Conservatives Without Conscience

One particularly enthusiastic Hoover admirer was Nixon’s vice president, Spiro T. Agnew. His charismatic style and high office gave him a certain marquee appeal, and he was an early leader of the cultural war.[25] As governor of Maryland, Agnew had been a moderate, but by the time he became vice president he had moved toward the hard right. He appears to have been a solid right-wing authoritarian with social domination tendencies.[*] He certainly was not a Double High authoritarian like Hoover. At the Nixon White House Agnew had the job of currying conservative favor. Employing the rabble-rousing rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Nixon dispatched Agnew to fight the cultural war, and the vice president delighted in unloading depth charges and assorted munitions assembled by Buchanan and others. In the fall of 1969, the war was escalated, and Agnew became the first high-profile conservative to go after the mainstream news media. For a half hour the vice president tore into the unaccountable power of the unelected newspeople, who decided what forty to fifty million Americans would learn of the day’s events.[26] Nixon later wrote in his memoirs, with some delight, that “at the networks, there was pandemonium; all three decided to carry the speech live.”

Agnew loved his work. “My mission is to awaken Americans to the need for sensible authority, to jolt good minds out of the lethargy of habitual acquiescence, to mobilize a silent majority that cherishes the right values but has been bulldozed for years into thinking those values are embarrassingly out of style.”[27] His recurring themes and targets were “avowed anarchists and communists,” “elitists,” the “garbage of society,” “thieves, traitors, and perverts,” “radical liberals,” and, of course the news media, whom he called “an effete corps of impudent snobs, a tiny fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government. They are nattering nabobs of negativism.” (They were also, for Agnew, the “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”) Agnew’s avowed aim was “dividing the American people,” which he called “positive polarization.” He was delighted when he caused a ruckus. “I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it.”[28] Conservative media loved Agnew’s authoritarian aggression as well. A Wall Street Journal editorial approvingly noted that “Mr. Agnew’s targets—the media, war protesters, and rebellious youth—are representative of a class that has enjoyed unusual moral and cultural authority through the 1960s.” (The editors proceeded to detail the failings of these authorities, the “highbrows, the intellectual—the beautiful people—Eastern liberal elite.”)[29] Thus, with Nixon in charge and taking the high road, the early skirmishes of the cultural war were launched by Agnew taking the low one. But the forced resignations of both men put the cultural war on hold. Others, meanwhile, quietly went about the work of building an army and drawing up future plans.

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]