The Republican Brain (24 page)

Schlafly returned to St. Louis, married, and became very politically active. At the time, as a grassroots conservative, that chiefly meant being a fervent anti-communist. For our story, two interrelated aspects of this movement are noteworthy: Its Manichean worldview—which viewed the Soviet Union as a truly evil empire, with which there could be no compromise—and its distrust of the “eastern elites” of both parties who were perceived as too wishy-washy and weak-kneed when faced with such a threat.

Grassroots anti-communism was also suffused with strong religiosity and nationalism. Or as Schlafly put it in a 1960 speech before the Illinois chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, where she sought to mobilize Christian women to support the cause—and used language notable for its black-and-white reasoning style to do so:

God told Abraham that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah would be spared from His wrath if only ten just men could be found in each city. Fire and brimstone descended on these cities when ten could not be found. Our Republic can be saved from the fires of Communism which have already destroyed or enslaved many Christian cities, if we can find ten patriotic women in each community.

For Schlafly, there was true evil and true good in the world, and you had to pick sides. It was, she wrote, “Total War . . . a war to the death—our death if we don't win it.”

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Schlafly grew in political influence as she organized the grassroots (chiefly Christian women) in an attempt to push the Republican Party to the right and unseat its moderate Eastern establishment—epitomized by liberal Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller. For at that time—and for reasons that I will examine shortly—mainline Republicanism was much more moderate, and also remarkably more pro-science, than it is today. Eisenhower, a former university president, appointed the first official presidential science adviser and convened the distinguished President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). He even spoke fondly of “my scientists” later in his life.

But to someone like Schlafly, these were the elites, the “kingmakers,” and they were far too wimpy in the face of mortal threat. As her influence grew, Schlafly wrote several wildly popular books, channeling conservative populist outrage and defending ultra-hawkish policies towards the Soviet Union. She played a prominent role in advancing Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, which failed but also rallied conservatives. All the while, she tirelessly trained conservative activists to learn the arguments of their opponents and know how to rebut them, providing them with recommendations of sympathetic books to read and later keeping them up to speed through her widely read newsletter, the
Phyllis Schlafly Report.
She worked to activate their latent ideologies, just as her own had been activated while working at the American Enterprise Association.

Throughout this period, Schlafly focused her energies on foreign policy and defense issues. She was the most strident of hawks, always wanting tougher anti-Soviet policies and stronger defenses, including more nuclear weapons. But in 1972, her focus changed—fatefully—to social issues. Almost accidentally at first, she got involved in the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which had already passed Congress easily and awaited ratification by the states.

At the time both parties in Washington supported this measure—a simple, blanket ban on any infringement upon the “equality of rights” due to a person's sex. The Amendment passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and was to be the crowning egalitarian achievement of a newly triumphant feminist movement.

Instead, the ERA sparked a stunning populist and traditionalist backlash led by Schlafly. It was a backlash that, in combination with similar reactions against
Roe v. Wade
and the Supreme Court's new restrictions on school prayer, changed America forever.

How could anyone oppose more equality for women?
That's what liberals and feminists couldn't get their heads around. Yet Schlafly certainly had a reason: She was reacting against the change that had now begun to split American society. She felt a need to preserve the traditional unit of the family—which, she argued, is the “basic unit of society, which is ingrained in the laws and customs of our Judeo-Christian civilization [and] is the greatest single achievement in the history of women's rights.” ERA opponents believed in a traditional, husband-centered family based literally on the Bible. They were authoritarians, they were traditionalists, and they were hierarchs. At STOP ERA rallies, Schlafly would approach the podium with the perfect joke: “First of all, I want to thank my husband Fred, for letting me come—I always like to say that, because it makes the libs so mad!”

This was nothing if not the consummate culture war issue. ERA opponents were overwhelmingly religious, while less than half of ERA supporters attended church. The battle was thus deeply polarizing and divisive. But what was new was how Schlafly tapped into the emotions of Christian conservatives who weren't used to engaging in politics. As she put it to
U.S. News and World Report
: “We saw an attack on marriage, the family, the homemaker, the role of motherhood, the whole concept of different roles for men and women. What we did was take these cultural issues and bring into the conservative movement people who had been stuck in the pews. We taught 'em politics.” As always, that meant teaching them lobbying, public speaking, knowing the other side's arguments and countering them.

What's notable in retrospect is just how badly the feminist supporters of the ERA underestimated Schlafly. The pro-ERA forces were much better funded, but also were divided and remarkably undisciplined, in a classically liberal way: The National Organization for Women regularly linked the ERA issue with abortion and gay rights, playing right into the hands of cultural traditionalists. At one point, Schlafly paid with her own money to reprint a National Organization for Women booklet, entitled
Revolution: Tomorrow Is NOW.
She knew nothing would inflame her own followers more than the feminists in their own words.

Nor did many feminists understand Schlafly's perspective. As one put it, “Nobody who is a good American is against equality.” Misguided explanations of Schlafly's motives even went so far as incorrectly tying her group, STOP ERA, to the Ku Klux Klan. Sometimes the frustration boiled over into true extremes, including threats of violence. Not only did Betty Friedan say she wanted to burn Schlafly “at the stake.” Another feminist declared, “I just don't see why some people don't hit Phyllis Schlafly in the mouth.” The author Harlan Ellison, an ERA supporter, said on television that “if Phyllis Schlafly walked into the headlights of my car, I would knock her into the next time zone.”

The ERA died—ratification was blocked by Schlafly's activists in several critical states. During it all, Schlafly, at age 51, managed to find the time to go back to Washington University and get a law degree, passing with flying colors and winning a prize for “best student” in Administrative Law. More than three decades later in 2008, when the school awarded her an honorary degree, students and professors protested the recognition of a woman they said had thwarted so much progress toward equality. Hundreds turned their backs at commencement when she rose for her award.

“I'm not sure they're mature enough to graduate,” Schlafly quipped.

Today, Schlafly's Eagle Forum pushes a Christian Right agenda—and an anti-science one—across America. “Much of what is taught as evolution in the schools is not falsifiable at all and thus cannot truly be called science,” wrote Schlafly in her report in March 2001.

And thus our bridge is built, a span connecting grassroots conservative activism to the modern day conservative denial of reality.

Schlafly's story is just one thread in the tapestry of the American conservative revolution. But it tells you a great deal about the emergence of the right and why it became so successful. It was Manichean. It was emotional. It was highly organized and singular in purpose. And it was dramatically misunderstood by liberals.

Consider what Schlafly taught her female Christian followers about public presentation skills. She told them what makeup to wear, which colors showed up well on TV, and—stunningly—“how to be poised and smile when attacked.” Were her liberal opponents really
smarter
than Schlafly, in any meaningful sense of the term? Given the story I've just told of how she bested them, that's pretty debatable.

Schlafly's story also helps us begin to see how the rise of the right, and its rejection of scientific and factual realities, are closely intertwined. Right-wing rebels against social and cultural change, like Schlafly, regularly attacked eastern “elites” and university professors—or as Spiro Agnew put it, that “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” This anti-intellectual populism was a consistent theme throughout the “New Right” revolution, and particularly prominent with the campus conservative group Young Americans For Freedom. But it wasn't just about attacking intellectuals. Conservatives also trained their own activists to
argue back against them
—about policy, about science, about whatever else needed arguing.

Understanding motivated reasoning, we can see that this had little to do with the truth, and everything with belief affirmation and ideological activation. Schlafly wasn't just trying to get the U.S. to build more nukes to battle the Soviets. She herself was handing out intellectual armaments to her followers.

Here it becomes important to draw a key distinction between conservative elites, like Schalfly, and the conservative base. As a movement leader and a conservative author and intellectual, Schlafly adopted a populist and an
us-versus-them
style and tone—as did many conservative elites. In the same era, observes the
New York Times Book Review
editor Sam Tanenhaus, other conservative thinkers were denouncing the “liberal establishment,” in the words of William F. Buckley, Jr., and the “new class” (in the words of Irving Kristol). They were constructing a Manichean dynamic, either because they really believed in the importance of doing so and it felt natural to them, or because they saw its strategic value.

These elites controlled the top-down side of conservatism, the message. Members of the conservative base then consumed claims and information that resonated for them, emotionally and psychologically. The base was whipped up, told it had an enemy, and responded accordingly.

In some cases, members of the conservative base probably responded in this way because they'd received large amounts of carefully framed political information—like Schlafly's books and newsletters. These helped create more political expertise and sophistication among conservative activists, changing their brains in a way that allowed them to better connect these ideas with their core values—setting the stage for emotional and motivated reasoning on behalf of conservative goals. The process here would be a kind of authoritarian activation.

Some members of the base, though, were then and will always remain low-information voters. They simply consumed the rhetoric and it resonated for them, even if they never developed much political sophistication or the ability to defend their beliefs in great detail.

So both groups, the elite and the base, were central to the growth of conservatism. And the actions of both reflect psychological factors, albeit sometimes in different ways.

I will explore further in a moment how the right created its own intellectual infrastructure, another key development in the “oven” of U.S. politics that dramatically amplified our divide over reality and the facts, as more and more conservative elites took up the task of generating ideological content for the base. But first, there's a question lingering in the background of this account that must be tackled directly.