A Born-again Liberal

May 15, 2002

So many aging liberals became conservatives in the years since Ronald Reagan that it‘s rare and even inspiring to read of a pilgrim who decided to swim against the tide.
In the process, he says he regained his soul.
That man is David Brock, whose book, “Blinded by the Right“ was reviewed by Nancy Sundstrom in the May 2 issue of the Express.
Brock may be well known to those of you who get your ideas from Rush Limbaugh or your “news“ from the “fair and balanced“ Fox News Channel. Throughout much of the ‘90s, he was a self-described “right wing hit man“ and soldier in the culture war who wrote for the far-right American Spectator and Washington Times. Blasted by the established press as a master of sleaze and a hatchet man, Brock‘s book “The Real Anita Hill“ dumped mud on the woman who exposed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a porn-obsessed sexual harasser. His articles on Troopergate and Paula Jones did much to wreck the Clinton presidency, and Brock had a role in inventing the non-scandals of Whitewater, Travelgate, the alleged murder of Vince Foster, and charges that Clinton ran drugs and ordered assassinations in Arkansas.
But in “Blinded by the Right,“ Brock reveals that the anti-Clinton agenda of extremists in the Republican Party was an embroidered lie from start to finish in a dirty tricks campaign that had no respect for the American presidency.
The book is poignant because as a teenager, Brock was a liberal supporter of Jimmy Carter who became turned off to the Left‘s politically-correct excesses while a student at U-Cal Berkeley. And because for much of his career, Brock was a gay man in league with extremists so vile they advocated ditching the Constitution in favor of a biblical society in which Brock himself would have been stoned to death as a homosexual.
As a journalist, Brock says he often had trouble believing the stories woven by vengeful characters in Arkansas who were Clinton‘s enemies; but he was seduced by easy money and the spirit of partisan hatred.
Brock also reveals that the “vast right-wing conspiracy“ described by Hillary Clinton was a reality, largely funded by eccentric Pittsburg billionaire and ultraconservative Richard Mellon Scaife, who gave more than $200 million from 1974 to 1992 to establish organizations such as the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) and the American Spectator. Dependent on Scaife‘s money, American Spectator writers were only too happy to investigate the twisted fantasies of their boss, and the tabloid-style stories they invented were amplified and repeated by the Washington Times (funded by religious extremist Rev. Sun Yung Moon of the “moonies“), the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and the press at large.
At the same time, the conspiracy marshalled hundreds of right-wing lawyers in the Federalist Society, cofounded by former Michigan Senator Spence Abraham. Brock says the Federalist Society (which includes special prosecutor Kenneth Starr) aims to roll back advances in civil rights, privacy, and freedom of reproductive choice, often by attacking the poor to gain a foothold.
Why did the right hate Clinton so much that they‘d risk destroying the American presidency? Brock says it‘s for no other reason than the fact that Clinton was a successful Democrat -- charismatic, well-liked, competent -- and on the other side.
Yet gradually, Brock came to realize that his life had become a lie and that many of his fellow conservative writers had no real ideas of their own, other than to destroy. “Conservatism can‘t exist without an enemy,“ he writes; and even the measured, reasonable ideas of traditional conservatism were trashed along with moderates in the Republican Party.
Brock‘s conversion to liberalism began after discovering that Clarence Thomas really was a pornography addict and a sexual harasser. “The act of doing something evil (in a book review in Thomas‘ defense) was bringing on guilty convulsions, creating a crisis of conscience that I didn‘t understand,“ he writes. “All I knew was that my zeal, my partisan loyalties, my allegiance to the conservative movement, my hatred of and desire to destroy the left -- it was all slipping away.“
When friends pushed him to lie about Hillary Clinton in a book, Brock realized that he’d lost his soul, his conscience and every shred of principle. “Who was this smirking asshole?” he wondered, who defended the likes of Clarence Thomas and aligned himself with gay-bashing extremists committed to advancing the fortunes of the rich through a war on America’s poor.
Eventually, Brock stunned conservatives with his book, “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham,” which presented Hillary in a favorable light. It was the end of his career in the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Today, he notes, members of that conspiracy fill the Bush government: “...the new administration‘s policies of tax cuts for the wealthy, slashing environmental protections, and rolling back civil rights bore the Federalist Society‘s stamp,“ while Christian extremists such as John Ashcroft and corporate interests such as Enron board members decide public policy.
Where would America be today if hundreds of FBI agents had been tracking down real threats instead of investigating President Clinton‘s sex life at the behest of extremists in the Republican Party? Perhaps the World Trade Center towers would still be standing and we wouldn‘t be on the road to war with Iraq in a cynical, transparent move to enrich the oil companies and their directors in the Bush administration.
Brock, the master of dirty tricks and pawn of the conspiracy, says he never got around to voting in the ‘90s. “I didn’t vote because the act of voting, the truest and purest expression of one’s political values as a citizen, would have forced me to confront the political lie that I was living.”
But the choice was clear in the last election:
“I fumbled with the unfamiliar punch card ballot, but the choice was easy,“ he writes. “I voted for Al Gore because I came to realize in writing this book that what set the Democratic ticket apart from the Republican one was that the Republicans, in all of the manifestations I had seen, from Reagan to Bush to Gingrich to Bush again, pursued a politics of self-interest that too often aligned them against the public good.“