PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY
The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress on March 22, 1972, and was sent to the states for ratification, with a seven-year deadline. Within the first year, it was quickly approved by twenty-two of the necessary thirty-eight states.[30] Then came Phyllis Schlafly. Whether one agrees or disagrees with her politics, she is a remarkable woman.[*] She appears to have a moderately right-wing authoritarian personality, but she does not carry much of the unpleasant baggage that many of these authoritarians do. Her authoritarianism is more akin to that of the strict schoolmarm.
With miraculous managerial skills, Schlafly assembled and trained women in key remaining states to block ratification of the ERA. In a standard authoritarian ploy, she relied on fear, claiming that the ERA would deny women the right to support by their husbands, that it would eliminate privacy rights and result in unisex public toilets, that it would mean that women would be drafted into the military and sent into combat, and that it would fully protect abortion rights and homosexual marriages. None of this was true, but her powerful propaganda got the attention of a lot of women who had never been particularly interested in politics. The authoritarian leader’s use of misleading information to gain control is a consistently successful technique for them. As a New Yorker profile observed of Schlafly’s style, “While Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham were still playing tea party, she recognized that deliberation was no match for diatribe, and logic no equal to contempt. She was, in this way, a woman ahead of her time.”[31]
Schlafly did not just organize women, but also persuaded businesses (like the insurance companies) and various religious groups to join her effort.[32] By 1980 Schlafly had successfully killed the ERA and had given birth to an antifeminist, so-called profamily movement that supported other social conservative causes. Schlafly’s activism evolved way beyond her allegiance to the “Goldwater-Reagan” (her term) school of conservatism (which she sums up as “lower taxes, limited government, fiscal integrity—and American military superiority, because everybody is safer that way”), and provided a corps of trained volunteers whose grassroots efforts have changed conservatism.
Not unlike Pat Buchanan, however, and notwithstanding her authoritarian conservatism, Phyllis Schlafly regularly takes issue with radical Republican proposals relating to domestic policy and foreign affairs. She also attacks the Bush/Cheney big-government policies and fiscal irresponsibility. Importantly, she remains a guardian of civil liberties at a time when other conservative authoritarians have willingly and unquestioningly trusted “the authorities’” claim that only the terrorists need worry. She has tried to correct abuses in the USA Patriot Act, explaining that “the problem that confronts America today is foreign-sponsored terrorism, and we must draw a bright line of different treatment between U.S. citizens and aliens. Our government should monitor the whereabouts of aliens, but not require U.S. citizens to relinquish our freedom”[33] (bold emphasis is in her original). To oppose the extension of the Patriot Act, Schlafly joined with former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia and the ACLU in forming Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances. Schlafly’s example illustrates that authoritarians can be effective leaders without being social dominators.
PAUL WEYRICH
The same cannot be said of Paul Weyrich, whose early work complemented that of Phyllis Schlafly in the development of social conservatism. Both Schlafly and Weyrich were once strident anticommunists, Hoover’s vigilant Americans. They continued the culture war that Agnew and Nixon had started, and their principal contribution was mustering the troops, working from the bottom up.
Weyrich has been described by friendly observers as “the Lenin of social conservatism—a revolutionary with a rare talent for organization,” and while his stature within social conservatism is waning, it remains significant.[34] Weyrich is a master of the art of direct-mail fund-raising and is best known as the “funding father” of modern conservatism. He believed conservatives needed a Washington-based think tank comparable to the once liberal (now moderate) Brookings Institution, so along with a colleague from Capitol Hill, Edwin Feuler, Weyrich established the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Today Heritage is the wealthy granddaddy of conservative think thanks.[35] These organizations have become the marketing arms of contemporary conservatism, providing various factions an imprimatur of scholarship, and none more than social conservatives. Much of their “thinking” supports their particular “authority,” and in this sense they are efficient authoritarian tools. They devote significant resources, and intellectual firepower, to demolishing policies and programs on the liberal agenda.[36]
Barry Goldwater described Weyrich as “a bull-headed, stubborn, son-of-bitch,” and observed that “Weyrich doesn’t really understand how Washington works, but he thinks he does.”[37] In his memoir he worried that Weyrich and other social conservatives were “pushing [their] special social agendas…at the risk of compromising constitutional rights,” an agenda that threatened to splinter Republicans. Weyrich “preached little or no spirit of compromise—[no] political give-and-take.” He “failed to appreciate that politics is the ordinary stuff of daily living, while the spiritual life represents eternal values and goals.” Goldwater added, “Public business—that’s all politics is—is often making the best of a mixed bargain.” Social conservatives, nonetheless, stressed “the politics of absolute moral right and wrong. And, of course, they are convinced of their absolute rightness.”[38] The senator was addressing the second phase of Weyrich’s activism, when the latter helped organize the religious right. In a profile that recognized his authoritarian influence, the Washington Times noted that Weyrich “helped bring [conservatism] structure, discipline and, gradually, dominance” over the Republican Party.[39] Weyrich may be a Double High authoritarian, and his authoritarianism is, at times, brutal.
30.
This material is drawn largely from Phyllis Schlafly’s Web site at http://www.phyllisschlafly.com/.
*
Schlafly graduated from college in 1944 at nineteen years of age with a Phi Beta Kappa key, and received her master’s degree in government from Harvard a year later. She twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress. She has long been involved in Republican politics at the state and national levels, once chairing the Illinois Federation of Republican Women. Ms. Schlafly obtained a law degree at Washington University Law School, and worked with her husband in a legal assistance (ACLU-type) organization for conservative causes. To date, she has written over twenty books; her monthly “The Phyllis Schlafly Report” to conservative activists is now in its thirty-eighth year; her syndicated column appears in about 100 newspapers; her radio commentaries are heard daily on some 460 stations; and her radio talk show on education, called