Republicans and the Authoritarian Impulse

Two weeks ago I wrote a post suggesting that the German chancellor might want to have dialogue with some members of the Democratic Party in the US.  That post was mentioned and linked by the right-wing Bush-Blog Medienkritik, and the hate mail began to arrive. You would think I had proposed that Angela Merkel hire Osama Bin Laden as a political consultant! There were a few common threads in most of the mail and comments I received:

• Many respondents believe that Democrats are treasonous terror-sympathizers because they oppose many policies of the Bush administration.
• There is an implied longing for a unitary party system under a strong, authoritarian leader.
• There is an intense dislike of the US press – except for Karl Rove’s Fox News – for its criticism of President Bush: especially the reporting on his failures in Iraq and the illegal scheme to spy on American citizens. There is a general consensus that the reporters and editors who publish these stories should be imprisoned (or worse).

One thing also surfaced which for me was rather unexpected.  I mention Iraq in my piece, and many of the commenters and e-mail writers state that, in fact, WMDs WERE discovered in Iraq.  It is just that the (Jewish) newspapers such as the New York Times have conspired to suppress this vital information from the American people.  It seems that WMD discoveries – like Elvis sightings – surface from time to time – coincidentally when the President’s poll numbers slip further. This irrational belief in the infallibility of the President is especially striking.

John Dean’s new book – Conservatives Without Conscience – offers an explanation for what I experienced, but also for the general hostility we see in political discouse today in America. John Dean blew the lid off the Watergate scandal in the Nixon White House and considers himself a Goldwater conservative.  But Republicans today have abandoned the traditional conservatism of Barry Goldwater and instead have become blind followers of an imperial presidency.  He sees Republicans today as embodying the "authoritarian personality" :a blind obedience to the leader and a rejection of the US Constitution, as they use anti-democratic means to attain and retain power.  Dean outlined his basic premise in a Boston Globe op/ed piece the other day:

"Today’s Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Krik’s classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham’s guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in “conserving" this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDs through abstinence."

"What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, “enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that’s not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades."

Based on the research, Dean believes that approximately 23% of Americans display the tendencies of the authoritarian personality.  This is the Republican "base" that responds to calls for imprisoning reporters, harassing judges, denying voting rights to African-Americans, etc.  They will blindly follow the Bush administration over a cliff.

Dean deserves credit for bringing to light the extensive research on the authoritarian personality.  It was the German sociologist and philosopher Theodor W. Adorno who actually pioneered the original study of the authoritarian personality back in 1950 with a psychometric survey of thousands of Americans. Adorno and his fellow researchers designed the F-Scale, which measured the "implicit antidemocratic tendencies and fascist potential" of the respondents.  The subscales in the study were:

The authoritarian personality was a threat to democracy when Adorno completed the study in the America of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and as John Dean points out in his book it is just as great a threat today in the America of George W. Bush.