Right On for the New Right

Resurgent conservatives plan to win the war for minds

In a private dining room of the Capitol Hill Club, a Republican oasis in a Democratic preserve, a group of 30 militant conservatives of both parties met in September to celebrate a crucial victory for which they claimed substantial credit. Paul Weyrich, director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, awarded gleaming brass plaques to Republican Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada and Richard Viguerie, the movement's genius of the direct-mail campaign. Their combined efforts, exulted Weyrich, had defeated Jimmy Carter's bills for election-day registration and the public financing of senatorial elections, which would have bolstered the Democratic vote. The plaques were inscribed with the tribute: FOR LEADERSHIP IN PRESERVING FREE ELECTIONS.

Those bronze plaques will doubtless be followed by many more accolades, for the conservatives are seeing a new day dawning. All surveys show that a growing majority of the American people consider themselves to be conservative. There clearly is continuing discontent with Big Government and big spending. Beyond these basic concerns, a burst of new emotional issues are swelling conservative ranks and stirring their rhetoric. The Panama Canal treaty may be the most prominent concern of the moment, but the movement is thriving on such life-style issues as abortion, pornography and gay rights. In general, the resurgent right inveighs against a slackness of standards and urges a return to a sterner morality--a personal message that seems to be welcomed by more and more of the electorate.

To be sure, a conservative takeover is hardly imminent. The normally liberal Democratic Party commands the White House, controls the Congress and most of the statehouses and legislatures. But from the President on down, Democrats are behaving much more cautiously than in the past, their liberalism laced with heavy doses of conservatism. Such a stalwart right-wing leader as National Review Publisher William Rusher believes that Jimmy Carter is so conservative that he might even be worth supporting over a more liberal Republican. With the tide running in their favor, the challenge for the conservatives is to translate success with current, perhaps transient issues into an enduring political movement that will prevail at the polls.

They claim to be the New Right, but several of the themes--and faces--are old. In 1972 Richard Nixon buried his New Left opponent with the help of some of the same issues that are current today. Many of the leaders are familiar: Ronald Reagan, 67, Barry Goldwater, 68, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, 55. As Viguerie puts it, they are "spokesmen, not leaders. They can bring audiences to their feet, but then they leave the hall, and everything stops." Viguerie believes that conservatives skipped an entire generation of leadership: "In the '30s, '40s and '50s, we did not graduate young leaders like the Kennedys and the Udalls on the left. But there is a different breed of conservative coming on the scene now." These include Laxalt, 55, and Viguerie, 44, and a group of aggressive Republicans: Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, 43, Illinois Congressman Phil Crane, 46, and California State Senator Bill Richardson, 49.

Like the liberals, the new New Right leaders dismiss past conservatives as "reactionaries." Scoffs Lyn Nofziger, a longtime Reagan aide: "The old right were talkers and pamphleteers. They would just as soon go down in flames as win. But the New Right has moved toward a more pragmatic goal of accomplishing things."

Their chief tool, in fact, is not new at all: the U.S. Postal Service. Through direct-mail bombardment, the right alerts its friends to a particular cause and adds to its converts. In this letter-box war for American minds, the top general is Viguerie, who is considered by friend and foe alike the "godfather" of the New Right. At his office in Falls Church, Va., some 300 people crank out 100 million letters a year (200 million in an election year) to 5 million conservatives whose names are on computer tapes. Says Viguerie: "The left controls all communications except one: direct mail. If Walter Cronkite and Katharine Graham don't think our activities are news, then we are out of it."

Often outmaneuvered by the left during the 1960s, the right has now copied the enemy's tactics. Like COPE, the political arm of the AFL-CIO, the New Right has plunged into the grass roots, ringing doorbells, phoning and passing out leaflets. Like the student left, the rightists have taken to the streets to demonstrate. And can they pack a meeting! Feminists everywhere were in an uproar last summer when they found that their state caucuses for the International Women's Year were infiltrated and sometimes taken over by conservative militants deriding ERA and opposing abortion.

"There's no question that the right is I getting increasingly successful on Capitol Hill," says Vicki Otten, legislative representative of the Americans for Democratic Action. She feels that the highly liberal freshmen elected in 1976 have hunkered down in a hurry. "Their mail is running 10 to 1, 100 to 1, against busing, abortion, gay rights. It's phenomenal. They believe that life-style issues will re-elect them or defeat them, and so they're voting with the antis."

But inflammatory issues, whatever their emotional impact of the moment, are not enough to build and sustain a major conservative movement. Arnold Steinberg, a political strategist who has worked for Helms and former Senator James Buckley, believes that an alliance based on these gut issues would attract at best one-third of the electorate. Further recruits can be gained only by reaching out to groups who normally vote Democratic, largely on such bread-and-butter issues as creating more jobs and fighting inflation.

Many New Right leaders seem to be rising to the challenge. They are welcoming and searching out Democratic defectors and trying to shed their country-club image of Wasp exclusivism. Says the Free Congress Committee's Weyrich: "In the past, we conservatives have paraded all those Chamber of Commerce candidates with the Mobil Oil billboards strapped to their backs. It doesn't work in middle-class neighborhoods."

New Rightists are also attempting to link up with blue-collar and ethnic groups they used to shun. Typical is Mike Thompson, the publicist for Anita Bryant's successful campaign against the homosexual antidiscrimination ordinance in Dade County. On the basis of overlapping economic and life-style issues, he is putting together what he hopes will be a "new majority" of Republicans, blue-collar Democrats and Jewish voters. "We will bring together people who have never been politically involved before," he says, "and they will go on to work together for other issues and candidates."

These tactics have paid off handsomely this year in special congressional elections. In three out of four races, Republicans have won upset victories over their Democratic opponents. In each case, the winner was helped by vocal and skillful conservative support.

In Washington State, G.O.P. Challenger John Cunningham found out that resentment against environmentalism was the biggest issue, so he made it his campaign theme. He won by splitting blue-collar Democrats worried about their jobs from liberal intellectuals preoccupied with the environment. Says Stanford Sociologist Seymour Lipset: "This is the kind of thing they are doing very well--looking from place to place, from region to region to find out what the discontent is."

These days the leaders of the New Right are not talking seriously about forming a third party--the idea is too impractical. That leaves them only one way to gain national power: by taking over the G.O.P. Clearly it is far too early to say whether or not they will be able to succeed, but even if they do, they would still have problems. Although they are more pragmatic about techniques these days, the New Rightists tend to be just as purist as the old right on the issues. Hewing a hard ideological line would be no way for the beleaguered G.O.P. to boost its membership: it now commands only 20% of the national electorate.

To build a coalition on the national level, the conservatives would have to learn to compromise on issues--something that has always been difficult for them. Otherwise, the New Right would soon have the faded look of the old right--and just about as much appeal at the ballot box.

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