I just finished reading John Deans latest book, Conservatives Without Conscience, a revealing look at the authoritarian personality and what kind of a person is an easy, blind follower of authority. It reaffirmed what I have sensed across a lifetime, from my school days, my time in the U.S. Army and across 35 years of community, church and journalism life. I was reminded of Eric Hoffers definitive work The True Believer I discovered in the 1960s about mass movements and the dangerous selflessness of followers who support despots and demagogues.Dean, one-time legal counsel to President Richard Nixon who pled guilty to obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandals, draws from several studies by scholars to show the sorts of people who are commonly drawn to causes. It centers around authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality, which can be a strong leader or unquestioning follower or both. Dean said an Arizona icon, the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, and he had originally intended to do the book together because Goldwater was growing more disturbed that classic American conservatism was being hijacked and refashioned, especially with the 1994 takeover of Congress by Contract With America Republicans He grew astonished by new conservatives reached into the realm of individual lives and a disregard for civil liberties. Goldwater died at 89 in 1998, and Dean just sat on the idea until he saw things come into focus after Sept. 11, 2001.
Distinctly absent from Goldwaters conservatism was any thought of the governments imposing is own morality, or anyone elses, on society, Dean writes. In other words, the values of todays social, or cultural, conservatism had no place in the senators philosophy. Dean spends careful time drawing from the research of Stanley Milgram, who laid out his study in 1969 in the book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. It looks at conscience, defined as our inner inhibitory system — part nature, part nurture and necessary to the survival of our species. It prevents humans for taking actions against our own kind. What he found in tests was that people with authoritarian personalities and deeply predisposed to obedience to authority could do heinous things — ordinary people just doing their jobs by instruction, like an Adolf Eichmann managing the extermination of Jews.
Social psychologist Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba put his research into several books: Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1981), Enemies of Freedom (1988) and The Authoritarian Specter (1996). Altemeyer said that when he started out, he was not looking for political conservatives. He was seeking people who overtly submit to the established authorities in their lives, who could be of any political/economic/religious stripe. What he found was that North Americans who score high on the scale of authoritarian tests tend to favor right-wing political parties and have conservative economic philosophies and religious sentiments.
When they were asked to respond to 32 statements, they showed up high on the RWA — right-wing authoritarian — scale. RWAs highly agreed to this sampling of sentences: 1) Old-fashioned ways and old-fashioned values are the best guide for the way to live; 2) Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us, and 3) Gods laws about abortion, pornography and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished. Dean says data show that right-wing authoritarians make up 23 percent of Americans.
When Christian conservatives take their religious beliefs into the political arena, they also carry authoritarianism with them, Dean writes. He supports that with Altemeyers assertion that acceptance of traditional religious beliefs appear to have more to do with having a personality rich in authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression and conventionalism, than with their beliefs, per se. Dean says that the way faith and politics have been commingled in America has compromised faith. He quotes conservative Christian author and commentator Cal Thomas, … the marriage of religion and politics almost always compromises the gospel because politics is is all about compromise. Much of the book points to a litany of conservative authoritarians and what to what they have said and done: Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Charles Colson, J. Gordon Liddy, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, Richard Nixon, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, J. Edgar Hoover, etc.
His last page draws again on Altemeyer: Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds.” That group would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things have improved as a result.
