The New Right:
We're Ready to Lead
Richard A. Viguerie
The New Right:
We're Ready to Lead
Richard A. Viguerie
Table of Contents
It has been obvious for a long time that conservatism is rising and liberalism is declining. Despite all the talk in the media about "trends," "cliffhangers," and "last minute shifts," the plain truth is that more and more Americans are sick of liberalism and aren't afraid to say so.
The election of 1980 was the first modern conservative landslide. But it wasn't the first anti-liberal landslide.
In 1968 two anti-liberal candidates, Richard Nixon and George Wallace, won a combined 57 percent of the popular vote against the well-liked but liberal incumbent Vice President, Hubert Humphrey.
In 1972 Nixon, never very popular, won more than 60% of the total vote against the flamingly liberal George McGovern, who carried only one state (not even his home state of South Dakota).
Jimmy Carter didn't win election as a liberal. In the 1976 primaries he presented himself as the most conservative candidate in the field, and it was not until after he was safely in office that it became clear he intended to be a liberal President.
Even in 1980, when Democrats were sick of Carter, he won primaries when his opponent was the even further left Edward Kennedy. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan piled up victories against conservative, moderate and liberal candidates in his own party.
After the televised debate a week before the election, an ABC phone-in poll gave Reagan a 2 to 1 edge over Carter. Many others in media denounced the poll as "unscientific."
Maybe it was. But the election on November 4 wasn't conducted in a laboratory either. The ABC poll was just one more sign of the times for anyone who was interested.
All the signs pointed one way. They've been pointing that way for years, and years, and years. They still do.
America is basically a conservative country. The potential for conservative revolt has always been there, under the most favorable conditions. But those conditions have to be made.
That's where the New Right comes in.
For many years, conservatives were frustrated. We had no way to translate our vision into reality.
Most importantly, we lacked a vehicle to carry our message to the voters without going through the filter of the liberal-leaning news media.
During the 1950s,1960s, and most of the 1970s liberal politicians were able to make speeches that sounded as if they were written by Barry Goldwater. The liberals could come home on weekends and make speeches calling for a strong America, attacking waste in Washington, and complaining about big government. Then, on Monday, they could go back to Washington and vote to block new weapons systems, to give away the Panama Canal, to increase taxes, to create new government agencies, and to weaken the CIA and FBI.
Occasionally, liberal politicians would visit Communist leaders like Fidel Castro and return to the U.S. with wonderful words of praise for the Cuban dictator, praise that most voters in South Dakota or Idaho never heard.
Why did the voters in South Dakota, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin not know about their congressmen's and senators' double lives - conservative- sounding at home, actively liberal in Washington or abroad?
Because most of the national (and some of the local) media didn't report the double life the politicians were leading.
Thanks to the New Right, the "people's right to know" -- which the establishment media pay loud lip-service to, when it serves their own purposes -- finally became a reality.
"You can't turn back the clock."
How often we hear this line from liberals. What they really mean is that we shouldn't try to correct their mistakes.
Well, the New Right has news for them. We aren't in the business of turning back clocks.
It's the Left that has tried to stop the clock and even bring back evils civilization has left behind.
Liberalism has pitted itself against the best instincts of the American people. Journalist Tom Bethell says the abortion issue alone has destroyed the liberals' "moral monopoly."
Put simply, most Americans no longer look up to liberals. They look down on them. . . .
Our success is built on four elements -- single issue groups, multi-issue conservative groups, coalition politics and direct mail.
Conservative single issue groups have been accused of not only fragmenting American politics but threatening the very existence of our two-party system. Congressman David Obey of Wisconsin, a liberal Democrat, has even charged that government has nearly been brought to a standstill by single issue organizations.
Nonsense!
In the first place, all the New Right has done is copy the success of the old left.
Liberal single issue groups were around long before we were, and the liberals still have as many or more than we do.
Civil rights was a single issue that Hubert Humphrey used to rise to national office. The Vietnam War was a single issue that George McGovern used to rise to national prominence. The environment, consumerism, anti-nuclear power -- these are all single issues around which liberals have organized and exercised power and influence. . . .
I want to talk now about the fourth reason for the New Right's success -- direct mail.
Like all successful political movements, we must have a method of communicating with each other, and for conservatives in the 1970s, it was direct mail.
Frankly, the conservative movement is where it is today because of direct mail. Without direct mail, there would be no effective counter-force to liberalism, and certainly there would be no New Right.
Some of the most common complaints I hear from conservatives are:
"I get too much mail." "I received six letters from one organization this month." "I get letters from twenty groups." "Why don't conservatives get together and form one organization?"
You may not have thought of it, but the U.S. mail is the principle method of communication for conservatives.
We sell our magazines, our books, and our candidates through the mail. We fight our legislative battles through the mail. We alert our supporters to upcoming battles through the mail. We find new recruits for the consenative movement through the mail.
Without the mail, most conservative activities would wither and die.
Most political observers agree that liberals have effective control of the mass media -- a virtual monopoly on TV, radio, newspapers and magazines.
Walter Cronkite of CBS, Katherine Graham, head of the Washington Post and Newsweek, the heads of the New York Times, NBC, ABC, Time -- to paraphrase Patrick Buchanan -- draw up the agenda for the nation's public business. They determine who shall be heard and seen, what subjects shall be discussed, and for how long.
They decide that it's cost overruns in the military that is a major story and not cost overruns in the Welfare Department.
It's not that the media presents the news in a partisan way, it's that they present the positive side of liberal causes, liberal issues, liberal personalities and, for the most part, ignore conservative causes, conservative issues and conservative personalities or present them in an unfavorable manner.
However, there is one method of mass commercial communication that the liberals do not control -- direct mail. In fact, conservatives excel at direct mail.
There's an old saying that if a tree fell in a forest and no one was in the forest, it didn't make any noise.
Well, before conservatives started using direct mail in a major way, many of our good candidates, books, magazines, ideas, causes were unknown and ineffective because there was no method to tell the public about them -- no one heard them. . . .
Without direct mail, we might have no National Review, no Human Events, no Conservative Digest, no conservative PACs, no effective organizations in Right to Work, Right to Life, pro-gun, anti-busing, national defense, pro-family, no large national conservative organizations and youth training.
You can think of direct mail as our TV, radio, daily newspaper and weekly magazine.
Some people persist in thinking of direct mail as only fund raising. But it's really mostly advertising.
Raising money is only one of several purposes of direct-mail advertising letters. A letter may ask you to vote for a candidate, volunteer for campaign work, circulate a petition among your neighbors, write letters and postcards to your Senators and Congressmen, urging them to pass or defeat legislation and also ask you for money to pay for the direct mail advertising campaign.
Direct mail is, in fact, the third largest form of advertising in the country, spending about $7.3 billion in 1978, third only to television and newspapers.
"Junk mail," by the way, is a phrase probably first used by the Scripps-Howard newspapers in the 1940s. I can understand why they did it. After all, direct mail was then the number one competitor of newspapers for the advertising dollar.
It is a unique form of advertising. If done properly, it pays for itself which is something almost no other form of advertising can do for conservatives.
It is the advertising medium of the underdog. It allows organizations or causes not part of the mainstream to get funding.
Direct mail is the advertising medium of the non-establishment candidate. . . .
George McGovern became the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972 because of direct mail.
When he couldn't afford to advertise on television, McGovern could spend $200,000 (mostly on credit) to write to 1 million identified liberal Democrats, knowing that an appeal for money in the letters would bring in enough funds within 30 days to pay for the direct mail advertising.
So George McGovern and his brilliant direct mail team of Morris Dees and Tom Collins used the mails to bypass the party bosses, the party establishment, and the smoke-filled rooms to go straight to the people.
Most of the news media didn't understand political direct mail, until George McGovern came along that year and made it an acceptable political tool. . . .
If you see three ads for Coca Cola in one day, you don't get upset or think the Coke people are wasting their money. If you are a Ford Motor Co. stockholder and you see five ads for Ford cars in one week, you don't get upset and think that they are wasting your money. It's the same way with direct mail.
excerpted from Richard A. Viguerie,The New Right: We're Ready to Lead (Falls Church, VA: The Viguerie Company, 1981), pp. 3-5, 78, 90-98.