Political Research Associates
Also from Political Research Associates is The Coors Connection; How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism by Russ Bellant. This is a short book, 100 pages of text and 40 of notes and appendices. Following the trail of Coors family funding, Bellant takes the reader on a tour of practically the entire spectrum of the American right, from the prosetylising end of the Born Agains to the World Anti-Communist League (as was). If the territory is familiar from other works, much of the detail and some of the perspectives are new.
Doing this kind of detailed, compressed work, Bellant faces in acute form the the basic problem we all have. X knows Y, who knows Z. Is this significant? Is there a connection between X and Z? For example: the Reagan White House supports the appointment of a former European war criminal to run one of the Republican Party’s minor committees. If this does not mean ‘Reagan White House supports Nazis’, what does it mean? Bellant is actually drawing out the strands of a large, ramified network. The problem with the concept of network is: what is the status of network membership? In some senses the difference between good and bad parapolitical research hinges on this question. At its worst all the links are perceived as causal and you have vulgar conspiracy theories: ‘Its all the fault of…’. The rest of us fall somewhere short of that, and for the most part Bellant’s attribution of causality is restrained. Occasionally it goes wrong. This, for example, is on p. 43, about Phylis Schafley. Now best known for her anti-feminist, anti-ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) statements, Schafley began as a right-wing conspiracy theorist. Bellant notes that she ‘defends as a hero the late Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary, a noted anti-communist who has been called a pro-feudalist, anti-semitic collaborationist who did little to stop the German Nazi massacre of Hungarian Jews.’ (My emphasis.) That takes up a third of the 9-line entry on Schafley, and it’s a mistake.
The Coors Connection is published by South End Press of Boston and is being distributed in the U.K. by Turnaround Distribution, if your local bookshop can’t find it. By mail to the U.S. it is $6.50, to Europe it is $9.00 (air mail) and $7.00 (surface). Payment from outside the U.S. by international money order only.