War

Inside the War on Terror  

Watergate witness John Dean’s examination of modern conservatism opens up a new take on the direction of America 

by Michael Nenonen  

Reading John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience (Viking, 2006), I was reminded of a line from Colin Wilson’s novel, The Philosopher’s Stone (T P Tarcher, 1974): “We are fighting a war, a war against matter and automation.”

Wilson was referring to the struggle to achieve healthy levels of consciousness. The healthier our consciousness is, the wider our awareness becomes, reaching outwards into new ideas, possibilities, meanings. The less healthy our consciousness is, the less aware we become, and the more we’re driven by habit, impulse, and instinct. If healthy consciousness encourages mindfulness, then unhealthy consciousness reduces us to the level of machinery, of “matter and automation,” operating without reason or reflection, with awareness of neither our motivations nor the consequences of our actions.

This is exactly the state of consciousness Dean describes in his examination of authoritarian conservatism. Dean discusses this subject from an insider’s perspective. He was White House Counsel to President Nixon, as well as the star witness of the Watergate prosecution. Dean writes that “authoritarian thinking was the principle force behind almost everything that went wrong with Nixon’s presidency.” Although he’s still a traditional conservative, he believes that authoritarian domination of the Republican Party is a growing threat to American democracy.

Conservatives Without Conscience draws heavily on the work of social psychologist and researcher Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, Felicia Pratto of the University of Connecticut, and Jim Sidanius of the University of California, Los Angeles. Altemeyer is the leading authority on right-wing authoritarianism. Pratto and Sidanius are the developers of social dominance theory, a theory that compliments and expands upon research into authoritarianism. Dean believes that these theories provide the necessary framework for understanding the prevalence of irrationality and aggressiveness among today’s Republicans.

Theories of authoritarianism typically focus on the followers in authoritarian movements. According to Altemeyer, authoritarian followers have very little self-awareness. They’re blind to their own hypocrisies, they’re good at using religion to shed whatever feelings of guilt they might have about their actions, and their minds are compartmentalized, allowing them to avoid thinking about information that might conflict with their beliefs or their self-concepts. They’re rigidly committed to the traditional norms of their society, they’re submissive to those authorities they consider legitimate, and they’re aggressive in their support of these authorities. Authoritarians are inclined to use punishment to control other people, particularly children, criminals, and those perceived as being unconventional in their behaviour or lifestyles. Most of all, authoritarians are frightened. Dean writes that authoritarians “see the world as a dangerous place, with society teetering on the brink of self-destruction from evil and violence, and when their fear conflates with their self-righteousness, they appoint themselves guardians of public morality, or God’s Designated Hitters.”

Unfortunately, Dean doesn’t examine in any detail the evidence that right-wing authoritarians suffer disproportionately from cognitive deficits. For example, a 1992 doctoral dissertation for the Fielding Institute by Mary Frances Wegmann, entitled Processing Deficits of the Authoritarian Mind, strongly suggests that authoritarians have more difficulty remembering and making correct inferences from written and oral information than non-authoritarians. This would explain a great deal. The more confused we are, the less control we feel we have over our world, the more frightened we become, and the more desperately we hold onto our prejudices, which at least provide the illusion of certainty in a bewildering environment. Including this information would have strengthened Dean’s argument.

Social dominance theory, meanwhile, illuminates the mentality of the leaders of authoritarian movements. People with a social-dominance orientation tend to answer “yes” to questions like “Do you enjoy having the power to hurt people when they anger or disappoint you?” and to agree with statements like “If you have power in a situation, you should use it however you have to, to get your way,” and “I will do my best to destroy anyone who deliberately blocks my plans and goals.” They tend to disagree with statements like “It is much better to be loved than feared” and to answer “no” to questions like “Would it bother you if other people thought you were mean and pitiless?” Needless to say, while they’re skilled manipulators, social dominators have little genuine empathy for other people.

In tests, some people score high for both right-wing authori-tarianism and social dominance. This combines the worst of both profiles. “These people respond to questions relating to submission not by considering how they submit to others, but about how others submit to them. They inevitably see the world with themselves in charge.” They’re the people most likely to mobilize and lead extremist right-wing movements, and least likely to care about the negative effects of their behaviour on their society and their world.

Authoritarian social dominators have a symbiotic relationship with authoritarian followers. “Experiments reveal that right-wing authoritarian followers are particularly likely to trust someone who tells them what they want to hear, for this is how many of them validate their beliefs. Social dominators, on the other hand, typically know exactly what song they want to sing to followers.” Their world-views are also complimentary: “Authoritarian leaders see the world as a competitive jungle in which the fittest survive; authoritarian followers see the world as dangerous and threatening.”

Altemeyer estimates that between 20% and 25% of Americans can be described as authoritarians, giving authoritarian leaders a vast political base from which to draw upon. Dean details the historic vulnerability of American conservatism to authoritarianism, how authoritarians have organized themselves into the most powerful political force in the US, and how they’ve silenced traditional conservatives in the process. He argues that authoritarian conservatives are pursuing a radically unconservative agenda, one that increases the size of government, promotes military adventurism, attacks civil liberties, polarizes the populace, and severely degrades public discourse.

While the history he provides is quite informative, it doesn’t offer enough contextual material to truly explain authoritarianism’s achievements. He doesn’t look at how Monetarism’s usurped Keynesianism as the economic theory of choice in the halls of power, or how this has increased economic inequality and unraveled America’s social safety nets. He doesn’t consider the way that globalization has devastated America’s manufacturing sector, destroyed American communities, minimized labour’s bargaining power, and magnified the power of corporations. Finally, he doesn’t address the Democratic Party’s abandonment of organized labour in favour of wealthier constituents. Besides leaving American workers without any political representation for their economic interests, these factors have also made their world far more dangerous and frightening. American workers are impoverished, overworked, and undereducated, and their communities are dying. Is it any wonder that they’re so easily exploited by demagogues?

Perhaps Dean’s own conservatism is reflected in his failure to examine the structural factors underlying authoritarianism’s resurgence. It is therefore best to supplement Conservatives Without Conscience with books that provide this larger context, such as Thomas Frank’s What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Henry Holt and Company, 2004) or Theodore Roszak’s World Beware! American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror (Between the Lines, 2006).

Having said this, the psychological information in Dean’s book is invaluable. If he’s correct, then authoritarianism expresses a painfully constricted degree of consciousness. Beneath America’s War on Terror rages the real war, the war against matter and automation, and, heaven help us, the wrong side is winning.