John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House lawyer and most recently author of Conservatives Without Conscience, has published the first of a three part series on FindLaw. In his FindLaw post, "Understanding the Contemporary Republican Party: Authoritarians Have Taken Control," he says:
... Most conservatives today do not believe that conservatism can or should be defined. They claim that it not an ideology, but rather merely an attitude. (I don't buy that, but that point is not relevant here.)
Conservatives once looked to the past for what it could teach about the present and the future. Early conservatives were traditionalists or libertarians, or a bit of both. Today, however, there are religious conservatives, economic conservatives, social conservatives, cultural conservatives, neoconservatives, traditional conservatives, and a number of other factions.
As one who tries to understand the motivations of the people who continue to call themselves "conservative," I have found Dean's insight and opinions invaluable.
The series by Dean is based on his most recent work, Conservatives Without Conscience. In a review of that book, Glenn Greenwald said:
... the true radicalism of the (Bush) administration and its followers has becoming unavoidably, depressingly clear, and it is equally clear that this movement has not reached anywhere near the peak of its extremism. Dean's central thesis explains why that is so ... the "conservative" movement has become, at its core, an authoritarian movement composed of those with a psychological and emotional need to follow a strong authority figure which provides them a sense of moral clarity and a feeling of individual power, the absence of which creates fear and insecurity in the individuals who crave it.
... What defines and motivates this movement are not any political ideas or strategic objectives, but instead, it is the bloodthirsty, ritualistic attacks on the Enemy de jour -- the Terrorist, the Communist, the Illegal Immigrant, the Secularist, and most of all, the "Liberal."
Dean explains that he thought it was "a bit too self-promoting" to use his FindLaw column to talk about the book, but he feels that "the material is simply too crucial to understanding current politics and government" for him to continue to ignore it in his columns. He also says that he will refer to the empirical studies conducted by social psychologists in his commentary on the 2008 presidential and congressional elections.
Dean blames Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush for taking the Republican Party hard right over the past two-and-a-half decades. Dean, like me, wonders what drives them, and why do their followers never question or criticize them.
According to Dean,
... Most conservatives today do not believe that conservatism can or should be defined. They claim that it not an ideology, but rather merely an attitude ... there are religious conservatives, economic conservatives, social conservatives, cultural conservatives, neoconservatives, traditional conservatives, and a number of other factions.
Within these factions, there is a good amount of inconsistency and variety, but the movement has long been held together through the power of negative thinking. The glue of the movement is in its perceived enemies. Conservatives once found a common concern with respect to their excessive concern about communism (not that liberals and progressive were not concerned as well, but they were neither paranoid nor willing to mount witch hunts). When communism was no longer a threat, the dysfunctional conservative movement rallied around its members' common opposition to anything they perceived as liberal. (This was, in effect, any point of view that differed from their own, whether it was liberal or not.)
I had noticed that the word "liberal" had become the "L-word," but the Republicans are masters of framing issues and using language to support their belief system. I say "belief system" because over the past several years, I have come to realize that while my opinions are generally based on thoughts and facts, the "conservatives" I encounter have opinions based on "beliefs." You can argue about facts and thoughts, but you can't argue against "beliefs."
Dean's thesis is: what do conservatives believe, and why do they believe it. He says that "While not all conservatives are authoritarians, all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives" and authoritarians "took control of the conservative movement in the 1980s, and then the Republican Party in the 1990s." Now, a few authoritarian leaders decide how and what the followers should believe.
The study of authoritarians began after World War II, "when social psychologists asked how so many people could compliantly follow an authoritarian leader like Adolf Hitler and tolerate the Holocaust." Studies conducted at the University of California, Berkeley resulted in the 1950 publication of The Authoritarian personality. Since then, other researchers followed the Berkeley conclusions and added empirical data. Bob Altemeyer, a social psychologist based at the University of Manitoba, has published several books on "right-wing authoritarians," among them, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, and The Authoritarian Specter. Altemeyer has published a (free) summary of his research online for general readers in The Authoritarians. (A printed, bound copy can be ordered for $9.77 plus shipping)
Altemeyer's research of people being anonymously examined reveal themselves to be "frequently enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, anti-equality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian, and amoral." That seems to be an apt description of most hard-core Republicans.
I have considered that conservatives who continue to support people who lie to them and make their lives miserable are not unlike "battered wives." In that sense, I recognized that there was a dysfunctional aspect to the syndrome that I have been calling "willful ignorance," but I still do not understand why the republican base clings to those who so arrogantly abuse them. I am looking foward to the remainder of Dean's assessment of the "dysfunctional conservative movement."