THE "EASTERN ESTABLISHMENT"
Dominant in both major parties for decades is what has been loosely called the "Eastern Establishment," which, in the Republican party, boils down to a close but sometimes uneasy alliance between two powerful and wealthy groups: the Rockefellers and their numerous industrial, corporate, and financial coterie ("the Rockefeller World Empire") (RWE); and the neoconservative-Wall Street group, the latter being a tight coalition of neoconservative foundations, academics, pundits, journalists, and think-tankers, along with their Wall Street allies.
Here we focus on the Republicans; the ruling elites among the Democrats are in some ways different – e.g., multi-gendered, multicultural, victim groups and the Hard Left, though the Rockefellers and the left-neocon Wall Streeters are also powerful if not dominant there. The neocons, who joined the Republican right, and soon took it over, in the late 1970s, brought to the alliance with the Rockefellers the crucial opinion-moulding elite (academia, pundits, technocrats, think-tankers, etc.), plus lots of money from endowed foundations, originally Old Right, which the neocons managed to capture totally in the early 1980s. Whereas the Rockefellers undoubtedly have more money altogether than the neocons, they are obliged to do things with their money – like producing oil – whereas neocon foundation money is free to exert all of its influence in a singleminded drive for State power. In addition, the moulding of public opinion is crucial for any wielding of power, since intellectuals must be relied on to spin the apologia for the exercise of power, and for getting the public to go along with the policies which violate all their sound instincts, e.g., higher taxes, government regulation, foreign aid, open borders, condomania, gun control, affirmative action, the welfare state, or the virtual expulsion of Christianity from the public square.
The Establishment within the Republican party is The Enemy, and always has been. The Eastern Establishment has been the key force in ruling the country for decades, and has guided the Republican party into aiding and abetting the Democrats in their continuing drive toward socialism; in the case of the Establishment, a corporate-statist socialism. It was in rebellion against this elite that the Old, pre-Goldwater right, essentially middle class and businessmen from the Midwestern heartland, waged its determined though losing struggle. And it was against the kindred Democrat elite that the American people waged their glorious populist revolution last year.
The composition of the Republican Eastern Establishment, however, has changed over the decades. From World War II until the 1970s, they consisted of the Rockefeller World Empire; since the late 1970s, however, the RWE has been joined by the neocon-Wall Street forces. In fact, the neocons have successfully achieved primacy over their Rockefeller allies in dominating the Republican party. One crucial reason is that the Rockefellers were always openly leftists (or "moderates" in the whitewash term of the liberal media), so that Nelson Rockefeller and the phrase "Rockefeller Republican" became a stench in the nostrils of every conservative, grassroots American. But the neocons were sneakier; they moved rightward from being Truman-Humphrey Democrats in the late 1970s; they claimed to be "conservative" and in short order managed to take control of the entire conservative movement.
How did the neocons accomplish such a feat? For one thing, as self-proclaimed New York Intellectuals they brought to the Republicans and to the conservative movement a veneer of High Theory that the party and the movement had long lacked: and as ardent "anti-Communists" and "ex"-leftists they were warmly embraced by conservatives as prodigal children and as knowledgeable comrades in the Great Crusade against the Soviet Union. Overlooked in this enthusiasm was the fact that the neocons' anti-Communism was rooted, not in the anti-socialism of the right, but in an adherence to other, anti-Stalin wings of the Marxist Church (e.g., Trotskyite, Bukharinite, Menshevik, and, generally, "right-wing Social Democrat"). This bloodless surrender to the neocons could never have been achieved without leadership in this process by the Pope of the Right since the late 1950s; Bill Buckley and his National Review. Buckley was motivated, not only by the anti-Soviet Communism common to the right, but even more by his yearning for respectability and social acceptance in the fetid hothouse atmosphere of the New York intelligentsiaCan acceptance that could be secured by the Kristols and the Podhoretzes.
Once they were welcomed into the conservative tent; it was duck soup for the neocons to take over: propelled by their organizing skills and their drive for power honed for decades in the Marxist-Leninist movement, and clinched by their rapid takeover of wealthy foundations endowed by Old Right heartland businessmen who doubtless have been spinning rapidly in their graves. Hence, the neocon dominance in much of the Reaganite movement, especially in foreign policy, in the upper strata of conservatism, and now in elite sectors of the Republican party.
