Corporate vs. Religious Conservatives: Who's Using Who? | Rick Perlstein | Big Think

Corporate vs. Religious Conservatives: Who's Using Who?

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The business and evangelical wings of the party may want nothing to do with each other, says Rick Perlstein, but they can “act in coalition” because they must.

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Rick Perlstein:

Rick Perlstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" (Scribner). "Nixonland" has been named one of the three best books of the year by the editors at Amazon.com and a New York Times notable book for 2008, and has been named on year-end "best of" lists by over a dozen publications.

His first book, "Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus," won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history and is newly available in paperback from Nation Books. It appeared on the best books lists of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune that year, and also became, in the wake of the Clinton Wars and the 2000 Florida recount, one of the very few books to receive glowing reviews in both left-wing and right-wing publications. From the summer of 2003 until 2005 he covered the presidential campaigns as chief national political correspondent for the Village Voice. He has also published The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party, an essay with responses from commentators including Robert Reich, Elaine Kamarck, and Ruy Teixeira. In 2006 and 2007 he wrote a biweekly column for The New Republic Online; his Nation article "All Aboard the McCain Express" was featured in "Best American Political Writing 2008." From March, 2007 to March 2009, Perlstein was senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, for which he wrote the blog The Big Con. He is now at work on a third and final volume in his Backlash Trilogy, covering the years 1973 to 1980.

He received a B.A. in history from the University of Chicago in 1992, where his cultural criticism was published in the Baffler, and spent two years in the PhD program in American culture at the University of Michigan. Moving to New York, he worked for two years as an editor at Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life. Perlstein's articles have appeared in publications including Newsweek, Slate, the Village Voice, Newsday The Nation, The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Arizona Republic, the London Review of Books, Newsday, Columbia Journalism Review and The New Yorker.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How will the tension between fiscal and social conservatives play out?

Rick Perlstein: Well, tactically the threat that - by conservatives, by social conservatives, by the conservative movement as they call themselves based in Washington, based in, you know, places like northern Virginia, to form a new party has always been this kind of bluff designed to, you know, bend the Republican Party to their will. And, you know, it’s usually worked because the media reports it seriously. Except for in the American context, you know, third parties very rarely work. We have a winner-take-all system. So, you know, the minute, say, Richard Viguerie, who threatens to create a third party, you know, every four or eight years because he claims that the conservatives in power aren’t really conservative - if he really did it he’d immediately be, you know, surrendering all his influence in national discussions.

So, that’s not really a serious threat. The division between let’s say corporate conservatives and religious conservatives is, you know, fascinating, interesting, rich and complex. I mean, one of the ways it worked was that traditionally - not traditionally. Basically, one of the ways it evolved in the 1970’s was that people who wanted - businesses who wanted more laissez-faire, less regulation, more control over government, more of say a “cronyist” stake in what government was actually doing, saw things like the Heritage Foundation, the Christian Coalition, the moral majority as opportunities for them to form a coalition - if you give it a generous interpretation or aggrandize their power, if you give it a little more cynical interpretation.

So, you get these fascinating movements like this war in West Virginia in 1974 by religious conservatives to kick heathen textbooks out of the schools that were sort of supposedly imposed by religious bureaucrats. It was a very local issue.

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