Organized Discontent

In a 2006 New York Times article titled "Defunders of Liberty," cultural historian Thomas Frank examined the sordid career of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff in light of his indictment and subsequent sentencing for conspiracy and wire fraud.1 Abramoff's body of work in American politics, dating back to the early 1980s, resembled that of an intellectual visionary more than it did the resume of a common criminal. In fact, Frank saw Abramoff as nothing less than "a sort of young Robespierre of the Reagan Revolution." "It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left," Abramoff once explained, "Our job is to remove them from power permanently."2 This project found its ideal expression in the direct mail campaigns of conservative strategists during the 1970s. These mailings crafted a unique genre of conservative communication that transgressed the secular conventions of the public square. This genre would come to dominate conservative communications writ large because it unified the movement while undermining liberal influence in American public life. Direct mail functioned as an early form of conservative resentment cultivation and constituency formation for a burgeoning Christian Right and its New Right architects in American public life.

The Revolution that had produced both the Reagan presidency and Abramoff's career in Washington shared a common through-line: an unwavering commitment to ideological principle and a ruthless pragmatism in the public square. Frank emphasized this point in his New York Times piece. Abramoff's comment about "liquidating the left" contained "the essence of the emerging conservative project" that culminated in the Reagan presidency. "You don't just argue with liberals," Frank observed, "you damage them." Frank's observations drew his readers' attention not only to the brutality of conservative grand strategy, but also to a level of ideational and strategic consistency rarely seen in American public life. Much of this was first accomplished in the 1970s through the sophisticated if misunderstood media of direct mail marketing.3 The goal of these mailings was simple: to make their readers angry, even resentful. Much needed campaign funds were also part of the deal — including funds that often went directly to the campaigns' organizers. Most importantly, the mailings forged a uniquely conservative genre of communication that was as abrasive as it was informative as it was entertaining.

Since at least the mid-1960s, conservatives of various sorts, including the likes of publisher William Rusher and direct mail consultant Richard Viguerie, have debated how best to adapt American conservatism to changing cultural times, to shifts in socio-economic sentiment, and to oftentimes volatile encounters between "the people" and the "powers that be."4 For these social actors, the East Coast had become a symbol of an establishment presence within the Republican Party — a sign of the worst kind of ideational stagnancy. For Rusher in particular, the party needed a spark that could energize new voters while strengthening the commitment of those already within the proverbial fold. Rusher's little studied text, The New Majority Party, published in 1975, would provide the blueprint necessary to remake the GOP as he and his supporters saw fit.5 What would become "the New Right" in American public life largely emerged from this collective reconsideration of how best to make conservative ideas palatable to the American people in the midst of Watergate, Vietnam, and severe economic uncertainty. In essence, the New Right embodied what Viguerie and his ideological peers of the 1970s attempted to practice daily in their meetings, publications, and policy briefings: principle over party. In the midst of a crumbling New Deal Order, how would conservatives advertise their message to the broadest yet most electorally productive audience possible?6 The weapon of choice would be direct mail as both delivery system and carefully crafted genre of incendiary proportions.

In essence, direct mail was an affective means of circulating a particular vision of American society within specific communities of readers and consumers as the collective expression of various urgent "social issues." It was as pragmatic as it was ideological because it sought to package largely political content within easily digestible taglines, advertising formulas, and sets of provocative images to further conservative aspirations for electoral and legislative power.7 Conservative consultants deployed what political scientist Larry Sabato describes as the "poisoned pen of politics" in order to gain an explicit advantage over their political counterparts in the public sphere.8 In no uncertain terms, conservative operatives like Viguerie and strategist Howard Phillips created a unique communicative genre of language through their use of direct mail that challenged assumed liberal democratic boundaries between informing and entertaining, between art and news, and between fact and fiction. As anthropologist Susan Harding has argued, these conservative conventions challenged the very mores of secularism itself — a challenge still largely unmet by those committed to defending liberal democracy's predominant organizing logic.9

Before the 1970s, direct mail was used predominantly by those in the fields of marketing and advertising. In most cases, it was an effective but costly way of generating interest and financial support for a given campaign or product in the marketplace. The logic, or genre, of direct mail made many of these aspirations possible because it relied on a form of affective encouragement to and from its various readerships. For one Democratic strategist, this formula was understood as "I-to-Me communications" aimed at "the already committed and not intended to convert the non-believers."10 In this sense, conservative operatives went about rewiring American public life according to the myriad connections made between party and constituency through the direct mail campaign.11 Such technological developments were characteristic of a moment in the history of American conservatism when professional consultants began to advise extensively on campaign-making and branding. Richard Viguerie in particular fits this character description when compared to the publishing prowess of Rusher, or the grand strategy of Howard Phillips: a fellow New Right conservative who also worked to "defund the left" from within the confines of the federal government.

While some commentators and literary scholars of American religion and politics have examined the impact of direct mail on conservative motivation and strategy formation in the recent past, work in American religious history has tended to examine what "activated" or catalyzed the "rise of the Christian Right."12 Much of this research has focused on the content of such a rise in an effort to explain how the Right reached  social and political prominence so quickly — while still somehow remaining under the proverbial radar.13 In most cases, historians of American religion use Southern racism to explain the Christian Right's "rise" and subsequent power in the public square. As a result, we have understood American conservatism's rise to dominance less through its deployment of marketing strategies and communicative genres through the post and more through the contents of conservative argumentation. In my estimation, direct mail is best understood as the circulatory apparatus needed to make possible three distinct but interrelated phenomena in histories of the recent American past: the rise of Ronald Reagan, the ascendance of our ubiquitous, polarized present, and the proliferation of distinctly conservative ideas about free markets, religion, and social issues.

In 1982, the Columbia Journalism Review published one of the earliest scholarly accounts of direct mail and its impact on American public life by journalism scholar Ralph Whitehead. Provocatively titled "Direct Mail: The Underground Press of the 80s," the analysis illustrated that much more was at play in direct mail than raising campaign funds. In fact, the medium had an insidious purpose: "to mould your thinking."14  By the early 1980s, upwards of fifteen million pieces of direct mail were coursing through the circulatory system of the republic. This amounted to half the circulation of one of America's most well-known periodicals, The Wall Street Journal. "For its millions of steady readers, political mail plays a crucial role in forming opinion," Whitehead contended. "To do this . . . it must do its work apart from and even in opposition to such journalistic conventions as balance and objectivity." Put another way, direct mail functioned as an ideational amplification system fit for a deregulatory age of culture wars and neoliberal ascent.15 It also challenged taken-for-granted journalistic conventions such as source verification and the inherent value of "facts." In their place, new conservative communicative conventions were born: ones that would forever change the character of public deliberation and debate.

"One of the conventions of these letters . . . is THE STRIKING FACT," Whitehead notes. "Usually slammed home in a single sentence, this bold but documented assertion is designed to fuse emotion and information for maximum impact."16 Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority was particularly adept at composing the striking fact for a variety of direct mail campaigns. By the middle of the 1980s, for example, the AIDS epidemic had become the latest ground of conservative activism and base mobilization. Evangelical and fundamentalist preachers in particular leveraged anti-homosexual sentiment on behalf of a larger discursive project that linked AIDS to seemingly sexually irresponsible homosexuals.17 Appropriately titled, "AIDS: The Gay Plague," a 1984 Moral Majority mailing expertly deployed the striking fact in hopes of galvanizing its readership to act on behalf of a nation under sexual siege. "Dear friend," the mailing's personal appeal from Falwell began, "Over 700 Americans are already dead! And I am writing this letter to warn you that 'The Gay Plague' is not confined to just the homosexual community."18On page two of the mailing, Falwell again blends scientific fact with fundamentalist fiction. "AIDS is deadly . . . so deadly that every person who contracted the disease in 1979 and 1980 is dead. Not one survivor." Because it is direct mail, the content of the message is less important than how it's delivered to the reader. "P.S. I repeat," Falwell concludes, "No one has yet survived AIDS. . . . The number of AIDS victims doubles every six months. Your contribution . . . will help me alert America to the 'Gay Plague.'"

The most notorious examples of conservative direct mail targeted classrooms and what the New Right claimed was taught within them. In addition to building conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the New Right also created a number of political action committees during the 1970s like the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). In one direct mailing composed on behalf of the NCPAC, Republican Senator Jesse Helms appealed to his readership's sense of grievance to invite conservative scrutiny of the public funding of grade school courses. "Right now," Helms warned, "your tax dollars are being doled out to people who are perfectly able to work, but refuse to. . . . Your tax dollars are being used to pay for courses that teach our children that cannabalism [sic], wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior."19 Rather than advocating for a coherent political program, Helms's copy was designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to incite a visceral and emotional response from its readers against an enemy of the people.

What I would like to suggest is that recent histories of American political and religious life need to be more intimately intertwined with related histories and analyses of emergent technologies and provocative marketing and advertising campaigns.20 While conservative strategists like Richard Viguerie would put direct mail to more effective electoral use in the name of political power than did his cultural combatants, this moment was less about what Conservatives said and more about how they disseminated their message. For Democratic strategist Frank O'Brien, the difference between conservative and liberal appropriations at the time couldn't be more different: "liberals used the mail to pay the bills, while conservatives used it to move the country."21 In recent times, a renewed appreciation for intellectual history and the influence of conservative ideas and argumentation has shaped the research agenda for commentators and scholars alike following the presidency of Donald J. Trump.22 In particular, political theorists, scholars of religion, and literary critics have renewed their collective attention to questions of method and theory in the study of American conservatism: including this cluster.23

Conservative consultants like Richard Viguerie are deserving of our careful and imaginative study. While Viguerie's contribution to American public life was ultimately his deployment of direct mail as a fundraising tactic, there is a far more significant insight to note. Viguerie and others used direct mail not only to attack the power structures of American political life itself, but also to help create enduring relationships between conservative Christian communities Protestant, Catholic, and otherwise. In response, such newly forged constituencies were dubbed "The Christian Right" by journalists and liberal commentators because they were seen as dangerous examples of conservative organizing and mobilization in the public square.24 In this sense, direct mail was as significant as a medium as it was as a message. For Whitehead, the widespread use of direct mail by conservative operatives reflected two important changes in American public life: the shift from mass media to tailored media and the emergence of "armchair activists" as legitimate participants in the political process. Not unlike the algorithms that shape our consumption of social media, direct mail as a genre of communication cultivated a particular political subject in the public square — one that could be easily agitated to act in the name of the body politic. In short, direct mail's ability to create a "clear line on an emotional issue [circumvented] the constraints of ordinary party politics." Combined with the widely noted political decomposition of the two parties in the 1970s, direct mail filled a void that would forever alter the tenor of American public life.25

In many ways, we continue to occupy the world that direct mail made for us all those decades ago by way of 24-hour news networks and ubiquitous social media. Direct mail's ability to speak simultaneously to multiple emotional registers in an effort to drive home a singular point revolutionized how political actors would make their cases to the American people for the foreseeable future. It is this blend of rational appeal and affective fervor delivered through expertly composed copy that is most fascinating in the recent history of conservative mobilization and argumentation. So why haven't literary scholars been more attuned to such developments? For Tracy Fessenden, a scholar of American religion and literature, a "particular strain of post-Protestant secularism" has been normative in the literary study of the American Right.26 This has resulted in an assumption that much of conservative Protestantism remains antithetical to modern ideas of progress, technological advancement, and rhetorical complexity — all of which direct mail embodied. While much has changed conceptually and intellectually in the field since Fessenden made that claim, the strain of thought she identifies still seems to be formative in both academic and public venues. In reality, however, our present world of ubiquitous infotainment is not that far removed from the world birthed by Viguerie and his fellow copy writers through direct mail and its relentless deployment of abrasive yet entertaining copy. It is to direct mail's ideational creativity and sophistication of genre, apocalyptic or otherwise, that literary scholars can turn in order to better understand the conservative presence in the public square over the last half century of American public life.

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L. Benjamin Rolsky (@LBRolsky) is an Affiliated Fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, and a History Teacher at Christian Brothers Academy in Lincroft, NJ. He is also the author of The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Television, Politics, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond (Columbia 2019).

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