The current Republican ascendancy in American government has generated considerable scholarly interest in the conservative movement. Through an ethno-graphic study of the widely publicized but seldom-observed “Wednesday meeting” of conservative activists, this article inquires into the bases of the conservative movement’s internal cohesion and successful management of alliances with state officials. I argue that the meeting functions as both an instrument of material power and a ritual of symbolic maintenance by establishing relations of reciprocal exchange and sustaining a moral community of conservative activists and their allies. More broadly, the article examines the mutual conditioning and genetic linkage of two dimensions of social reality: relations of force and relations of meaning.
Karl Rove, from a speech given at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, February 17, 2005.
2.
At the start of the 2005 governing sessions, Republicans held fifty-five out of 100 seats in the U.S. Senate, 232 out of 435 seats in the House of Representatives, twenty-eight out of fifty state governorships, and majorities in fifty-four out of 100 state legislative chambers. By 2008, Republicans will have controlled the White House for twenty-eight of the previous forty years.
3.
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2004).
4.
and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin, 2004).
5.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Right Nation.
6.
Murray J. Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (Chicago: Markham, 1971).
7.
William Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1975).
8.
and Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Right Nation.
9.
I secured permission to attend the Wednesday meeting through personal contacts developed as part of a study of the history of American think tanks. My initial purpose in observing these sessions was to learn more about the role played by the right-wing think tanks in the conservative movement. I spread out my observations over a fourteen-month period, attending sessions in several clusters in order to observe long-term patterns in the meeting’s form and content. I took extensive fieldnotes, both during and after the meetings, but was not permitted to record the sessions.
10.
A 2001 profile of Norquist in The Nation (Dreyfuss, “Grover Norquist”) identifies him, Keene, and Weyrich as three of the four major leaders of the conservative movement during the past generation:
11.
[O]ver the past decade Norquist has eclipsed such older stalwarts as Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, David Keene of the American Conservative Union and Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation to emerge as the managing director of the hard-core right in Washington.
12.
Reprinted with permission from the May 14, 2001, issue of The Nation magazine. For subscription information, call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week’s Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.
13.
J. Craig Jenkins, “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements,”Annual Review of Sociology9 (1983): 527-553.
14.
Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 7-7.
15.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (1912; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1995).
16.
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (1915; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1947).
17.
and Jeffrey P. Broadbent, “Movement in Context: Thick Social Networks and Environmental Mobilization in Japan,” in Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, ed. Mario Diani and Doug McAdam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
18.
and Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (1980; reprint, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990).
19.
The following four paragraphs draw from Himmelstein, To the Right.
20.
Rebecca E. Klatch, “Review of To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism, by Jerome Himmelstein,”American Journal of Sociology96, no. 3 (1990): 801-803.
21.
In addition to bringing together disparate intellectual strands on the right, the effort to reconstruct conservative ideology involved purging certain others, particularly the most racist and nationalist elements, from the conservative ranks. On this point, see Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties.
22.
and Perlstein, Before the Storm.
23.
and Thomas Medvetz, “Merchants of Expertise: Think Tanks and Intellectuals in the U.S. Field of Power” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2006).
24.
John Judis (p. 212) names Grover Norquist as the “key political operative in engineering Clinton’s [health care] defeat,” and suggests that the “Wednesday group” was the original source of public scrutiny of President Clinton’s Arkansas land deal (“Whitewater”), which eventually led to the special investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr resulting in Clinton’s impeachment. Judis, The Paradox of American Democracy.
25.
Gingrich praises Norquist in a 2001 article in The Nation: “He is essentially the most creative and most effective conservative activist in the country. He is both a serious conservative intellectual [and] a remarkable implementer of effective communications and grassroots political strategies”; Dreyfuss, “Grover Norquist.”
26.
and Zuckman, “Pipeline Leads to White House.”
27.
According to The Nation in 2001 (Dreyfuss, “Grover Norquist”),
28.
Norquist’s support was decisive in swinging the bulk of the conservative movement into Bush’s camp by early 1999....Then, when Bush ran into trouble battling Senator John McCain of Arizona, Norquist mobilized the right against McCain in the early primaries, especially in South Carolina—and, in the process, cemented his ties to Bush and Rove.
29.
The same article goes on to speculate,
30.
To a significant degree, George W. Bush owes his election to Norquist, whose early support was crucial in lining up the right behind the Texas governor’s campaign. And if Bush... has managed to forge a governing coalition that includes both Big Business and the far right, Norquist’s skillful ability to hold that coalition together is a big reason why.
31.
While it is difficult to weigh the various lines of influence leading to the passage of the Bush tax cuts, a journalistic consensus has emerged that Norquist was one of the key figures in their implementation. For example, NPR reported in 2001, “No piece of legislation is as important to the president’s agenda as the tax cut, and no one person outside of Congress had more to do with getting it passed than a conservative activist named Grover Norquist”; Liasson, “Political Activist Grover Norquist.”
32.
See also Dante Chinni, “Washington’s Tax-Cut True-Believers Are ‘in’ Again,”Christian Science Monitor, February 20, 2001.
33.
Toner, “Conservatives Savor Their Role.”The Nation quote is from Dreyfuss, “Grover Norquist.”
34.
Blumenfeld, “Sowing the Seeds of GOP Domination.” (c) 2004, The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission.
35.
See also Scherer, “The Soul of the New Machine.”
36.
I have altered or omitted the names of participants who are not public figures.
37.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is a non-profit animal rights organization.
38.
The Federal Pledge, “started in 1986 as the first project of Americans for Tax Reform,” runs as follows:
39.
I, _______, pledge to the taxpayers of the _____ district of the State of ______ and to the American People that I will: ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.
40.
Tim Michels lost his Senate race to Russ Feingold in the November 2004 elections.
41.
In an interview with NPR (Liasson, “Political Activist Grover Norquist”), Goeglein explains,
42.
I attend Grover Norquist’s meeting at least twice and sometimes three times a month, and the reason I go is because I am specifically tasked in the White House with outreach to conservatives. I make it a point to make sure that they, the conservative community, understand exactly what the president’s message is and to make sure that I bring from those meetings thoughts from the groups and individuals back to the White House.
43.
In general, attendees of the Wednesday meeting tend to prefer the Washington Times to the Post, sometimes referring to the latter as an organ of the “liberal establishment.”
44.
There is a considerable amount of talk at the Wednesday meeting about local party and campaign structures, much of it rooted in very particular historical and regional circumstances.
45.
The term “Hillary-care” is a pejorative reference to President Bill Clinton’s 1993 health care plan. First Lady Hillary Clinton led the administration’s unsuccessful effort to install this plan as federal law. The Contract With America was a 1994 policy plan written by Republicans in anticipation of their new status as the majority party in Congress. Newt Gingrich played a leading role in its design.
46.
Author interview with Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform, August 2, 2004.
47.
Interview with Grover Norquist, August 2, 2004.
48.
One of the most apt characterizations of resources may be found in William H. Sewell Jr.’s theory of structure, which is worth quoting at length:
49.
Resources are of two types, human and nonhuman. Nonhuman resources are objects, animate or inanimate, naturally occurring or manufactured, that can be used to enhance or maintain power; human resources are physical strength, dexterity, knowledge, and emotional commitments that can be used to enhance or maintain power, including knowledge of the means of gaining, retaining, controlling, and propagating either human or nonhuman resources. Both types of resources are media of power and are unevenly distributed.
50.
William H. Sewell Jr., “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,”American Journal of Sociology98 (1992): 9-10. Resources, then, are forms of power needed for collective action. They may be incorporated in the person of the social actor, or they may be physical objects like factories, weapons, land, and money.
51.
and Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice.
52.
and Pierre Bourdieu, “Bodily Knowledge,” in his Pascalian Meditations (1997; reprint, Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 128-163.
53.
On the concept of habitus, see also Loïc Wacquant, “Habitus,” in International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, ed. Milan Zafirovski (London: Routledge, 2005).
54.
Owing perhaps to the apparent seamlessness of this model, one of the most common errors is to interpret Bourdieu as a theorist of social reproduction. However, the possibility—in fact, the necessity—of structural transformation is built into the model because agents are socialized into multiple settings and traverse social space, routinely transposing schemas of classification, evaluation, and action they have acquired from one domain into another. The theory is therefore just as well suited to describing cases of structural change arising out of the tension or incongruity between structure and habitus as it is to describing cases of perfect congruity and reproduction.
