National conservative think tank lurking in Teele Square

By David Taber

Past Teele Square on Broadway, inside a nondescript shoebox shaped red brick office building, is an internationally renowned think tank and research library devoted to the study and documentation of right wing political movements in the United States.
Founded in Chicago in 1981 as the Midwest Research Group and later renamed Political Research Associates (PRA), the organization was founded to help the left develop a more nuanced understanding of domestic reactionary politics.

“When we got started people could not tell the difference between Phyllis Schlafly and the KKK,” said Chip Berlet, a co-founder of and Senior Researcher with PRA. “Shlafly is an anti-communist and anti-liberal activist who likes traditional, judicial family structures and got famous successfully opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. The KKK is an armed paramilitary group.”

Founded by Berlet and Dr. Jean Hardisty who met when they were both working for the ACLU of Illinois, PRA took its cues from analyses movements on the left such as the civil rights, feminist, and black power movements, Pat Chamberlain, another Senior Researcher, said.

Founded at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s first tern as President, PRA has been ideally situated to monitor and map the rise to prominence of the neo-conservative movement, she said.

With the inauguration of Reagan, conservatives were able to implement the fruit of strategic infrastructure building and policy development that had gone on in the 1970’s, she said.

“They took ideology seriously and organizing seriously in the 1970’s,” she said. “They had a strategic funding plan, they did studies and held trainings and conferences. They parlayed all this into strong ideological positions and they published,” Berlet said.

The upshot of these efforts were that conservative think-tanks were ready with a fully formed domestic policy for Reagan when he took office. “The Heritage foundation produced a big fat book called Mandate for Leadership, and it became Reagan’s blueprint for domestic policy,” Chamberlain said.

In a 1997 PRA report entitled Decades of Distortion: The Right’s Thirty Year Assault on Welfare Policy, Lucy Williams describes the 1000 page book thusly:

“While it did not contain detailed recommendations advocating for reductions and restrictions in most welfare programs, it discussed fraud, waste, and abuse in the Food Stamp program, the school lunch program, and all the programs operated by the US Department of Health and Human Services, often implying that "non-needy" individuals were receiving benefits.

The book was released to Reagan’s transition team one week after he took office, and it set the stage for the fortieth President’s reliance on the recommendations on the foundation on a number of policy issues.

“We were alive during the rise of the new right, which is now just called the right,” Chamberlain said.

In an effort to be comprehensive, PRA’s analysis of the U.S. right wing as a number of esoteric as well as mainstream strains of conservative thought. It divides the right into three overlapping movements -- the secular right, the religious right, and the xenophobic right.

The secular right includes corporate internationalists who believe nations should have no control over international trade. It also includes business nationalists, who believe in the exact opposite, and enlist allies from the ranks of anti-globalization activists and the xenophobic right’s patriot movement. The secular right also includes economic libertarians, who believe “the state disrupts the perfect harmony of the of the free market system,” and neoconservatives and national security militarists – apologists for Cold War and Post Cold War U.S. foreign policy, respectively, according to PRA literature.

The patriot movement, which includes armed citizen’s militias, believes “secret elites control the government and banks.” Other segments of the xenophobic right include white nationalists of different stripes, who believe cultural or biological differences between races make democracy impossible, paleoconservatives who believe, “natural financial oligarchies preserve the republic against democratic mob rule,” and the extreme right, which includes various neo-fascist groups, PRA’s analysis states.

The religious right includes religious conservatives who believe in pluralist democracy, and Christian Nationalists and theocrats, or soft and hard dominionists. Soft dominionists believe immorality and sin lead to chaos and anarchy and the U.S. is God’s chosen land but society is being undermined by liberal secular humanists. Hard dominionists believe, “ Christian men are ordained to run society.” They believe non-Christians are second-class citizens.

Over the last thirty year PRA has watched the Christian right blossom with some trepidation, Berlet said.

“The Christian right is so common now people don’t realize the degree to which it has become part of our thinking about the way things should be done,” he said.

The parlance of the anti-choice movement, for example, has become institutionalized in Boston’s newspaper of record. “Unborn child is now used by the Boston Globe instead of fetus,” Chamberlain said.

About half of the work PRA does is original research, and half is consulting for groups around the country organizing to oppose campaigns undertaken by the radical right, Berlet said.

For example, upon receiving a request from concerned parents, they were recently able to determine that a group protesting and handing out literature about abstinence only education at a small town’s school board meetings was a coalition between libertarians and Christian conservatives.

The libertarians are interested in cutting taxes and cutting public programs and the Christians conservatives are interested in promoting abstinence. “We can help unravel that, and say it is a tactical alliance,” Berlet said.

PRA is not primarily focused on electoral politics, but, Berlet said, he does not understand why the Democratic Party does not pay more attention to the mechanics of right wing organizing and try to mount a more coherent opposition.

“Nationally the Democrats don’t understand they are up against a powerful social movement and they have to engage in a struggle over ideas,” he said

Instead, the lesson the national Democratic Party seems to have taken from recent electoral history is they have to move more to the right, he said.

“They are trying to reclaim moral values in language they have adopted from the right.
They are trying to say ‘we are moral, too.” But, Berlet said, but once you adopt the language and framework of your opponents you have already lost the argument.

“If you adopt a right wing frame and you are talking about trying to reduce abortions you are abandoning the progressive frame, which would discuss reducing unwanted pregnancies which is a frame that allows you to step back and looks at the roots of the problems,” he said.

Talking about curbing unwanted pregnancies allows discussion about a host of social justice issues including race, economics, and women’s rights, he said.

And the Democrat’s increasing willingness to let conservatives frame social justice issues has impoverished dialogue in the civic arena, Berlet said.

“It used to be there was a debate about how the government should provide services for people who need them,” he said, but that has been replaced by a push to privatize social services and scapegoat those who would most benefit from them.

“Once you agree to the frame of your opponent you have already lost,” he said.
And refusing to engage with conservatives may be costing the Democrats at the polls, Berlet said.

The ideological right has grown 15 percent since 1970, he said. And three to seven percent, without being courted by the party, have been observed to swing their vote to Democrat based on moral issues like the war, corruption, and poverty, he said.

Comments

huh?

Posted by: conservative? | May 20, 2007 at 10:02 PM

Whoever wrote this headline did not read the article! Political Research Associates is most definitely NOT a "conservative think tank", nor does it claim to be one. It is a think tank that researches conservative and right-wing movements.

Posted by: Ron Newman | May 20, 2007 at 11:09 PM

From Wikipedia:

Political Research Associates Political Research Associates (PRA) (formerly Midwest Research, Chicago, 1981-1987) is a non-profit research group located in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Mission
Part of the series on
Dominionism
Ideas
Biblical Theology
Separation of church and state
Postmillennialism
Supersessionism
Theonomy

Advocates
R. J. Rushdoony
Greg Bahnsen
Gary North
Gary DeMar
Kenneth Gentry
David Chilton
Paul Weyrich
D. James Kennedy
Roy Moore
James Dobson

Former advocates
James B. Jordan
Peter Leithart
Andrew Sandlin

Organizations
American Vision
Chalcedon Foundation
National Religious Broadcasters
Free Congress Foundation
Center for Reclaiming America for Christ
Coral Ridge Ministries
Focus on the Family

Influences
Abraham Kuyper
Francis Schaeffer
Cornelius Van Til

Financiers
Howard Ahmanson Jr

Critics
TheocracyWatch
Chip Berlet
Randall Balmer
PRA
Chris Hedges
Thomas Ice
Dave Hunt
Hal Lindsey

v • d • e
PRA studies the U.S. political right wing, as well as white supremacists, anti-Semitic groups, and paramilitary organizations. It has a full-time staff of six. The director is Rev. Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale. Dr. Jean V. Hardisty was the director from 1981 to 2004. Chip Berlet is the group's senior analyst. Researchers include Tarso Luís Ramos and Pam Chamberlain.

PRA publishes a journal, The Public Eye, three times a year, which reports on specific and current movements or trends within the U.S. political Right, and also produces special reports, past examples of which include "Calculated Compassion," which details attacks on gays and lesbians, and "Decades of Distortion," which alleged scapegoating of welfare recipients. [1]

The group provides public speakers, and has staff on hand to answer queries from journalists, researchers, and activists. Its annual funding of approximately $700,000 per year comes from foundation grants, individual contributions, and the sale of research materials. Expenditures are directed toward staffing, general & administrative expenses, programs and fundraising.[2] . Among its major donors are the Public Welfare Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

PRA is supported by a number of progressive and liberal activists, including Anne Braden of the Southern Organizing Committee, and Suzanne Pharr of the Highlander Research Center. Pharr has written that PRA "sets the standard for researchers and political analysts of integrity," and describes the group's research as "thorough, thoughtful, carefully researched, and presented within a broad context of understanding of the complex relationships and activities of the Right." [3]

[edit] Criticism
Stanley Kurtz of the conservative magazine National Review described PRA's researchers as "conspiracy mongers" for a 1994 report on the religious right. According to Kurtz, PRA used guilt by association techniques to associate conservative Christians with theocratic Dominionism: "By quoting a pathetic Dominionist extremist’s desperate efforts to prove his own influence, clever liberals can now argue that the ultimate goal of all conservative Christians is the re-institution of slavery, and execution for blasphemers and witches.[4] PRA responded to Kurtz by stating that the report was "a serious study of the Dominionist Christian Reconstructionist movement."[5]

The David Horowitz Freedom Center accuses PRA mainstay Chip Berlet of engaging in "smear" tactics and accuses PRA of promoting a "hard-left agenda".[6] The article on PRA at Horowitz' Discover the Networks (DTN) site says the organization's purpose is to promote the Marxist doctrines of "dialectical materialism" and "progressive internationalism". It says PRA endorsed the adoption of the Plan of Action from the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, "largely a forum for anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric".[

Posted by: brickbottom | May 21, 2007 at 12:11 AM