ON POLITICAL BOOKS

...They are the blue-collar workers who will not just ignore Walter Mondale's endorsements by Big Labor, but actively resent them...

...But the fact is, Viguerie has never been a stickler for ideological purity in his heroes...

...Probably the only way we can save America," he writes in one of the book's more revealing passages, "is by the election of a great leader as president who believes in and understands God's law...

...to a bit of wishful thinking in which a political scientist with a computer demonstrates that a populist party could capture the presidency...

...Mistrustful of institutions, Viguerie proclaims his faith in the people...

...George Wallace, for whom Viguerie once reportedly raised $6 million, was, aside from his segregationist views, a big-government liberal in his early terms as governor of Alabama...

...As I write this, a press release arrives from Viguerie's command post exhorting President Reagan to remove American Marines from Lebanon immediately...

...It does not ridicule his music, religion, or manner of dress:' Viguerie's appeal is to Americans who believe those in power laugh at their prayers, condescend to their patriotism, belittle their folk heroes...

...He is just the latest New Right hero to be cast overboard for excessive pragmatism (Barry Goldwater was another...

...The phrase was coined to distinguish them from traditional conservatives, whose orientation is more Eastern, intellectual, partisan Republican, and, in the view of Viguerie's comrades, elitist and morally compromised...

...Viguerie's first book, which he published in 1980 and promoted with such zeal that the newspaper bureau where I work still has eight complimentary hardback copies filling space on various bookshelves, was entitled The New Right: We're Ready to Lead...

...Viguerie goes to embarrassing lengths to affectionately pat every fanny in the New Right, including his own, as when he quotes a Moral Majority official lauding Viguerie as "brilliant, insightful, and wisely prophetic!' The book's chief virtue is inadvertent...

...The lesson of their victories, though Viguerie seems to miss it, is that populism does not have to be the exclusive franchise of Richard Viguerie's band of wildcat reactionaries...

...How many farmers, a group he dotes on as the antithesis of Eastern elitism, would endorse his proposals to abolish government crop supports and ban all trade with communist governments...

...In case the president is unsure how to go about it, Viguerie helpfully offers a first step: "Appoint a panel of conservatives to recommend within 15 days the best way to manage a withdrawal:' That may sound like laughable advice from an arch-enemy of needless bureaucracy, but it reflects Viguerie's deepest yearning—to have himself and his friends looked to for something more than their mailing lists...

...Populism has always kept company with more malignant isms—racism and jingoism among them...

...And his gun-owning friends are one of the most powerful constituencies for preservation of public lands, something Viguerie sees as a scheme against progress...

...It is to traditional, conservative Republicanism what the Yippies are to the Democratic Study Group...

...John Connally, the former Texas governor, would find plenty to dispute in Viguerie's chapter on 100 Ways to Make America Great Again, not least of all the abolition of tax subsidies for the businesses that now pay Connally's legal retainers...

...He devotes a chapter to chiding the masses for drinking too much, cheating on their taxes, wasting electricity, telling off-color jokes, and accepting federal subsidies...

...If we take Viguerie's words at face value, it is hard to imagine a leader who would conform to his expectations...

...Viguerie and his cohorts in the Moral Majority and the National Conservative Political Action Committee and so on are united by a common animus toward the arrogant, faceless institutions by which the little guys on Viguerie's computerized mailing lists feel manipulated and excluded: Big Government, Big Unions, Big Business, Big Media, Big Law, Big Education, Big Banks...

...It is written in the catchy, simplistic polemical style of Viguerie's fund-raising letters...

...troops out of Europe but would set the CIA loose to undermine governments we don't like in Cuba, Nicaragua, Eastern Europe, and Syria...

...Actually, we're not even calling them the New Right anymore...

...Leery of institutions and uneasy with the popular will, Viguerie winds up putting his hope in a great, as yet undiscovered, leader...

...Suspicion of bigness is not necessarily a bad thing...

...More important, to the extent the feeling of being left out and looked down upon is shared by many other Americans, it is the source of what influence the New Right has mustered, the emotional wellspring of neopopulism...

...They are also a potential source of sustenance to politicians who do.not share Richard Viguerie's right-wing views...

...They want someone who will sweep from the halls of power the bureaucrats who ridicule the beliefs and the lifestyle of ordinary Americans:' Viguerie says...

...Viguerie's faith in the people struggles against a powerful sense that the people are wallowing in original sin...

...He wants a piece of the action...

...Viguerie makes it pretty obvious why the title of his first book was at best premature...

...These constituencies have come to be known collectively as the New Right...

...But Viguerie has * Regnery Gateway, Inc., $12.95...

...The people on Viguerie's mailing lists may not be able to agree on a savior or an agenda, but they are going to create problems for politicians they see as beholden to a fat-cat establishment...

...It is a tradition of "politics of resentment:' often inspiring in its iconoclasm and compassion for the common man, but often also deeply ignorant and reactionary...

...In the government-by-referendum Viguerie seems to prefer, he would probably find himself betrayed by even the interest groups he claims as his own...

...the traditional populist difficulty translating his complaints into something lasting and constructive...

...Doesn't Viguerie wonder why so many of the evangelical Christians he embraces as his own also support a nuclear freeze...

...This may sound presumptuous when you consider that Reagan was not Viguerie's personal favorite for the job...

...He is a great believer in the initiative and referendum, in the popular election of judges and the recall of politicians who flaunt the public will...

...Have you considered that you could be as responsible for America's problems as the homosexual pimp on New York City's 42nd Street...

...These are Viguerie's chapter titles and objects of cold rage...

...Though the New Right has enjoyed some success in exploiting narrow grievances and class bitterness, Viguerie and his colleagues are not ready to lead anything as complicated as a nation...

...Populism is better at making rhetoric and revolutions than laws and governments...

...Liberals (and traditional conservatives) may not be inclined to listen to the new populists, the heirs of George Wallace, for lessons in tolerance...

...What Viguerie really wants is a leader who will listen to Richard Viguerie...

...If only government could be made more immediately responsive to the popular will, he says, things would be okay...

...For example, he deplores paternalistic welfare programs that prescribe how a poor family must divide its resources among food, housing, and medicine: "The unspoken assumption of the welfare bureaucracy is that poor people just don't have enough sense to use money for food unless it comes to them in the form of food stamps!' But later on, we learn that Viguerie doesn't much trust the good sense of the poor, either, when he groans righteously about the food stamps spent on "filet mignon, fancy desserts, and tickets in state and local lotteries!' Rather than resolve the contradiction in his thinking about welfare, Viguerie tries to make the source of his confusion go away by advocating sharp reductions: a cut of "at least" 50 percent in food stamps, elimination of public housing, and a prayer that economic recovery will lift all boats...

...Viguerie's deeply felt convictions on gun control (against), abortion (against), and the death penalty (surprise: against), are minority views, if you believe the polls...

...That is a natural enough feeling from someone who has spent so long with his nose pressed to the windows of government...

...But neopopulism's own will is torn by contradictions...

...A libertarian streak (demanding freedom from busing, the public school monopoly, prying IRS agents, and gun-control agents) coexists uneasily with a stern disciplinarian bent (Viguerie wants laws to make divorce more difficult, and life prison terms for drug peddlers...

...Viguerie's new book, The Establishment vs...

...Ronald Reagan has failed—in Viguerie's opinion, if not necessarily in the eyes of the populist masses—to be that leader...

...Isolationist tendencies war with a flag-waving interventionism (Viguerie would pull U.S...

...Populism identifies with the 'common man: that is, the man or woman who works for a living:' Viguerie writes...

...he asks...

...But the hurt feelings of the middle-class Americans Viguerie writes to are genuine, and powerful...

...Viguerie himself cites Texas Governor Mark White and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, moderate Democrats elected in 1982 by harnessing populist impulses...

...he preferred, and raised money for, former Texas Governor John Connally and Illinois Representative Phil Crane...

...New Right theorists like Kevin Phillips and critics like Alan Crawford have already thoroughly traced the movement's populist antecedents, from the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, through William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, and Joe McCarthy, to George Wallace and Jesse Helms...

...In it, he claimed credit on the New Right's behalf for the election of Ronald Reagan and thoughtfully laid out a suitable agenda for the new president...

...Individually, and in groups, we should pray for God to send us this leader!' The New Right: We're Ready to Be Led...

...Viguerie now prefers "New Populist" or "Neopopulist!' It is a more marketable label, I think ("New Right" has always reminded me of the Australian wine producer who calls his stuff "Long Flat Red"), and probably more accurate...

...If anything binds Viguerie's odd lot of interest groups, it is the common sense that they and their values—work, family and patriotism—are sneered at by the establishment...

...The People, * is an effort to pep up the movement after three dispiriting years of watching Reagan sell grain and pipeline equipment to the Russians, bail out the international banks, raise taxes, set record deficits, reappoint Paul Volcker, and generally ignore the agenda of the New Right: This is not a book to be read for rigorous analysis...

...One chapter is given over entirely to editorial cartoons, another to short, uplifting quotations from the New Right network, another to "An Open Letter to Presidents, Present and Future:' another Bill Keller is a reporter for the Washington bureau of the Dallas Times Herald...

...Indeed, some of his grievances, particularly in the chapters on business and education, would be at home in this magazine...

...Elsewhere, Viguerie's prejudices collide, leaving him immobilized...

...He has built his direct mail company in Falls Church, Virginia, into a lucrative enterprise by grabbing the attention of gun owners, right-to-lifers, right-toworkers, fundamentalist Christians, sagebrush rebels, gold bugs, Taiwan loyalists, anticommunists, antihomosexuals, antifeminists, and assorted other antis, and, after reaching into their wallets for the cause, declaring them a movement...