The late Francis Schaeffer was one of the most celebrated
evangelical Christian writers of the late 20th century, the
author of several influential books,
including How
Should We Then Live? Though less well-known than such
figures as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Schaeffer nonetheless
played an important role in the rise of what is usually called
the Religious Right.
Schaeffer's son, Frank, has in recent years begun to trade on his
late father's legacy, asserting that Christian conservatives and
the Republican Party have been bamboozled and hijacked by
extremist charlatans. Chief among the charlatans, according to
Frank Schaeffer, is
Sarah Palin, whom he savages with a guilt-by-association
attack involving Lynn Vincent, my longtime friend and
co-author of
Donkey Cons, who also happened to be Sarah Palin's
collaborator on
Going Rogue.
Among the telltale idiocies of Frank's attack is the way in which
he cites a paragraph from Chapter 6 of
Donkey Cons regarding Whittaker Chambers' revelations
about Alger Hiss. This shows that (a) Schaeffer is getting his
talking points from Media Matters, and (b) Schaeffer doesn't have
any real comprehension of Chambers' significance in the history
of American conservatism. Chambers' landmark memoir
Witness was one of Ronald Reagan's favorite books, and
Chambers interpreted his own experience through a religious lens.
And it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Chambers' exposure
of Hiss was a turning point in world history. (Just in case
anyone is curious -- I feel like Paul McCartney discussing his
songwriting partnership with John Lennon -- Chapter 6 was largely
Lynn's work.)
In his desperate desire to smear Palin, Schaeffer doubles down on
idiocy by making Lynn the linkage for a second-degree
guilt-by-association attack. Some such attacks -- including a
misinformed outburst by Rachel Maddow a few weeks ago on
NBC's "Meet the Press" -- have tried to use me as a
stick with which to beat Palin, for having worked with
Lynn, a "known associate" of such a terrible person as
myself.
Schaeffer, however, chooses to focus his own guilt-by-association
Palin smear on
Marvin Olasky, who as editor-in-chief of World
magazine was for many years Lynn Vincent's boss. (Readers are
invited to smile with me at the irony of this. Would you
wish to be held accountable for everything your boss ever said or
did? And did I happen to mention that I spent 10 years working
for The Washington Times, whose founder is the Rev. Sun
Yung Moon?)
Schaeffer endeavors to convince readers that Olasky is a
dangerous "far right" extremist, "who has been working to
more or less turn America into a theocracy ever since the late
1980s and early 1990s," and whose work "was largely funded by far
right banker" Howard Ahmanson. Generally speaking, I distrust any
writer who, as Schaeffer does, insists on shoehorning three
"far rights" into a single paragraph. Schaeffer earns compound
interest on my distrust when, in support of his claim
that Olasky is an advocate of "Bible-inspired
totalitarianism/theocratic neofascism" (!) he cites Max
Blumenthal, son of our old Clintonista acquaintance Sidney
Blumenthal.
Most remarkably, Schaeffer does all
this while posturing as a friend to
Republicans and conservatives and -- further exposing himself as
irony-impaired -- invoking another historic figure:
The chief characteristic of Palin's book is her trashing of the
old cautious and respectable William F. Buckley-style
Republican Party . . .
Buckley was among other things a close associate of that
notorious extremist, Whittaker Chambers, but anyone familiar with
Buckley's career knows that for many years the founder of
National Review was regarded as anything but "cautious
and respectable." Buckley's seminal book
God and Man at Yale was famously denounced as
"having the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at
night" (Saturday Review) and its author's methods
described as "precisely those employed in Italy, Germany,
and Russia" (New Republic).
By dint of his long and successful career, Buckley eventually
obtained a stature that might be deemed "cautious and
respectable," but to invoke Buckley's name as a means of
denouncing an eminent conservative intellectual like Olasky
as a "neofascist" is the act of a fool, which Frank Schaeffer
most certainly is.
