Dancing on Weyrich's Grave

Burying conservatism
Paul Weyrich helped American conservatism rise to prominence. It's fitting that his death comes at the movement's nadir
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* Ian Williams

o guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 December 2008 14.00 GMT
o Article history

I oppose the death penalty but, as Clarence Darrow said, I often read obituaries with great pleasure, and I read the recent epitaphs to Paul Weyrich – the man who put the truth in the rumours about vast right-wing conspiracies – with even more gusto than usual.

That may sound unseemly, but one only has to read Weyrich's own obituary of Augusto Pinochet to see him clog-dancing on the hidden graves of the Chilean tyrant's thousands of victims:

Pinochet should go down in history as a liberator ... Yet what he is known for, it seems to me, are the deaths of some 3,000 people and the torture of others. As William F Buckley reminded us, Pinochet "spoke with passion to say he had not himself known about, let alone authorised any of the random killings and torture laid at his door." Perhaps he did not know of these killings and the torture of the living. First, let it be said: He fought a war. And when you fight a war, people will end up dead.

Dead, not to mention tortured, raped, thrown from helicopters and all the rest of the sundry dry-runs for Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib (also cheered by Weyrich) that were pioneered by the Chilean Caudillo.

Weyrich and his conspiratorial network of foundations depended on two very odd sets of benefactors for such proponents of the moral majority and manipulators of the evangelical block vote: booze and ciggies. Joe Coors gave them their initial impetus, followed by the Scaife family, with valuable top-ups from Philip Morris, which in its previous deranged corporate incarnation put large sums into defeating a national health service plan that could be funded by excise taxes on tobacco (memo to Tom Daschle: an idea whose time has re-arrived).

Under his stewardship, the Heritage Foundation grew like a metastasising tumour from a rival to the John Birch society for eccentric irrelevance into the overt policymaker for presidents, whose pundits graced the talkshows like infallible oracles. Backed by the Free Congress Foundation, NET television and his other organisations, it certainly achieved its aims.

As fellow nutter Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform wrote: "Most of the successes of the conservative movement since the 1970s flowed from structures, organisations and coalitions [Weyrich] started, created or nurtured." Weyrich himself declared: "We are different from previous generations of conservatives. We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country."

And the interesting thing about the rabid anti-communist radicals like Weyrich was how they emulated the unscrupulousness of the Third International in going after their targets with a combination of absolute ruthlessness and manipulation of front organisations. From the persecution of Bill Clinton (for all the wrong reasons) to the swiftboating of John Kerry, his cabal of cheque-wielders were behind the plots.

In triumphant mode at Bush's re-election, Weyrich declared: "There are 1,500 conservative radio talkshow hosts. You have Fox News. You have the internet, where all the successful sites are conservative. The ability to reach people with our point of view is like nothing we have ever seen before!"

And yet, reality has this gravitational effect. It is entirely fitting that as he shuffles off his mortal coil, we can look around and see why Americans looked on his works and despaired. The shoe is on the other foot as protégée George Bush shuffles shame-faced off the world stage. The meltdown of the casino economy, the nadir of American prestige, the stalemate in Iraq and Afghanistan – these are all suitable epitaphs for the world Weyrich made.

But there is an even more telling tale. Weyrich, like the proverbial stopped clock, was occasionally right. He supported trains for transport. However, it was for the wrong reasons, since he apparently gave as one of his reasons that white people took commuter trains.

There could be no greater epitaph for him than the black man who will be boarding the train in Philadelphia to go to Washington for the inauguration next month. The epitaph's second line should be that Barack Obama's election was in part made possible by the sane and liberal citizenry who (belatedly) adopted many of Weyrich's grassroots organising techniques. That may make it possible to say with deep sincerity: We shall never see his like again.

Inshallah.