ensure an open democratic political system, without it, those with money will certainly continue to exercise disproportionate power. Clearly the ability of business interests, corporations, and wealthy individuals to obtain special government access and influ- ence is patently antidemocratic. Following the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, Con- gress passed a clean-elections law, the Fed- eral Election Campaign Act, which covers both  candidates  and  political  parties.  It limits individual donations to $1,000 for any one candidate and provides matching funds for parties whose presidential candi- dates received 5% of the popular vote in the previous election.¹⁴ Because  Republican  and  Democratic politicians at the federal level thwarted fur- ther efforts in the 1980s, activists began to work for clean-elections laws at the state level.  If  a  candidate  consents  to  private fundraising restrictions, public funding of campaign races is now available in Maine (1996), Vermont (1997), Arizona (1998) and  Massachusetts  (1998),  and  activists are pursuing this reform in 6 other states. Thus, campaign finance reform activists have put the issue on the table for public debate and have raised the public’s aware- ness of the role of money in undermining democratic principles and practices. But campaign finance reform laws can be nul- lified if the state legislature refuses to grant the funds to underwrite them, as it has in Massachusetts, or are voluntary, as is usu- ally true. Even in their weak forms, nearly all Republicans and many Democrats have fought campaign finance reform laws at every step. For instance, 38 of 50 Republi- can Senators and 3 of 50 Democrats opposed the campaign finance reform bill, which passed the Senate in early 2001 with a vote of 59-41. Narrowing Rights for Some of “The People” A t every step, the Right—both the Old Right and the contemporary Right— has opposed across the board democratic guarantees of equal treatment for all, with- out regard to race, ethnicity, religion, gen- der, sexual orientation, and disability. While claiming  to  speak  for  “the  people,”  the Right’s leaders have for decades supported full rights of some people and opposed full rights for others. An early example is the New Right’s opposition to a guarantee of equal legal, political, and economic rights for women when it organized a vicious and effective campaign against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This anti-ERA position was characteristic of the Right’s historical opposition to many other civil rights issues. States’ Rights F or decades, the Right has argued that the Constitution supports “states’ rights”— the idea that the federal government has very limited authority vis-à-vis the states and that most  decisions  should  (constitutionally) stay at the state level. The “states’ rights” slo- gan has an ignoble history. Southern politi- cians widely used it as a code for “White rights,” opposing federal civil rights policies. When the New Right realized it could cap- italize on many White Americans’ impa- tience with antiracist programs, it retained the  Old  Right’s  arguments  and  courted Southern Democrats into the Republican Party. States’  rights  allow  states  to  preserve their “right” to discriminate. For example, the  rights  of  gay,  lesbian,  bisexual  and transgender people are unevenly protected across the states, as are the rights of wel- fare recipients and prisoners. When the protection  of  the  rights  of  unpopular groups is handed to the states, they are likely to follow more conservative social and political attitudes. The “Colorblind” Paradigm T he New Right’s leadership crafted a rationale for its “benign neglect” of civil rights enforcement and its trust in the states to  police  civil  rights  enforcement. This rationale, adopted and promoted by the Rea- gan Administration, differed from the Old Right’s White  supremacist  position  and provided a new analysis of race in America. In  books  and  speeches  throughout  the 1980s, the leaders and ideologues of the New Right  “embraced” the Civil Rights Move- ment, claiming that, thanks to the Civil Rights  Movement,  legal  segregation  was now overturned. This was in keeping with a  widespread  acceptance  among Whites that segregation’s time had passed and it should not be restored. Asserting that the Civil Rights Movement had accomplished its goals, the New Right opposed programs developed in the course of that correction as irrelevant and, in most cases, unfair to White people in the present “post-civil rights” period in which there is “no longer racial dis- crimination.” The only fair current policies, therefore, are “colorblind” ones that do not unfairly discriminate against Whites. The Right’s claim that racial discrimi- nation is a thing of the past serves as a sleight of hand that masks its attack on civil rights. Republican rightists in the House and Sen- ate resisted the reauthorization of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by claiming that it was no longer needed. Similarly, rightists during the Reagan Administration popularized the argument that affirmative action resulted in the unfair treatment of Whites. Nathan Glazer and other neoconservative rightists argued that, because affirmative action was “discriminatory,” it was contrary to the goals of the Civil Rights Movement.¹⁵ By claim- The Public Eye THE PUBLIC EYE SUMMER 2001 6 And, although campaign finance reform alone will not ensure an open democratic political system, without it, those with money will certainly continue to exercise disproportionate power.