Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Contemporary conservatives have become extremely contentious, confrontational, and aggressive in nearly every area of politics and governing. Today they have a tough-guy (and, in a few instances, a tough-gal) attitude, an arrogant and antagonistic style, along with a narrow outlook intolerant of those who challenge their extreme thinking. Incivility is now their norm. "During the Father Bush period, there was a presumption of civility," Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute observes, but "we lost it under Clinton," when conservatives relentlessly attacked his presidency, and "then the present President Bush deliberately chose a strategy of being a divider, rather than a uniter."

Even more troubling, the right-wing presidency of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney has taken positions that are in open defiance of international treaties or blatant violations of domestic laws, while pushing the limits of presidential power beyond the parameters of the Constitution. It is aided and abetted in these actions by a conservative Republican Congress that refuses to check or balance the president. These patterns were apparent long before the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, but the right wing's bellicose response to the events of that day has escalated into a false claim of legitimacy. Many authors (and journalists) have described the extreme hubris now present in Washington, along with the striking abuses of power. While some of this activity has ostensibly been undertaken in the name of fighting terrorists, much of it is just good old-fashioned power corruption.

Conservatives Without Conscience, however, is not a book about Bush and Cheney. My venture here is not to expose more malfeasance, misfeasance, or nonfeasance in places high or low in Washington, nor even to try to catalog it, for the gist of what is occurring under con-servative Republican rule is all too obvious. Although this is a report that cannot be given without frequent references to the administration's disquieting politics and governing, my effort, fundamentally, is to understand them, to explain why they are happening, while placing them all in a larger context, including the particular events that initially prompted my inquiry about people with whom I once thought I shared beliefs.

Frankly, when I started writing this book I had a difficult time accounting for what had become of conservatism or, for that matter, the Republican Party. I went down a number of dead-end streets looking for answers, before finally discovering a true explanation. My finding, simply stated, is the growing presence of conservative authoritarianism. Conservatism has noticeably evolved from its so-called modern phase (1950-94) into what might be called a postmodern period (1994 to the present), and in doing so it has regressed to its earliest authoritarian roots. Authoritarianism is not well understood and seldom discussed in the context of American government and politics, yet it now constitutes the prevailing thinking and behavior among conservatives. Regrettably, empirical studies reveal, however, that authoritarians are frequently enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian, and amoral. They are also often conservatives without conscience who are capable of plunging this nation into disasters the likes of which we have never known.

Although I have only recently learned the correct term for describing this type of behavior, and come to understand the implications of such authoritarian thinking, I was familiar with the personality type from my years in the Nixon White House. We had plenty of authoritarians in the Nixon administration, from the president on down. In fact, authoritarian thinking was the principal force behind almost everything that went wrong with Nixon's presidency. I had had little contact with my former colleagues, or with their new authoritarian friends and associates, until the early 1990s, when they decided to attack my wife and me in an effort to rewrite history at our expense. By then I had left public life for a very comfortable and private existence in the world of business, but they forced me back into the public square to defend myself and my wife from their false charges. In returning, I discovered how contemptible and dangerous their brand of "conservatism" had become, and how low they were prepared to stoop for their cause. ...

OLBERMANN: That would be the thesis of the book, and we‘ll go into that at length. But I wanted to start at the very beginning. You dedicated this book to Barry Goldwater. What would he, in your opinion, having known him and having dealt with him on these political issues, have thought of the current conservative movement as it has become, and what would the conservative movement have thought of him at this point? What do they think of him now?

DEAN: Well, that‘s a—I think right now, we can say, in fact, I discuss this in the book, that Goldwater Republicanism is really RIP. It‘s been put to rest by most of the people who are now active in moving the movement further to the right than it‘s ever been.

I think the senator, before he departed, was very distressed with conservatism. In fact, it was our conversations back in 1994 that started this book. It‘s really where I began. We wanted to find answers to the questions as to why Republicans were acting as they were, why conservatives had taken over the party, and were being followed, you know, as easily as they were in taking the party where he didn‘t think it should go.

OLBERMANN: What did you find? In less than the 200 pages that the book—

DEAN: Right.

OLBERMANN: ... that the book goes into.

DEAN: I ran into a massive study that had really been going on for 50 years now, by academics. They‘ve never really shared this with the general public. It‘s a remarkable analysis of the authoritarian personality, both those who are inclined to follow leaders, and those who jump in front and want to be the leaders.

It was not the opinion of social scientists, it was information they drew by questioning large numbers of people, hundreds of thousands of people, in anonymous testing, where they conceded, you know, their innermost feelings and reactions to things. And it turned out that these people were—most of these that came out of the testing were people who had been prequalified to be conservatives, and then they found that this, indeed, fit with the authoritarian personality.

OLBERMANN: Does it really—do the studies indicate that it really has anything to do with the political point of view? Is it—would it be easier to essentially superimpose authoritarianism over the right than it would the left? Or is it theoretically possible that they could they have gone in either direction, and it‘s just a question of people who like to follow other people?

DEAN: They found—they have found really—maybe a small, 1 percent of the left, who follow authoritarianism, probably the far left. But as far as widespread testing, it is just overwhelmingly our conservative orientation.

OLBERMANN: There is an extraordinary amount of academic work that you quote in the book. A lot of it is very unsettling. It deals with psychological principles that are frightening and that may have faced other nations at other times, in Germany and Italy in the ‘30s coming to mind in particular.

But what—how does it apply now? And to what degree should it scare us? And to what degree is it something that, that, that, that, that might still be forestalled?

DEAN: Well, to me, it was something of an epiphany to run into this information. First, I‘d never read about it before. I sort of worked my way into it until I found it. It‘s not generally known out there what‘s going on. And I think, from best we can tell, these people, the followers, a few of them, will change their ways when they realize what they‘re doing, not even aware of their behavior.

The leaders, those who were inclined to dominate, are not going to change a second. They‘re going to be what they are.

So by and large, the reason I write about this is, I think we need to understand it, we realize, when you take a certain step and vote a certain way and head in a certain direction, where this can end up. So it‘s sort of a cautionary note. It‘s a warning as to where this can go, because other countries have gone there.

OLBERMANN: And the idea of leaders and followers going down this path, and perhaps taking a country with them, requires—this whole edifice requires an enemy, communism, al Qaeda, Democrats, me, whoever, for the two minutes hate. I mean, there is—we overuse—I overuse the Orwellian analogies to nauseating proportions. But it really was, in reading what, what, what, what you wrote about, and especially what the academics talked about, there was that, that two minutes hate thing. There has to be an opponent, an enemy, to coalesce around, or the whole thing falls apart. Is that the gist of it?

DEAN: It is one of the things that, believe it or not, still holds conservatism together, because there are many factions and conservatisms, and their dislike or hatred of those they portray as liberal, who will be anybody who basically disagrees with them, is one of the cohesive factors. There are a few others, but that‘s certainly one of the basics.

There‘s no question that the—particularly the followers,. they‘re terribly, they‘re very aggressive in their effort to pursue and help their authority figure out, or their authority beliefs out. They will do whatever needs to be done, in many regards. They will blindly follow. They stay loyal too long. And this is the frightening part of it.