sex, lies, and authoritarian conservatives

dr. elsewhere here

As promised, finally, some (warning: many) thoughts on John Dean’s new book, Conservatives without Conscience (CWC), and beyond.

This book was a gift to me by a very dear friend who happened to pick it up at a book-signing. She asked Mr. Dean to address it to dr. elsewhere; I was most pleased.

And very excited on at least two dimensions beyond just wanting to read it. First, I’m giving away my age to tell you all that I can vividly remember the scene from the Watergate hearings in the Senate (watched each and every night on PBS like an instant replay reality mini-series), with Sam Irvin presiding, when Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee asked John Dean, special counsel to President Nixon, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” From the moment of Dean’s responses (leading to Nixon's resignation on my birthday), I’ve been a fan, because Dean actually refused to go along with the cover-up, and showed the courage to cooperate with the committee’s investigation. Having his signature on this book adds a special thrill.

But the other dimension of the book speaks to me professionally, as Dean looks at the work of Bob Altemeyer, a sociologist who has done extensive research into the nature of the authoritarian personality. A real review is not intended here, but instead I'd like to focus on this research. A little background on the book to set the stage.
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Dean started talking to Goldwater several years ago during the thick of the Republican revolution, with Limbaugh making war on the airwaves, and Newt doing battle in the House. It was the beginning of really nasty times, and a really nasty turn, as both Goldwater and Dean agreed. They talked about writing this book to address what has gone wrong with the Republican Party, and with the entire conservative movement that Goldwater so conscientiously nurtured and wrote about in his book, The Conscience of a Conservative.

Unfortunately for the project, Goldwater died before work in earnest began on the book, but eventually Dean’s concerns about the questions they had raised haunted him so deeply that he had to continue. The main question he pursued was what has happened to the GOP and the conservative movement, and who were these people who had taken it over.

About six or seven years ago, I happened to ask the friend who gave me this book a similar question, because she had been since her youth a very active Republican, campaigning for Reagan and Bush, even actively participating in local Republican caucusing and such. Given that she is one of the smartest and wisest individuals I have ever known, just really level-headed and practical while still maintaining remarkable humanity and integrity, I’ve often said she would make a perfect judge, despite being Republican.

So I asked her this question, what do you think about the Republicans these days. Her answer was instant and rich with emotion. “Oh God, they’ve been taken over by aliens!” And she proceeded to tell me stories about how, over the previous decade, she had watched as southern Christian Republicans started moving to her historically blue state and joining the Republican Party and taking over leadership positions and running for local offices, not as traditional Republicans but as conscripted Christian soldiers. She told me that many of these folks were quite candid about the agenda within the party nationally to do these very things. And the rest, as they say, is history. But just to update you on my ex-Republican friend’s history, since we’ve been talking more and more over the past few years, she’s become quite educated about the grand agenda of her former party (like I said, she’s wicked smart), and even about things that went on for years under her radar. She is now inclined as any smart and wise individual will be when they then educate themselves about the truly scary reality out there. In fact, it was her curiosity and careful scrutiny of the blogs that brought me to Cannonfire.

So this friend ran across John Dean at a book signing and asked him to sign this book for me, while proudly telling him she was a member of the Youth for Goldwater organization back when he ran for President. She said Dean beamed. We won’t get side-tracked by a discussion of Goldwater's conservative vision; Dean does a good job of laying out the framework of the differences between conservative and liberal thinking.

For my money, the only compelling argument he made in defense of conservative thinking was to say it supports those things in the past that have worked, which actually seems to go without saying. When that generic wisdom is applied then to the economy and social welfare and foreign policy, my patience wears thin; any crisis suggests that what has been applied is not working, even if you thought it was. The resistance to consider unique interpretations and solutions to problems based on an ideological stance (e.g., the "free" market) has always seemed to me to be dangerously self-serving.

Nevertheless, Dean has actually done "right" by his efforts to beyond these somewhat pedestrian definitional issues in his attempts to answer the more pressing question that plagued him and Goldwater and prompted the first initiative to write this book. Namely, who are these people, and why do they hate American principles so much?

After considerable inquiry and investigation, Dean finally ran across a series of sociology studies inspired by the work of Adorno and associates in the late '40s on the authoritarian personality, and the historical Milgram experiments of the early '70s, which demand description here.

If you’re unaware of these experiments, don’t feel bad. They occurred decades ago, and they'll never be exactly replicated (one hopes, Gitmo notwithstanding) because the methodology would never pass current restrictions on use of human subjects. The experiment went like this. A subject entered a laboratory room with a scientist in a lab coat, sat at a table on which was placed a button that they were told controlled voltage to an electrode device placed on another person in another room they could see through a one-way mirror. This other person was supposed to be learning word pairs, and the subject was to apply a jolt for each error. Occasionally the scientist would suggest that the subject increase the voltage, up to 450 volts, which is pretty dangerous.

What the subject did not know was that the button did not really deliver electrical voltage, and that the other person was not really learning word pairs but was acting out the pain each time the shock was applied. Still, to Milgram’s great dismay, more than 65% of the subjects increased the voltage to maximum levels without ever questioning the scientist’s orders, despite the painful cries of the person they were ostensibly zapping. Milgram concluded that for many human beings who are otherwise decent, caring, and reasonable, it is harder to disobey authority than it is to set aside conscience and their own good judgment. A conclusion not inconsistent with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”

Dean felt he was on to something with this discovery, and looked further to find the more recent work of Bob Altemeyer, a sociologist who has defined various aspects of what he has come to call the Right Wing Authoritarian personality(RWA). Altemeyer’s work is world-renowned and has gained him acclaim, recognition, and several awards. Dean corresponded with him at length when writing CWC, and gave him drafts of many sections to make sure it accurately represented the research. Bear in mind what I share here is a synopsis of my scant memory of his early studies, augmented by Dean’s detailed descriptions.

Altemeyer is careful to explain that what he means by “right wing” is not the typical political right wing, as opposed to left wing, as he actually predicted and documented that extreme left wing members of the Soviet Union scored high in his Right Wing Authoritarian scale. What he refers to here instead is the tendency to defer to the established authority in one’s life.

What Altemeyer has discovered empirically is that high scoring RWA individuals tend to favor conservative politics to a very strong degree. The kinds of statements endorsed on his measure by these folks prefer old-fashioned values, God’s laws, tradition, strong leaders, and the duty to follow them, while disagreeing with statements asserting the health of homosexuals, the goodness of atheists, and the admissibility of nudist camps and premarital sex.

The RWA is a constellation of traits falling into three distinct but converging categories, submission, aggression, and conventionalism. Scoring high on this scale indicates adherence to tight social and ideological circles, with inclination to accept without question what authorities have said. This of course leads inevitably to inconsistencies, double standards, hypocrisies, and dogmatism.

These individuals are hostile toward minorities while being unaware of their own bigotry because they can justify the contradictions according to whatever authority they subscribe to. In fact, they are able to ignore their own sins because they do not see themselves honestly and tend to prescribe to religious beliefs that have moral loopholes, such as divine forgiveness and confession, that let them off the hook.

RWAs also feel safer and not more vulnerable in the presence of someone in authority (hence their acceptance for surveillance), though they discern between “right” and “wrong” authority figures who do or do not adhere to their own dogma (hence their hatred of “activist” judges). Punishment is their preferred choice of behavioral control, and they have a decreased tolerance for leniency, targeting the unconventional and unfamiliar. They are intolerant of criticism and will aggressively support their chosen authority, yet this aggression is fueled by fear and self-righteousness, a combination research has shown to be particularly dangerous (think lynchings).

Another scale was developed (not by Altemeyer, but inspired by his work) to capture the authoritarians who run things, who lead; the Social Dominance Orientation (SDOs). The key dimension focused on here is equality, and the SDO feels this is a “sucker word in which only fools believe.” The statements they endorse are variations on the Animal Farm theme: Some pigs are more equal than others. Their world is competitive, dangerous, and threatening, where the powerful survive anyway they can, to hell with everyone else, and the ends always justify the means. They evidently suffer virtually no moral restraint, and feel allowed to do whatever they can get away with. They dismiss the Golden Rule and champion prejudice. They are ruthless and hedonistic, and do not care about harming others. Consequently, they gravitate to status jobs where inequality is the norm, such as corporate hierarchies and law enforcement, and research finds they are over-represented in positions of political power. Their personalities are “intimidating, unsympathetic, untrusting and untrustworthy, vengeful, manipulative, and amoral….power hungry, domineering, mean, [and] Machiavellian.”

The RWA and SDO personalities would seem to be somewhat orthogonal, one being more inclined to follow and the other to lead, but there are those who score high on both scales; Altemeyer calls these individuals “particularly scary.” These “Double Highs” are not submissive, instead seeking those who will be submissive to them. They are exceedingly prejudiced, exhibiting stark hostility against rights for ethnic groups, homosexuals, and women. This group, unlike the SDOs but more akin to the RWAs are extremely religious, tending to be Christian fundamentalists, who are also profoundly parochial, wishing to mingle only with their own kind.

Double Highs appear willing to take the ruthlessness of the SDO and the self-righteousness of the RWA to perilous heights. In a game simulation of global policy and power, these individuals quickly provoked world crisis by risking everything to win, including billions of lives and destruction of the ozone layer, just to “win.” This type of individual leading the gullible and unthinking RWAs with a band of SDOs….well, we’ve seen it in action.

There are of course many subtleties and complexities that cannot be explored in depth here, but you get the idea and can easily apply these three types to the various players we encounter in our current administration of the absurd. Dean does a great job of this very thing, and of bringing his personal knowledge of some of the historical characters, such as Liddy and Colson, into this constellation. It’s bracing, but oddly satisfying, in that it articulates and frames a category that we know but were not always able to identify.

The book is well worth the read for Dean's application to the actors on the American political stage, and raises numbers of provocative issues that stay with you long after closing the last chapter. For instance, this piece you're reading had reached about this point in completion just over a week ago when the Senate voted to legalize torture and drop habeas corpus. Reviewing the list of characteristics of RWAs and SDOs, the mystery as to how some people can actually propose such Neanderthal positions is lifted; the mystery of how some people can support them when they know better is answered by combining what we know from Altemeyer’s RWAs and Milgram’s pivotal studies.

The SDOs and Double Highs exhibit a strong belief in inequality - could there possibly be a more unAmerican trait? - which appears to underly their strong tendencies to prejudice and aggression, as well as their capacity to justify breaking all the rules to suit their own greed and entitlement. These tendencies further explain why they appear to be completely void of empathy. Hence it logically follows that these are the folks who are not only capable of justifying torture and cruelty, they are capable of carrying these acts out, given the proper authority in the proper uniform giving them orders.

Thus we come to see the confluence of sadism and unlawfulness in Cheney and Gonzalez, with racism in George Allen and Strom Thurmond, and unbridled greed and entitlement of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay. It is not simply coincidence that these characteristics gravitate to the same party, or that the party of choice here is the conservative party.

Another specter looms over the implications of authoritarian personalities, and though Dean does not address it directly, he interestingly flags it in the story highlighted in his preface. Seems in 1991, Dean received a call from Mike Wallace asking various questions about a book that was soon to be released about Bob Woodward, Silent Coup. Long story short, the book was written by two Republican hacks and accused Dean’s wife, Maureen (“Mo,” an elegant beauty who got a lot of attention during the Watergate hearings), of running a call girl ring that serviced Democrats on the hill, and this was what The Plumbers had really been after that fateful night of the Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters. This was apparently an attempt fifteen years after the fact to rewrite history, an attempt to claim that the entire Watergate episode was really a Democratic cover-up of Democratic sexual sin that Dean’s wife participated in.

I know, outlandish; but no more outlandish than many other stories we’ve been fed – and the public has swallowed – as a regular diet in the past quarter century. Dean’s reason for telling it, though, was to emphasize the lengths to which these characters would go, the lies they would tell, the crimes they would commit, all in order to force the world to spin to their tune.

However, Dean made little of the delivery system selected for this attempted conservative reconstruction. The way the Silent Coup authors chose to get attention for their bizarre agenda was to use the most scandalous, sensationalist means possible, by making it about sex. Our current Foley feeding frenzy, in the face of all the other equally (and worse) scandalous crimes against our American way of government, is just such a case in point.

Given Dean opened his book with this story, it is both odd and understandable that he never linked the Altemeyer authoritarian scales with the increasing evidence of connections to sexual deviance. Understandable because the story offended him and his wife then, and it no doubt – and no less understandably – offends him now. Odd, though, because that somewhat obvious connection exists, and because there are studies that actually document that authoritarian profiles can predict sexual aggression, sexual harassment, and battering. In fact, the original, sixty year old Adorno study on authoritarianism documented that individuals with high scores showed “signs of underlying resentful disrespect for women generally.” I would submit that an identical disrespect for the vulnerable, the "unequal" - as evidenced in racism and homophobia - also exists in these individuals.

The facts are particularly intriguing when viewed as the frame for the current, most publicized conservative Congressional scandal, not only among the seemingly endless conservative scandals (Congressional and extra-Congressional), but also among the apparently significantly higher incidence of Republicans exposed for immorality and sex crimes in recent years, particularly pedophilia.

Of course we see the Republicans attempting now to make this Foley issue about gays, as if being gay is in itself perverse and equivalent to pedophilia. Pat Buchanan made a loud fool of himself on this count just this week on MSNBC. Such a position exposes both Pat’s ignorance of the truth of the matter, and his resistance to entertain any data that contradict his position. In other words, his RWA tendencies are showing.

But we all know there is no such equivalence as he asserts, and that instead countless homosexuals enjoy perfectly healthy lives, with and without partners, with and without children, but with the caveat that they of course must deal with the prejudices of an ignorant public. What the ignorant public – or the media – will not consider, of course, is that neither being a victim of abuse nor alcoholism “cause” homosexual orientation, and neither can homosexuality be “cured.” They also fail to recognize that Foley had several choices before him, as did the Republican leadership; these choices included doing the right thing. Always an option, but not one the conservative RWA rarely seems to consider as a first choice. The fact that so many of them so easily lie about every aspect of their criminal actions exposes their cavalier relationship with truth; they speak whatever serves their goal of power, so much so that truth is thoroughly lost in the scramble.

The delay in posting this piece has therefore been ultimately a benefit, as events have allowed me to include the full spectrum of pathologies included in the authoritarian profile, not least of which would be sexual pathologies. Clearly, Foley is not a healthy man, based not on his homosexuality, but based on his predatory habits. Foley’s political positions notwithstanding, his predatory habits alone suggest consistency with the SDO wing of authoritarianism, as he used power in order to get his way, he used power to intimidate those more vulnerable than him, he evidently did not care about the potential for harming his victims, and he was apparently rather relentless, if not ruthless, about his pursuits. These characteristics are further perpetuated by the Republican Party leadership in their attempts to cover it up and pass the buck, not only to hold on to power as a Party, but as individuals. I've pointed out more than once here that eventually these crooks will begin to turn on each other like rats on a sinking ship.

Looking at Foley’s history in the Party and now with the Congressional pages, we might still consider him relatively tame on the SDO definitional factors of dominance and economic conservatism when compared to Gingrich, Robertson, Frist, and DeLay (all of whom Dean lists as SDOs). That is, until we recognize his connections to Scientology and Mel Sembler.

But putting the scales and profiles aside for a moment, I would pose this simple, logical question. Given the level of psychological dysfunction listed in the authoritarian personality, why would anyone ever expect such individuals to have healthy sex lives? Finding the two together in the same individual would be most incongruent. A primary requisite for a healthy sex life would seem at the very least to be the capacity for recognizing and honoring equality in the union; anything shy of that invites instead of union and balance, an event of overshadowing and eclipse, a pairing of domination/submission, rule/subjugation.

It would actually seem to also follow that the sexual deviations of rape and sadism and pedophilia expose the demand for dominance that these individuals exhibit, and so they seek not their equals (none to be found, of course), but the weak and vulnerable, the submissive and helpless. This argument would therefore predict a high incidence in the SDO authoritarian ranks a pattern of sexual dysfunction as it is associated with abuse, harassment, victimization, predation, and pedophilia. Studies suggest this prediction may bear out in truth.

For all these many and varied reasons, I submit, no one should be at all surprised by the Foley page scandal; it’s just the latest in a string of scandals that are thoroughly consistent with the total authoritarian pathology. Nor should anyone be surprised that we find an excess of Republican sex abuse scandals over the years, or that Republicans are working to perform and justify torturing of anyone, stripping all of us of our rights. Nor should we be at all shocked to discover that these Republicans will stop at nothing and stoop to any lows to grab power and keep it. Their rhetoric has betrayed these truths about them for the past twenty-five years (with a long history prior to that in America, and for that matter, in the world), and now we see it all in action, unleashed.

Still, we must also acknowledge that they represent the darkest fears and impulses of humanity, and what has always happened – and what will forever happen – if we do not educate ourselves for recognizing and abating them. Not only in our midst, but each of us within ourselves.