Conservatives Without Conscience

How can this paradox be explained? Right-wing authoritarians employ “a number of psychological tricks and defenses that enable them to act fairly beastly,” Altemeyer explained, all the while thinking they are “the good people.” To begin with, they have relatively little self-understanding: “For instance, they do not realize they are more prejudiced and hostile than most people. In fact, they do not realize any of the many undesirable things that research has discovered about them.”[*] Second, right-wing authoritarians have very compartmentalized minds, and “they can just pull off a Scarlett O’Hara (‘I’m not going to think about it!’) whenever they want.” Altemeyer found the fact that so many others are able to detect their hypocrisies while they themselves are oblivious demonstrates how effective they are at ignoring their shortcomings. Third, he said, “right-wing authoritarians shed their guilt very efficiently when they do something wrong. Typically they turn to God for forgiveness, and as a result feel completely forgiven afterwards. Catholics, for example, use confession. Fundamentalist Protestants use a somewhat different mechanism. Many who are ‘born-again’ believe that if you confess your sins and accept Jesus as your personal savior you will go to heaven—no matter what else you do afterwards. (This is called ‘cheap grace’ by those within fundamentalism who hold its members to higher standards.)” In brief, “When a great deal of misbehavior is engaged in by born-again Christians it troubles their fundamentalist consciences very little, for after all, they are the Saved. So by using their religious beliefs effectively, right-wing authoritarians have high moral standards in many regards, but pretty ineffective consciences.”

This analysis can account for how someone like the born-again Chuck Colson can go about his hatchet work on people today without troubling his conscience just as he did at the Nixon White House. And how Christian conservatives like Pat Robertson can openly call for the assassination of foreign leaders, despite the Ten Commandments that he holds so dear. It is as if these individuals had worn down their consciences with cheap grace—a remarkable and frightening process. “One of the things a conscience is supposed to do is make us act better, but when you have a means of eliminating guilt, there is not much incentive to clean up your act. You can see how conscience gets short-circuited,” Altemeyer noted. He added, “Bad behavior may produce guilt, but it is easily washed away. So then more bad behavior can result, again, and again, each time getting removed very easily through religion. There is a terrible closing to this reality. The lack of guilt over things he has done in the past can actually contribute to the self-righteousness of the authoritarian. And this self-righteousness has proven, in experiments, to be the main factor that unleashes the right-wing authoritarian’s aggressive impulses.”[38] He concluded, “I have called them ‘God’s designated hitters.’ We end up with the irony that the people who think they are so very good end up doing so very much evil, and, more remarkably, they are probably the last people in the world who will ever realize the connection between the two.” There is no better explanation for the behavior of many Christian conservatives, for it accounts for their license to do ill, Christian beliefs notwithstanding.

Certainly, not all authoritarian conservatives are without conscience. There is no better example of an authoritarian conservative with a high political profile than Pat Buchanan. Lance Morrow, writing in the National Review, observed: “Buchanan emerged from Gonzaga [High School in Washington, DC] an authoritarian and dogmatist, possessing something of the Jesuit’s fierceness and delight in argument. I cannot see that he has changed in the 40-odd years since then. About America he has instincts of a sometimes paradoxical dynamic: aggressively defensive, militantly wistful.”[39] Likewise, in a less than flattering piece, the New Republic claimed, “In many ways, Buchanan’s authoritarian personality—although far less complex than Nixon’s tortured motivations—was a perfect political instrument for the dark, polarizing side of Nixon.” Its authors added that “Buchanan’s authoritarian mania was the key to high ratings for shows like ‘Crossfire,’ ‘The McLaughlin Group,’ and ‘The Capitol Gang.’”[40] While such characterizations are fairly typical assessments of Buchanan, he has in fact shown himself to have a strong and consistent set of principles. During Watergate, Buchanan was part of the Nixon White House defense team but since the Nixon tapes emerged, he has acknowledged, “I think what Nixon did, clearly, was wrong. And he made terrible mistakes. And partly as a result of his mistakes, he was destroyed, but he was destroyed also by his political enemies…. We weren’t saints.”[41]