Pattern Recognition

The modern conservative movement began to gel in the mid-1930s when intellectuals and politicians collaborated with businessmen to oppose the liberalism of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal…Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was a series of domestic programs enacted 1964-68, with the stated goals of totally eliminating poverty and racial injustice in the country. Major new federal programs addressing civil rights, education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation were launched. In scope and sweep, the Great Society was comparable to the 1930s New Deal.

In 1969, young political strategist Kevin Phillips predicted that Republican electoral strength would grow, as people and industry moved from the old industrial states of the North to the South and West.

In January, 1973, the US Supreme Court legalized abortion. In February, The Heritage Foundation conservative think tank was founded; in May, the anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee was formed. In 1974, American Christian Cause was founded, in an effort to institutionalize the Christian right as a politically active social movement.

Time magazine declared 1976 the year of the evangelicals, as 50 million people, a quarter of all Americans, identified themselves to pollsters as born-again Christians. Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter made his evangelical faith a central part of both his personal and political identity. Meanwhile, conservative evangelical Christians played prominent roles in a variety of political efforts that sought to reclaim what conservatives saw as “family values,” and the 1970s were characterized by a shift toward social and political conservatism, as well as a sharp decline in the proportion of voters who identified with liberalism.

In 1978, Christian Voice was founded to recruit, train, and organize evangelical Christians to participate in elections. In 1979, Jerry Falwell founded Moral Majority, marking the reentry of Fundamentalists into partisan politics. Paul Weyrich and his Free Congress Foundation (part of an alliance of over 50 prominent conservative Christian leaders and organizations that threatened the separation of church and state) were closely associated with dominionism, a group of far-right Christian political ideologies that sought to institute a nation governed by Christians and based on their versions of biblical law.

The Family Research Council (FRC) emerged from a 1980 White House conference on families. James Dobson, founder of the religious-right powerhouse Focus on the Family, met and prayed with a group of eight Christian leaders at a Washington, DC hotel, leading to the creation of FRC in 1983.

My freshman-year roommate at college was a secular Jewish dude from Oregon. One evening in the early autumn of 1982, we had a visit from two upperclassmen who represented the Campus Crusade for Christ. After a bit of chitchat, I told them to get lost.

In 1987, the Reagan administration repealed the Fairness Doctrine that mandated broadcast networks devote time to contrasting views on issues of public importance. Instantly, there was an explosion of highly biased talk radio programs. Reagan also cut the Department of Education’s budget in half by the end of his term.

In June 1988, James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified to the US Senate Energy committee, warning that the world was moving toward a “new climate frontier” that would threaten all life on Earth. (In the 1970s, oil companies had published research that agreed with Hansen, then begun organizing widespread and systematic climate change denial campaigns to seed public disinformation, as the tobacco industry had done regarding the hazards of tobacco smoking).

In August 1988, Rush Limbaugh debuted a talk radio show that quickly became the highest rated radio show in the US. Of Limbaugh's controversial statements and allegations they have investigated, Politifact has rated 84% as ranging from "Mostly False" to "Pants On Fire,” with 5% of Limbaugh's contested statements rising to the level of "Mostly True" and 0% rated "True."

In November 1988, lifelong Cold Warrior and former CIA director George HW Bush was elected president. In 1990-91, US-backed counterrevolutions overthrew the Eastern Bloc. Bush helped oversee brutal neoliberal capitalist reforms that were referred to as “shock therapy” that led to millions of unnecessary deaths in the former Soviet Union. Under Bush’s leadership, the US pressured these former socialist governments to engage in mass privatizations, selling off state-owned industries and assets for pennies on the dollar. This US-backed neoliberal shock therapy established the network of capitalist oligarchs who still control Eastern Europe.

In the 1990s, conservative think tanks mobilized to challenge the legitimacy of global warming as a social problem. They challenged the scientific evidence, arguing that global warming would have benefits, and warned that proposed solutions would do more harm than good.

In 1996, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News Network. Its strong appeal to conservative viewers on cable television soon gave it more viewers than arch-rival CNN.

In 1996, my younger brother, then a student in a state university, was “saved” along with his roommate by an evangelical. He soon got married to a woman he’d met in church, and became an evangelical pastor who claimed to believe that the Bible was literally true, and proudly told me about two research papers that he’d written, one about how all the Founding Fathers had been Jesus-loving Christians, and the other about how Charles Darwin had been responsible for the Holocaust. Both of these ideas are so wrong, I’ve always wondered about the professor who gave the papers a passing grade.

The neoliberal era died in 2016, with the election of Donald Trump, and the resurgence of far-right and fascist movements across the globe. Despite its continued political work, by 2020, Family Research Council requested and was granted special tax status as a “network of churches,” which allowed it to shield salaries and donors from public scrutiny. As an independent nonprofit, FRC continued its work in “pro-family” areas, working against abortion and stem-cell research, fighting pornography and LGBTQ equality and promoting “the Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free, and stable society.” That work would establish FRC as one of the most powerful far-right advocacy groups, and it played a pivotal role in the first Trump administration.

In April 2023, Project 2025 was published by The Heritage Foundation, whose advisory board is heavily funded by just six family fortunes. Foundations linked to these billionaire families have contributed over $122 million to Project 2025 groups, including entities that actively deny the science of anthropogenic climate change, as well as organizations that have been classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. There are also ties between the six families and Trump/Vance, though both have tried to distance themselves from the initiative.

Said President-elect Trump, just prior to his inauguration, “Your head will spin when you see what’s going to happen.” Said Trump-appointed FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino: “Power is the only thing that matters…Liberals are not ready for what comes next.”

Trump-appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (former Army National Guard officer and Fox News political commentator) identifies as an Evangelical Christian. Among his Christian/White Nationalist tattoos, “Deus Vault” is popular with members of the alt-right (such as Brenton Tarrant, who in 2019 shot dead 50 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand). He wants parents to “pursue homeschooling, classical education, or Christian schools” for their children, as part of his theology of Reformed Reconstructionism, which advocates for a Christian theocracy. He has fired and replaced the military’s top generals and attorneys general, which suggests that the Trump administration is planning to break the law, and wants military lawyers who will OK the use of American troops against American civilians on American soil, and a pliant military that won’t object to using overwhelming force to keep the regime in power.

I lived in Japan 1987-2007, and made India my home back in 2008, to live a simple life in Dharamsala. https://outofunitedstates.com/p/home-in-the-himalayas