Clara Listensprechen @ClaraListensprechen4@qoto.org

The US supreme court just completed Trump’s January 6 coup attempt

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/03/supreme-court-trump-coup-attempt

🌌👨‍🚀 𝔾ℕ 𝕊ℙ𝔸ℂ𝔼ℝ𝕊 ☄️✨

mlem

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My main point at this juncture: when Reagan and the Heritage Foundation embraced one another both of them were committed to, and knew the other was committed to, the full package of modern American conservatism, a package dating back to the 1950s. Continuity of commitment on both sides. 17/

Weyrich on Schlafly: She “dressed up the conservative movement for success at a time when absolutely no one thought we could win.” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/obituaries/phyllis-schlafly-conservative-leader-and-foe-of-era-dies-at-92.html. 16/

Here’s Phyllis Schlafly on Weyrich: “Paul Weyrich made the conservative pro-family movement into a fighting brigade instead of just a collection of naysayers. We are grateful to him for his extraordinary vision and leadership, and he never disappointed us. Paul was a man of integrity, courage, perseverance and political smarts. We are proud to have stood by his side for so many years.” https://eagleforum.org/pr/2008/12-18-08.html 15/

Here’s a good article on how Weyrich used white supremacist reactions to school desegregation to bring white Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals to political activism. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133 14/

Meanwhile, in 1973 Paul Weyrich co-founded the Heritage Foundation. The other founders were Joseph Coors and Edwin Feulner. From inception, the mission was to unite the push for a pro-business unregulated market and promotion of white Christian patriarchal social policies. 13/

The Chamber of Commerce responded wholeheartedly, with internal reorganization, increased contributions to BIPAC, and the funding of “affiliated organizations” dedicated to using the courts and state governments to eliminate regulation of businesses. 12/

In 1971, the Chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Education Committee recruited Lewis Powell to write a memorandum intended to rally the business community to political action. The Powell Memo argued that an overall attack on capitalisms was responsible for regulatory laws, public spending, labor laws, and higher taxes. The solution, according to Powell, was concerted political action spearheaded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 11/

Starting in the 1970s the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce decided to “modernize” — that is to organize as lobbying outfits dedicated to rolling back OSHA, environmental protection, and product liability law. In 1973, NAM moved headquarters from NYC to DC and created a "Government Affairs Division.” 10/

Meanwhile, business interests were coalescing around political action to rollback environmental and workplace safety regulations. The American Medical Association, fighting legislation that ultimately formed Medicare and Medicaid, created PAC in 1961 to raise money for candidates who opposed programs like these. Copying that example, board members from the National Association of Manufacturers started the first corporate PAC, the Business-Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC) in 1963. 8/

By the early 1960s and 1970s, modern American conservatism fueled resistance to racially integrated schools, led by Jerry Falwell, and to resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment and insistence on patriarchal heterosexual marriage, led by Phyllis Schlafley. 7/

In 1960, Buckley’s brother-in-law ghost-wrote a book published under Barry Goldwater’s name, titled The Conscience of a Conservative. This was the first popular statement of the tenets of modern American conservativism and how they should be operationalized. 6/

The founding proponents of modern American conservatism started to advance their views as early as 1951, when William Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale. If you are not familiar with this book, you can get an idea of it from this highly critical contemporaneous review. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1951/11/the-attack-on-yale/306724/ 5/

Modern American conservatives believe in inherent authority of the church, the patriarchal Christian family, and an unfettered market. The view also rests on a belief about the incompetence of government. Government is too removed, too big, too clumsy for tasks other than minimal order-keeping. When government does properly maintain order and stability, individuals and nongovernmental organizations can attend to all the other tasks government might attempt but is likely to botch. 4/

Modern American conservatism approves only a very small range for government action. Government may act to maintain order, stability, and certain kinds of hierarchy, and only it if does not encroach upon the prerogatives of appropriate churches (white evangelical Christian ones and those with comparable tenets and practices), acceptable families (heterosexual, two-parent, patriarchal), and the free market (capitalist). 3/

Modern American conservatism fuses ideas from libertarianism, Chicago-School free-market economics, and white Christian evangelicalism, with the goal of reversing the New Deal and the post-World-War-II civil rights movement. 2/