FBI procedure in security cases.” Rather than follow orders, he has consistently “extrapolated” and regularly disobeyed and deceived superiors.[6]
Milgram’s work does not explain Liddy’s behavior, or for that matter the obedience of the conservative Republicans who agreed to vote to impeach Clinton because their leaders instructed them to do so. And it does not even begin to illuminate the question of what drives authority figures, for Milgram focused only on those who compliantly follow orders, not on those who issue them. To really understand the conscience of contemporary conservatism we must turn to the study of authoritarianism, which explores both those who give orders in a political setting, as well as those who obediently follow such orders.
Linguistics expert George Lakoff reports in Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think that the language and thinking of contemporary conservatism is, essentially, authoritarian. The conservative’s worldview draws on an understanding of the family that follows “a Strict Father model.” (By way of comparison, he noted, the liberal worldview draws on a very different ideal, “the Nurturant Parent model.”) Lakoff contends that the organizing ideal of conservatism is the strict father who stands up to evil and emerges victorious in a highly competitive world. In the terms of this model, children are born bad and need a strict father to teach them discipline through punishment.[7] Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball has made similar observations, and describes today’s Republicans as the “Daddy” party and Democrats as the “Mommy.” There is no doubt in my mind, based on years of personal observation, that contemporary conservative thinking is rife with authoritarian behavior, a conclusion that has been confirmed by social science. An examination of the relevant studies provides convincing support for the argument that authoritarian behavior is the key to understanding the conservative conscience, or lack thereof.
Authoritarianism Social psychologists have spent some sixty years studying authoritarianism.[*] A decade before Milgram produced his startling findings, those most likely to comply with authority figures were identified as a personality type in The Authoritarian Personality, a study undertaken at the University of California, Berkeley. This work was part of the effort of leading social scientists to understand how “in a culture of law, order and reason…great masses of people [could and did] tolerate the mass extermination of their fellow citizens,” a question that was of some urgency after the horrors of World War II.[8]
The Berkeley study introduced the idea of “the authoritarian type”—people with seemingly conflicting elements in their persona, since they are often both enlightened yet superstitious, and proud to be individualists but live in constant fear of not being like others, whose independence they are jealous of because they themselves are inclined to submit blindly to power and authority.[9] For good reason, alert observers of American democracy are again expressing concern, as they had after World War II, about the growing and conspicuous authoritarian behavior in the conservative movement. Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science at Boston College and the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, suggests that The Authoritarian Personality be retrieved from the shelves. “The fact that the radical right has transformed itself from a marginal movement to an influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party makes the book’s choice of subject matter all the more prescient,” Wolfe wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education.[10]
Although The Authoritarian Personality is not without critics, Wolfe believes that despite its flaws it deserves a reevaluation. Public officials “make good subjects for the kinds of analysis upon which the book relied; visible, talkative, passionate, they reveal their personalities to us, allowing us to evaluate them,” he observes. A good example, he suggests, is United Nations ambassador John R. Bolton. At Bolton’s Senate confirmation hearings (after which the Senate refused to confirm him; Bush nonetheless gave him a recess appointment), his contentious personality was exposed, with one former State Department colleague calling him “a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy.” Wolfe notes, “Everything Americans have learned about Bolton—his temper tantrums, intolerance of dissent, and black-and-white view of the world—step right out of the clinical material assembled by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality.” Wolfe also finds Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas and former House majority leader Tom DeLay in its pages as well.[11]
During the past half century our understanding of authoritarianism has been significantly refined and advanced. Leading this work is social psychologist and researcher Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba. Altemeyer not only confirmed the flaws in the methodology and findings of The Authoritarian Personality, but he set this field of study on new footings, by clarifying the study of authoritarian followers, whom he calls “right-wing authoritarians” (RWA). The provocative titles of his books— Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1981), Enemies of Freedom (1988), and The Authoritarian Specter (1996)—and a few of his many articles found in scholarly journals—such as “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities” in the Journal of Social Psychology (2004) and “Why Do Religious Fundamentalists Tend to Be Prejudiced?” in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (2003)—indicate the tenor of his research and the range of his interests.[*]
Halfway through Altemeyer’s The Authoritarian Specter I realized that I should get guidance to be certain I understood the material correctly, because the information he had developed was exactly what I needed to comprehend the personalities now dominating the conservative movement and Republican Party. For instance, he asked a very troubling question at the outset of The Authoritarian Specter: “Can there really be fascist people in a democracy?” His considered answer, based not on his opinion but on the results of his research, was: “I am afraid so.”[12] Altemeyer’s studies addressed not only those people mentioned by Alan Wolfe, along with my muses Chuck Colson and Gordon Liddy, whose behavior had provoked my inquiry, but all conservatives. Altemeyer graciously agreed to assist me in understanding his work and that of his colleagues.[13]
To study authoritarians Altemeyer and other researchers have used carefully crafted and tested questionnaires, usually called “scales,” in which respondents are asked to agree or disagree with a statement such as “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us,” or, “A ‘woman’s place’ should be wherever she wants to be. The days when women are submissive to their husbands and social conventions belong strictly in the past.”[14] As a professor of psychology Altemeyer has tested (usually anonymously) tens of thousands of first-year students and their parents, along with others, including some fifteen hundred American state legislators, over the course of some three decades. There is no database on authoritarians that even comes close in its scope, and, more importantly, these studies offer empirical data rather than partisan speculation.
Authoritarianism Vis-a-Vis Conservatism Since the “authoritarian type” was first introduced in 1950, the question of the relationship of authoritarianism to ideology has been an ongoing investigation. Extensive research, and overwhelming evidence, shows “that authoritarianism is consistently associated with right-wing but not left-wing ideology.”[15] To underscore the fact that his questionnaire does not address the left, Altemeyer specifically calls his scale a survey of right-wing authoritarianism. “I have tried to discover the left-wing authoritarian, whom I suspect exists, but apparently only in very small numbers,” he told me. He is not testing for political conservatism per se, however. Nonetheless, he finds that those who score highly on his right-wing authoritarian scale are by and large “conservatives,” as journalists and the general public understand that term. Other social scientists have reached the same conclusions.[16]
In one of Altemeyer’s recent articles—“What Happens When Authoritarians Inherit the Earth? A Simulation”—he describes right-wing authoritarians as “political conservatives (from the grass roots up to the pros, say studies of over 1500 elected lawmakers).” He explained what can be a confusing distinction between a right- wing authoritarian and a political conservative:
When I started out, and ever since, I was not looking for political conservatives. I was looking for people who overtly submit to the established authorities in their lives, who could be of any political/economic/religious stripe. So in the Soviet Union, whose Communist government we would call extremely “left-wing,” I expected
