Abstract

"Constructing Victimhood: Right-Wing Interest Groups and Institutional Hollowing in the 20th Century"

Caroline Johnston, University of Cambridge (caroline.a.johnston@vanderbilt.edu)

In the last quarter of the 20th century, institutions funded by right-wing businessmen worked to declaw a wide range of federal institutions. They sought to defund social services, curb regulatory oversight, and quiet legal challenges that hindered corporate autonomy. Focused on the Heritage Foundation and the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, this paper illuminates the ideological posture interest groups sharpened and relied upon in order legitimize their institution hollowing campaign.

This paper will deconstruct the anti-statist principles that right-wing interest groups cultivated, which helped convince a wider public to be critical of federal institutions. The groups coopted language long used by segregationists who had resisted emancipation, Reconstruction, and later the Civil Rights Movement. Interest groups used segregationists’ language to argue against environmental regulation, corporate oversight, labor organizing, affirmative action programs, and civil rights protections.

By positioning themselves of victims of “federal tyranny,” conservative Americans in the 1970s and 1980s renegotiated collective memories of federal intervention. White Christian conservatives and free market executives, facilitated by interest groups, solidified their political alliance by obscuring histories of federal programs and subsidies designed for their advantage. Right-wing interest groups developed both the political processes that weakened federal institutional power and the ideologies that made these processes popular.