Weyrich fears ‘cordial’ ties between GOP and the Right

When Paul M. Weyrich came to Washington 40 years ago, the conservative movement was largely a playpen for right-wing intellectuals.

He helped bring it structure, discipline and, gradually, dominance over the Republican Party, which has been winning elections ever since.

Mr. Weyrich, the founder and chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, said conservatism, though built on ideas, is not an ideology.

“It’s anti-ideology, a way of looking at the world, a way of life,” he explained.

What’s more, “conservatism gets off course when it becomes an ideology,” he said, shifting his weight in the wheelchair that has been getting him around town since a fall in 2001 exacerbated a 1996 spinal injury.

He doesn’t complain. Not about that. What rankles him is the tendency of some conservatives to make the movement a mirror image of the left.”When conservatism becomes an ideology, then, like the liberal ideology, reality has to fit into the ideology,” he said. “So you can’t have any deviation from the ideology. Orthodoxy demands that you take this position, and that has never been the hallmark of conservatism.”

Mr. Weyrich said he is happy that the Republican Party has shed its country-club elitism and finally come to define itself as America’s conservative party. But the relationship has become too close for comfort.

“Right now the conservative movement has an all-too-cordial relationship with the Republican Party that has prevented many conservatives from speaking out, for example, about the absolutely out-of-control spending that occurred in the last Congress,” he said.

Mr. Weyrich has exercised considerable influence over the years. He helped build support for President Reagan’s sweeping tax cuts by bringing religious conservative leaders together with Jack Kemp, a New York congressman at the time and the prime exponent of those proposed cuts.

“When Jack Kemp came up with supply-side economic theme in the 1970s, the religious right had no idea what this meant or how it fit in with anything they cared about,” Mr. Weyrich said. “So Kemp came over and briefed our whole assemblage at the time and convinced the leaders of the religious right to support his tax-cut bill, and that gave it an extra push it wouldn’t have had except for that meeting.”

Mr. Weyrich devoted much of his time in his early years in Washington tutoring religious leaders and activists in the ways of practical politics. He told the Rev. Jerry Falwell there was in America a “moral majority” — unaware of their potential power but waiting to be organized. Mr. Falwell liked the phrase and adopted it for his movement.

“My role was basically as coach to the various groups that are now called religious right — to get them to the point where they could function politically and then to put them into a coalition where they could work together,” he said.

One of Mr. Weyrich’s most public shows of force came right after the first President Bush took office in 1989, when Mr. Weyrich testified against former Republican Sen. John Tower of Texas, who was nominated for defense secretary. Mr. Weyrich raised questions about Mr. Tower’s moral character and personal life and dealt the nomination a fatal blow. Mr. Bush then tapped a relatively unknown Republican from Wyoming — Rep. Dick Cheney — to head the Pentagon.

That was in 1989, 23 years after Mr. Weyrich had first come to Washington as press secretary to a senator.

“I remember, around 1971, there was a major battle on land use under way in the House, with the vote a few days off,” he said. “I heard conservatives were meeting in the Longworth Building, So I went and for 45 minutes listened as differing intellectuals argued arcane ideas about the government role with land.

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