The real enemy is the secular humanist mindset which seeks to destroy everything that is good in
this society. The fight that we
are fighting, the battle we have joined, is one that encompasses our
entire life span. Remember,
you have God. You have your
families; you have your community, your church community, your
neighborhood, and all the things you are concerned about. They have only power. That's all that matters to them. They will fight with everything that's
in them to keep that power [Weyrich].
Today we face what I believe is an even greater threat
to our lives. The enemy is more
insidious, more chameleon‑like than a Hitler. And this
enemy is even more deadly. The enemy is lethal and
must be stopped [Fournier].
So far from having ended, the cold war has increased
in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has
been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. Now that the other 'Cold War' is over,
the real cold war has begun [Kristol, quoted in
Starr].
Yes, we are engaged in a social, political, and
cultural civil war. There is a lot
of talk in America about pluralism.
But you can't have a society whose highest value is merely live and let
live. The bottom line is
somebody's values will prevail.
Somebody is going to win this civil war. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to
believe about things like life and death, love and sex, and freedom and
slavery.
As I have travelled the
length and breadth of this great God‑given land of ours, I have often run
into skeptics. They say,
"Well, J.D., if there is a civil war going on,
where are the two sides?" And
my explanation is that on one side there are men and women like Americans
under God. People
who believe that God is.
And believing that God is, they are required, they are obligated
to take the positions they take on a whole host of issues. And on the other side of this great
conflict there are people at very significant positions in our culture who
begin their thinking with the belief that God isn't. They are our enemy [Bauer].
Yes, it is time to take America back, from the liberal
politicians who are attempting to erase every evidence of God from public
life, from government officials who hide their radical, anti‑Christian
bigotry behind a twisted view of "the separation of church and
state," from gay and lesbian radicals who not only claim the right to lead
their Godless lifestyle, but demand that we support this abominable behavior,
from the radical feminists whose "right to choose" has
caused the murder of millions of innocent unborn little babies, from
the militant left which is the fount of all evil—take her back from every
group or individual that refuses to recognize our beloved nation for
what it truly is—a
nation under God!
[Falwell]
We are the only society in history that says that
power comes from God to you . . . and if you don't tell the truth about the
role of God and the centrality of God in America, you can't explain the
rest of our civilization. I
look forward to the day when a belief in God is once more at the center of
the definition of being an American [Gingrich, 1].
As to the future, if you think about the notion that
the great challenge of our lifetime is first to imagine a future that is
worth spending our lives getting to, and then, because of the technologies
and the capabilities we have today, to get it up to sort of a virtual state, although
that's done in terms of actual levels of sophistication, all that's done
in your mind.
And that takes leadership. Most studies of leadership argue that leaders actually
are acting out past decisions. The
problem when you get certainty with great leaders is that they have already
thoroughly envisioned the achievement, and now it is just a matter of
implementation. And so it is
very different. And so in a sense,
virtuality at the mental level is something I
think you find in leadership over historical periods. But in addition, we are not in a new
place; it is just becoming harder and harder to avoid the place where
we are [Gingrich, 2].
In fighting this fight to avoid this place, we face an
increasingly militant, radical, socialist left. And this is how we are going to win the
war against this left. We will use
the same strategy General Douglas MacArthur employed against the Japanese
in the Pacific in World War II: by‑pass their strong‑holds, then
surround them, isolate them, bombard them, then blast the individuals
out of their power bunkers with hand‑to‑hand combat. The battle for Iwo Jima [Author's Note: the penultimate major battle of the Pacific War in
1945] was not pleasant, but our troops won it. The battle to regain the soul of America won't be pleasant
either, but we will win it [Robertson].
Yes, with your help and God's blessing we will win
it. Thank you and good night.
A Connie Conroy Note (December 27,
2004)
We did it!
We pulled it off! We got
the Prez a good speech, a great speech, if I may say
so myself. And after all those
drafts he didn't like at all, too.
Trying, honestly, honestly, to come up with a new way to say the
same old thing he had been saying over and over in the campaign. And so what did we do? We went back to some tried and true
stuff from our "Patron Saints," (if I may say so revealing
my Catholic background—don't let any of the true Fundy Ministers
hear me saying anything like that!): Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson,
Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, the
Newt Man.
Just took some of their best stuff, threw it together,
nobody was the wiser, especially the Prez, and
presto! The best speech money
couldn't begin to buy. And
I'll tell you, after old Carney, I think that this young guy is going to be
fun!
Author's Commentary
The Hague Heritage
On
Tuesday, November 2, 2004, Jefferson Davis (J.D.) Hague was elected as the
45th President of the old United States.
He was a greatgrand nephew of the pre‑World
War II Mayor of Jersey City, NJ, Frank Hague, a man who once said (Peter):
"You hear about
constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to
myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist!' You never hear a real American talk like that."
J.D.'s
father, "Big Daddy Hague," was a truck driver who sported the old
Confederate States of America flag on the radiator of his 22 wheeler's tractor,
and carried a loaded sawed‑off double‑barreled shotgun
underneath the passenger seat.
It was there, Big Daddy would confide in friends, "to protect
myself from the niggers." His
choice of name for his second‑born son came as no surprise to his
friends, especially since his first‑born son "Nat" had
been named after Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest. This man's principal claim to fame was
that a year after the end of the First Civil War he had founded the virulently
anti‑black terrorist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan.
Big
Daddy happened to be a passionate reader.
His taste in books ranged from those carried in the Paladin Press catalog
(1991, focussing on guns, explosives, and survivalism) to those carried in the National Vanguard
Books catalog (1993, featuring anti‑semitism,
racism, glorification of Hitler's Germany, and children's books).
J.D.'s
mother had been an active and vocal member of the movement to harass and
assault elective pregnancy termination clinics, their staffs and patients. She had joined the first Northern New
Jersey chapter of the militant, violence‑inducing anti‑freedom‑of‑choice
organization called "Operation Rescue" when it was founded
in the mid‑1980s. She had
been arrested many times for screaming at staff and patients alike "up
close and personal," attempting to physically block clinic entrances,
and on suspicion of participation in anti‑clinic vandalism.
One
of President Pine's first acts in 2001 had been to order the end to enforcement
of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a Federal law passed
by the 103rd Congress that had offered some protection to the
clinics. (In ordering the non‑enforcement
of existing legislation that he didn't like, Pine was following a well‑known
Right‑Wing pattern. For
example, former 1996 Republican Presidential candidate Phil Gramm had declared
that if he were elected President, one of his first acts would be to end
enforcement, on his own authority, of Federal affirmative action (equal rights
in employment) law [Page].)
J.D.'s
mother was one of the first in the nation to publicly take advantage of
the new Pine policy. She went on
to become a national leader of the violence‑centered
movement spawned by Operation Rescue and its
many mutations. Aided by Pine's
Executive Order and the subsequent repeal of the FACE Act by the
107th Congress, by the middle of the Pine Presidency, the movement
had succeeded in driving out of business most of the open elective
pregnancy‑termination centers around the country, even though the
procedure was technically still legal.
The Development of the Republican‑
Christian Alliance
Hague
was the candidate of the newly‑formed Republican‑Christian Alliance
(R‑CA). The R‑CA had
been created at the quadrennial Republican National Convention
held in Indianapolis, IN in the second week of August, 2004.
It was the final recognition of a reality that had been developing
since the Republican National Convention held in Houston, TX August 16‑20,
1992 had adopted a platform largely written by representatives of the
Christian Coalition (RNC). Over
the intervening 12 years, the dominant and driving force in the
Republican Party had become ever‑increasingly the Religious Right, led by
its dominant political arm, the Christian Coalition.
It
is interesting to note briefly the parallels between the development
of the Republican Party in the last decade before the First Civil War and of
the Republican‑Christian Alliance in the second decade before the Second
(Marsden).
In the 1850s, the "Anti‑Masons," an evangelical political
party opposed to "free thinking" as well as slavery, lead the movement which divided the old Whig Party into
two. Subsequently, the Anti‑Masons/"Northern
Whigs" evolved into the new Republican Party.
In
the case of both the latter and the R‑CA, a movement that began with
moral preaching eventually married itself to political power. It was ironic, of course, that the
Republican Party of the Transition Era, the R‑CA, and their successor,
the American Christian Nation Party (ACNP), would eventually undo much of what
the original Republican Party had accomplished when under President Abraham
Lincoln it had lead the nation into war over the twin issues of preserving
the Union and ending Negro slavery.
The
ACNP would, by creating the New American Republics in 2011, break up the Union,
and institute enforced, absolute, racial segregation that to some
represented a form of slavery.
Prior to the formation of the NAR, although the action had no
practical application, it happened that they had, for the symbolic reason of
adhering to the "Doctrine of Original Intent" concerning the Constitution,
in 2010 among other things repealed the XIIIth
Amendment (which had abolished slavery).
It
was at the 13th annual "Road‑to‑Victory" national meeting
of the Christian Coalition held at Regent University in Virginia Beach, VA
in November, 2003 that Jefferson Davis Hague had
gained the Coalition's "highest moral evaluation." (Right up to the adoption of the
Supremacy Amendment in 2007, the Coalition was always careful to do
nothing to jeopardize its tax‑exempt standing. The adoption of the Amendment had, among other things, lead
to the passage of Federal legislation guaranteeing "approved"
churches tax‑exemption regardless of what activities they undertook. Before that time, however, the
Coalition never "endorsed" candidates [Freedom Writer]. It simply
"recognized their moral value.") Once having achieved the Coalition's top rating, Hague had
the Republican‑Christian Alliance Presidential nomination well in
hand.
The Political Background
of Jefferson Davis Hague
Given
Jefferson Davis Hague's background, it would come as no surprise that as
President, he would live up to the heritage implied by both his given and
surnames, and then some. At age 34
in 1994, Hague had been elected to the House of Representatives
from a district in Northern New Jersey.
He thus became a member of that year's so‑called
"Freshman Class" of Right‑Wing Reactionary Republicans. A salesman of heavy‑duty truck
rigs of the type his father drove, typical of many in the "Freshman
Class" before his election he had had no experience in
government at any level. He saw
government in general and the Federal government in particular as enemies
to be subdued, not as a set of institutions there to be made to work
for the benefit of all the people, operating under a Constitution that gave the
Federal government a broad mandate and responsibility to work on
behalf of the public good.
He
was from the beginning vocal and vigorous in promoting the whole Right‑Wing
Reactionary agenda: end welfare, cut taxes, emasculate government
regulation and "interference in the free market" with a special
emphasis on gutting environmental regulation, significantly reduce
legal protections and recourse for both consumers and organized labor, introduce
Congressional term limits, and so forth.
(That he was especially vocal on the term limits issue is highly ironic
in the light of his own later history.)
He was also at the cutting edge of developing the new political
racism that began with the Republican anti‑affirmative action campaign
first featured in the 1996 elections.
He
finely honed the line of assaulting "preferences, quotas, and special
privileges for special interests," while proclaiming all the while that he
was "no racist," and simply wanted a "color‑blind
society" (Wilkins). He also
was one of the first to develop the strategy by which the Republicans were able
to maintain support for affirmative action programs benefiting (white)
women while attacking those benefiting all persons of color. This tack proved very useful
electorally for the Republicans.
Like
many of his Right‑Wing Reactionary cohorts supported by the Christian
Coalition he had never been particularly religious himself. For example, he had never attended
church on a regular basis. (That
inconsistency was nothing new for Right‑Wing Reaction. Its patron
saint, Ronald Reagan, himself attended church infrequently). It is not even clear that Hague
believed in a God conscious of his own person, a key tenet of the New American
Religion (Bloom). Nevertheless,
throughout his tenure in the House he spent an increasing amount of time
developing his "pro‑Christian" position and allegiances. As indicated, this proved very
useful to him in the Presidential primaries of 2004.
From
1995 on, he attached himself closely, both physically and ideologically,
to Newton Gingrich, the Right‑Wing Reactionary Speaker of the House. And Hague quickly rose through the
ranks of the House leadership, despite his young age. By the time the 108th Congress convened
on Monday, January 3, 2003, he had become Chairman of the increasingly powerful
House American Morality Committee (HAMC).
It was created at the behest of the Religious Right by
the 106th Congress.
The HAMC had been formed to investigate the "moral
decline" of America and propose ways and means to deal with it.
The HAMC
In
many ways, the HAMC was like its ideological predecessor, the old House Un‑American
Activities Committee (HUAC, 1938‑1975). The HAMC spent a great deal
of time defining groups that supposedly consisted of "moral enemies
of the American Way of Life."
It then spent a great deal of time "investigating" supposed
members of these supposed groups.
A major means for doing this was to conduct highly publicized hearings
into the private lives of American citizens, especially prominent
ones, who did not buy into the ideology the HAMC represented.
Unlike
the HUAC, which focused on political issues, as its name indicated the HAMC
focused on "moral" ones.
It was especially interested in "sexual morality,"
sex and sexual identity being almost a matter of obsession for many a
Right‑Wing Reactionary. Also
unlike the HUAC, which never in its entire tenure proposed even one piece of
legislation, much less secured its passage, the House American Morality
Committee was very busy in both regards.
The
HAMC became the most public proponent of the position that private morality
should be the subject of the public law, especially the criminal law, the
position held so strongly by the Religious Right during the Transition Era
(see Appendix IV for a theoretical discussion on this subject by Dino Louis).
The
HAMC held the legislating of "moral behavior" to be its highest
responsibility. Hague's
vigorous and very public efforts in leading this crusade were central in
getting him the 2004 Republican Presidential nomination. He in turn, publicly at least, held the
passage of the 31st and 33rd Amendments to the Constitution, (the Morality
and Supremacy Amendments respectively [see Chapters seven and nine]), to
be the most important achievements of his first term.
The Elections of 2004
By
2004, "The 15% Solution" was in full operation for the electoral
benefit of Right‑Wing Reaction. The Democratic Party had still not recovered from its
Transition Era, Democratic Leadership Council‑ inspired, "me‑too"
stupor. The left, such as it was,
was never able to develop a solidly American ideology and program that went beyond
a Christmas‑tree ornament package with individual proposed solutions
to individual problems, having nothing to tie anything together into
a consistent, politically salable, comprehensive philosophical and programmatic
package.
Thus,
with no viable alternatives to the continuation of Right‑Wing Reactionary
policies offered by the R‑CA, voter turnout remained abysmally
low. Hague waltzed in with 55% of
the vote, and the Republican Party gained solid two‑thirds‑plus,
"Amendment‑guarantee," majorities in both Houses of Congress. As had been the case
from 1994 onwards, even though the number of voters choosing the Republicans
hovered around 15% of the total number eligible to vote (thus "The 15%
Solution"), the victory was hailed by the media as a
"landslide."
The First Hague Inaugural
President
Hague's First Inaugural Address was delivered from the National Cathedral on
Christmas Day, 2004. Under
President Pine, Inauguration Day had been moved from January 20th to
that date. The move accomplished
the dual purpose of having the new President in place before the new
Congress would convene on Monday January 3, 2005, and making a strong
Republican nod in the direction of the Religious Right, even before the
formalization of the R‑CA. The National Cathedral
had been taken over several years earlier by the New American Religion
(Bloom), the rapidly growing religious arm of the political Religious
Right.
The
text of the Hague speech contained a peculiar amalgam of styles. On occasion it was quite explicit but
in one place it was quite opaque.
For a speech that definitively announced to the world that the new U.S.
President fully intended to carry out his campaign promises, it had a
somewhat jumbled nature and was quite short. However, the latter characteristic was quite common in
Hague addresses (and quite the opposite of the usual style of dictators from
Mussolini and Hitler through Stalin to Castro, a role Hague would later fill).
Historians
of our time generally consider Hague's trade‑mark brevity to be a
nod, conscious or unconscious, in the direction of recognizing that a
short attention span was characteristic of most of his followers. For many years, historians have been
split on what, even in the context of understandable brevity,
accounted for the strange nature of the text of his first Inaugural. Indeed, the controversy of the
"why and how" raged hot and heavy in certain quarters until it was
settled by the recent discovery of the "Connie Conroy Note" which
answered the question (see above): the speech was a cut‑and‑past job
using various Right‑Wing Reactionary texts from the late Transition Era.
An Alex Poughton
letter
December 31, 2004
Dear Karl,
I am writing you on this last day on this dismal
year before I dismally go into my cups and hopefully pass out before the
cheers of the faithful echo around Washington welcoming in what they expect
to be a glorious New Year. Glorious for the faithful, perhaps. But for this increasingly benighted
country, I don't think so.
What a speech!
First, my suspicion is that few of its words were original. I know I heard several of the most
famous 90s quotes from Buchanan and Robertson, without attribution, of
course. And towards the end there
was something that sounded just like Gingrich. But plagiarism is a detail in the context of the politics of
the thing. Hague and his new "Repub-lican‑Christian
Alliance" are just ever‑more deeply into the "Politics
of Mythology."
You will recall that that strategy was introduced
first in the 1980s by Reagan with the use of, for example, mythical
"Welfare Queens" and fake quotes from Lincoln (Mitgang). But
it was really developed intensively in the 1990s by such people as the
Republican ideologue Bill Kristol and the controllers
of Rush Limbaugh: inventing some thing, some force, some trend in society,
some supposed social policy that really doesn't exist, then getting people to
believe that it does, and finally making it into "The Enemy."
The latter was crystallized in this speech by the
short section referring to the "enemy's" "insidious,
chameleon‑like" nature.
That "enemy" is never clearly identified, but presumably the
faithful know precisely to whom the reference is being made.
In the 90s, for example, Kristol
and his ilk constantly harped on the "Counter‑Culture" of the
60s and its impact on American values, in the 90s. They conveniently neglected to define
it, of course—its major social features happened to have been the promotion
of peace, love, and community (Vitello). (They liked to focus on the "sexual
revolution" which supposedly accompanied it, but then these guys
are all sex‑obsessed anyway.)
They conveniently neglected to point out that there
never was a national political leader who ever came close to adopting the
"Counter‑Culture" as representing his basic values, so it never
received that kind of imprimateur. But for the Right‑Wing Reactionaries, that
lacuna in their logic was just an inconvenient detail.
They also conveniently ignored the fact that the
"Counter-Culture" was marginal to most of the lives of many
Americans even when it was a somewhat prominent feature of American life
back in the 1960s. And they most
conveniently ignored the impact on American life of the Reaganite
ideology of "every man for himself and the devil take the
hindmost" [Author's Note: see also the quote from Michael
Levin that appears in Chapter seven, p. 88].
That ideology, of course, was very influential in the
historical period just prior to Kristol's
first rise to prominence in the mid‑Transition Era. And because it was associated with a
very popular national leader, and was backed up by his social, political,
and economic policies, it happened to have had a much more widespread, and
extremely deleterious impact on American life than did the
"counter‑culture."
The Reaganite ideology of the 80s was also the
centerpiece of the Limbaugh ideology of the 90s, disguised as "self‑responsibility"
(both harking back to Herbert Hoover's pre-Great Depression "rugged
individualism"). But Kristol and Limbaugh, and the other promoters of
the Politics of Mythology just ignored the historical
facts.
Proceeding along these historical lines, in March,
1994, for example, Kristol's ideological
soul‑mates at the old Wall
Street Journal
wrote an editorial that actually blamed the murder that month of Dr. David Gunn, the
first victim of the violent wing of the forced birthing movement, on the
"permissiveness" of the 1960s! The Politics of Mythology.
Then there was Limbaugh himself continuing in the
spring of 1995 to rail against the Congress as the fount of all
evil. He did this was even
after Congress had come under Right‑Wing Republican control. Back then, despite the power of Bob
Dole and Newton Gingrich and the success of Right‑Wing Republicanism
in the Congress, Limbaugh was already beginning to call for the election
of a "strong leader in the White House," to solve the country's
problems, because "Congress couldn't do it." The Politics of
Mythology.
Or take the Religious Right and the Politics of
Mythology. For years they
regularly railed against the "secular humanists" as the most dangerous
enemy of everything that was right about America. In the mid‑90s, I know for sure,
the leading organization so‑labelled by
the Religious Right, the American Humanist Association, had all of
5400 full members. Hague took pains to single out the "secular
humanists" in his speech, and no one has heard of the American Humanist
Association for quite some time now.
In that tradition of creating supposedly powerful
enemies where there are none, in his speech Hague talked about:
• A
"militant left" when no active left, militant or otherwise, exists
in this country—and hasn't for decades—proposing to
"bombard" and "blast" them, to boot.
• "Radical
feminism," when it had been marginalized long before 2004.
• The
"promotion of homosexuality by homosexuals," never a feature of the
Gay culture, a culture that has for the most part tucked itself well‑back‑into‑the
closet in the face of the manufactured hate‑filled homophobic
public atmosphere of 2004.
• The claimed "anti‑Christian bigotry" of
anyone who dares to simply disagree with so‑called
"Christian" policies.
• And so on and so forth.
But those who rise to power by generating an ever‑rising
tide of hate and fear need to keep the supposed enemies front and center. And just as in the 90s, if they aren't
here in fact, they have to be invented.
As usual, thanks for bearing with me. You are familiar with the nice things I
must say about this place in my regular columns. You are my only outlet for what I know to be the truth.
All
the best,
Sincerely,
Alex
A Parthenon Pomeroy Diary Entry, December 26, 2004
We did it, we
did it. We've finally got
the President we need. Wow! 15 years of hard work to get someone
who is on our side. He's going to
save our country, our freedom, our American way of life. I can't believe it. But I'd better believe it. I do believe it.
This is going to fix things up all right. Jobs for everyone. Cut taxes to the bone. And we can get the coons out of the
schools, get sex out of the schools, get those faggots out of the schools, get
prayer back in, where it belongs.
Really keep those damned foreners (sic) out. This is what we need
to get America to where it ought to be, to what it can be, to what it
always was and always will be.
Thanks, God, and thanks Pat, too.
References:
Bauer, G.,
"Speech," Christian Coalition Road‑to‑Victory Conference,
Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA, 1991.
Bloom, H., "New Heyday of Gnostic
Heresies," New York
Times, April 26, 1992, p. 19 (see also Bloom's The American Religion: The
Emergence of the Post‑Christian Nation).
Buchanan, P., "Speech," Republican National
Convention, 1992.
Falwell, J., Fundraising
letter, May, 1993.
Fournier, K., Fund‑raising letter, American Center
for Law and Justice (Vir-ginia Beach, VA), April, 1995.
Freedom Writer, "Stealth? Deception? You
decide," April, 1994, p. 7.
Gingrich, N., 1, quoted in a fund‑raising letter,
American Humanist Associa-tion (Amherst,
NY), Summer, 1995.
Gingrich, N., 2,
quoted in Kelly, M., "Rip It Up," The New Yorker, Jan. 23, 1995.
Marsden, G., "The Religious
Right: A Historical Overview," Chap. 1 in Cromartie,
M., Ed., No Longer Exiles, Washington, DC: Ethics and Public
Policy Center, 1993, p. 4.
Mitgang, H.,
"Reagan's 'Lincoln Quotation' Disputed," New York Times, August 19, 1992.
National Vanguard Books, Catalog No. 15, PO Box 330, Hillsboro, WV 24946, 1993.
Paladin Press, Catalog Vol. 21, No. 2, PO Box 1307, Boulder, CO 80306, 1991.
Page, S., "His Stetson's in the Ring," Newsday, Feb. 25, 1995.
Peter, L.J., Peter's Quotations: Ideas
for Our Time, New York: Morrow, 1977, p. 46.
RNC: Republican
National Committee,
The Republican Platform: 1992, Washington, DC: August 17, 1992.
Robertson, P., quoted in fund‑rasing
letter of the ACLU, 1993,
Freedom Watch, March/April, 1994, Vol. 3, No. 2, and
Right‑Wing Watch, Vol. 2, No.
11, Sept., 1992.
Starr, P.,
"Nothing Neo: Neoconservatism: The Autobiography
of an Idea by Irving Kristol," The New Republic, December 4, 1995,
35.
Vitello,
P., "No Sign of Counterculture," Newsday, December 6, 1994, p. A8.
Weyrich,
P., quoted in "The rights and wrongs of the religious right," The Freedom Writer, Oct. 6, 1995, p.
6.
Wilkins, R.,
"The Case for Affirmative Action," The Nation, March 27, 1995, p. 409.