11-27-05, 2:00 pm
Right-wing psychologist, author and media personality Dr. James Dobson and his national organization, Focus on the Family, have risen in recent decades from obscurity to national prominence. Dobson and his followers now seem poised to wield the degree of national political clout once enjoyed by Jerry Falwell and his “Moral Majority.”
However, unlike Falwell, whose constituency largely consisted of older rural or southern white evangelicals, Dobson has managed to attract a younger, more educated suburban following that may soon be larger and more politically powerful than Falwell’s ever was. Focus on the Family (FoF) now employs hundreds of workers at its headquarters in Colorado, broadcasts on religious and secular radio stations nationwide and around the world, and receives so much correspondence that the Postal Service has issued the organization its own zip code, 80995. Fiercely antigay, antifeminist, pro-war and pro-Republican, the organization has become one of the major players in Washington as much because of its immense constituency and perceived mass support as for its not inconsiderable financial resources and strong connections with Bible-bangers within the Bush administration.
Is Dobson’s success in pushing rightwing politics on America solely due to the virtually unlimited material resources (money, broadcasting networks, ink and paper and presses and video studios) available to the political right? Do great masses of younger, suburban Americans really loathe gays and lesbians, want environmental laws gutted, crave more tax cuts for the superrich and want women’s place to be limited to the kitchen, the nursery and the bedroom? And if not, how do groups like Dobson’s recruit mass support among younger, educated working people? And most importantly, what (if anything) can the left, liberals and progressives learn from their success?
Unlike Falwell, Pat Robertson and the past generation of televangelists, Dobson has carefully tailored his outreach to contemporary suburban and urban tastes. Dobson himself holds an earned PhD in psychology and is a prolific author, silver-tongued speaker and master of contemporary media. Perhaps his greatest claim to fame is that he is the original popularizer of the now-universal expression “tough love.” The phrase was featured in his book, Love Must be Tough, written toward the end of the Vietnam War era, (earlier editions of the book contained fulminating blasts against student protesters and antiwar activists), a work that is still in print and selling well today.
In notable contrast to televangelists of the 1980’s, Dobson lacks a perceptible southern drawl, and his on-the-air style is more like that of a wise, friendly professor than that of a preacher. And, very much unlike many previous media-driven religious figures, his “ministry” has not yet been tarnished with significant financial corruption. Occasional personnel “scandals” within Dobson’s organization, such as the notorious case of a “cured” gay man whose “deliverance” into the straight life proved surprisingly temporary, have had little long-term impact on Dobson’s or his group’s reputation and public influence.
Yet, it is not Dobson’s undeniable brilliance and personal charisma alone that has driven the success of Focus on the Family. Dobson’s success story is one of “giving people what they want,” or in the case of FoF, creating what appears to be a gigantic public constituency by expertly and “caringly” addressing people’s most immediate personal and social pain, and tagging on the right wing’s political agenda as a sort of fine print.
The vastly greater part of Dobson’s public outreach does not deal explicitly with politics, but rather with toddlers’ tantrums, shaky marriages, baby blues and bedroom issues. A review of Dobson’s “Top 100 Broadcasts” listed on the FoF website shows the majority of the programs feature psychological advice on problems such as interpersonal communication, fatigue, selfesteem and addiction. Other frequent themes include child abuse, recovery from rape or childhood trauma, parenting issues and dating, marriage and relationship crises. About one out of every 10 programs is about sex. Although every broadcast has a clear religious orientation, only a small minority (less than 20 percent) of the programs could be called preaching or sermonizing. And, of the “Top 100,” only three or four programs on anti-abortion or antigay themes can be described as explicitly promoting the right-wing political agenda as such.
This is not to say that FoF goes under false colors. Dobson is always amply clear on where he stands, and on the organization’s Internet homepage a prominent link asks visitors to “Contact California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and urge him to stand firm in
his resolve to veto a gay marriage bill.” Another link, “Cultural Issues,” found on a pull-down menu within the FoF website, offers books and pamphlets that make the organization’s core ideology clear. Available “resources” (most not written by Dobson himself) include “The ACLU vs. America,” “Coming Out of Homosexuality,” “How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America,” “The New Tolerance: How A Cultural Movement Threatens To Destroy You, Your Faith, And Your Children,” and even the blasphemously titled “When God Says War is Right.”
One may draw two conclusions from FoF’s public presence: The first is that the overwhelming majority of Dobson’s admittedly vast following tunes in or writes seeking personal or relationship advice, not to express their support for the war in Iraq or opposition to women’s equality. The second and more immediately relevant lesson for left and progressive forces is that the right builds strength by appearing to address people’s immediate human needs, and then, once the hook is set, introducing the most palatable aspects of their own profoundly antihuman ideology as logical and even necessary for human happiness.
It is indeed ironic that a great part of the suffering that the religious right claims to be concerned about (loneliness, social and family disintegration, child abuse, mental and emotional illness, the commodification of sex and the coarsening of American culture) is a result of either the capitalist system itself, or of conscious political choices not to devote available public resources to pressing human needs. However, the day is past when the religious right would respond to people’s needs by declaring “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die” or “Offer it up.” In fact, some of what FoF does is genuinely helpful, and a few of their standpoints (against addiction, consumer debt slavery, child abuse, neo-Malthusianism, the porn industry, and family/household violence and against financing state budgets with lotteries and gambling) could and should be shared wholeheartedly by the left. It is a grave strategic error to dismiss the 21st century religious right as the same old gang of crooks, cornballs, fundamentalists and lechers as always. Yet, any left response to the right-wing challenge that ignores the real needs that “ministries” like FoF purport to address is even more deeply flawed.
So what can left and progressive forces do to counter the religious right’s (very effective) appeal to those who are hurting, lonely and in personal pain? How can leftists grab back the initiative from groups like FoF and address immediate issues that occupy ordinary people’s lives here and now (despair, relationship problems, child-raising, sex, aging, death), while still remaining faithful to our core struggle for working-class power and human material and political liberation? Arguably, Marxism has precious little that is unique to say about phobias, dating, intimate satisfaction, sibling rivalry, grandparenting or the horrors of the tantrum. Nor, one may suggest, should it. Past utopian attempts at left “cultural revolution” or building the new world in the “belly of the old” have generally had dismal results, and “the new socialist man and woman” can hardly be expected to emerge independent of a long-established new socialist reality. Most activists are not and cannot become therapists, and even the best-intentioned efforts to forge a coherent left ideology of emotional health, child-raising or sexuality (viz. Wilhelm Reich) seem inevitably to shatter into dust against the very material wall of capitalism. Lenin compares leftists who spend their time obsessed with such matters to navel-gazers.
Yet, waiting for “advanced workers” to recruit themselves spontaneously by realizing that objective dangers and opportunities are more important than their subjective ones guarantees a microscopic cadre of “The Enlightened”, but never a mass movement. The first step toward mass-based social change is recognizing, acknowledging and working with both the subjective and the objective realities working people face every day “on the ground” in order to reach people where they are and inspire them to move forward.
We cannot be content with trying to convince masses of people that, objectively, their greatest concern must be defeating the ultraright and defending democracy if we cavalierly brush aside their biggest immediate subjective concerns about raising the next generation, making a living, family and household life, sex, paying the bills, aging and dying, not necessarily in that order. Scholarly dissertations about false consciousness aside, for the left to take the “principled” but idealistic approach of ignoring these subjective concerns virtually guarantees that organizations like Focus on the Family will continue to have their own zip codes, while left groups go on struggling for bare survival. If the left ever hopes to build a mass movement, these critical questions absolutely must be fearlessly confronted with creative solutions.
A possible way out of this dilemma is to seek to address those many immediate subjective issues that Marxism can indeed address in a unique or particularly effective way, and attempt to confront personal questions that are outside the scope of public politics with what was once called the special “plus” that Marxism can offer. As examples, recovery from childhood trauma may be a psychological, not a political issue, but cutbacks and shortfalls in community-based psychiatric services are very political indeed, an inconvenient fact that groups like Dobson’s carefully ignore. In spite of much interesting feminist theory on the subject, marital discord remains a problem that is usually more interpersonal than political in any meaningful or material sense of the word. Nonetheless, the financial, time- and workrelated pressures that underlie far too many spousal conflicts are deeply political. Though the aging process and death are part of the human biological heritage and not political, issues of health care, Social Security, retirement fund protection and real Medicare reform are core political questions. And, of course, credit card and personal debt issues bedeviling so many working families today are nothing if not political.
While Marx has little to say about sex, dating or caring for kids with colic, live, breathing Marxists have plenty to say, and even more to hear. Often (perhaps in the majority of cases), working people who are experiencing loneliness or personal, financial or family problems (and who isn’t these days?) mainly want a listening ear, or perhaps a solid shoulder to cry on. Capitalism’s relentless destruction of all interpersonal networks except those that serve its interests has left immense numbers of working people without a safety net and defenseless against the seduction of the religious right. If left groups, labor and activists can find a way to offer the kind of simple, honest human support, solidarity and comradeship that capitalism has robbed from masses of working people, the left movement can expect unprecedented mass growth. If not, the road to the future will be rough indeed. Finally, Marxists can offer a unique subjective insight that the right, religious or secular, cannot: the concept of righteous anger.
Right-wing ideologues like Dobson realize and fear this, and have bitterly fought to expunge the concept of “victimhood” from American political discourse. If each individual has only himself or herself to blame for racism, exploitation, poverty, rape and abuse, unemployment or illness, anger is self-destructive. Suicide rates, drug use and the mushrooming problem of youth “self-injury” or “self-harm” all suggest that this ruling class initiative has scored significant success. But, when the questions are transformed from “Why am I this way?” and “What did I do wrong to have this happen to me?” to “What have they done to me?” righteous anger becomes a powerful force for change, both personal and social. If there are no victims, perpetrators also conveniently vanish. But, drawing on an old Texas saying, when working people stop letting the ruling class spit in our faces and tell us it is raining (the actual saying is considerably more salty), we will begin to see the dawn of a new day.
The truly sinister aspect of groups like FoF is how they harness people in trouble, grief or mourning to pull the evil vehicle of the ultra-right agenda. Dobson and those like him have embraced with a vengeance the old 1960’s axiom that “the personal is political” and turned it on its head. Thus, a grieving parent who orders a pamphlet from FoF on how to cope with the loss of a child materially ends up doing his or her bit to help the living children of billionaires seeking repeal of the estate tax. A troubled couple wanting advice about sexual problems is automatically counted in the ranks of those who fight to enshrine homophobia in the US Constitution, and the fearful family of a senior who contact friendly, wise old Dr. Dobson to find out the symptoms of Alzheimer’s make an unknowing but effective contribution toward putting an end to Social Security as we know it. All this, if nothing else, is reason enough for the left to make a special, conscious effort to recapture the initiative from the religious right, and to be true to the promise of “a new world in birth.” The future expects no less from us.
--Owen Williamson teaches sociology at the University of Texas at El Paso.
