The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism, by Rick Perlstein
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Not long after I let the magic of the placenta-based oilfield sink in, I got another pitch, this one courtesy of the webmasters handling the Human Events mailing list and headed The Trouble with Get-Rich-Quick Schemes. Perhaps Im a little gullible myself; for a couple of seconds, I believed the esteemed Reagan-era policy handbook might be sending out a useful consumer advisory to its readers, an investigative guide to the phony get-rich-quick schemes caroming around the right-leaning opinion-sphere. But that hasty assumption proved sadly mistaken, presuming as it did that the proprietors of outfits like Human Events respect their readers. Instead, this was a come-on for something called INSTANT INTERNET INCOMEthe chance at last to put an end to your financial worries . . . permanently erase your debts . . . pay cash for the things you want . . . create a secure, enjoyable retirement for yourself . . . give your family the abundant lifestyle they so richly deserve.
Back in our great-grandparents day, the peddlers of such miracle cures and get-rich-quick schemes were known as snake-oil salesmen. You dont see stuff like this much in mainstream culture any more; it hardly seems possible such déclassé effronteries could get anywhere in a society with a high school completion rate of 90 percent. But tenders of a 23-Cent Heart Miracle seem to work just fine on the readers of the magazine where Ann Coulter began her journalistic ascent in the late nineties by pimping the notion that liberals are all gullible rubes. In an alternate universe where Coulter would be capable of rational self-reflection, it would be fascinating to ask her what she thinks about, say, the layout of HumanEvents.com on the day it featured an article headlined Ideas Will Drive Conservatives Revival. Two inches beneath that bold pronouncement, a box headed Health News included the headlines Reverse Crippling Arthritis in 2 Days, Clear Clogged Arteries Safely & Easilywithout drugs, without surgery, and without a radical diet, and High Blood Pressure Cured in 3 Minutes . . . Drop Measurement 60 Points. It would be interesting, that is, to ask Coulter about the reflex of lying thats now sutured into the modern conservative movements DNAand to get her candid assessment of why conservative leaders treat their constituents like suckers.
The history of that movement echoes with the sonorous names of long-dead Austrian economists, of indefatigable door-knocking cadres, of soaring perorations on a nation finally poised to realize its rendezvous with destiny. Search high and low, however, and theres no mention of oilfields in the placenta. Nor anything about, say, the massive intersection between the culture of network or multilevel marketingwhere ordinary folks try to get rich via pyramid schemes that leave their neighbors holding the bagand the institutions of both evangelical Christianity and Mitt Romneys Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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The lists got bigger, the technology better (Where are my names? he nervously asked, studying the surface of the first computer tape containing his trove): twenty-five million names by 1980, destination for some one hundred million mail pieces a year, dispatched by some three hundred employees in boiler rooms running twenty-four hours a day. The Viguerie Companys marketing genius was that as it continued metastasizing, it remained, in financial terms, a hermetic positive feedback loop. It brought the message of the New Right to the masses, but it kept nearly all the revenue streams locked down in Vigueries proprietary control. Here was a key to the hustle: typically, only 10 to 15 percent of the haul went to the intended beneficiaries. The rest went back to Vigueries company. In one too-perfect example, Viguerie raised $802,028 for a client seeking to distribute Bibles in Asiawho paid $889,255 for the service.
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http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_long_con/print
There's a lot more, all about how major parts of the conservative movement over the past 50 years have been milking their supporters for donations for 'causes' which receive almost none of the money, and how it seamlessly blends into straight rip-off 'get rich quick' or 'miracle health cure' scams that the rest of us would delete as email spam the moment we saw it, but which is directly recommended by the RW publications who sell their mailing lists to the scammers. As Perlstein says, of the scare stories mixed in with the scams, "these are bedtime stories, meant for childlike minds. Or, more to the point, they are in the business of producing childlike minds." For more than 40 years, the right wing has been cultivating low-information victims, to get money from them, and, as a by-product, votes.
NICO9000
(970 posts)"Nixonland" is one of the best books I've read recently. He actually makes Tricky Dick into a sympathetic character.
EC
(12,287 posts)And TV evangelists are all repub.
hedda_foil
(16,375 posts)It's an in-depth examination of connections that finally make sense of the crazy right and Romney's lies
CosmicMemory
(7 posts)I was going to post this myself, but you beat me to it! Thank you for sharing. I agree this is a must-read. Also makes you wonder where all the big-donation money went. The super-PACs and non-profit fundraisers are all pretty secretive. Suppose an outfit raised, say, $8 million and spent $4 million on TV ads. Now where to you suppose the other half of the money went? Into Rove's own pockets?
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)One of the reasons why he had such an oversized influence in the GOP was his immense nationwide mailing lists and networks of business owners/prominent pastors, and how reliably he reap donations from them with just a persuasive form letter...
Until the GOP congressional campaign organizers joined the 20th century in the mid '90s, so many wannabe candidates had to kiss Helms' ass to get access to his lists, or a piece of his war chest....