The New Right was built by copying the left’s religious coalition-building.
Evidence
As the Lynchburg crowd commenced their conversations, Weyrich had already formulated a general idea for an electoral strategy that would take the New Right from opposition to power. He had studied the successes of the left in the 1960s and 1970s, and now he thought he knew what the left had that the right lacked: the right needed to get religion. The left had successfully appealed to religious feelings and organizations in forming the coalition that advanced civil rights, promoted Great Society programs, and opposed the Vietnam War. Just as reformers around the turn of the century had deployed the Social Gospel on behalf of progressive causes, Martin Luther King Jr. has used his pulpit to mobilize change. If the right could access the religious vote, Weyrich reasoned, power would be in its grasp. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 242
Categorization
- XREF: The Christian right’s organizing deliberately mirrored the civil-rights religious mobilization it opposed. — connects to: Neoliberalism forms one distinct faction within a fractious New Right coalition. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 109; The right adopted religious mobilization in imitation of the left’s success; Well-funded right-wing groups borrowed leftist protest aesthetics for funded political goals — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 553 (+1 more)
- SEED: An essay angle on how political movements adopt rivals’ successful coalition toolkits, religion as infrastructure.
Broader Connections
- The right adopted religious mobilization in imitation of the left’s success
#corroborates(1.00) - Well-funded right-wing groups borrowed leftist protest aesthetics for funded political goals
#exemplifies(0.80) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 553 - Left-originated syndicalism became a powerful organizing tool of the fascist right
#corroborates(0.70) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 262