|
Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
Insufficient scholarly attention has been devoted to alternative or "oppositional" serials from the political right, even though a number of scholars have used these materials as primary sources for studies in several academic disciplines. This overview reviews some of the terms used to describe these serials, explores the development of distinct post-WWII right-wing ideologies, and proposes that these serials usefully can be analyzed through a sociological lens as movement literature that both reflects and shapes different sectors through frames and narratives. How oppositional serials can play a role in constructing rhetorical pipelines and echo chambers to take movement grievances and push them into mainstream political policy initiatives is explored. The sectors defined and examined are the secular right, religious right, and xenophobic right. Examples from each sector are provided, with selected periodicals highlighted in detail.
**********
Conservatives generally cannot tolerate neo-Nazis. The feeling is mutual. Much wood pulp is expended as they denounce each other in print periodicals. The great bulk of print material from the U.S. political right, however, is devoted to attacks on politicians, political liberals, and progressives. Just which perceived left-wing policies and programs are considered the primary subjects for denunciation depends on the sector of the political right doing the publishing. Conservatives, libertarians, the Christian right, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, patriots, and the extreme right (folks who tend to dress up in white robes or black uniforms) all maintain distinct print subcultures.
Books, flyers, pamphlets, and posters are part of the right-wing print culture; but by reviewing serial publications in myriad forms we clearly see that newspapers, magazines, and newsletters provide a lush forest for scholarly analyses of text and image. This study will review oppositional right-wing serials, with an emphasis on describing different print forms within competing political sectors during the post-WWII period. Danky (in press) observes, "Scholarly attention to America's ideological conservatives, even reactionaries, to say nothing of racists and homegrown fascists, has been scant." This began to change in the 1980s, as many of the citations herein demonstrate, but the situation is still lopsided.
A librarian will have no trouble finding anthologies of writing from liberal and left alternative serials (see for example Armstrong, 2005; Conlin, 1974; Streitmatter, 2001); or scholarly journal articles about these types of periodicals. A number of libraries collect alternative periodicals, but they are primarily on the political left (see Danky, 1974). The astonishingly detailed service Alternative Press Index covers progressive social and political movements. Finding information about alternative serials on the political right is another matter. From time to time someone compiles a list of groups on the political right and includes mentions of their serial titles, but these efforts are either sporadic or incomplete or both. It is difficult to locate scholarly material on the "history or impact of overtly conservative alternative media" (Streitmatter, 1999, p. 11).
Anthologies from mainstream conservative media exist, a specialty of Reader's Digest as a magazine (and who can forget its "Condensed Books" series?). This study, however, is not looking at mainstream conservative serials such as Reader's Digest, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Times; it is looking at alternative conservative and right-wing serials. One such publication, The Freeman, produced anthologies from its pages in the 1970s, but this is a rarity among these periodicals. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of right-wing alternative serials. "The books and serial publications produced on the Right have a great variety," explains Danky (in press), "and perhaps they are only united by their critique of mainstream politics." Nevertheless, this "critique frequently forms an interior dialogue by which the reader's world view is authenticated in print" (Danky, in press; see also Danky & Cherney, 1996, 1995). Public collections of right-wing serials are few, and collectors sometimes must scour basements and jimmy open dank archives to conjure up issues of older periodicals on their sinful wish list of historical artifacts; a sad state for society's scholars. A few archives, however, do collect right-wing oppositional serials. (See online resource listed in unnumbered note.)
The collection of right-wing periodicals at the Wisconsin Historical Society is one of the largest and most current in the United States. Many of the serials were obtained by librarian James P. Danky, who explains that few libraries archive such materials because "most librarians are revolted at the racist stuff, perplexed by the narrow political stuff, and made uncomfortable by the religious stuff." Some serials posed special challenges for Danky. One rejected participation in what they called the "jew-commie banking system," and required a money order. "The Massachusetts libertarians refused our check" from a state agency "because they did not want to receive funds that the state had stolen from the people through taxation," recalls Danky, while another "refused any payment other than gold or pre-composite silver coins" (J. P. Danky, personal communication, March 13, 2007).
WHAT IS THIS STUFF CALLED?
Librarians are faced with the problem of what to call serials from the rivulets, back eddies, and swamps of the political and intellectual spectrum. Various terms used have included alternative, dissident, oppositional, "ephemera," "fugitive literature," and "little magazines." Danky (in press) prefers the term "oppositional press" as an umbrella way to refer to "nonstandard, non-establishment publications which advocate social change through deed or idea." He admits this is a "relational definition" in which the "oppositional press" is contrasted against "the mainstream press, the proclaimed voice of the majority."
As ideological winds buffet the body politic, however, what were once oppositional serials sometimes move from the margins to the mainstream. This is clearly the case with the National Review magazine and the Human Events newspaper. Editors and writers for both publications now regularly appear on network news programs as political commentators, an idea that would have been considered alarming in the 1950s. Note that William E Buckley's Firing Line television program did not appear until 1966, two years after the Goldwater presidential campaign demonstrated that conservatives were not all vestigial troglodytes, despite the common characterization of them by many liberal periodicals and pundits at the time.
This migration also goes the other way. Consider the case of paleoconservative journalist Samuel Francis, booted from the nation's capital and the Washington Times daily newspaper in 1995 and sent to the woodshed of the oppositional press for rhetoric deemed too blatantly white supremacist. Until his death in 2005, Francis continued publishing in a variety of right-wing oppositional serials, including Citizens Informer newspaper (Council of Conservative Citizens); Chronicles magazine (Rockford Institute); and Occidental Quarterly, a journal celebrating white culture. In a similar fashion, author Joseph Sobran was exiled from the National Review for antisemitism, and then he turned to writing for oppositional periodicals ("Dirty Dozen," 2006).
A BRIEF MAGICAL HISTORY TOUR
There was a sharp break before and after WWII in the nature of the U.S. political right. "In the early twentieth century, there was no such thing in American politics as a conservative movement," Judis (2001) explains. "The right was an unwieldy collection of anti-Semites, libertarians, fascists, racists, anti-New Dealers, isolationists, and Southern agrarians who were incapable of agreeing on anything" (p. 142). It can be hard to imagine today, but as an example, John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, was so embedded in the normative white supremacist worldview in the 1930s that he saw no problem with describing southern wage earners as "almost wholly of one blood, one God, and one language.... No people on earth love individual liberty, or will make greater sacrifices for it, than ... those proud Anglo-Saxon elements who constitute the working army of this homogeneous section of the nation" (Edgerton, 1930, p. 6).
Obviously there were right-wing publications prior to the 1950s, and some continued publishing across this transitional period, including Human Events, The Freeman, The Cross and the Flag, and others.
After WWII a number of conservative publications sought to avoid the rhetoric of overt white racism, and to distance and distinguish themselves from conspiracy theories, which were often antisemitic. Judis (2001) argues that it wasn't until the mid-1950s that a coherent conservative movement emerged on the political scene:
Its intellectual voice was William F. Buckley, Jr.'s, National Review and its political champion was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. These conservatives were united by opposition to the New Deal, including Social Security, and to any accommodation with the Soviet Union, which they viewed as an immediate threat to America's survival. (p. 142)
William A. Rusher was publisher of National Review and a leading architect of the new conservative coalition. Schoenwald (2001, p. 258) notes that Rusher wrote an article titled "Crossroads for the GOP" tot the February 12, 1963 issue of National Review in which Rusher "urged fellow conservatives to take a risk" in order to "break the New Deal Coalition's lock on the presidency." Rusher predicted: "It will take courage; it will take imagination; it will compel the GOP to break the familiar mould [sic] that has furnished it with every presidential nominee for a quarter of a century--but it can be done" (as cited in Schoenwald, 2001, p. 258).
Conservatives rallied to the cause of propelling Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater into becoming the 1964 Republican candidate for president. Goldwater was supported by right-wing periodicals that helped network key activists, but the campaign failed to attract a voting block, and Goldwater suffered a stinging and lopsided defeat. The organizers of the Goldwater campaign, however, had laid the foundation for the New Right that emerged in the 1970s and crested into public view with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 (Diamond, 1995; Easton, 2000; Ferguson & Rogers, 1986; Himmelstein, 1990; Hodgson, 1996; Schoenwald, 2001).
The already existing right-wing serials gained new energy, readership, and mainstream attention; and a new crop of periodicals were launched to surf the right-wing wave. In addition to Free Market ideology, some of these publications began to report on conservative opposition to the feminist movement, abortion, and the gay rights movement. These became major themes within the New Right (Faludi, 1992; Hardisty, 1999; Herman, 1997; Mason, 2002). A number of publications also adopted populist-sounding rhetoric to appeal to broader constituencies (Berlet & Lyons, 2000; Frank, 2004; Kazin, 1995; Lakoff, 2002). Genres can shift as the historic moment passes. The theme of anticommunism was popular in the 1950s and 1960s; now it is attacks on liberal secular humanism. Support for segregation has been displaced by opposition to multiculturalism.
OPPOSITIONAL SERIALS AS MOVEMENT LITERATURE
For decades oppositional literature was dismissed by most scholars and librarians as the ranting of a "lunatic fringe." When the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s garnered national headlines, it also began a process that gained the attention of serious scholars and archivists. Social movements began to be studied not as irrational mob action, but strategic organized attempts to change power relationships and norms in a society. While attention first focused on the political left, eventually it turned to inspect the political right (Danky & Cherney, 1995, 1996; Diamond, 1995; Hixson, 1992).
Social movements are built around some sense of shared grievances seen as justifying collective action such as public protests, meetings, or confrontations (Buechler, 2000; Gamson, 1990, 1995; Oberschall, 1973). According to McAdam and Snow (1997), a social movement is composed of a group of people acting collectively "with some degree of organization and continuity outside of institutional channels for the purpose of promoting or resisting change in the group, society, or world order of which it is a part" (p. xviii). When a social movement is involved in policymaking, legislative work, or election campaigns, it is working both inside and outside of institutional channels, and thus incorporates or allies with political movements (Gamson, 1990). In order to be effective, a social movement needs to construct coherent and compelling ideological arguments; frames of reference to portray a grievance as justified and needing resolution; and narrative stories that mobilize listeners into recruits, and recruits into active and loyal participants. All of these elements--ideology, frames, and narratives--are employed in the text circulated in serials and other movement literature.
Frames help translate ideologies into action by crafting culturally-appropriate perspectives from which to view a struggle over power (Gamson 1995; Oliver & Johnston 2000; Zald, 1996). (l) According to Klandermans (1997), the "social construction of collective action frames" involves "public discourse, that is, the interface of media discourse and interpersonal interaction; persuasive communication during mobilization campaigns by movement organizations, their opponents and countermovement organizations; and consciousness raising during episodes of collective action" (p. 45). Frames can be constructed to appeal to different audiences, including leaders, followers, potential recruits, and the public (Gamson, 1995; Johnston, 1995; Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1997). Studying frames helps us understand how social movements attract attention and loyal followers in a society (Goffman, 1959, 1974; Johnston, 1995; Snow & Benford, 1988, 1992).
A narrative in a social movement is simply a story with a plot in which there is a protagonist, and antagonist, and a lesson. The study of narratives reveals much about how heroes and villains are identified by a social movement (J. Davis, 2002; Ewick & Silbey, 1995; Polletta, 1998). Several authors...
|
