William Rehnquist. Sandra Day O'Connor. Clarence Thomas...
They were not alone - indeed, a welter of connections tied principals of both 2000 election campaigns to Doug Coe’s secretive, elite fundamentalist organization, founded in the 1930’s as a union busting initiative, that stresses benevolent rule by a divine appointed caste of wealthy and powerful Christian "elect", bound together through personal covenants into deeply loyal prayer groups and prayer "cells" and worshiping a denatured and business friendly Jesus:
The Family.
Three of the United States Supreme Court Justices who issued the controversial and logically incoherent ruling in Bush v. Gore and who formed the rump majority of the five justice block that voted to shut down the 2000 election Florida recount were associated with The Family in far less than casual ways. But that salient fact is actually only part of the story of The Family's influence in the 2000 election, and the core significance of the tale is this: the subversion of American Democracy and the slow motion demolition of the New Deal.
Below: video segment from April 3, 2008 NBC expose' on The Family, by NBC's Andrea Mitchell and Jim Popkin :
Key Articles On The Family
Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats (Harpers, 2003)
Hillary's Prayer: Hillary Clinton's Religion and Politics (Mother Jones, 2007)
Showing Faith in Discretion: The Fellowship, which sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast, quietly effects political change. It acts with the blessing of many in power. (LA Times, 2002)
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (2008, excerpt from Jeff Sharlet's book)
Review of "The Family" by Frederick Clarkson
2008 Interview with Jeff Sharlet
Beyond the association of Rehnquist, O'Connor and Thomas with The Family, Clarence Thomas is also an Opus Dei member as is Antonin Scalia. Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia are, according to Frank Cocozzelli, who writes extensively on the Catholic right, Opus Dei 'cooperators', not officially members but who further the group's agenda:
Scalia and Thomas, however are Opus Dei "cooperators" -- simpatico non-members who actively further Opus Dei's agenda . Santorum is another. Being a cooperator offers them technical deniability.
Opus Dei's approach and ideology has a great deal in common with The Family and, as Cocozzelli described Opus Dei, in an early installment of his groundbreaking ongoing Talk To Action series on the Catholic Right:
The danger that a politically active Opus Dei membership currently represents to liberal democracy is not from assassinations by imaginary albino monks (for the record, there are no Opus Dei monks), but in its very Plutocratic attitude in abhorring dissent... Opus Dei is openly more concerned with the economic self-interest of "friends" who already have superfluous wealth and power, often at the expense of the economically less powerful... It is the antitheses of the Catholic Worker beliefs of Dorothy Day as well as the liberal economics of distributive justice advocate Monsignor John A, Ryan.
Despite protestations, wealthier Opus members use politics as the means to further its own financial as well as theological interests.
Many on the newly energized Democratic left have recently become disturbed or dismayed that, even after the insurgent progressive activist-powered Democratic reconquest of both branches of Congress in the 2006 election, Congress seems unwilling to oppose George W. Bush on key fronts - on FISA legislation and on Bush Administration moves to provoke a US war with Iran.
According to a recent New Yorker story by legendary journalist Seymour Hersh, through voting to fund a secret several hundred million dollar "black ops" program run out of the White House that targets Iran, the Democratic Party controlled Congress appears to be complicit enabling the Bush Administration to carry out a secret course of provocation, against Iran, that increases the likelihood of a US war with that nation. But, the majority of Americans are opposed to another, even larger and probably more disastrous, Middle East war and the apparent rift, between the wishes of average Americans and the decisions of their elected representatives in Congress suggests a basic breakdown in American Democracy.
As part of that pattern, at least four out of the five justice majority which prevailed in the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, that definitively threw the election to Bush by shutting down the Florida vote recount, were members of or associated with elitist, anti-democratic and theocratic organizations that serve both as influence-peddling rings, to advance the personal interests of their membership, and by operating beyond public scrutiny and accountability, function to subvert the open governmental processes necessary for healthy democracy
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What if Supreme Court justices Thomas, O'Connor, Rehnquist and Scalia had opted to back Al Gore and allow the Florida recount to proceed, and Gore had then prevailed over Bush ? If only...
The Family, and other elitist, cultic religious groups such as Opus Dei and the Unification Church, have made themselves intrinsic to the Washington power structure at the highest levels. For decades, Family head Doug Coe has reportedly been able to arrange private meetings with US Presidents, and among the members and former members of Doug Coe's personally administered, elite prayer circle can be found Al Gore, James Baker and Hillary Clinton.
After the 2000 Florida presidential vote had left George W. Bush with a razor-thin vote margin in an election that was beset with questions and accusations of voting improprieties, the Gore campaign mounted a legal battle to prevent the Florida vote recount from being shut down. James Baker, who has been described at the Bush clan’s consigliere, went down to Florida to manage the Bush campaign’s legal strategy. Al Gore and James Baker were ranged against each other, in battling camps, in an acrimonious legal battle for the presidency of the most powerful nation on the planet. But above that fray they were still tied, through their former prayer cell led by Doug to the warm, secretive and elitist embrace of The Family...
The Age of Minority Control
In a late 1980’s sermon, probably given at a West Coast retreat of the fundamentalist group The Navigators, which evangelizes within the US military, otherwise genial and easygoing head of The Family Doug Coe explained the power of mafia-style organizational tactics:
"They keep their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Everything invisible is permanent and lasts forever.The more you can make your organization invisible the more influence it will have. Jesus Christ, when he organizes, the way he puts the organization together he makes it invisible."
Coe was following in the tradition of Family founder Abram Vereide who, in a 1940’s pamphlet, declared;
"We have entered an era when the masses of people are dependent on a rapidly diminishing number of leaders for the determination of their pattern of life and the definition of their ultimate goals. It is the age of minority control."
Vereide’s words have come to seem prophetic, especially to developments in American politics that have unfolded in the first decade of the new millennium but if it is indeed the case that the decisions of Washington’s political elite seem to be drifting away from the wishes of a majority of Americans that trend is anything but inevitable or accidental and close to or even at the center of the process lies The Family.
In 1974, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, a Family member, started the organization’s first weekly Bible study for federal judges. Leading up to the 2000 election Rehnquist, who by that year had advanced to become the Supreme Court’s chief justice, was not the only court justice with Family ties.
As Former White House Special Assistant to the President David Kuo wrote in his 2006 book "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story Of Political Seduction", in the acrimonious late 1991 battle over President George Bush Senior’s nomination of Thomas to the Supreme Court, "during the brutal confirmation hearings Clarence Thomas sought solace" from the contentious hearings at The Family’s magnificent Arlington, VA mansion overlooking the Potomac River, "The Cedars", which has housed many world leaders since Tom Philips, Raytheon CEO and Ken Olson, founder and president of Digital Equipment bought the $1.5 million dollar property for the group in 1978; Yassar Arafat and Mother Theresa, a number of unnamed "corrupt African dictators," Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Mikhael Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela...
If Kuo’s list gives the impression The Family serves as a shadow US State Department, Rolling Stone journalist Jeff Sharlet’s new, landmark book "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism At The Heart Of American Power" massively documents that impression is locally accurate but substantially inadequate because The Family is, in a way, an entire parallel government and also a ruling elite which has operated for decades with established bodies of American and international elites.
The story of the Family is one that a single book could never adequately address - Sharlet’s book, based on substantial archival research work at the Family archives housed at the Billy Graham center in Wheaton, Illinois, provides a view on a poorly understood and almost wholly unappreciated but vast new dimension of American politics and political history - in which an elitist, supple form of Christian fundamentalism, often effectively amoral, has incrementally and implacably advanced an agenda supporting the interests of concentrated wealth and corporate power and has co-opted, seduced and corrupted America’s ruling class with a doctrine of hyper-Calvinism asserting the wealthy and powerful are a priori among a divinely chosen elect who are above normal moral rules and judgment.
Besides Clarence Thomas, another US Supreme Court justice shows up in David Kuo’s book; during the Summer of 1996, David Kuo, who had been a speechwriter and ghostwriter for Ralph Reed, Bob Dole and John Ashcroft, received a personal invitation from Family head Doug Coe to go on a fly-fishing trip out west. At "the only private ranch in Yellowstone National Park", Doug Coe friend and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor personally coached David Kuo on how to cast a fly-fishing rod - "Sandra Day O’Connor is draped around me, gripping my right forearm like a stick, flailing it back and forth. It was very relaxing."
Immediately following the contentious 2000 presidential election, Supreme Court justices Rehnquist, O’Connor and Thomas were to form the rump bloc of the five-justice majority which ordered the Florida election recount stopped, in effect handing the election to George W. Bush. Did Family members or Family head Doug Coe influence the votes of those Justices, in Bush v. Gore ? Or was that even necessary ? It is not likely we will ever know and that is the essence of the problem.
It's tempting to think the course of the last seven years would have been radically different had Al Gore been elected president in 2000. Americans upset with the course America has taken over the course of President George W. Bush’s subsequent two terms in office might want to believe candidates Bush and Gore occupied extremely different parts of the ideological spectrum. To be sure, Al Gore took Global Warming seriously and George W. Bush did not. But there were significant points of agreement between the two that merit more scrutiny.
Would the United States have gotten into a war with Iraq ? Perhaps not, but it's worth noting that Al Gore's political rhetoric in the several years leading up to the 2000 election had called for regime change in Iraq and during the 2000 presidential campaign Al Gore's rhetoric (along with Joe Lieberman's) was more aggressively interventionist than that of George W. Bush. It's hard to imagine that Saddam Hussein could have been unseated by anything else than direct US military intervention. But even if a Gore presidency would not have led to a direct US military assault on Iraq, and from that to the sort of strategically botched post-invasion situation that the Bush Administration inflicted on Iraq and bequeathed to the US military, there were other major points of common agreement between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
1985 Al Gore, in ascending to the US Senate, also ascended to a Senate prayer circle run by Family head Doug Coe himself, and in that prayer circle, as well, were US Senator Lawton Chiles and Reagan's then-Chief of Staff James Baker, later to become George Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State. Al Gore has to describe Doug Coe as a "hero", but many major Washington politicians, Republican, Democrat or Independent have also praised Coe and so Gore’s tribute was hardly unusual. Several years later, Hillary Clinton would ascend into the Senate and into Coe's elite prayer circle as well.
During the 2000 election campaign, both Bush and Gore proposed versions of the "Faith Based Initiative" and that's notable given the fact that The Family, and its members and "friends", has played a central in advancing and implementing the Faith Based Initiative.
Shortly prior to his mysterious Yellowstone fly fishing expedition with Sandra Day O’ Connor and Doug Coe, David Kuo had helped to co-author, under Family member and US Senator John Ashcroft, an amendment add to the 1996 "Welfare Reform" bill (which actually ended welfare as it had been known) called "Charitable Choice" - introduced as an amendment to the new "Welfare Reform" bill, Ashcroft’s Amendment opened the legal doorway for Federal money to flow directly to churches and religious organizations. The elimination of both Welfare and church-state separation had long been Family objectives, and with the Temporary Aid To Needy Families (AKA "Welfare Reform) bill, the slow motion dynamiting of the wall of separation was truly underway.
Also in 1985, the same year Senator Al Gore came to know Doug Coe’s Jesus, in Coe’s prayer group alongside James Baker, a project tied to the Family, Community Bible Study, helped George W. Bush, caught between alcoholism and a failing oil business, to discover faith through a Midland, Texas Bible study group. As Bush charted a more successful course and eventually won the Texas Governorship, he was to play a key role in facilitating pioneering church-state hybrid ventures, such as key Family member Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship prison programs.
Many of the "faith based" ventures established during Bush’s gubernatorial rule were later legally challenged and proved dubiously effective or in some cases less effective than the secular government programs they sought to supplant, but evidence for that lagged behind the bright PR gloss that Bush operatives, Karl Rove and others, buffed over facts so that the alleged revolutionary and transformative power of "faith-based" programs established in Texas under Bush, in redeeming prisoners and wayward teens, could be held forth as a national model to transform government administered social programs that had been for decades attacked from the right as heartless , ineffective and wasteful.
As Tom Franks' new book "The Wrecking Crew" correctly, in my opinion, points out, the American conservative movement have for years been embarked on a program of intentionally wrecking and monkeywrenching US Federal Government agencies and programs and the Faith Based Initiative can be seen as part and parcel of that project, which concerns, really, the demolishing federal programs and agencies that were born as part of Roosevelt's New Deal era and similar redistributive and equalitarian government programs that have sprung up since.
The Family was born in opposition to the American organized labor movement, initially as a Seattle based as union-busting effort and as the movement got its hooks in to Washington in the early 1940s the legislative counterattack against organized labor's gains under the New Deal commenced. The Faith Based Initiative, and the Family's role in advancing the initiative, has received little scrutiny and that very fact illustrates how successful the Family's style of politics really is.
The process is strikingly similar to the creep of anthropogenic Global climate change - each year is a bit warmer, but only by a little. In a similar manner, the Faith Based Initiative doesn't involved that much money in relative terms, for now at least. But the Initiative has opened the door for Faith Based organizations to apply for a of of Federal grant money of nearly 100 billion dollars. Gradually, "faith based" organizations are learning to apply for such federal funds and yet there's close to no tracking of how such funds get used or whether "faith based" social programs supported by federal funding perform better than their secular counterparts. In the long term, the process winds up devolving social services, that were once provided in a uniform manner by the US federal Government, down to the local and state levels. The end product, really, is a system of locally-run church social programs that fits rather neatly into the Christian Reconstructionist vision of how to deal with America's poor and down-and-out. The goal is to return America to an imagined halcyon period, perhaps sometime in the mid to late Nineteenth Century, when churches dispensed sermons promoting moral rectitude prior to dispensing gruel, to return America to those happy days when workers and bosses coexisted in some edenic paradise, lions with lambs.
*****
What's perhaps the least recognized major force in American politics over the past seven or eight decades ?
What if there existed a secretive right-of-center Christian fundamentalist group, with its hooks in both major US political parties, that was devoted to gradually, incrementally indeed, shifting US politics rightward but not just rightward but also towards the the rule of a theocratic and antidemocratic elite class ?
What if a recent expose' on this group has proved offensive not only to partisans of the left but also to a research fellow of The libertarian Cato Institute ?
Meet "The Family".
The following is an extended interview between Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute and Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at The Heart Of American Power:
The story of The Family is the story of the perfection of a hitherto almost wholly unnoticed form of secret government--vectoring through elite American fundamentalism and especially through Methodist minister and Family founder Abram Vereide’s "Prayer Breakfasts" that spread rapidly through top American business and political circles in the 1930’s and 1940’s until the tradition became institutionalized in the Congress and Senate in the early 1940’s and culminated in 1953, under Eisenhower, with the first National Prayer Breakfast.
For five decades since The Family has burrowed into the Washington power structure. And it's worth comparing the sort of influence the Family wields with the influence peddling at the center of the latest political scandal to beset the Bush Administration: while two-decade Bush friend Stephen P. Payne has been accused of offering access to the White House in exchange for a donation to the planned Bush Presidential library, and even though Payne claims to have worked both sides of the fence, as both a paid lobbyist of foreign nations and a de-facto unofficial US ambassador or White House emissary, brokering massive international deals such as the sale of US F-16s to Pakistan and the renegotiation of billions in foreign debts held by that nation, Stephen Payne's influence is dwarfed by that of Douglas Coe, head of The Family since the mid 1960's, when Coe took over control of the cultic fundamentalist organization and took it underground.
But the assertion that Family members and "friends" swung the US 2000 Presidential election, though it might be in a technical sense a justifiable claim, would amount to a distraction from the deeper story of The Family and the 2000 election - because to say that The Family "swung" the 2000 election could be taken as suggesting The Family was some sort of external force and that would be exactly wrong:
For The Family’s part, Al Gore did not prevail in the post-2000 election dispute probably not because Doug Coe issued any sort of edict but simply because Coe and other Family leaders had engineered the contours of the very playing field, or battleground, itself which, regardless of The Family’s ostensibly bipartisan nature, slides always right.
Supreme Court justices Thomas, Rehnquist and O’ Connor likely just did what was in their hearts. God speaks to the 'elect' says family doctrine - daily even, and God's voice is not always ideologically predictable. Better, even, if it is not. So, on one day Jesus might even talk like a DLC Democrat or a moderate Republican but Jesus is somewhat more likely to talk in the the voice of a right-wing Republican and, in any case, Jesus’ precepts, his accent and his dialect were always Christian nationalist and theocratic.
Whatever Jesus’ political mood of the day might be, the Jesus of the Family always slides right and towards Abram Vereide’s utopian vision of a benign sort of theocracy where workers ask little to nothing of bosses, bosses give enough to workers, and big business lies down with labor, the lion with the lamb, as if in some early Medieval painting depicting a original, Edenic state free from strife because it was free of Original Sin. In The Family, the path to that utopia slopes always mildy right. Jesus told the Supreme Court Justices what was best - and so they appointed, as the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush.
And it was so.