Editor's note: Chip Berlet is a senior analyst at Political Research Associates and has written, edited and co-authored numerous articles on right-wing activity and government repression for The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Progressive, The Nation, The Humanist, and The St. Louis Journalism Review. Berlet edited Eyes Right! Challenging the Right-wing Backlash (PRA and South End Press, 1995). He is also co-author with Matthew N. Lyons of Right-wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (Guilford Press, 2000).

PA: What are the main political forces that compose the right?

CB: You can probably divide up the right into three broad categories: the secular right, the Christian right, and the xenophobic right. Everyone to the right of the Republican Party is sometimes lumped together in a variety of ways. And although they overlap, they really make up different sectors that sometimes can agree on an agenda and sometimes can’t. So coalition-building is crucial to their success.

In the secular right you have the standard Republican corporate internationalists, the Rockefeller wing of the corporate right. They think that trade barriers are bad and moving capital and property across borders is fine, but people should be restricted. Then there is a group of people who don’t like that. They are business nationalists. They like strong borders, lots of sovereignty, and trade restrictions. That is the Buchanan wing of the Republican Party. Then there are economic libertarians who don’t like any kind of government regulation except the most basic. They often come into alignment with the corporate internationalists around trade, but end up opposing all kinds of government regulations that the corporate internationalists would support. They’re separate. Libertarians are basically right-wing anarchists for want of a better term. They’re very Darwinian, Ayn Rand-type people. The purists will argue that she’s not really a libertarian, but close enough. Then there’s the national security military establishment. They’re ultra patriots and support unilateral US intervention around the world. Finally, the neo-conservatives are new conservatives because they were liberals and in many cases socialists in the 1950s and 1960s. They developed a backlash against the liberation movements and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. Some of them aligned with cold war liberals like Humbert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson and people like that. They are a group of people who are really offended by gay rights, by the feminist movement, by the idea that America should rein itself in in terms of intervention when its needs, as perceived by the elites, are threatened. So they really are an unusual group of people.

A lot of people note that there are some high profile Jews and a handful of Catholics in the neo-conservative movement. While that’s true, you have to be careful not to step over that line into saying it’s a Jewish movement, because it’s not. A lot of people confuse the issue. The LaRouche people will talk about the neo-conservatives and they use phrases on their pamphlets like 'children of Satan.' That’s kind of an old medieval anti-Semitic kind of framing. People need to be careful here.

PA: So you’re emphasizing that it’s secular?

CB: It really is secular. It’s rooted in a Judeo-Christian morality, but it’s really a secular movement. It combines a metaphysical demand for the morality of the American way of life, as they define it, which is basically capitalism that is unregulated. But it’s a secular movement. It has a base of support that should not be overlapped with phrases like the 'Jewish lobby,' which is a problematic term because it simply erases the fact of Jews who struggle for justice in the Middle East and for Palestinian rights. That’s just a caution that a lot of people are being sucked into this LaRouchian and anti-Semitic view of the neo-conservatives as Machiavellian.

The Christian right, of course, everybody’s heard of because they are very powerful. The Christian right is the largest single voting bloc within the Republican Party. It is a really significant force that needs to be given patronage by the Republicans. People get appointed to federal agencies, and their legislative agenda gets put on the front burner. But even within the Christian right you have two sectors. One would be Christian nationalists. They see America as God’s chosen land, but they draw the line and work within the system. Whereas the Christian theocrats, the harder right wing of the Christian right, are people who think that only Christian men deserve to rule American society. Theocracy means rule of the godly as represented by a particular religious viewpoint. They’re a pretty scary group. The Christian Coalition would be like the Christian nationalists and groups like the Christian Reconstructionists are Christian theocrats.

What a lot of people call the extreme right or the ultra right is part of a larger sector that we call the xenophobic right, which is made up of the folks in the militia movement, the patriot movement, or groups like the John Birch Society. They are very anti-globalist and often work with the Buchanan wing of the business nationalists.

Then there is a group you might have heard of that call themselves the paleo-conservatives. They were a backlash against the neo-conservatives. This is the old-fashioned, usually nativist, usually anti-Semitic, often elitist groups of people who really think the Republican Party is way too liberal. By 'paleo' they mean they’re the dinosaurs, they are the old form of conservatism, which, prior to FDR’s election, would have been typical of the Republican Party. But most of the slightly racist, slightly anti-Semitic, elitist brand of Republican Party politics that was popular before World War II got shelved after World War II because it just couldn’t be sold to any kind of mass audience.

Then there are white racial nationalists. They are always worried about the immigrants coming in and alien cultures destroying America. Some of them are biological racists who think whites are genetically superior – that would be the people who liked the book The Bell Curve. And there are also cultural supremacists who say that it is not race so much as the proper culture. Of course the culture they are promoting is white. An example of that in some way are the Promise Keepers. They represent a form of cultural supremacy because while they work with a lot of Black members, the price you pay for being allowed into the club of men in the Promise Keepers is abandoning the Black Protestant tradition, which is liberationist. There’s a codicil: you can join the boys club but you have to give up Black culture in order to do it. You have to become more white culturally.

Then of course, the ultra right, the extreme right, the neo-nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, the pagan neo-nazis, the creativity movement, and the National Alliance. This is a range of groups that want to overthrow the current system and replace it with a kind of authoritarian dictatorship that promotes white rights and either expels or murders people of color, Jews and for the most part homosexuals.

PA: How does Bush knit this complex picture together to get enough votes to win an election. To be more specific, is he a Christian theocrat or is he just playing politics?

CB: He’s a Christian nationalist. On paper he belongs to a fairly mainstream Protestant denomination, but he considers himself born again. That makes him a conservative Christian evangelical. What’s interesting here then is he has knit together two groups around foreign policy and domestic policy, and that would be the Christian evangelical right and the neo-cons.

Those are two very interesting groups. They both have a kind of apocalyptic view of the world. By apocalyptic I mean there’s a confrontation coming between good and evil. We have to act now because time is running out and this will shape the history of the world. And when it’s dualistic as in this 'us-them' and 'good-evil' rhetoric that you do hear form George Bush, it leads to confrontation obviously. Now the Christian evangelicals who are apocalyptic have a script written in the Bible in the book of Revelations and other books of the Bible in which the Middle East plays an important role in the return of Jesus Christ, specifically Israel, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which is currently known by another name by the Muslims who have the mosque there. PA: Do we need to fear that fascism is on the way?

CB: We always need to keep an eye open for fascism, because it moves quickly and is devastating. I think the mistake people make is in misunderstanding the idea of Italian corporatism. There’s this quote floating around: fascism is corporatism. It’s attributed to Mussolini, but no one can find him saying it. But here’s the problem. Fascism as a social movement is anti-regime and appears to be anti-capitalist. It’s important to draw a distinction between fascism and state power which forms an alliance with capitalist elites versus fascism as a social movement which appears to involve elements from both the left and right and appeals to working people and appeals to stopping the corruption of the regime. The dilemma here is: Bush is a militarist, he’s imposing all sorts of repression, he’s engaged in all sorts of military operations overseas, but you can do that under capitalism. You don’t need fascism to do that. And as bad as what he is doing is, it’s not fascism.

Yet around the world there are fascist political movements. There are fascist movements in the US. The most militant elements of the Christian right like the Christian Reconstructionists are pretty much accurately called fascistic. But you look at groups like the Taliban and Al’Qaeda and they’re as much a form of theocratic fascism as any of the others. Look at Hindutva in India, the Hindu nationalist movement, and there clearly are elements of fascism there. Whenever you combine xenophobia, anti-regime politics, and apocalyptic dualism with a form of militant nationalism, you have the basic elements to build fascism.

So we need to be opposing both US imperialism and unregulated capitalist aggression and we need to be opposing the rise of ethno-nationalist militant movements that want to wipe out their enemies completely. That’s a balance that’s hard for people to find. But it isn’t useful to misanalyze repressive capitalism as fascism because the trick is fascist movements are quite willing to look at repressive capitalism and say, it’s not enough. We need a firmer hand at the helm to fix things. So there is something worse than what we have now. That would be a murderous, militant, dualistic apocalyptic theocracy. I know that for a lot of people of color and immigrants, things are very bad now, but, in fact, things could get worse.

PA: Some on the left use the label of fascism and deliberately confuse the picture to say, well Bush and Kerry are both fascists, so it doesn’t matter what we do in this election? CB: If you had your choice would you rather walk across hot coals or jump into a blast furnace? They are both forms of fire. The answer is there is relative repression, relative aggression, there are relative kinds of cultural oppression. Insofar as things are going to be opened up more by defeating Bush at home and abroad – to give people some breathing room here, some time to recover from the dramatic assaults that we’ve seen on the Constitution and on international law and other things. I think it is an entitled and privileged point of view that says well I can say Bush and Kerry are both fascists, but if you’re locked up in Guantanamo, or you’re being deported against your will, or you’re facing military arms carried by US soldiers in Iraq, the argument might be that we have a better opportunity to stop that when Bush is out. I recognize all the flaws of Kerry and he doesn’t represent my goal, but we have been pushed so far back under Bush that just to have a little breathing room to recover and have the chance to counter organize would be a useful moment even if that is only a small opening that we’re being given, it is better than what we’re facing now.

PA: So it’s more than, to paraphrase somebody else, 'a dimes bit of difference'?

CB: Of course it is. It’s enough of a difference that for some people their lives will be made significantly better, and for all of us, it will give us an opportunity to build a broad coalition to turn things around.



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