As a tribute to Paul Weyrich, Russia Blog is reposting below this article two of his op-eds published earlier this year on topics related to Russia. We hope our readers enjoy them and remember Weyrich for who he was -- a lifelong advocate of ordered liberty in America and around the world.
- The Editors
Paul Weyrich, the founder and longtime CEO of the conservative Free Congress Foundation, died on December 18, 2008, at the age of 66. Born in 1942, Weyrich began his career as a young newspaper and radio reporter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and as an activist in the groundbreaking 1964 campaign of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. While working as press secretary for Colorado U.S. Senator Gordon L. Allott, Weyrich formed a friendship with Jack Wilson, an aide to the brewing magnate Joseph Coors. In 1973, with $250,000 in seed money from Joseph Coors, Weyrich, Wilson and Ed Fuelner founded the Heritage Foundation, which would become one of the most influential non-profit public policy institutes in the world and a model for other think tanks, including the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.
Weyrich became involved in outreach to democracy advocates in Russia as President of Free Congress Foundation's Kreible Institute from 1989 to 1996. Through Kreible Institute events, Weyrich met Dr. Edward Lozansky, a Soviet émigré and naturalized U.S. citizen who had created the group Russians for Reagan during the 1980s to support Reagan's pro-freedom policies in the Communist Bloc. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Weyrich and Lozansky joined with others to petition the George H.W. Bush Administration to bury the Cold War divide once and for all, by admitting Yeltsin's struggling Russian Federation into NATO. Weyrich and Lozansky's proposal did not get very far in the Bush 41 White House. Nonetheless, for his work with the Kreible Foundation and personal outreach to Russians, Weyrich deserves to be remembered as a champion of post-Cold War reconciliation between America and Russia.
Click on the extended post to read more about the remarkable life and career of Paul Weyrich.
Paul Weyrich earlier this year (Photo by: Heritage Foundation)
Weyrich is best known by the mainstream media as the co-founder, along with the late pastor Jerry Falwell, of the Moral Majority, an organization that mobilized evangelical Christians to support conservative causes and political candidates in the United States. In a profile this week, U.S. News and World Report calls him one of the founders of the Christian Right in American politics, and a key mover and shaker behind the more public and polarizing figure of the Reverend Falwell. Weyrich's organizations pioneered using direct mail for fundraising campaigns and to mobilize conservative and evangelical activists. After the Moral Majority dissolved in 1989, evangelical Christian activist groups, such as the Christian Coalition, reached the height of their influence in the Republican Party when Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich led the Congressional class of 1994 to the first GOP majority in both chambers of Congress in forty years.
The stunning Republican victories of 1994-95 would not have been possible without evangelical voters, and they led to the first balanced U.S. budget in decades, but also numerous bruising confrontations with a well-entrenched Clinton Administration, which was often backed by the more culturally liberal Washington Beltway media and bureaucratic establishment. During the 1990s, Weyrich became increasingly disillusioned with how much influence evangelical Christians could actually exert over the culture through politics. In the wake of what he viewed as a lack of U.S. public outrage over the Clinton/Lewinsky sex and perjury scandal in 1999, Weyrich declared that evangelicals had effectively lost America's "culture wars".
In a controversial essay, Weyrich wrote, "I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics" and suggested that American Christians ought to focus on building their own countercultural movements, such as homeschooling children, outside of an increasingly decadent society. Weyrich's call for a new emphasis on building Christian institutions over politics was echoed by columnist Cal Thomas and Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson in their book, Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Change America?.
Weyrich's remarks were widely critized both by fellow evangelicals who accused him of advocating that Christians withdraw from politics altogether, and by his critics on the secular Left who accused him of wanting to institute a "Dominionist" Christian theocracy in America. Weyrich rejected both claims as blatantly false, arguing that he would be the first to oppose any Iranian-style theocracy in the U.S. Weyrich added in an interview with the evangelical magazine World that Christians should continue to be engaged in politics, just as they are active in the workplace and in other spheres of public life. In 2001, Weyrich was also defended from his critics' charges that he was an anti-Semite by fellow conservative activist David Horowitz, who cited his longtime support for Israel's right to self-defense and his lifelong friendships with many Jews.
Weyrich's critique of America's moral direction also led him to differ with other Washington D.C. conservatives about foreign policy, particularly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Weyrich viewed the overextension of U.S. forces and influence abroad as part of the dramatic expansion in federal spending at home during President George W. Bush's two terms, culminating in a string of trillion dollar bailouts of troubled financial institutions in 2008. Weyrich publically expressed doubts about the wisdom of the Iraq War and declared that he hoped to plant the seeds for the revival of the American republic even as he feared that the "American empire" -- in financial, cultural and military terms -- was in a state of collapse.
Weyrich was skeptical of what Big Government bureaucracies could accomplish both in America and abroad, but he had an unrivaled optimism in the abilities of individuals, families, and churches to redeem the time. Weyrich served as an ordained protodeacon at Holy Transfiguration Church, a Melkite Greek-Catholic congregation, in McLean, Virginia. Weyrich is survived by his wife of 45 years, Joyce Anne, and their five children and 13 grandchildren.
