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3 In 1996, he became president of one of the most prominent think tanks long engaged in right-wing attacks on the mainline churches and the ecumenical movement, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (which will be treated in the next chapter). By 1986, Norman Podhoretz was savagely rebuking President Reagan for having become a "Carter clone" in seeking arms agreements with the Soviets. One of Podhoretz's allies in both nuclear and Central American affairs was the hawkish and politically ambitious president of ideologically embattled Boston University, John Silber, who would later wage a losing campaign for the governorship of Massachusetts.

So the Christian Right, many of whose followers are persons of modest means, is enlisted in support of business elites. " Among the most prominent Evangelical theologians, the celebration of capitalismthe freedom to pursue economic gain without government interferenceis virtually unqualified. Jerry Falwell repeatedly claimed that "God as in favor of freedom, property, ownership, competition, diligence, work and acquisition.  . The free enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible.

The social policies of the Reagan administration were charted by George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty (1981) in Reagan's first term and by Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 19501980 (1984) in the second term. Both Gilder and Murray were sustained at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank founded by Wall Street lawyer and speculator, William Casey, Reagan's 1980 campaign chairman who became CIA director. What Gilder, Murray, and other ideological point-men of the Regressive Revolution were doing, was to overturn the claim of Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and the "end-of-ideology" camp of the early 1960s that conservatives had accepted the welfare state as a permanent reality.