Conservatives Without Conscience

Cheney administration. It certainly does not explain conservatives’ engaging in conspicuously unconscionable activities. I am not referring here to their practice of defaming perceived enemies, or to the corruption that has infected the K Street to Congress corridor. Rather, I have in mind more consequential activities, like taking America to war in Iraq on false pretenses, and the blatant law breaking by countless executive branch departments and agencies that, directed by the president or with his approval, torture our perceived enemies or spy on millions of Americans to look for terrorists. These activities have been acquiesced to by the Republican-controlled Congress, and by millions of conservatives who are tolerating, if not encouraging, this behavior.

Why is this happening? How can young American men and women working for the CIA or armed forces ignore their consciences to carry out orders that defy well-known international laws? How do employees who go to work every morning at the National Security Agency, the most powerful electronic spying machine in the world, illicitly turn their awesome surveillance powers on fellow Americans? Is it merely a matter of dutifully following the president’s instructions? What was going through the heads of Justice Department lawyers as they sifted through the law to create dubious arguments justifying torture of our enemies? Where are the consciences of the conservatives who are now running the government, and where are the consciences of the countless conservative voters who tolerate, and in many cases actively support, this behavior? Or are these activities, in fact, reflective of their consciences?

I found answers to these and many other questions primarily in two places. During the years following Watergate, when I was looking for explanations of what had gone so wrong with Nixon’s presidency, I encountered the work of Stanley Milgram. Later, when writing this book, I discovered the research of Bob Altemeyer. Both have conducted studies so important that it is dangerous to ignore their findings.

In the aftermath of Watergate a significant number of studies were undertaken by political and social psychologists, in fields of inquiry with which I was not familiar but which I found extremely revealing. Many seemed right on the mark and were helpful in understanding the dynamics of what had transpired. Some of these studies examined the mind-set within the Nixon White House that produced Watergate, and to assist in them I frequently shared my insider knowledge. One such study resulted in my encountering the classic experiments developed by social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who invited me to be the featured speaker at a gathering of psychologists in New York not long after I had published my book about Watergate, Blind Ambition. The purpose of the conference was to discuss Watergate as it related to Milgram’s pioneering work on obedience to authority.

Obedience is “the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purposes,” Milgram explained, and he called it “the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority.”[1] Without it many organizations simply would not work; with it, they could also run amuck. Because I had witnessed obedience facilitate both good and bad in government, I believed Milgram’s work was both relevant and important. Today I think the implications of that research should be known by everyone working in Washington, if not in governments everywhere.

Obedience to Authority

To his surprise, and to the amazement and dismay of others, Milgram’s classic experiments revealed that 65 percent of seemingly ordinary people were willing to subject what they believed to be protesting victims to painful, if not lethal, electric shocks (450 volts of electricity). They did so simply because they were instructed to by a scientist dressed in a gray lab coat in the setting of a scientific laboratory. This apparent authority figure ordered that the jolts of electricity be administered to determine if the “learner” would memorize word pairings faster if punished with increasingly painful electric shocks when he failed to accomplish the task. Actually, this experiment was designed to test not learning but rather the willingness of those administering the electric shocks to obey the authority figure. The subjects were not told of the ruse—that the “learner” was only pretending to experience pain and, in fact, was not being shocked—until the end of the experiment.[2]

When Milgram invited me to speak at his conference, he explained that it was because the Watergate probes had established that I was not a person who blindly followed the commands of authority figures. To the contrary, I had disobeyed an ultimate and powerful authority figure, the president of the United States, as well as his senior aides. Milgram noted that my breaking ranks and testifying about the Watergate cover-up placed me at the opposite end of the spectrum from people like Gordon Liddy and Chuck Colson, who compulsively obeyed authority. The conference proved to be a learning experience for me, because I discovered things about myself I had not really thought about.[3] More importantly, Milgram’s work provided a compelling explanation for why many people obey or disobey authority figures, and the role of conscience in their behavior.

Conscience and Obedience

Milgram described conscience as our inner inhibitory system—part nature, part nurture, and necessary to the survival of our species.[*] Conscience checks the unfettered expression of impulses. It is a self-regulating inhibitor that prevents us from taking actions against our own kind. Because of conscience, Milgram says, “most men, as civilians, will not hurt, maim, or kill others in the normal course of the day.” Conscience changes, however, when the individual becomes part of a group, with the individual’s conscience often becoming subordinated to that of the group, or to that of its leader. In an organizational setting few people assess directions given by a higher authority against their own internal standards of moral judgment. Thus, “a person who is usually decent and courteous [may act] with severity against another person…because conscience, which regulates impulsive aggressive action, is per force diminished at the point of entering the hierarchical structure.” Those who submit to an authoritarian order, and who adopt the conscience of the authority figure that issues the order, are in what Milgram called an “agentic state.” They have become an agent of the authority figure’s conscience.

Milgram devised various methods to test and measure points of individual resistance to authoritative commands. He discovered that most people who resist those commands go through a series of reactions, until they finally reach the point of disobeying. The decision of whether to follow an order is not a matter of judging it right or wrong, he learned, but rather a response to the unpleasantness of “strain” (a natural reaction, for example, to the moaning and eventual screams of a putative victim). When “a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate his standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense,” Milgram concluded. Rather, that person simply places his moral views aside. His “moral concern shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations of the authority figure.”

Milgram believed that Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) was correct in its analysis. She took issue with the Israeli war crimes prosecutor’s efforts to depict Eichmann as a sadistic monster for his horrific role in exterminating Jews during World War II. She in turn described Eichmann as “an uninspired bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and did his job,”[4] a compliant cog who had set aside his conscience. “Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine,” Milgram observed. In fact, the lesson of his work was that “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terribly destructive process.” Stated a bit differently, Milgram revealed that for a remarkable number of people, it is very difficult to disobey authority figures, but quite easy for them to set aside their conscience.

Milgram’s research explained how someone like Chuck Colson was able to set aside his conscience when Nixon wanted a break-in at the Brookings Institution, and Colson became a dependable and unquestioning lieutenant for following orders.[5] Colson, a former Marine, was a click-the- heels, salute, and get-the-job-done type. But after he had left the White House, had become a born-again Christian, and had acknowledged Nixon’s disgraceful conduct, the Milgram model became less than satisfactory in explaining Colson’s efforts to promote a bogus history of Watergate.

Milgram’s notion of an agentic conscience, however, appears to explain how, under Bush and Cheney, National Security Agency employees can turn their powerful electronic surveillance equipment on other Americans without objection. It can also account for CIA employees’ and agents’ willingness to hide so-called enemy combatants (that is, anyone they suspect of terror connections) in secret prisons, not to mention engage in torture—all contrary to law. Gordon Liddy, in contrast, pretends that he is obedient to the orders of his superiors, when exactly the opposite is the truth, as a close reading of his semiconfessional autobiography reveals. When in the FBI Liddy made illegal entries—“black-bag jobs”—searching for clues in an auto theft case, even though such activity was authorized (under the Fourth Amendment) only for certain national security cases, and even then had to be approved by FBI headquarters in advance. Liddy describes his illegal activity as “a simple extrapolation from