Conservatives Without Conscience (14 page)
Read Conservatives Without Conscience Online
Authors: John W. Dean
Tags: #Politics and government, #Current Events, #Political Ideologies, #International Relations, #Republican Party (U.S. : 1854- ), #Political Process, #2001-, #General, #United States, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Conservatism, #Political Science, #Political Process - Political Parties, #Politics, #Political Parties, #Political Ideologies - Conservatism & Liberalism
Social Dominators—Leaders:
- typically men
- dominating
* - opposes equality
* - desirous of personal power
* - amoral
* - intimidating and bullying
- faintly hedonistic
- vengeful
- pitiless
- exploitive
- manipulative
- dishonest
- cheats to win
- highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic)
- mean-spirited
- militant
- nationalistic
- tells others what they want to hear
- takes advantage of “suckers”
- specializes in creating false images to sell self
- may or may not be religious
- usually politically and economically conservative/Republican
Right-Wing Authoritarian—Followers:
- men and women
- submissive to authority
* - aggressive on behalf of authority
* - conventional
* - highly religious
- moderate to little education
- trust untrustworthy authorities
- prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals, women, and followers of religions other than their own)
- mean-spirited
- narrow-minded
- intolerant
- bullying
- zealous
- dogmatic
- uncritical toward chosen authority
- hypocritical
- inconsistent and contradictory
- prone to panic easily
- highly self-righteous
- moralistic
- strict disciplinarian
- severely punitive
- demands loyalty and returns it
- little self-awareness
- usually politically and economically conservative/Republican
A few closing thoughts about authoritarian personalities. As distasteful as these qualities may appear, for authoritarians they can be (secretly or even openly) very attractive. While these traits may, or may not, be found in all persons who are social dominators or right-wing authoritarians, they are characteristics of those who test high. People who test low tend to have fewer of these traits, but it is not possible to say which ones they do possess. Although most authoritarians will deny they are such, often failing to recognize these qualities in themselves, low testers may, in fact, be justified in their denials. The good news is that when some high-testing right-wing authoritarians do become aware of their characteristics they actually do work to change their outlook and behavior. Social dominators, however, do not seem able to make such adjustments. Authoritarianism is not a pathology; nor is the term pejorative, for it is descriptive.
However one views authoritarians, their behavior is not without significance, for they have played a major role in developing the contemporary conservative movement, and now they are taking conservatism increasingly toward
political
authoritarianism. Many are appropriately described as conservatives without conscience. What distinguishes conservatives with conscience from those without? The summary table below highlights a few distinctions, based upon information developed by social scientists and upon my own broad application of that information to government and politics at the national level.
Conservatives | | Conservatives |
They have a high authoritarian personality with a host of negative traits. | | They have a low authoritarian personality with few negative traits. |
They pretend to honor the past while often drawing on its worst. | | They draw on the wisdom of the past and not the worst. |
Order and safety always trump freedom when government needs to balance them. | | Freedom always trumps order and safety when government needs to weight them. |
A “unitary executive” branch operates under the president, who has virtually exclusive and unlimited powers in foreign affairs as commander-in-chief. | | They insist that the separation of powers in government be maintained, along with checks and balances in all areas. |
If conservatives control Congress they run it their way and exclude others from having a say. | | They believe Congress must be a deliberative body free from tyranny of the majority. |
Federal courts should be staffed by judges who think and act like good conservatives, and if they do not, Congress should take jurisdiction away from lower courts, which it controls. | | They oppose packing federal courts with ideologues and interfering with judicial independence. |
Because most of the public does not really understand politics, elites must run the government, and equality goes to those who earn it. | | They oppose elitism and encourage equality for all. |
Government secrecy is necessary in an age of terror, and transparency makes it difficult to run the government. | | They reject government secrecy and seek as much transparency as possible. |
Terrorism has created an indefinite war, and, as Winston Churchill said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” | | They believe honesty is not merely the best policy, it is the only policy. And terrorism must be viewed realistically. |
America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, the Bible is an indisputable guide for government, and there is nothing in the Constitution creating a “wall of separation” between church and state. | | Religious dogma is personal and private, and the Bible is not a basis for government policy; separation of church and state is essential in our pluralistic society. |
Big government is here to stay, deficits do not matter, and if liberal social programs can be choked by cutting taxes, that is even better. | | The national government should be limited, and should be fiscally responsible. |
Voters who are kept anxious by fears of terrorism will become or remain conservatives and keep Republicans in power; it is time—and smart politics—to go back to a Department of War to deal with terrorists. | | The politics of fear have no place in a democracy. A strong defense is the best offense, and the military-industrial complex should not control the Department of Defense. |
So long as America remains the strongest nation, it can control the world and maintain peace by preemptively going to war to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. | | America cannot police the world unilaterally and needs the good will and cooperation of other nations to prevent the spread of terrorism and WMD. |
Tough times demand tough talk, and it is an unfortunate reality that mudslinging works in politics. | | Civility is a sign of strength not weakness, and democracy cannot survive without it. |
It should surprise no one that when conservatism and authoritarianism are joined together the result is authoritarian conservatism. Here too are found right-wing authoritarian followers and social dominators, as well as conservatives without conscience. With science to assist as an analytical tool, the growing authoritarian conservatism can be more deeply probed.
AUTHORITARIAN CONSERVATISM
P
OLITICAL AUTHORITARIANISM
in America still pales in comparison with that in countries like China and Russia, or in any of the many semidictatorial or quasi-totalitarian governments. This is as it should be; America’s founders rejected political authoritarianism when they rejected monarchy and it has no place in our history. But democracy is not simply the antithesis of political authoritarianism, for any government has an inherently authoritarian nature. The United States is a republic, meaning that authority resides with the people, who elect agents to represent them in making day-to-day political decisions. Our founding fathers understood that republics were vulnerable; they knew that “many republics in history, such as the Roman republic, had been replaced by despots,” political scientist Jay Shafritz of the University of Pittsburgh pointed out. Shafritz noted that when Benjamin Franklin was asked what sort of government had been created at the Constitutional Convention, he suggested that weakness in his reply, “a republic, if you can keep it.”
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The vehicle that despotism rides is authoritarianism, and we have been fortunate that authoritarianism, until recently, existed only at the fringes of our government.
In fact, authoritarian conservatism has been present in American politics in some form since America’s founding. There has always been an authoritarian element in modern conservatism (which developed post–World War II), but only recently has it found widespread adherence, overpowering libertarian and traditional thinking. Nonetheless,
there exists a symbiotic relationship between authoritarianism and conservatism, which today is concentrated in social conservatism and the policies of neoconservatism. Its presence in these factions is no small matter, though, for it is they who largely control the current political agenda in the United States. Keeping the authoritarian influence of conservatism in check, however, is vital to maintaining our republican form of government, and it can only be checked if it is recognized and its implications understood.
Early Authoritarian Conservatism
Alexander Hamilton, the monarchist-leaning founding father, can justifiably be considered America’s first prominent authoritarian conservative. Political scientists Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard reported in their study
The Conservative Tradition in America
that Hamilton’s “brand of conservatism may be properly labeled authoritarian conservatism.” Dunn and Woodard trace the ideology of authoritarian conservatism to Joseph de Maistre, a French nobleman and political polemicist who became an outspoken opponent of Enlightenment thinking, and who favored a strong central government.
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Maistre’s writing provides an all too vivid glimpse at his rather dark worldview, such as this from his appreciation of executioners.
A prisoner, a parricide, a man who has committed sacrilege is tossed to [the hangman]: he seizes him, stretches him, ties him to a horizontal cross, he raises his arm; there is a horrible silence; there is no sound but that of bones cracking under the bars, and the shrieks of the victim. He unties him. He puts him on the wheel; the shattered limbs are entangled in the spokes; the head hangs down; the hair stands up, and the mouth gaping open like a furnace from time to time emits only a few bloodstained words to beg for death. [The hangman] has finished. His heart is beating, but it is with joy: he congratulates himself, he says in his heart “Nobody quarters as well as I.”…Is he a man? Yes. God
receives him in his shrines, and allows him to pray. He is not a criminal. Nevertheless, no tongue dares declare that he is virtuous, that he is an honest man, that he is estimable. No moral praise seems appropriate for him, for everyone else is assumed to have relations with human beings: he has none. And yet all greatness, all power, all subordination rest on the executioner. He is the terror and the bond of human association. Remove this mysterious agent from the world, and in an instant order yields to chaos: thrones fall, society disappears.
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Conservative scholar Peter Viereck examined authoritarian conservatism in his work
Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill,
in which he analyzed the “rival brands” of early conservatism, dividing them into two founding schools: that of Edmund Burke and that of Maistre.
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Viereck characterized Burkean conservatism as “the moderate brand” while Maistre’s as “reactionary.”
*
Burkean conservatism was not authoritarian but constitutionalist, while Maistrean conservatism was “authoritarian in its stress on the authority” being granted to “some traditional elite.”
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Although most conservative scholars choose to ignore Maistre, treating him as an unwelcome member of the family,
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his work is significant in that it suggests that authoritarianism was an integral component of conservatism at the time of its founding. Authoritarian conservatism had subsided by the time Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, and in the ensuing years (literally from
the age of Jackson until recently) it was quiescent.
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Today, however, a neo-Maistrean brand of conservatism is on the rise.
Dunn and Woodard paused in their study of the American conservative tradition to compare authoritarian conservatism with libertarianism and traditional conservatism. They provided an illuminating contrast.
Authoritarian conservatism begins with basic conservative beliefs—order, distrust of change, belief in traditional values—and branches in the direction of favoring state power to protect these beliefs. Libertarianism has an entirely different set of core beliefs which are based upon nineteenth-century liberalism. Those beliefs subordinate the order of a community to the desire for individuality and stress personal rights over personal responsibilities. Libertarians move away from state power to secure maximum liberty for the individual. Authoritarian conservatives are like traditional conservatives in their belief in established values, while libertarians are like traditional conservatives in their desire for limited government. Traditional conservatives and libertarians, however, differ in the degree of their belief in limited government. Libertarians are extreme in their opposition to state power while traditional conservatives are more moderate in their opposition. Traditional conservatives are much more likely to accept some state power than are libertarians.
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Two factions of conservatism currently embrace a contemporary adaptation of authoritarian conservatism: neoconservatives and social conservatives.
*
Neoconservatives are a relatively small group of social-
dominance authoritarians, with significant, if not disproportionate, influence. Social conservatives, whose core members are Christian conservatives, comprise the largest and most cohesive faction of conservatism. They are, by and large, typical right-wing authoritarian followers. Both neoconservatives and social conservatives include countless conservatives without conscience within their ranks.
Authoritarian Policies of Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism first surfaced in the public during the Reagan administration. More recently its interest in, and influence on, American foreign policy has drawn a great deal of attention. One of the more colorful (and accurate) descriptions of the typical neoconservative comes from Philip Gold, who justifiably described himself as having “impeccable conservative credentials and long experience in the national-security field,” as well as being “a grumpy old Marine (a former intelligence officer), who has grown infuriated with and appalled by the conservative embrace of disaster” served up by neoconservatives. Gold, a former Georgetown University professor, described neoconservative foreign policy wonks as “a new aristocracy of aggression that combines 19th-century Prussian pigheadedness with a most un-Prussian inability to read a man or a ledger book, and a near total lack of military—let alone combat—experience. Ask these people to show you
their wounds and they’ll probably wave a
Washington Post
editorial at you.”
*
The
Christian Science Monitor
describes neoconservatives as mostly liberal Jewish intellectuals who became disenchanted with the left in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s they had become Republicans, having found a home for their aggressive policies in the Reagan administration. According to the
Monitor,
what distinguishes neoconservatives from other conservatives is their desire for militarily imposed nation building. They believe the United States should “use its unrivaled power—forcefully if necessary—to promote its values around the world.” Neoconservatives do not trust multilateral institutions to keep world peace; rather they believe the United States must do it.
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An American empire is a perfectly plausible scenario for neoconservatives; containment is a policy they believe is outmoded. Neoconservatives view Israel as “a key outpost of democracy in a region ruled by despots.” They want to transform the Middle East with democracy, starting with Iraq. Today the foreign policies of neoconservatives and of the Bush administration are fundamentally synonymous.
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff and national security adviser—and he was also an assistant to the president—is an überneoconservative, a personification of the true believer who has been involved with neoconservatism since its arrival in Washington during the Reagan administration. Libby is also
an exemplary authoritarian.
*
Until he was indicted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald for perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice relating to the investigation of the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s covert status, Libby was relatively unknown, a “behind the throne” man with unique influence within the Bush/Cheney White House. Libby worked with Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense under Bush I, and while at the Defense Department he assisted his former Yale professor Paul Wolfowitz in drafting a defense policy guidance paper calling for unilaterally preemptive wars and the invasion of Iraq—a decade before the 9/11 terror attacks. (When this highly controversial document was leaked to the press, Bush I had the policy withdrawn, assuring the world that this was not the way Americans were thinking.) Later Libby would help draft a report for the neoconservative Project for the New American Century entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses—Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century,” which was merely a restatement of the early policy paper, but
under Bush II it became the blueprint for the administration’s defense policy.
Libby has been extremely aggressive in promoting the aims of neoconservatism. Reportedly:
It was Libby—along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and a handful of other top aides at the Pentagon and White House—who convinced the president that the U.S. should go to war in Iraq. It was Libby who pushed Cheney to publicly argue that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and 9/11. It was also Libby who prodded former Secretary of State Colin Powell to include specious reports about an alleged meeting between 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official in Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations.
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This, of course, turned out to be extremely bad advice but typical of authoritarian aggression. Libby no doubt took whatever steps were necessary to further the cause he believed in, even pushing dubious information with great self-righteousness.
The skulduggery that led to Libby’s indictment is likewise characteristic of authoritarian behavior. Libby had sought to discredit the visit to Africa, by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, to determine if Niger was supplying yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Bush and Cheney had been claiming that Iraq’s pursuit of uranium was evidence of their development of a nuclear capacity, thus providing a justification for a preemptive war. Wilson found the yellowcake report not true (in fact, it had been based on forged documents), and after the president made a contrary statement in his 2003 State of the Union address, Wilson publicly corrected the record. Libby was outraged and apparently believed that by claiming that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA operative involved in monitoring the proliferation of such weapons, had been involved in sending her husband to Niger, the trip would be perceived as some kind of boondoggle. In fact, she was not involved in
the CIA’s decision to ask her husband to make the trip, but Libby leaked her covert identity to members of the news media anyway. Under some circumstances it is a violation of the law to reveal the covert status of CIA operatives, for it not only places the agents themselves in jeopardy, but also their contacts. Surely Libby knew this, given his long experience with national security. When special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald investigated her exposure, Libby gave FBI agents and the grand jury false statements about the newspeople to whom he had revealed her name. As Altemeyer’s work shows, authoritarians have little if any conscience when pursuing their causes, and reason gives way to expediency.
Many conservatives view the grandiose plans of neoconservatives and their aggressive implementation by people like Scooter Libby as overzealous and loaded with potentially terrifying consequences. By way of comparison, more traditional conservatives call for “realism” in foreign policy that they feel is more appropriate in this age of terrorism. Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft champion this school of thought, and the
American Conservative,
a publication launched by Pat Buchanan, has urged that American self-interest be the controlling consideration in national security. “Realists take seriously the threat from international terrorism but keep it in historical perspective,” a lead article reported. “They are also skeptical of the administration’s claim that we face a more dangerous adversary now in al Qaeda than we did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. After all, the Soviets had a huge nuclear arsenal, while our worst-case fears today are that al Qaeda might get one or two crude radiological ‘dirty bombs.’ Realism counsels prudent caution but not panic in our approach to the global War on Terror.”
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