EXCERPT FROM THE NEW RIGHT: WE'RE READY TO LEAD (1980, by Richard A. Viguerie)

In part because of the increasing tensions of the Cold War, conservatism in American politics rose sharply in the late 1970s and early 1980s. With the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, the "New Right" emerged as a powerful political force with a rapidly growing number of constituents. Many of these supporters had been solicited through the painstaking work of conservative Virginia advertising executive Richard Viguerie. Viguerie created a database of over twenty million persons who had donated to conservative causes, which he used to solicit money and support for conservative candidates in massive direct-mail fund-raisers. Viguerie's book, The New Right: We're Ready to Lead(1980), decries the "liberal" control of mass media and claims that the majority of Americans are good, god-fearing Christians who support the conservative agenda. Though the rallying cries of the New Right were devoted mostly to social issues, the administration they supported concentrated its efforts on right-wing economic and foreign policy agendas.

Leah R.Shafer,
Cornell University

See also Conservatism ; Mass Media ; Neoconservatism .

We're just beginning. And the future is wide open.

As the Bible says, there is a time for everything under heaven—a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to keep silent, and a time to speak; a time of war, and a time of peace.

I think it is a time to lead.

We've already made such tremendous gains that some people assume we must have already fulfilled our basic potential. Frankly, I might have thought so too—except for one thing. We've surpassed our early goals by so much that I've learned to quit expecting to run up against a final limit.

It isn't just the liberals who have been shocked by our successes. Even some of our conservative allies have been stunned. They're glad, of course, but they can't quite believe it's really happening.

Perhaps if I had been in the foxholes for 30 years as a lot of conservatives have, if I had been shot at and shelled and torn apart and suffered as many defeats as they've suffered, I might have a defeatist attitude too.

But life teaches you to be ready for anything—even success.

And we're ready. We of the New Right believe that we will prevail.

Several years ago, Phyllis Schlafy asked Dr. Fred Schwarz what did he think was the Communists' greatest asset, and before he could reply Phyllis answered her own question. She said she felt the Communists' greatest asset was their total conviction that they will win.

There isn't a Communist leader in the world worth his salt who doesn't feel that Communism is the wave of the future.

That's what conservatives have going for them now. New Right conservatives believe that we will govern America. And we believe that freedom is the wave of the future.

A lot of older conservatives did not see themselves as winning and governing America. They saw themselves as sometimes influencing those who governed, but they did not see themselves as governing.

When Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door, he didn't know he was launching the biggest revolution in the history of Europe. Like everyone else in his time, he assumed that there would always be one all-inclusive Church.

But within a few years the entire face of the continent was changed. I believe that something similar, on a smaller scale, is now happening in America.

Like Luther, American conservatives didn't set out to make radical changes—just to restore some basic principles. But we've found that the ancient truths require new actions.

Our new reality has been achieved—though only partially so far—in the New Right, a network nearly as vast and complex as all the new Reformed churches that sprang up in Europe in Luther's time. If the Reformation could occur so swiftly in the age of the printing press and the horse-drawn carriage, think of how fast

America can change in the age of television, computers, and jet planes!

Think of the established media as being like the medieval Church, and you begin to grasp why people are alarmed by the New Right. People are used to getting their messages from certain familiar sources: the major networks, the newspapers and wire services, the schools and universities, the pollsters and experts.

CBS may be a private organization, but there is something so official-seeming about Walter Cronkite.

I don't just mean that the established media are liberal in their orientation. That's only part of it, and maybe not even the most important part.

It's something different. People are used to being guided by these media not only in what to think, but in what to think about. They expect the media not to dictate opinion (which most people in the media conscientiously try to avoid doing) but to announce the agenda.

The pollsters are willing to let you give your own answers, but you're probably accustomed to letting them choose the questions.

The result of this is that what we call "public opinion" is highly artificial. It may tell you in a general way what most people feel about the items on the liberal agenda. It doesn't answer the deeper question of how they feel about the agenda itself.

They may care very little about things the liberals feel strongly about, like the Equal Rights Amendment. They may hide their real feelings and give the answers they think the pollsters expect, because they think it's "unenlightened," or "bad taste," or may be seen as a sign of a "lack of compassion" to give non-liberal answers. They may not even realize there are non-liberal answers. So the responses people give to the polls are often formalistic and misleading.

For all these reasons, polls can be used to make it appear there is a national mandate for liberal policies, when in fact there just isn't. Don't think it doesn't happen!

Columnist Joseph Sobran has defined public opinion as "what everyone thinks everyone else thinks." That's an apt way of describing the barrier the New Right has had to break down.

Public opinion of this kind has another serious defect. It doesn't include all the things people may think and talk and care about when they're among themselves, without any liberal supervision around—the things the liberals would often prefer not to hear about anyway, and even discourage people from mentioning in public.

As the years have passed and the media have grown in influence, something else has grown too: a widening gap between "public opinion" and the real concerns of Americans.

It isn't just a gap. It's become a real tension, as the liberal program has been imposed often in direct opposition to what the American people would really prefer.

As I said at the beginning of this book, the media have given very little attention to subjects like school prayer and Communist aggression. A study by Dr. Ernest Lefever of Georgetown University found that the CBS Evening News had devoted only one minute to the Soviet arms buildup over a two-year period! And naturally enough, TV has given very little coverage to one of its own "pocketbook issues": immorality on TV.

Is it any wonder the New Right has sought to break free of the established mass communications system with its own independent channels of communication?

And is it any wonder we make them and the people who have innocently relied on them a little uneasy?

Our power is the ignored and untapped power of millions of ordinary Americans who want to hear another side and make some contribution of their own. We're trying to answer a profound need in American life. The results speak for themselves.

The American people believe in the separation of church and state. They don't believe in the segregation of traditional morality and public life.

Many who were alarmed by us at first are discovering that while we may be a little unorthodox, they basically agree with us. This has even been known to happen to liberals! Some of them too have come to feel that while tolerance is a fine thing, enough is enough.

One of the few conservatives who rejected the attitude that the nation was somehow doomed to eternal liberalism was the late Professor Willmoore Kendall. He long ago perceived that liberalism was riding for a fall, and that it was placing intolerable strains on the patience of the American people and on their deepest traditions.

Kendall predicted that when all the pockets of resistance to the liberal program had had enough, they would get in touch with each other and fight back. And in the showdown, he added, liberalism would lose.

That's exactly what is happening today.

Conservatism isn't the special philosophy of a fringe group. It's the American mainstream. That's why we know we're going to win.

Today, as Jeffrey Hart has observed, it's the liberal New York Times, not the conservative National Review, that seems like the "fringe" publication.

The liberals have done a good job of impersonating a mainstream, and they have succeeded in winning an extension for their unnatural dominance in public life.

They should have lost in 1974, and in 1976. But each time they succeeded in improvising, with issues like Watergate and with a Southern presidential candidate who was able to patch together the old Democratic coalition for a last hurrah, while the Republican Party failed to provide conservative leadership.

But deep down, they knew it wasn't solid. Today, some of the hard-core liberals know their time is up, and many of their own faithful are defecting. They can't pretend we aren't here, as they did for so many years. At the moment they are pretending we pose a threat to the Constitution they have so badly abused, but this is only a desperate, rear-guard action to rally their remaining troops.

It won't last. In a few months—a few years, at most—they will have to concede defeat and step aside. The 1980 elections were a big victory for conservatives. We won a battle, not the war.

But our final triumph won't happen automatically. All the conditions are favorable. But we still have to make it happen, just as much as when we set out, many years ago, to fight our first lonely battles.

There won't be a formal surrender. Pockets of liberal resistance will remain for a long time—after all, they've ruled the roost for at least half a century. The framers of our constitutional system created a wonderfully durable and complex political order, one that has withstood many determined assaults, and no single party—not even conservatives—can or should take it over all at once.

And let's not forget the many positive contributions of liberals themselves. For all their excesses, they have helped America to see and correct blind spots with respect to blacks, women, prisoners, and various other victims of injustice. We want liberals out of power. We don't want them out of the country.

Meanwhile, there is work to be done.

Conservatives have a lot of good ideas to make America a better place to live and work in. But I can't say it enough: the basic ingredient now is leadership. That's what the New Right has to offer. But we can't get too much of it. There has never been a leadership surplus.

I feel that most of the problems the cause of freedom faces in America and in the world today arise from a lack of leadership. Most of them could be corrected if we had a few more good leaders.

If you think about it, this country is here today because of a few dozen people. If there had been no Washington, no Franklin, no Jefferson, no Adams, plus 20 others some 200 years ago we might still be a colony of Great Britain.

Starting in the early 1930s, we did not graduate from the universities or colleges future conservative leaders.

For some reason, we conservatives skipped an entire generation of leaders.

As a result, in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the Left had their Humphreys, Stevensons, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Javits, Mondales and Reuthers.

But the right had very few leaders during these three decades.

We did have a fair number of people who were well-known and articulate, good writers, good debaters, who had charisma.

And most people would think that they were leaders. But only in the last few years did I come to understand that most were spokesmen. They were not leaders.

A leader will make things happen, he will start a new organization or a new magazine. He will call meetings, suggest assignments, then call a follow-up meeting to review the progress.

A leader realizes that winners have plans and losers have excuses.

There is a big difference between a spokesman and a leader. It's not that a spokesman is not important; it's just that you need both spokesmen and leaders. But for many years conservatives had spokesmen but very few leaders.

But starting in the 1950s and early 1960s we started to produce from our universities and colleges those who have gone on to provide the critically needed conservative leadership.

First came Bill Buckley, Bill Rusher, Stan Evans, and Phyllis Schlafly, then, in rapid succession, Howard Phillips, Carol and Bob Bauman, Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell, Jameson Campaigne, Orrin Hatch, Mickey Edwards, Paul Weyrich, James Robison, Morton Blackwell, Terry Dolan and many, many others.

While the conservative leadership gap is being filled, the liberals are rapidly losing their leadership. And it will be at least ten years before the kids who were in the streets marching against the war in Vietnam will be old enough to provide leadership for the Left.

It appears to me that the 1980s will see the liberals suffering from a serious leadership gap.

This provides an enormous opportunity for the conservatives to take charge of the major institutions in America while the left is not playing with a full team.

However, we need lots more leaders—and at all levels, not just in Washington.

I'd like you, personally, to give some serious thought to becoming a leader. You might think about becoming a candidate for the school board, city council, state legislature or Congress. Or perhaps you might seek a position in your local Democratic or Republican organization.

Don't sell yourself short by thinking you don't have the talent or ability or background to run for or hold public office.

Very few people who hold public office are genuine giants. They are people for the most part like you and me—engineers, housewives, doctors, concerned parents, salesmen.

Don't make the mistake of waiting for a committee of the leading citizens of your community to plead with you to run for Congress, or mayor, or city council, or the board of education.

Occasionally, it does work that way. But if Jimmy Carter had waited for a committee to plead with him, he'd still be waiting in Plains, Georgia.

Orrin Hatch, a Salt Lake City attorney with no political experience, decided to make his plunge in 1976. He now represents Utah in the U.S. Senate.

Gordon Humphrey, an Allegheny Airlines co-pilot who had never run for public office, decided to provide some leadership in 1978. Gordon did not have the support of any big name New Hampshire political leaders, only his own friends, his associates from The New Hampshire Conservative Caucus and a few New Right national leaders. He now represents New Hampshire in the U.S. Senate.

There are many more Orrin Hatches and Gordon Humphreys in America—conservatives who can and must make a contribution now to their country.

For the past 50 years, conservatives have stressed almost exclusively economic and foreign policy. The New Right shares the same basic beliefs of other conservatives in economics and foreign policy matters, but we feel that conservatives cannot become the dominant political force in America until we stress the issues of concern to ethnic and blue collar Americans, born-again Christians, pro-life Catholics and Jews.

Some of these issues are busing, quotas, crime, abortion, pornography, education and traditional Biblical moral values.

However, there are certain qualities that the New Right has that previous conservatives didn't have.

As a general rule, New Right conservatives are young. They are aggressive, sharp, tough, work long hours, meet often, develop strategy, plans and tactics, cooperate with Democrats, Independents and Republicans, use and understand new technology. Their day is filled with activities designed to replace liberals with conservatives in all major American institutions.

They are conservatives who are tired of losing and are personally committed to bringing freedom to America and the world in the near future. And they have a firm conviction that they will succeed.

What keeps conservatives like Jesse Helms, that dedicated, tireless "conscience of the Senate" going? He has the following motto on a plaque in his Senate office, and I've adopted it as a guide for my life:

"God does not require me to succeed, but He does require me to try."

Frankly, I think He requires all of us to try.

As I said at the very beginning of this book, the left is old and tired. We in the New Right are young and vigorous.

Many of the liberals' leaders like Adlai Stevenson, Nelson Rockefeller, Hubert Humphrey, Robert and Jack Kennedy are gone. Our leaders are coming into their own.

The liberals had a lot of victories over the last 50 years. But they've grown soft and sluggish. They have lost confidence in themselves and in their ideas.

We're lean, determined and hungry—to gain victories for conservatism and to renew our great country.

Yes, the tide is turning. It is turning our way—freedom's way.

SOURCE: Viguerie, Richard A. The New Right: We're Ready to Lead. Falls Church, Va.: Viguerie Co., 1981.