Conservatives Without Conscience

Linguistics expert George Lakoff reports in Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think that the language and thinking of contemporary conservatism is, essentially, authoritarian. The conservative’s worldview draws on an understanding of the family that follows “a Strict Father model.” (By way of comparison, he noted, the liberal worldview draws on a very different ideal, “the Nurturant Parent model.”) Lakoff contends that the organizing ideal of conservatism is the strict father who stands up to evil and emerges victorious in a highly competitive world. In the terms of this model, children are born bad and need a strict father to teach them discipline through punishment.[7] Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball has made similar observations, and describes today’s Republicans as the “Daddy” party and Democrats as the “Mommy.” There is no doubt in my mind, based on years of personal observation, that contemporary conservative thinking is rife with authoritarian behavior, a conclusion that has been confirmed by social science. An examination of the relevant studies provides convincing support for the argument that authoritarian behavior is the key to understanding the conservative conscience, or lack thereof.

Authoritarianism

Social psychologists have spent some sixty years studying authoritarianism.[*] A decade before Milgram produced his startling findings, those most likely to comply with authority figures were identified as a personality type in The Authoritarian Personality, a study undertaken at the University of California, Berkeley. This work was part of the effort of leading social scientists to understand how “in a culture of law, order and reason…great masses of people [could and did] tolerate the mass extermination of their fellow citizens,” a question that was of some urgency after the horrors of World War II.[8]

The Berkeley study introduced the idea of “the authoritarian type”—people with seemingly conflicting elements in their persona, since they are often both enlightened yet superstitious, and proud to be individualists but live in constant fear of not being like others, whose independence they are jealous of because they themselves are inclined to submit blindly to power and authority.[9] For good reason, alert observers of American democracy are again expressing concern, as they had after World War II, about the growing and conspicuous authoritarian behavior in the conservative movement. Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science at Boston College and the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, suggests that The Authoritarian Personality be retrieved from the shelves. “The fact that the radical right has transformed itself from a marginal movement to an influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party makes the book’s choice of subject matter all the more prescient,” Wolfe wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education.[10]

Although The Authoritarian Personality is not without critics, Wolfe believes that despite its flaws it deserves a reevaluation. Public officials “make good subjects for the kinds of analysis upon which the book relied; visible, talkative, passionate, they reveal their personalities to us, allowing us to evaluate them,” he observes. A good example, he suggests, is United Nations ambassador John R. Bolton. At Bolton’s Senate confirmation hearings (after which the Senate refused to confirm him; Bush nonetheless gave him a recess appointment), his contentious personality was exposed, with one former State Department colleague calling him “a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy.” Wolfe notes, “Everything Americans have learned about Bolton—his temper tantrums, intolerance of dissent, and black-and-white view of the world—step right out of the clinical material assembled by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality.” Wolfe also finds Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas and former House majority leader Tom DeLay in its pages as well.[11]