And what they have to say may not be good for our collective political health. Fortunately, we have a window into some of what they willingly profess when no liberals or media is around, thanks to the Council for National Policy.
The Council for National Policy, or CNP, is an infamous secretive society of most of the leading lights of the Conservative Movement, from Grover Norquist to the Reverend Dobson, from Paul Weyrich to Dick Cheney. A quick review of what it is, who its members are and the impact it has can be found here, in one of my first online diaries.
In essence, CNP provides networking for its members, especially between Republican politicians, government officials, fundamentalist religious leaders, conservative think tanks, corporate lobbyists, financiers of conservative causes, etc. Its meetings also help set and coordinate the conservative movement’s agenda each year.
One example of CNP’s influence: Bush made a special appearance at one of their 1999 meetings in order to obtain the group’s collective blessing for his presidential candidacy. Subsequent meetings, since his election in 2000, have been attended by high ranking Bush administration officials, who have often been featured speakers at these events.
CNP is officially incorporated as a charitable organization undere Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, in order to avoid paying taxes, even though its membership is not open to the public, and it provides no educational programs or other benefits to anyone other than its members. The sole sop it gives to the IRS regulations regarding charitable organizations is its online journal where it publishes selected speeches given at its semiannual meetings. Even this small attempt to provide a “public benefit” doesn’t meet the IRS regs, but no one in the Treasury Department has seen fit to challenge CNP’s tax exampt status since an effort during the early years of the Clinton administration which was sidetracked for unknown reasons.
Nonetheless, the few speeches they do publish provide a window into the thinking of the movers and shakers of the far right who now dominate our political landscape. In an ongoing series, I’ll present for you the words of CNP’s speakers so that you too can discover what it is that the most extreme and powerful elements of the Right tell themselves when they meet behind closed doors. Obviously the few speeches that CNP chooses to publish are doubtless the least significant, and least revealing, but I still believe there is value in exploring the ideas expressed, and the agenda promoted, by the members of this highly secretive society.
Therefore, without further adieu, I bring you the enlightened words of some of CNP’s prominent after dinner speakers, so you too can discover what wingnuts say to each other when they don’t think anyone else (especially anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan) is listening.
First up, are excerpts from a speech by Charles Colson, former Watergate felon, who spoke at the Spring 2005 meeting on the finer points of the conservative movement’s superior moral values and what that means for governing America:
Conservatives work for the common good—how you can promote the common good in society. When I read things in the newspaper these days about–particularly Social Conservatives going and saying, You’ve got to do this for us or else. I cringe. I’m not proud of the trade union movement. I’m not proud of a special interest group. I’m interested in the kingdom of God being exalted in our midst in righteousness. I’m interested in the basic fundamental Conservative values, which is tradition and order and a sense of personal responsibility and religion. And I’m not going to trade those as political pawns in a political game. I know that’s controversial but it needs to be said. […]
And if the Conservative movement stands for anything it is revealed truth. As a Christian, I believe it’s revealed truth in the Bible. But it’s revealed truth through the natural law; it is revealed truth through the common wisdom of a civilization that has been lived out. […]
We really believe in the dignity and the responsibility of human beings. We believe it is anchored in their God-given character. We believe human dignity is anchored in God-given character. We believe in the wisdom that has been learned through civilization. We don’t want to cut ourselves off from our past and leave ourselves spinning around in this post-modern vacuum. We believe we’ve learned more from history and from what’s gone on before us and from the great art and great advances of civilization and Western civilization and we want to profit from that for our own good now. We believe in order, because freedom has to flow out of order; […]
Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote that book, One Nation, Two Cultures. I think she was dead wrong. I don’t how many of you read that book; I thought it was a great, very popular book about five years ago. She said, “We’re always going to have to live with these two cultures.” […] She was talking about the two different ways of looking at life in our society–two different cultures. And she said they can live side by side in peaceful accord. No they can’t. Because the basic premises that you live by are just totally different. […]
Russell Hittenger said that the job of government throughout modern history and the biblical job of government is to enforce the common good. The job of government in the last hundred years because of social liberals influenced by Mill is to keep government from enforcing anything on you: free you from the common good. And there can’t be common good anyway because there’s no truth by which you can measure the common good. So the only thing that matters is, you do whatever you want to do and ethics are what Peter Singer says it is: Maximizing pleasure for the most people.
It’s a disaster.
[…]
Today, the Liberals own the culture. We’ve got a political majority because that’s the way people can express their beliefs, but they still own the culture. The culture is determined today (I could give you case after case after case to prove this)–the culture is determined today by people who basically believe Mill. [Note: Colson is referring to John Stuart Mill, who professed the philosophy of utilitarianism, or the greatest good for the greatest number]. . . So long as they control that culture, our victories in the ballot box aren’t gonna make that much difference. […]
But we’ve got a much bigger job than that, and that’s why I appeal to you to have a look of a governing majority – how it is that we look at society, not as the naysayers, but as the people who are advancing the cause of human freedom and liberty and human dignity and the rights of individuals in society and a society that is based in revealed truth, not on the ideological propositions of some coffeehouse dreamers. That’s the kind of life an American would want to live in.
Ignore for a moment the rank hypocrisy of a man who broke the law repeatedly when he was a powerful figure in the Nixon White House lecturing on the subject of morality and ethics. Consider what he is saying and advocating; that conservatives (and especially religious conservatives) need to stand for restricting freedom, and imposing their morality (specifically, morality as revealed through the Bible) on the rest of us. A liberal society which permits diversity and differences of opinion cannot co-exist with their world view. Only by reimposing order on our people’s daily lives (i.e., by eliminating freedoms we currently possess) can we be truly “free.” A more cogent example of Orwellian double speak you are unlikely to find anywhere.
And that is also what the Conservative Movement is seeking to implement: No abortion rights. No birth control. No gay rights. Limits on freedom of speech, and limits on what we can read or watch on television. Limits even on the science that can be taught in our schools. Fundamentalist Christian Morality in all its glory.
That, my friends, is a truly scary philosophy. We just rarely see it spoken about so openly by prominent conservative leaders and the Republican politicians who are in their pockets.
