Accidental Elitism

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The New York Sun

Few Americans have been more caricatured than Phyllis Schlafly, the woman many love to deride as the Church Lady of the American right. But it is only now, 50-plus years after she launched her remarkable crusade to change American and Republican politics, that she is the subject of a full-fledged biography by a serious academic.


Donald Critchlow’s heavily footnoted “Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade” (Princeton University Press, 438 pages, $29.95) is as much a history of red-state conservatism as it is a biography of a conservative blue-staters love to hate. Particularly when viewed through the prism of gender politics, Mrs. Schlafly’s accomplishment is remarkable. While her counterparts on the feminist left took a movement of the ruling class and rendered it increasingly marginalized, Mrs. Schlafly took a movement of lumpen proletariat and brought it to the center of American power and institutions.


Mr. Critchlow’s book reminds us that Mrs. Schlafly spent her formative political years in ideological exile. None of the nation’s institutions – not its colleges and universities, its media, or even the two major political parties – were hospitable to conservatives when Mrs. Schlafly began campaigning against communism abroad, collectivism at home, and the Republican establishment of the 1950s. She built her movement from the ground up by tirelessly cultivating the troops of what would become today’s Republican base, what Mr. Critchlow calls “moral Republicans”: Christian conservatives, small-government libertarians, and moral traditionalists.


Her tactics and rhetoric were populist as much as they were partisan. Mr. Critchlow vividly describes the distance – both geographically and culturally – between the East Coast of the United States and Midwestern America in the 1950s. Even in 1957, he notes, “the St. Louis Cardinals were the westernmost and southernmost of any major league baseball team.” Mrs. Schlafly capitalized on this distance in books like “A Choice Not an Echo” (1964) – Barry Goldwater had used the phrase in announcing for the presidency in 1964 – which was, Mr. Critchlow writes, “a manifesto against the moderate-liberal wing” of the GOP.


But history will best remember Phyllis Schlafly for her successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. She came late to antifeminism, after more than two decades spent chiefly on anti-communist and national security issues. But when she finally entered the arena, Mrs. Schlafly gave voice to millions of American women and exposed the lie of gender politics: Feminist groups did not speak for the majority of American women in the 1970s. They speak for far fewer American women today.


Ironically, the contemporary conservative movement that Mrs. Schlafly did so much to build today again embodies much of the elitism that she campaigned against. Purged from the respectable right, thankfully, are Mrs. Schlafly’s isolationism, her sometimes bullying moralism, and her flirtation with the John Birch Society and other practitioners of the politics of paranoia. But conservatives have established themselves in institutions formerly off-limits to the right. Groups like the Federalist Society have sunk roots in the nation’s most selective law schools, and conservative media like Fox News, National Review, and the Weekly Standard have graduated from insurgent to mainstream. The rejection of Harriet Miers’s Supreme Court nomination by the conservative elite would seem to be the high point of this trend.


Yet this is a very different sort of “elitism” than the one Mrs. Schlafly decried in the 1950s. After all, conservatism is about standards and merit, and being a conservative means making judgments based on standards and merit, acknowledging that some things are better than others, and some people more talented than the rest of us. Conservatives haven’t worked as hard as they have to pry open the doors of elite institutions to have their accomplishments turned into insults. And conservative women like Phyllis Schlafly didn’t work as hard as they did to be condescended to with gender-based affirmative action.


Ms. Miers may have been this administration’s gift to the empowerment of women – but conservative women, to their credit, said thanks, but no thanks. We’d prefer an elitist male any day – and I have a feeling Mrs. Schlafly would agree.



Ms. Gavora is the author of “Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX” (Encounter Books).


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