Conservatives Without Conscience

The study of authoritarianism began during the Holocaust, as scientists could not understand why people in Germany and Italy were tolerating, if not supporting, Hitler and Mussolini. They wanted to know if that sort of blind allegiance could develop in the United States. Accordingly, they set about the task of finding out what types of people were susceptible to authoritarian leadership. After a half century, they have found answers, which I have outlined in this book.

I have discussed, in broad terms, the growing authoritarianism that conservatives are making part of American government and politics. Needless to say, I find this trend troubling. I am struck by how an understanding of authoritarianism explains the patterns of behavior that I have seen time and again during my years of observing government and politics. It answered questions about why people who call themselves conservatives act or respond as they do. I have only touched on the subject. Authoritarian behavior is often described as “protofascists,” which led me to read deeply and widely about fascism. For example, Professor Robert O. Paxton recently observed that a “fascism of the future—an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols…. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well.”[98] Are we on the road to fascism? Clearly we are not on that road yet. But it would not take much more misguided authoritarian leadership, or thoughtless following of such leaders, to find ourselves there. I am not sure which is more frightening: another major terror attack or the response of authoritarian conservatives to that attack. Both are alarming prospects.

Like Dick Cheney’s, my memory is seared by Vietnam and Watergate, and so it appears is Bob Altemeyer’s. His work initially caught my attention because he noticed that as Watergate unfolded, the public was very slow to react. For example, the Watergate burglars from the Nixon reelection committee were arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972. Polls conducted shortly before the 1972 elections showed that some 62 percent of the voters dismissed the Watergate break-in and resulting investigation as “mostly politics.”[99] Notwithstanding the growing and hard evidence of the president’s deep involvement, public opinion was slow to change or turn against Nixon. Americans want to believe in their president, and for that matter, their own representatives or senators—although they may hold Congress and politicians in general in low esteem. Altemeyer understood what few did: It was not public opinion that forced Nixon from office. He correctly noted that Nixon resigned “because [Nixon’s] attorney had forced the disclosure of evidence so damaging that it seemed certain he would be convicted of high crimes by the Senate.” This is true, but there is more to the story.

In fact, Nixon had many defenses that he could have mounted had he gone to trial in the Senate, many of which Bush and Cheney are promoting today under the rubric of national security and the inherent power of the presidency. The reason Nixon did not go to trial was not his loss of support on Capitol Hill, which he might have rebuilt, but rather because he lost the support of his defenders, principally on the White House staff. Other than White House counsel Fred Buzzhardt, and possibly chief of staff Al Haig (with whom Buzzhardt had roomed at West Point), no one was aware that Nixon was lying about what he knew and when he knew it once the cover-up had initially fallen apart. Nixon provided the lawyer he had hired to defend him in the House’s impeachment inquiry, James St. Clair, with false information, and St. Clair—as it happened—was a man of integrity and not a right-wing authoritarian follower. When he found out that his client had lied to him he had two choices: to resign or to join the new cover-up. He was, as it happened, interested in participating in the latter. Nixon at one point considered defying the Supreme Court ruling that he turn over his incriminating tapes (evidence that revealed that his defense was a sham) on the very grounds that Bush and Cheney argue: They have authority under the Constitution to read it and comply with it as they see fit. Once it was apparent that Richard Nixon had broken the law, he made the most significant decision of his presidency: the decision to honor the rule of law and resign.