Category Archives: Right-wing Extremism

The Demise of the Fairness Doctrine and the birth of the politics of Resentment

Extremism, Polarization, Right-wing Extremism

 

Jen Senko said her father got “brain-washed” by all this right-wing extremism.   He had been a Democrat but he, like so many others, became “a Reagan Democrat.” In fact, he became a Republican, because after watching right-wing media continuously, he found he had been wrong for all those years. He had stopped watching news from Walter Cronkite and other such news providers and switched entirely to Fox News.  Fox News became his Bible for news. And Fox News shaped her Dad there was no doubt about that. Whether that amounted to brainwashing was of course another matter.

 

The odd thing was her father Frank Senko actually flipped his previous values and turned against what Jen Senko saw as the core of his being and identity. It was that profound a change.

 

Part of this change in her Dad occurred as a consequence of the removal of the “fairness doctrine.” How can removing fairness do that?

 

The so-called “Fairness Doctrine” in the US required American media to broadcast news in the public interest. It operated for 40 years and in 1949 was voted in as law by the US Congress.  It was effective until 1987. As Thom Hartmann said, “as a result radio and television stations had real news.”

 

It did not require equality of all views. That would have been impossible, but it did require media to recognize that it had to consider views other than their own or that of their owners. If people felt their views were not being considered they could complain to the station and if that did not give relief one could complain to the FCC who might give relief and force the station to include more views.

 

The doctrine was dropped by the Reagan administration. They saw it as unnecessary government interference. This resulted in an explosion of talk radio in the US. And the gloves were off. No more mealy-mouthed opinions. Extreme views were not just tolerated, they were encouraged. Americans loved those extreme views.

 

Talk radio started off as local radio but eventually some of them went national, starting with Rush Limbaugh in 1988, immediately after the demise of the fairness doctrine. Fairness was government interference.

 

As Steve Rendall, a senior magazine writer said,

“In 1987 I couldn’t believe what I heard. I heard over and over again gutter racism,’ and this was coming from different talk show hosts, but the main man was Bob Grant. I heard black people referred to as ‘savage.’

 

Other racial slurs were common.

 

As Rendall said,

“The allure of the Limbaughs and the Grants was that they tapped into a kind of resentment and a kind of insecurity on the part of mostly white men, and in large part, of aging white men. A kind of injured pride.  A feeling that the world is passing them by. It’s typical of demagoguery. That your problems aren’t really caused by you. They are caused by these other people that aren’t like us.”

 

It is all their fault. Men like Jen Senkow’s father at this stuff up. Jeff Cohen put it this way: “Talk radio was always in the hands of right-wing backlash artists.”

 

Or as Rendall said, “A bunch of white guys on the right railing against the women’s movement, the civil rights movement…”

The American right-wing was unleashed. Good-bye namby-pamby. Hello polarization. Because, of course, extremism on one side always gives birth to extremism on the other side.  And America would never be the same again.

 

 

Trickle-down Economics

Capitalism, Economics, Indigenous--Reconciliation, Right-wing Extremism

 

 

The Powell manifesto or memorandum set the stage for Ronald Reagan to support supply-side trickle-down economics.  Famously, Reagan said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That was a bedrock part of the right-wing movement that emerged in the United States. It still is very important.

 

The idea was to put in place policies, particularly tax policies, that would benefit primarily the wealthy, and then the money spent by the wealthy would trickle down to those with less wealth and all would benefit. In time.  This economic theory has since been largely discredited, except by people like Donald Trump and his friends who benefit greatly from those policies. Benefits to the wealthy are obvious. Benefits to the less wealthy are much harder to find. Naturally, people like the wealthy have been quick to find the benefits.  It is hard not to like something that benefits you.

Thanks to the vast network of right-wing organizations however, these views have been so widely promulgated that that even those who don’t benefit from them are frequently heard arguing in favor of them. People like Senko’s father The Brain Washing of my Dad.

Studs Terkel said in the 1990s, “the only thing I’ve seen trickle down is meanness.” Jeff Cohen, also interviewed by Jen Senko in the film  was a professor of Journalism at Ithaca College, and he said by that Terkel meant, the kind of Country Club cronies “looking down on the less fortunate”. Cohen said, people like Russ Limbaugh tried to get white middle-class males as angry at vulnerable groups in the film  as some people did in country clubs in the 1950s.  Terkel meant that this mean streak was what was disseminated in the 1980s.

Someone else said, “the only thing I’ve seen trickle down is the rich pissing on the middle class.” The reality was that money was taken from the middle class and given to the rich.

Ronald Reagan, we must remember, was the one who brought us the expression, “Make America Great Again,” that was later adopted by Donald Trump. Reagan advocated for a return to a simpler time, a mythic time, when white males were in control, unencumbered by worries about others such as black Americans, gay, lesbians, and when Evangelical Christians did not have to worry about catering to other religious groups such as Muslims. They could be safely ignored. Donald Trump has tried the same thing, with a lot of success.

According to Claire Connor, author of Wrapped in the Flag,

“they saw America of 1900 as the apex of when we were great as a nation. 1900. Before the income tax. Before the fed. Before any progressive legislation was considered or passed. Before child labor laws. Before women had any rights. Before women even had the right to vote.”

 

According to Connor, Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society,

“talked a lot about 1900, as this glorious time in American history, and he said, ‘there were pockets of poverty, but it was a healthy kind of poverty. Poverty free from government interference where every man understood that relief from dire want was entirely his own responsibility. Thus the blessings of liberty outweighed the poverty.”

 

Ronald Reagan, known as the Great Communicator,  said this:

“Looking back, we lived in poverty or pretty close to that all the time, but we didn’t know that at the time, because the government didn’t come around and tell us that we were poor.”

As Rick Perlstein said,

“Conservatives were all about balanced budgets. They were all about making people eat their spinach. They came up with this new theory called ‘Supply-side Economics.’ And Supply side means basically that you give money to business and that way they’ll produce more plenty that will trickle down to ordinary people. And it was what George H. W. Bush in 1980 who called this  “voodoo economics” because it sounded like magic. It was like he was promising you the candy store. He said he could lower everybody’s taxes and by doing so everybody would benefit. It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes. In actual fact how it turned out was hurting the very working-class voters who trusted Ronald Reagan with their economic future. Of course, inequality just sky-rocketed. The rich got richer and the wages of ordinary people just stagnated.”

 

It did after all, sund like magic.  And people wanted it to be true. So they did not demand evidence. In fact, the message was so powerful that Donald Trump used the same discredited claims to sell his tax cuts that mainly benefited the wealthy during his first presidency and again, most recently, in the second. And once again, poor people, who were not getting the breaks, got screwed again.

Funny how that happens.

The Effects of the Powell Memo

Extremism, Polarization, Right-wing Extremism

 

The Powell memorandum impacted law, media, business, politics and education, in many ways.

The groups had meetings where issues of all kinds that were important to those on the right could be discussed. The issues ranged from fur trade commission, restricting rights of gays and lesbians and their ilk, de-regulation of businesses, gun deregulation, anti-tax, anti-immigrants, pro-lifers, evangelicals and many more.  Many of those issues are still important issues, except perhaps the fur trade. The genius of the meetings was that they provided a broad tent where all kinds of people appeared who often did not agree with each other on much, but they learned to like each and spread their respective gospels. These meetings benefited many right-wing groups.

 

Conservative think tanks exploded around the country. The Heritage Foundation was established in 1973, 2 years after the Powell memorandum was created.

One thing these groups established was balance in the media.  In other words, media need no longer be objective, as had always been the goal, now instead, media would be balanced. For example, if a newspaper wanted to cover the issue of climate change it must give an opportunity to both sides of the debate to be heard. This sounds pretty good, but it had flaws. For example, even if 99% of scientists agreed that climate change was real and was caused by activities of humans, if a media outlet wanted to report on the issue it had to give a platform for both sides. This gave far too much weight to crackpot ideas often funded by industries affected, such as the oil and gas sector. They managed to have their minority views get equal time with independent science. As a result these views received much more attention than they should have received. “Balance” really did not work well in practice.

In fact, this helped to establish the age of extremism and polarization in which we now live.

There was a large group of meetings led by Grover Norquist who founded Americans for Tax Reform and The Americans for Tax Reform Foundation to lobby governments to reduced taxes on wealthy business people and provided education opportunities for people with the right views.

When Hillary Clinton complained about “a vast right-wing conspiracy” she actually had a point. When you look at the vast number of right-wing organizations from legal foundations to media organizations, to think tanks, to advocacy groups, and many others, the network was indeed vast. Some called the Norquist Meetings the headquarters of the right-wing conspiracy. Personally, I don’t like to call this movement a conspiracy, but it was clearly a growing movement, well-funded and supported by American business interests.

The Confidential Lewis Powell Memo (1971)

Conservative, Right-wing Extremism

 

The film, The Brainwashing of My Dad, gave an extensive background on right-wing extremism in America.

During the 1960s the student movement in the US and the hippie’s movement,  had achieved remarkable changes in American and Canadian youth. I must confess I was a part of that movement in a small way. This movement was highly successful at promoting opposition to the War in Vietnam and the hippy life of freedom, drugs, sex, and rock and roll. Some of my friends were amazingly successful at this while I was a sad sack hanger on. Poor me.

The corporate elites in North America were keen on fighting back. From their point of view, backlash was in order.  They focused a lot on a memo created by a Richmond attorney who sent a confidential memo to his friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce decrying possible threats to the American free-market system by unruly mobs of miscreants. This has been called, Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s “manifesto” and it figured in prominently as the impetus behind big business lobbying in America’s money-fueled politics. Powell was a lawyer who later became a judge of the US Supreme Court.

The memo, which has become known as the “Powell Manifesto,” among other names, which he wrote before Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court and while he was still in private legal practice in Richmond Virginia.

In uncompromising words, Powell’s memorandum urged American business leaders to unite to defend their interests. As if they really needed defending. He felt that the “American economic system is under broad attack.” Powell also  wrote. “ … The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” He decried this unfortunate circumstance and begged his fellow captains of industry to resist the left-wing hordes and unwashed masses.

He pointed to causes of this malaise that included environmental groups, consumer-rights organizations like those led by Ralph Nader, and a society that he feared was headed for socialism and away from free enterprise. He was also alarmed by acts of violence against business interests which he believed were on the rise.

Jeff Cohen, a former Fox broadcaster, interviewed by Jen Senko for the film, called this memo a symbol of the backlash. As Noam Chomsky also told her, about Powell, “he claimed that the whole country was being taken over by the radical left.” Exactly what Donald Trump has been doing since at least 2024.

Powell said in the memo that American businessmen had to support efforts to get conservative professors appointed in influential universities to teach the values of American business. He said we have to establish our own research organizations to promulgate our views. As a result, a vast array of American right-wing think tanks were born  such as the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, the Center for the National Interest and many others, usually with innocuous sounding names that masked their true nature.

They also started journals and publishing houses to publish their views.

They also wanted to buy media to get out their views. This was probably the most effective part of that campaign. This led to the boom in right-wing talk radio nationally and across the country in every locale. Ultimately this led directly to the biggest media of them all—Fox News Channel.

The Powell Memo was extremely influential affecting politics, judicial law, and media and education. To a very significant extent it has helped to create our modern polarized world.  For quite some time it was the political Bible of the extreme right in America.

 

The Southern Strategy

Conservative, Right-wing Extremism

 

Nixon latched onto southern racism in particular to turn the white voters against the Democrats and in favor of the Republicans. The south had traditionally voted Democrat but that changed under Nixon’s campaigning. But whites in the south were horrified by Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation including the Voting Rights which had insulated the whites from losing power as a result of blacks voting against white interests. The whites wanted to maintain their hegemony as they do to this day in America. From their perspective, the less black voters the better. Sounds a lot like the modern Republicans doesn’t it?

 

In 1970 American workers upset at the anti-war protesters started beating the protesters with their hard hats as part of what rick Perlstein in the filmThe Brain Washing of my Dad, called “a marauding army.”[1] . As Perlstein said, “Rather than excoriating these essentially vigilantes, Richard Nixon invited the Peter Brennan the leader of the construction trades to the White House where Nixon was presented with a ceremonial hard hat. Nixon did not try to stop the vigilantism, he tried to use it for his own benefit. And he did that masterfully.  Again, it sounds a lot like Donald Trump.

 

In the process Nixon was creating what George Lakoff  called “conservative populism.”  He persuaded a large part of the working class “to vote against their economic interest in order to vote on the moral issues.” Just like modern Republicans do with the culture war. Of course, Conservative politicians have been doing this ever since. They could not persuade working people to vote for their platforms that obviously supported the wealthy at their expense, so he got them to vote for him on moral grounds, or what we now might call cultural grounds. This includes voting on the basis of sexual identity, anti-woke, and things like that.

That was how Nixon contributed to moving America further to the right. And Trump has joined the movement. And guess what the strategy works.

 

 

Nixon and the Politics of Division

Culture Wars, Right-wing Extremism

 

Donald Trump did not invent the cultural wars, nor was he the first right-wing politician to take advantage of them.

 

The author Rick Perlstein  was interviewed in the film The Brain Washing of my Dad in which he said “the  brilliance of Nixon was to bend a politics of deference to money and autocracy and frame it to a kind ofcultural populism.” Nixon’s idea, according to Perlstein, was “the real snobs are not the people who hire and fire, but the people who decide cultural trends.” Nixon early on, realized the importance of culture wars, though that expression was not to my knowledge used by him.

George Lakoff is the author of the book, Don’t Think of an Elephant! The Essential Guide for Progressives.  He was also interviewed in the film about Richard Nixon. In 1964 the Republican Party candidate for president, Barry Goldwater got smoked.  Lakoff said, “conservative” was a dirty word. Nixon started running for the presidency in 1967 and he knew he had a problem. How to get around the apparent despising of conservatives? How could he change the Americans who wanted to be liberals?

Specifically, he wanted to get working people to vote for him, rather than a Democrat. Many veterans saw the anti-war movement in the US as a betrayal of their service and unpatriotic to the country. Nixon was hostile to protesters. He also opposed women who were railing against societal norms that forced them to stay at home and raise children. Their movement was called. “Women’s Liberation,” and Nixon hated that too.  So did many others.

Nixon argued for traditional family values to attract working men who felt threatened by what they saw as radical feminism.  Women would try to upend their privileges and take their jobs. Which was, of course, was completely true.

Nixon capitalized on fears of whites that they would lose their hegemony to uppity blacks. He elicited fear and loathing among whites. He ran in favor of law and order, which was often a dog whistle for whites who felt most criminals were black. He latched onto white bias, often of a silent implicit kind of bias. Again, he concentrated on white fears. There is nothing quite like fear to bring out the vote.

Donald Trump used similar tactics in order to twice get elected president of the United States.  Many think those tactics were crucial to getting Trump elected both times. Winning the cultural wars can be a winning statetgy.

 

The Birth of Fox News and the Dividing of America

Death of Truth, Extremism, Right-wing Extremism

 

One of the things I found fascinating about the film The Brain Washing of My Dad was the importance of Fox News to the American right-wing extremist movement.

 

The John Birch society was a cauldron of right-wing extremism in America. As Claire Conner, author of a book called, Wrapped in the Flag: What I learned growing up in America’s Radical Right, How I Escaped and Why My Story Matters, said, “the John Birch Society was built on the theory that Communism was right around the corner.”

 

The Society believed that the bad communists were not just in Russia, or China, or Cuba, they were right here in America and in particular in our government. The John Birchers were considered nutty and extreme, which they were, so they resisted these attacks. In the election of 1964 where Barry Goldwater got hammered by Lyndon Johnson, partly because he had so many supporters in the John Birch Society, that many thought he must be as nutty as the Birchers. At the time, the American right was considered nutty or worse.

 

David Brock wrote a book called The Conservative Noise Machine in which he explained  how one of the first things conservatives did after the humbling defeat in 1964 was to attack the media on the basis of liberal media bias. As he said in the film, “the campaign to discredit the media would lay the groundwork for the vast alternative media that would come later.”

 

A central player in the media take down was Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News. Gabriel Sherman wrote a book about him, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the brilliant bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News and Divided the Country. As Sherman said, “Roger Ailes understood one thing about television. He understood that television is about emotion. And you need to communicate to the audience and hook into them on an emotional level.” Fox News embodied this insight and it did that with heart and soul.

 

Added that, Fox found that in America bombast engages. You can still see that on Fox today. Many Fox commentators are brimming with bombast. They don’t like namby-pamby. They like the extreme.

 

Richard Nixon exemplified how this worked. In the 1960s he debated John F. Kennedy and in the debates he looked slick with sweat and was acknowledged to be very smart and tough but he came off looking badly compared to Kennedy. He lost in a very close election.

 

As we all know Nixon came back. He picked himself off the ground and later became President of the United States. In 1968 when he ran again in a campaign for the presidency with Eugene McCarthy, Nixon knew he needed a media guy in his campaign. Roger Ailes was that man. And Ailes taught Nixon how to play the media.

 

Ailes was the power behind the sound bite. He taught Nixon to keep his sentences short with real bites. Short snappy one-liners that can stick in the audience’s mind. According to Sherman, Ailes told Nixon that America was dumb and would not understand him unless he kept his message simple. He should boil down his message and they would get it.  As a result, Nixon learned to master TV which had become a mass medium in the late 1960s.  And that made all the difference.

 

Years later Donald Trump learned the same message.  Keep it simple stupid. Or perhaps, ‘Stupid, keep it simple, would be more like it.

 

According to Sherman in a memo in 1970, Ailes said “Television had become such an important instrument, because people are lazy and want someone to do their thinking for them. It became the blueprint for Fox News.”  Later Roger Ailes said, “There are simple things the American people believe in. It is the reason that John Wayne is still one of the top 5 actors of all time 40 years after he died. You knew all about him: Don’t touch my woman; don’t draw a gun on me; don’t take my horse.”

When nuance becomes nonsense, truth flies out the door.

 

Reese Schonfeld, the founding President and CEO of CNN said this about TVN the news network for which Ailes worked at the time.  He said they wanted to be like a tiny tugboat pulling the Queen Mary a little farther right, and again further right to get the good ship to move as far right as he could.  He said this about Ailes: “He didn’t know much about news then and I’m not even sure he knows much about news now, but he sure does know television. He knows as much about television in the country as anyone and by the way he’s a great propagandist.”

 

When Ailes moved to Fox News it exploded in popularity and with it the interest in right-wing extremism. It engaged. Like nothing else on cable TV.

 

Raging Hate Machines

Death of Truth, Hate, Right-wing Extremism, The Sleep of Reason

 

In the documentary film The Brain Washing of My Dad Jen Senko’s father started to listen to Rush Limbaugh on a small portable radio with ear buds. He was in business—ready to attack the world. At least the part of the world that was sane.

 

Then, as his daughter Jen Senko said, “it got worse when he discovered Fox News. It was like he had joined a cult or a new religion.” He started sending links to hateful stories to his relatives and acquaintances.

 

Jen Senko wondered if he really was brain-washed. She was determined to figure it out. So she made a film about her father and his changes. She found similar stories from around the country. She realized this issue went far beyond just her father and his wild politics. There were bitter and angry people everywhere.  Loving and caring people from around the country were turning into raging hate machines. What was going on? She wanted to know. So do I.

 

She concluded that ordinary people around the country had become raging hate machines after listening to and watching right-wing media. First it was right-wing talk radio, then it was cable TV, particularly Fox News.

 

Hillary Clinton referred to it as a vast right-wing conspiracy. She, of course, along with her husband, were 2 of its biggest victims.

 

Jen said when Reagan was elected president in 1980 she noticed the country going into what she called a more hardened place. This was also the time when her father started to change from fun loving to hating.