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Table of Contents

Letter from the President: Connecting the Dots

Notes on the Right: The Enduring Importance of Strategy

EJS December 8 Fundraiser Features Harriet Tubman Jazz Oratorio

Vote Yes on 89: 'Clean Money' Initiative

First California, Now Michigan: Putting Race up for a Vote

Supreme Court to Revisit Brown v. Board in School Cases

EJS, CTA Look at Unconscious Bias in Schools

U.N. Committee Criticizes Racism in U.S.

New Voting Rights Act Under Attack

A First Look at the Roberts Court

Latina/o Law Student Symposium

Foundations Support EJS Efforts to Balance Racial Justice Debate

Farewell from our Irmas Fellow

Staff News and Notes

Newsletter Editors:
Elaine Elinson
Miguel Gavaldón

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Notes on the Right:
The Enduring Importance of Strategy

By Lee Cokorinos

I recently attended a talk at the Open Society Institute in New York by James Piereson, a veteran strategist in the conservative funding establishment.   Piereson expressed confidence that the right wing infrastructure he helped build, now a mature complex of think tanks, advocacy groups and legal organizations such as the Federalist Society, would be able to weather the many challenges it currently faces.

Piereson pointed out that the Right’s organizations have developed deep links with one another and a broader financial base over the years, and are aggressively courting smaller but significant donations from a new generation of individual contributors. He remarked, with a mixture of pride and apprehension, that many of the organizations he helped set up have taken over the networking and coordinating functions previously carried out by the Right’s big foundations.

The danger looking forward, as he sees it, is that the Right may lose strategic cohesion and philosophical grounding as its component groups increasingly pursue the narrow imperatives of issue advocacy or winning legislative battles. Dictated by dedicated and micromanaged funding streams and the incessant demand for policy cover from conservative politicians, the new dynamic could easily knock the Right’s coordinating structures off mission.

Piereson has also expressed concern that the proliferation of individual donors, each with their own agenda, may make the leaders and activists of the Right forget one of the key sources of their success:  the ability to operate boldly across a wide range of issues and bring together differing constituencies by fostering debate, moral courage in the face of adversity and cultivation of a shared strategic vision.

The growing pool of benefactors, however, and the Right’s preoccupation with policy battles, “are gradually turning conservatism into a policy movement rather than a movement of ideas,” Piereson told the Hudson Institute last year.  This makes  it “less appealing to prospective converts than one defined by broader ideas about politics, history and religion.”

Needless to say, the flood of lobbying money into the conservative policy infrastructure, on wide display in the Jack Abramoff scandal (as detailed in Peter Stone’s new book, Heist), has also dramatically shifted the conservative infrastructure’s priorities and dampened its commitment to philosophical cohesion and strategic planning.

Piereson told his OSI audience that it would be a mistake to view the Right simply as a set of issue-focused structures. An important part of the Right’s success lay in its willingness to create space for philosophical alignment by taking the risks involved in opening up debate on the hot button issues of the day.

How Does the Right “Connect the Dots”?

Morton Blackwell, head of the Leadership Institute, has said that the Right is “held together by shared philosophy, shared enemies and shared experiences.” But, as Piereson has argued, the institutional dimension—the infrastructure created since the mid 1970s—has been critical to the Right’s success and durability, whatever the vicissitudes of campaigns and elections.

Thus the Right has been able to “connect the dots” because, first and most obviously, there are dots to be connected—flexible multi-issue organizations that have been sustainably funded and built up over a generation.

The conservative movement is multi-layered, with base level structures tying together religious conservatives, pro-gun activists, “free market” libertarians, the anti-immigration movement, anti-tax activists, “school choice” and property rights groups, and student activists at colleges and universities. Local and grassroots organizations in turn connect with intermediary organizations though regular meetings, interlocking boards, and coalitions. 

These include well developed local and state Republican Party structures, networks of megachurches, National Rifle Association affiliates, local chapters of Dick Armey’s anti-tax and anti-government organization FreedomWorks, the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s network of grassroots anti-immigrant groups and so forth.

Their leaders and staff link up with the national policy and messaging infrastructure, sometimes serving as policy fellows at, or regular visitors to, the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Hudson Institute, the National Chamber Institute, Manhattan Institute, or American Enterprise Institute. The Right’s 527s, PACs and media outlets in turn amplify their voices.

Where gaps exist, “anchor” think tanks are also being continually created to bring disparate groups together to design and implement policy initiatives. These help tie together existing local networks and give them a regional and national voice.

For example, just last month with the help of a huge grant from the $116 billion South Carolina-based BB&T bank, Clemson University launched a new think tank, the Institute for the Study of Capitalism.  Its goal is to drive conservative values into economic policy debates in academia and beyond. “We want to be the Hoover Institution of the South,” its founder, C. Bradley Thompson, proclaimed.

The Right also has also developed what might be called good “connect the dots” mechanics: solid planning, regularity in meetings (there’s always a Federalist Society convention in November, a Heritage Foundation Resource Bank in April, and an American Legislative Exchange Council annual meeting in the summer), staffing dedicated to networking, talent spotting initiatives, and stable substructures to help coordinate action within issue areas (the Federalist Society’s Practice groups, ALEC’s task forces). These efforts build cohesion, foster movement recruitment and develop leaders, spokespersons and new candidates.

Issue Linkage

The conservative movement takes issue linkage very seriously. Overlapping issues (race and immigration issues, education and labor issues, etc.) are, of course, used to bind together potential constituencies with similar commitments. But taking a broad approach can also serve to bring very different elements of the base and leadership into the same movement space, as at Federalist Society meetings, where religious conservatives rub shoulders with hardened movement libertarians, legal academics, state and Federal judges, traditional conservative philosophers, corporate counsel and government attorneys. CPAC conferences, the major annual conservative town meetings, are important events for coordinating multiple issues and networks.

Coordinating organizations, particularly the national ones, weigh in most heavily on domestic policy and law. Conservative foundations (e.g., the Roe Foundation) have created and supported locally rooted multi-issue think tanks and policy action centers (the Pacific Research, Heartland, and Manhattan Institutes, for example) that range across the entire spectrum of issues and can flexibly respond to local issues and needs.

These groups coordinate with one another through regular meetings and conferences sponsored by organizations such as the State Policy Network, Atlas Research Institute, Family Research Council, ALEC’s December State and Nation Policy Summits, religious broadcasters, Paul Weyrich’s Coalitions for America, and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform..

But the larger umbrella organizations are also active on the most important issues in international affairs: AEI, which houses Charles Murray, also gave birth to PNAC, and has been an organizational hub of activity promoting support for the war in Iraq. Grover Norquist, of the multi-issue Americans for Tax Reform and the now infamous Wednesday strategy meetings of the Right, got his start alongside Jack Abramoff organizing opposition to national liberation movements in southern Africa. The religious right fights to ban same sex marriage and drive evolutionary science out of the classroom domestically, while also actively intervening in every global field from Darfur to Iraq. Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice has a European and a Russian branch. The Federalist Society recently opened a Paris branch.

Sustaining these coordinating initiatives is no easy task.  The funders of the Right thoroughly understand the importance of investing in collaboration, even though the benefits might not be immediately visible. The objective is not just to win particular policy battles, but to develop real-time connections between constituencies. This is not a sprint, but a long distance race.

Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing movements and organizations. He is the author of The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littlefield), and Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault in Urban Democracy and Smart Government, and can be reached at rightnotes@earthlink.net.

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