Conservatives Without Conscience (32 page)

7.
George Lakoff and John Jost radio interviews, “The Science of Conservatism,” WBAI-FM (November 12, 2005). See also George Lakoff,
Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 33. (Lakoff’s work is fascinating, and his credentials are strong, but his book really provides no documentation. He does provide a laundry list of references at the back of the book, but it is impossible to tell where his material comes from. It appears he speaks largely ex cathedra. Since there was no way to examine his sources, I found I could not use his material. I was unsuccessful in my efforts to contact him, with my e-mail resulting only in my being added to the mailing list of his foundation.)

8.
T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Bruswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sandford, in collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and William Morrow,
The Authoritarian Personality
(New York: Harper & Row, 1950), v.

9.
Ibid., ix.

10.
Alan Wolfe, “‘The Authoritarian Personality’ Revisited,”
Chronicle of Higher Education,
vol. 52 (October 7, 2005), B-12.

11.
Ibid.

12.
Bob Altemeyer,
The Authoritarian Specter
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 8.

13.
Bob Altemeyer is an American scholar who went to Canada to teach psychology at the University of Manitoba, where for several decades he has been a relentless researcher. An article written for
Political Psychology
described Altemeyer’s work since the 1970s as “convincing [other] scholars (in Canada and beyond) of the fruitfulness of [his] endeavors,” for he has undertaken literally “hundreds of experiments in the past three decades,” achieving “admirable robustness in terms of [his work’s] reliability and validity.” Paul Nesbitt-Larking, “Political Psychology in Canada,”
Political Psychology,
vol. 25, no. 1 (2004), 97, 106–7. The
Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology
reported that Altemeyer’s work “powerfully predicts a wide range of political, social, ideological, and intergroup phenomena.” David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis (eds.),
Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Because Altemeyer’s work is critically insightful to understanding contemporary conservatism, it is regrettable that the principal audience for his extensive writing is composed of other psychologists and social scientists. In an effort to translate his findings, I asked him many questions over an extended period that he was kind enough to answer. Any mistakes in presenting his work are mine, not his.

14.
A person being tested is typically asked to indicate the extent to which he or she agrees or disagrees with each statement by being given the following options: very strongly disagree (-4), strongly disagree (-3), moderately disagree (-2), and slightly disagree (-1), and corresponding positive values for agreement (ranging from +1 to +4). If the respondent feels neutral about a statement, he or she can give an answer that has no value—a zero. If he or she strongly agrees with part of a statement (+3), but slightly disagrees with another part of the statement (-1), the respondent would be in moderate agreement (+2) after doing the math.

15.
Stanley Feldman, “Enforcing Social Conformity: A Theory of Authoritarianism,”
Political Psychology,
vol. 24, no. 1 (2003), 41, 44.

16.
“In a detailed review of the research…[it has been] shown that authoritarianism is consistently associated with right-wing but not left-wing ideology.” Feldman, “Enforcing Social Conformity: A Theory of Authoritarianism,” 42.

17.
“A large array of studies…document high correlations between Authoritarianism and Conservatism.” Gerard Saucier, “Isms and the Structure of Social Attitudes,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
vol. 78, no. 2(2000), 366–67.

18.
Bob Altemeyer,
The Authoritarian Specter,
296.

19.
Markus Kemmelmeier, “Authoritarianism and Candidate Support in the U.S. Presidential Elections of 1996 and 2000,”
Journal of Social Psychology
(April 2004), 218.

20.
Bob Altemeyer, “The Other ‘Authoritarian Personality.’” In John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius,
Political Psychology
(New York: Psychology Press, 2004), 88.

21.
Sears et al., eds.
Oxford Handbook,
577.

22.
Ibid., 579.

23.
Bob Altemeyer, “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities,”
Journal of Social Psychology,
vol. 144, no. 4 (2004), 422–25.

24.
Ibid.

25.
Ibid.

26.
Marc Stewart Wilson, “Social Dominance and Ethical Ideology: The End Justifies the Means?,”
Journal of Social Psychology,
vol. 143, no. 5 (2003), 549 (citing Sidanius et al.).

27.
Ibid.

28.
Bob Altemeyer, “What Happens When Authoritarians Inherit the Earth? A Simulation,”
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy,
vol. 3, no. 1 (December 2003), 161.

29.
Ibid. See also Bob Altemeyer, “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities,” 431–35.

30.
Ibid., 439.

31.
Ibid.

32.
Bob Altemeyer, “What Happens When Authoritarians Inherit the Earth?,” 161.

33.
Altemeyer, “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities,” 445.

34.
In Altemeyer’s formulation, “Our conscience is the part of our minds that makes us feel guilty: (1) we can feel guilty because we did not do the right thing (but instead did nothing), and (2) (more commonly) we can feel guilty because we did something wrong. Conscience, or (perhaps more usefully) the strength of someone’s conscience, is a very tricky thing to measure. It is a very private experience, and no one can know exactly how someone’s guilt feels to him. And guilt usually means feeling shame, and for some reason people don’t like to reveal how ashamed they are of themselves.”

35.
There are some indirect ways to make measurements, for example, “by using anonymous surveys in good testing circumstances with the ‘Hidden Observer’ technique”—a metaphorical concept based on the suggestion that such an observer exists within each of us—Altemeyer made some intriguing findings. He asked a group of high-scoring right-wing authoritarians he had tested earlier—who almost across-the-board had strongly agreed with a statement about the existence of “an Almighty God who will judge each person after death”—whether the “Hidden Observer” in them agreed with this statement. He got surprising answers. About a fifth said they had some doubts about God’s existence, which they had shared with someone else, and about a third conceded that they had secret doubts about God’s existence that they had shared with no one. Altemeyer said he felt this to be one of the most amazing things right-wing authoritarians have ever admitted in his surveys.

36.
Bob Altemeyer,
Enemies of Freedom
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1988), 147–51.

37.
Ronald J. Sider,
The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005), 17.

38.
Altemeyer,
The Authoritarian Specter,
chapter 5.

39.
Lance Morrow, “The Brawlers,”
National Review
(October 25, 1999), 20.

40.
Charles Lane and Jennifer Bradley, “Daddy’s Boy,”
The New Republic
(January 22, 1996), 15.

41.
U.S. Senate, “Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972,” Hearings Before the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Book 10 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1973), 3922–24.

42.
Ibid.

43.
See Fred I. Greenstein, “Can Personality and Politics Be Studied Systematically.” In John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, eds.,
Political Psychology: Key Readings
(New York: Psychology Press, 2004), 108, 118.

Chapter Three: Authoritarian Conservatism

1.
Jay M. Shafritz,
American Government & Politics
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 418.

2.
Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard,
The Conservative Tradition in America
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 88–89.

3.
Bill Schardt, “Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821): A Great and Virtuous Man?,”
Newcastle Philosophy Society
at http://www.newphilsoc.org.uk/Freedom/berlinday/a_great_and_virtuous_man.htm.

4.
A brief biography of Joseph de Maistre and a Maistre home page administered by Richard Lebrun at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, is located at http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/history/links/maistre/maistre. html. Lebrun has written a full biography of this early conservative,
Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant
(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988). This work is described by the publisher as follows: “The Joseph de Maistre revealed here is a more complex figure than either the bloody-minded apologist for conservatism portrayed by his liberal critics or the steadfast Church Father of his traditional Catholic admirers. Maistre was a scholarly magistrate in the tradition of Montesquieu, a man who had been open to the trends of his time but was profoundly shaken by the violence of the French Revolution. Appalled by the prospect of chaos, he used his rhetorical skills as a lawyer to defend monarchical institutions and traditional Catholicism. Lebrun argues that only with the opening of the family archives and the discoveries in recent studies are we able to appreciate Maistre’s struggles to understand the upheavals of his time, his doubts and hesitations, and his reasons for taking the public positions he chose.”

5.
Peter Viereck,
Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill
(Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1956), 11.

6.
Nash’s
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America
(Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998) makes only two passing references to de Maistre; similarly, Russell Kirk makes two fleeting references to de Maistre in
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2001), and the way in which he first comes into the narrative, with no introduction whatsoever, gives one the feeling that he was edited out.

7.
Dunn and Woodard,
The Conservative Tradition in America,
89–90.

8.
Ibid., 100.

9.
John W. Dean,
Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush
(New York: Little Brown, 2004), 132–36. This book spells out the unprecedented nature of the aggressive policies of the Bush/Cheney administration.

10.
John Lyman, “Who Is Scooter Libby? The Guy Behind the Guy Behind the
Guy,” Center for American Progress Web site (October 28, 2005) at http://www.americanprogress.org/sit/p.aspz?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=109719& printmode=1.

11.
Michael C. Desch, “George ‘Wilson’ Bush: How the dark side of America’s Liberal Tradition drives us to global crusades in democracy’s name,”
American Conservative
(November 21, 2005), 24–25. Michael C. Desch is a Professor at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

12.
Melanie Scarborough, “The Security Pretext: An Examination of the Growth of Federal Police Agencies,” Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 94 (June 29, 2005) at http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3828.

13.
Norman Ornstein, “Checks and Balances? The President Has Few, if Any,”
Roll Call
(December 21, 2005) at http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.23607/pub_detail.asp.

14.
See Abraham H. Maslow,
Maslow on Management
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 292. Maslow wrote in this classic, “The more grown people are, the worse authoritarian management will work, the less well people will function in the authoritarian situation, and the more they will hate it. What this means is that people who have experienced freedom can never really be content again with slavery, even though they made no protest about the slavery before they had the experience of freedom.”

15.
See, e.g., Patrick J. Buchanan, “America’s Next War,” Creators Syndicate (August 23, 2004); Max Boot, “Q & A: Neocon power examined,”
Christian Science Monitor
at http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/boothtml; and Jay Solomon and Neil King, Jr., “As ‘Neocons’ Leave, Bush Foreign Policy Takes Softer Line,”
Wall Street Journal
(February 6, 2006).