Conservatives Without Conscience

out they explain it away. The unborn are innocent while those being executed are not, yet the culture of life believes it is God’s wish to protect all life. As another example, social conservatives are deeply offended by atheists who want to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, yet with great solemnity and earnestness they recite—as often as possible—that pledge and its words: “liberty and justice for all.” For all but atheists, they mean. Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited prayer in public schools, Christian conservatives have been up in arms, with the most vocal being Christians who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Of course, those who truly know the Bible know that Jesus said, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you (Matthew 6:5–7; emphasis added). So illogical is much of the biblically driven political thinking of evangelical Christian conservatives, for whom faith appears to trump reason, that theologians like Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong have written books with titles like Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991).

Jonah Goldberg, writing for the National Review, has acknowledged the contradictions within modern conservatism. Rather than finding them a problem, though, he deems them a virtue. “The beauty of the conservative movement,” he said, “is that we all understand and accept the permanence of contradiction” in thinking. One can envision George Orwell spinning in his grave in frustration at a remark like that, for it is pure “doublethink.” Goldberg noted in passing that Jesus was not a conservative, which is certainly true, and is another fact ignored by the religious right. It does not take a particularly close reading of the New Testament, or the teachings of Jesus, to appreciate that the term “politically conservative Christian” has an oxymoronic quality. This is why conservatives have had to invent terms like “compassionate conservatism.” But for those who believe that contradiction is a thing of beauty, the concept of compassionate conservatism will not tax credulity whatsoever.

Psychological Perspectives on Conservatism

Public criticism by conservatives greeted the work of New York University professor John T. Jost and his collaborators when they published a report entitled “Political Conservatism as Motivated Cognition.”[*][64] This study examines the psychology of political conservatism, basing its findings on a mass of data: forty-four years of studies by social scientists investigating conservatism, using eighty-eight different techniques and involving over twenty-two thousand participants.[65] Because its results are founded on empirical information drawn from experiments and testing—and conservatism views itself as grounded in empirical thinking— the negative reaction seemed out of place. Indeed, conservative commentators devoted little serious attention to the study, rejecting its conclusions based on a press release.[66]

Jost and his collaborators developed their working definition of “conservative” by reviewing dictionaries and encyclopedias along with the literature of historians, journalists, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers from the mid-1950s (which, according to most conservative scholars, generally marks the beginning of the modern conservative movement in the United States) through the end of the 1990s. The study placed apt parameters on its inquiry while focusing on those who would be considered conservative under most any characterization. Their survey of the usage of the term “conservative” over roughly a half century revealed “a stable definitional core and a set of more malleable, historically changing peripheral associations.”[67] While its core meanings were considered to include “a resistance to change” and “an acceptance of inequality,” its peripheral meanings were more complex, because not only did they change with time, but in some cases they overlapped the core meanings. For example, the study found the peripheral focus of “conservatism in the United States during the 1960s entailed support for the Vietnam War and opposition to civil rights, whereas conservatism in the 1990s had more to do with being tough on crime and supporting traditional moral and religious values.” In addition, the authors provide examples of people who became conservatives for reasons having nothing to do with the identified core meanings, yet who later accepted those aspects of conservatism “because of their association with likeminded others.”[68]

The heart of Jost and his collaborators’ findings was that people become or remain political conservatives because they have a “heightened psychological need to manage uncertainty and threat.”[69] More specifically, the study established that the various psychological factors associated with political conservatives included (and here I am paraphrasing) fear, intolerance of ambiguity, need for certainty or structure in life, overreaction to threats, and a disposition to dominate others. This data was collected from conservatives willing to explain their beliefs and have their related psychological dynamics studied through various objective testing techniques. These characteristics, Dr. Jost said, typically cannot be ascribed to liberals.

Right-wing talk-radio hosts, conservative columnists, and conservative bloggers generally dismissed Jost’s study, although apparently few could be bothered to read it. Jonah Goldberg of the National Review wrote a lengthy piece about it, but managed to focus on such irrelevancies as Alec Baldwin, Viagra, Napoleon, and what he calls “the left’s medicalization of dissent.” Goldberg described the study as “gassy, insubstantial, malodorous…cow flatulence.”[70] Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter offered characteristic attacks, with Limbaugh mixing name calling with false and misleading information before dismissing it.[71]

After being hammered by conservatives for several months, Jost and his collaborators responded with a Washington Post op-ed piece, noting that their critics remained conspicuously less than familiar with the actual contents of their study. Notwithstanding commentary to the contrary, the Jost group pointed out that they had not, in fact, implied that conservatism was “abnormal, pathological or the result of mental illness.” Nor had they claimed that conservatives themselves were insane, sick, or strange.[72] At the same time, they were not claiming their study was welcome news for conservatives.[73]

The difficulty of identifying in oneself such psychological factors as fear, intolerance of ambiguity, need for certainty or structure in life, overreaction to threats, and a disposition to dominate others does not mean that such dynamics can be summarily rejected. These characteristics are, in some cases, not only easily recognized by others but are discernible through psychological testing. A study published subsequent to Jost’s confirmed the findings of his group. It is an unprecedented survey of nursery school children, commenced in 1969, that revealed the personalities of three- and four-year-olds to be indicative of their future political orientation.[74] In brief, this research suggests that little girls who are indecisive, inhibited, shy, neat, compliant, distressed by life’s ambiguity, and fearful will likely become conservative women. Likewise, little boys who are unadventurous, uncomfortable with uncertainty, conformist, moralistic, and regularly telling others how to run their lives will then become conservatives as adults.[75]

Future Direction of Conservatism

Austin W. Bramwell, one of the best and brightest of the new generation of conservatives, laments the great quantity of information about conservatism that has little quality, as he explained in the magazine for traditional conservatives, The American Conservative. Bramwell says that “whereas 50 years ago the American Right boasted several political theorists destined to exert a lasting influence, today it has not one to its credit.” He adds that “conservatism has reached an unacknowledged consensus about the outcome of the theoretical debates of the ’50s and ’60s. The consensus holds, first, that someone has discovered the Holy Grail that will vindicate conservatism once and for all, otherwise why be a conservative in the first place? Second, it holds that, whatever the Grail actually is, it does not do any good to describe it with too much specificity. These beliefs contradict each other, yet the conservative consensus has proved remarkably stable.”[76] This is a highly accurate assessment of conservative thinking.

Who is Austin Bramwell? To begin with, he is Sarah Bramwell’s husband. [77] Sarah is another well-credentialed young conservative, a former chairperson of the Conservative Party of the Yale Political Union, a former senior editor of a Yale University journal of conservative opinion, a former associate editor of the National Review, a former deputy press secretary to Colorado’s Republican governor Bill Owens, and a featured speaker at the fortieth anniversary of the Philadelphia Society, which has been described by the New York Times as “a prestigious club for conservative intellectuals.”[78] The Bramwells were married at the Episcopal Church of