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.

‚ÄúWhen we got started people could not tell the difference between Phyllis Schlafly and the KKK,‚Äù said Chip Berlet, a co-founder of and Senior Researcher with PRA.  ‚ÄúShlafly 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.‚Äù

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‚Äôs, she said. 

‚ÄúThey took ideology seriously and organizing seriously in the 1970‚Äôs,‚Äù she said.  ‚ÄúThey had a strategic funding plan, they did studies and held trainings and conferences.  They parlayed all this into strong ideological positions and they published,‚Äù 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.  ‚ÄúThe Heritage foundation produced a big fat book called Mandate for Leadership, and it became Reagan‚Äôs blueprint for domestic policy,‚Äù 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‚Äôs transition team one week after he took office, and it set the stage for the fortieth President‚Äôs 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‚Äôs 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‚Äôs patriot movement.  The secular right also includes economic libertarians, who believe ‚Äúthe state disrupts the perfect harmony of the of the free market system,‚Äù and neoconservatives and national security militarists ‚Äì apologists for Cold War and Post Cold War U.S. foreign policy, respectively, according to PRA literature. 

The patriot movement, which includes armed citizen‚Äôs militias, believes ‚Äúsecret elites control the government and banks.‚Äù  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, ‚Äúnatural financial oligarchies preserve the republic against democratic mob rule,‚Äù and the extreme right, which includes various neo-fascist groups, PRA‚Äôs 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‚Äôs chosen land but society is being undermined by liberal secular humanists.  Hard dominionists believe, ‚Äú Christian men are ordained to run society.‚Äù  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‚Äôs newspaper of record.  ‚ÄúUnborn child is now used by the Boston Globe instead of fetus,‚Äù 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.  ‚ÄúWe can help unravel that, and say it is a tactical alliance,‚Äù 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 ‚Äòwe are moral, too.‚Äù  But, Berlet said, but once you adopt the language and framework of your opponents you have already lost the argument. 

‚ÄúIf 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,‚Äù 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‚Äôs 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.