that existed when" George Bush was elevated to power by the Supreme Court in 2000.

Extremism as a Career Choice

The appointment of George Bush to the Presidency in 2000 marked the apogee of American political realignment from left to right that began to coalesce in the late 1960s - during the Vietnamese War abroad and the civil rights battles at home. Eulogies on the death of Ronald Reagan have failed to note that it was he who first imported new cadres of the radical right inside government in 1981, and made them a ruling elite. He brought to power a new brand of conservatism that is regressive, self-referential, and focused solely on the exploitation of government and the accumulation of wealth, status and power. As the defector from the right-wing, author David Brock pointed out, one ultimately sought to be a new conservative not because of sacred principle but as a career choice.

Republicans have now controlled the White House for 24 of the past 36 years, and moved the nation rightward with them. Understanding how the far right emerged and expanded its power is essential if progressivism is to lead a revival that restores the essence of what a caring America has lost under "conservative" leadership.

Beatrice Webb, the British social reformer, well understood that a transfer of power calls for the shaping of a people's consent. "There is no such thing as spontaneous public opinion," she wrote. "It all has to be manufactured from a center of conviction and energy." The manipulation of the public's consent rightward in America actually began in the very shadow of Franklin Roosevelt's dominion when it seemed that liberalism would reign forever.

Conservatives of the period were seen as bizarre isolationists, haters of big government and the taxes needed to fund it, pirates who practiced gloves-off capitalism dignified as economic liberty. As outsiders, lean and hungry for power, they cast about for a way to create that "center of conviction and power."

They finally settled on a negative base - their shared hatred of the "liberal establishment." Against this liberal enemy a remnant of far-right thought gathered, eventually devising a body of political ideas that would define and drive a successful movement. In an influential book called Ideas Have Consequences (1948), political philosopher Richard Weaver argued that the liberal in-group was undermining American culture, and only a counter-culture based on the foundations of right-radicalism could defeat it.

The result was that hundreds of think tanks, policy institutes, litigation centers, special-interest advocacy groups, public opinion and propaganda operations, campus activist outfits, and publishing enterprises were created in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as newcomers to reinforce the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The AEI itself had been founded in 1943 to rival the liberal (at the time) Brookings Institution, and is now recognized as the pioneer right-wing policy think tank. In 1964, it supplied the brainpower that drove the presidential campaign of traditional conservative Senator Barry Goldwater. A young AEI scholar, Karl Hess, served as principal speech writer, and created the notoriously well remembered words of Goldwater's convention acceptance speech which became the stamp of a new, aggressive brand of movement conservatism: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Funding the Movement Against Liberalism

Goldwater's defeat was in fact a beginning. The Johnson landslide of 1964 did not blunt the momentum of the newly motivated radical right. In the aftermath of the rebellious 1960s, a political manifesto by a Richmond attorney and future Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell, urged conservative activists and experts to roll back perceived threats to capitalism by gaining control of power centers on campuses, in the courts, in the media, in politics, and in the government bureaucracy. Distributed widely by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Powell's action memo attracted wide attention, and it energized businessmen to return to the political arena from which the Depression had driven them, and to use their deep pockets to fund a power apparatus that could shift public opinion rightward and carry the day in electoral politics.

Money from corporate and inherited wealth was married to right-wing ideas. In 1972, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate, was persuaded by Powell's memo to seed the Heritage Foundation, the so-called General Motors of right-wing think tanks, with $250,000. Other right-wing industrialists and scions of inherited wealth such as Lynde and Harry Bradley, Richard Mellon Scaife, John M. Olin, and Randolph Richardson established private foundations and dedicated millions to fund the burgeoning activist front of advocacy organizations that were to be the muscle of movement conservatism.

Patience and persistence were the watchwords of new-conservative philanthropic grant-making. The patrons viewed it as long-term investment, and focused giving on advancing a narrow set of principles: less government "interference," sharply reduced taxes, unrestricted private enterprise, personal responsibility, economic freedom, rabid anti-communism, and the export of free-market gospel to the nation and the world. The agenda was elastic enough to gather disparate interests under the big tent -- old and new conservatives, libertarians, social and religious conservatives - united against the common enemy, liberalism.

The movement began to attract and train fresh recruits through programs that brought young and ambitious political talent into the fold. With the defeat of Hubert Humphrey by Richard Nixon in 1968, a group of disillusioned right-wing Democrats, former liberals and ex-communists seeking power swung hard right. They were the kernel of the so-called neoconservatives, and they lent fresh energy, ideology, and organizing skills to the movement. These new radical right shock troops transmitted the ideas of the far right through targeted and popular media, and went to work for candidates who could make those ideas happen. They were, according to Sidney Blumenthal, "a political elite aspiring to become a governing elite."

William Simon and the Counter-Intelligentsia

No one exemplified emergent right-wing power more than the late William E. Simon. Simon projected a charismatic personality that drove change. He used exuberant salesmanship, ringing prose, and high polemical style to move a movement. He bridged the gulf between business and right-wing politics. He was a full partner of a major investment house on Wall Street, Salomon Brothers. In 1973, under Nixon, Simon was made federal "energy czar," despite his espoused dislike of government. It was government, Simon maintained, that had caused the energy debacle. "All governments know how to do," he declared, "is to compound the problem that government created in the first place." He nonetheless remained part of the new right-wing governing elite when Watergate forced Nixon to resign. Simon agreed to serve as Secretary of the Treasury under Nixon's successor Gerald Ford. Under Reagan, in the early 1980s, Simon helped funnel private right-wing funds to Oliver North's secret government within the government that smuggled illicit arms to the contras against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

His popularity and fund-raising abilities made Simon a power. He cast a vast organizational presence within the radical right. In Blumenthal's phrase, he "controlled the wellsprings of funding [to] make the movement green." In 1977, Simon won an influential position that carried prestige and vast funding potential. He became the President of the John M. Olin Foundation, and made it one of the major sources of millions in contributions to radical right causes. He was also on the boards of the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the Manhattan Institute - all major generating centers of right-wing thought and action. He wrote two influential books, Time for Truth (1979) and A Time for Action (1980) detailing his case against "stupid, despotic" liberalism, whose championing of equal rights was "a morbid assault on both ability and justice." Liberal leaders, he wrote, constituted "as stubborn and ruthless a ruling elite as any in history and worse than many because it is possessed of delusions of moral grandeur." The Republican Party was "stupid," as well, and had to be shoved from the accomodationist center into the tabernacle of belligerent, far-right conservatism.

Simon's creed, put simply, was to be vigorous in belief, wise in strategic planning, and united in collective action. He picked up where Powell had left off. His goal was to defeat the "Liberal Establishment," and to replace it by planting right-wing cadres as the dominant force in politics, media, academia, and the courts. They would constitute an alternative power that he labeled the "counter-intelligentsia," a vast network of new conservative thought that would challenge and overwhelm seemingly omnipotent liberalism. Under Simon, Olin funded programs in law and economics, political science, business, and major fellowships and endowed chairs at major American universities including Harvard and Yale. With neoconservative theoretician Irving Kristol, he created the Institute for Educational Affairs, which would churn out young activists from universities and right-wing leadership programs to staff the institutes, think tanks, and journals of the counter-intelligentsia that moved public opinion rightward.

Simon-izing a Network

Though he died in 2000, the influence of the organizations that Simon's leadership and money helped to build has been pervasive. Among other things, according to People for the American Way, they "stirred up" activism from the national to the local level, funded "scholars to push the intellectual boundaries of the issues, graduate students to form the next wave of scholarship and movement leadership, and college newspapers to shape the milieu in which American's next generation…comes to its political awakening."

The impetus toward industrial deregulation that took root within the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter was generated by academic-style "scholars" of the American Enterprise Institute, a major recipient of Simon's largesse from Olin. The campaign to privatize Medicare, under the rubric of "reform," has been pushed with diligence by the Heritage Foundation since the 1980s. Heritage "scholars" drew up the programs and policies of the Reagan Administration in a volume called Mandate for Leadership. Many were carried out. Hundreds of young cadres in policy-making and government contributed to the volume. More than 30 of them were hired by the Reagan Administration, including the controversial William Bennett as Secretary of Education, and James Watt as Secretary of the Interior. The movement's network has offered promising career paths to young activists ever since. Campaigns for public school privatization through school voucher programs have been spurred through the efforts and funding of the Bradley Foundation.

The Smith Richardson Foundation was the incubator of so-called "supply-side" economics, the perverse school of "voodoo economics" (according to George H.W. Bush) that holds that the benefits of tax-cuts for the wealthy will somehow trickle down from the privileged to those lower on the totem pole. Most recently employed by George W. Bush and the tax-cutting Republican majority in Congress, supply-side policy has resulted in economic class warfare, and a vast and ever-widening gap between those who earn more than $200,000 per year and the rest of us. Carried to its logical extreme, the ideological platform pursued by William Simon has morphed into the policy excesses of today over which the Bush Administration presides.

Fault Lines on the Right

From out of the political wilderness to dominion in Washington, the once-derided "crazies" of the radical right have, in the words of John Mickelthwaite and Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist, "out-organized, out-fought, and out-thought liberal America the past 40 years. And the left still shows no real sign of knowing how to fight back" [emphasis added].

However, the signs of ideological wear and tear are becoming evident, as the right-radical policies of the Bush regime come into direct conflict with the injunctions of classical conservatism. To cite examples:

Though shalt not indulge in fiscal irresponsibility. Bush's tax cuts have thrown the federal budget deeply into the red to record depths -- a deficit in the current budget year of between $400-500 billion -- causing consternation among Republican ranks in the Congress.
Though shalt not engage in foreign adventuring. The botched war in Iraq has undermined America's standing in the world, cost taxpayers $5 billion a month, and claimed many thousands of human lives. The price of imperial adventuring is steep indeed. As unhappy Pat Buchanan conservatives increasingly point out, if you play at being an empire, you're in danger of losing the republic. And members of the ideological right at the state and local levels are restively watching their own budgets wither as a result of both Iraq and those tax cuts.

From the center to the left, funders and activists must study the means and methods of the radical right in order to reverse the damage. Communicating effectively through outreach to disillusioned and alienated voters is a key. So are efforts to mobilize and activate the young. Uniting on common objectives is another. To become a viable alternative for a majority of Americans, "it all has to be manufactured from a center of conviction and energy," with infinite patience for the long haul.

[Among other works, the author is indebted to Sidney Blumenthal's eloquent history of the emergence of the new conservatism, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment (Times Books, 1981), now sadly out of print, for its lucidity and political acumen]