Conservatives Without Conscience

(‘I’m not going to think about it!’) whenever they want.” Altemeyer found the fact that so many others are able to detect their hypocrisies while they themselves are oblivious demonstrates how effective they are at ignoring their shortcomings. Third, he said, “right-wing authoritarians shed their guilt very efficiently when they do something wrong. Typically they turn to God for forgiveness, and as a result feel completely forgiven afterwards. Catholics, for example, use confession. Fundamentalist Protestants use a somewhat different mechanism. Many who are ‘born- again’ believe that if you confess your sins and accept Jesus as your personal savior you will go to heaven—no matter what else you do afterwards. (This is called ‘cheap grace’ by those within fundamentalism who hold its members to higher standards.)” In brief, “When a great deal of misbehavior is engaged in by born-again Christians it troubles their fundamentalist consciences very little, for after all, they are the Saved. So by using their religious beliefs effectively, right-wing authoritarians have high moral standards in many regards, but pretty ineffective consciences.”

This analysis can account for how someone like the born-again Chuck Colson can go about his hatchet work on people today without troubling his conscience just as he did at the Nixon White House. And how Christian conservatives like Pat Robertson can openly call for the assassination of foreign leaders, despite the Ten Commandments that he holds so dear. It is as if these individuals had worn down their consciences with cheap grace—a remarkable and frightening process. “One of the things a conscience is supposed to do is make us act better, but when you have a means of eliminating guilt, there is not much incentive to clean up your act. You can see how conscience gets short-circuited,” Altemeyer noted. He added, “Bad behavior may produce guilt, but it is easily washed away. So then more bad behavior can result, again, and again, each time getting removed very easily through religion. There is a terrible closing to this reality. The lack of guilt over things he has done in the past can actually contribute to the self-righteousness of the authoritarian. And this self-righteousness has proven, in experiments, to be the main factor that unleashes the right-wing authoritarian’s aggressive impulses.”[38] He concluded, “I have called them ‘God’s designated hitters.’ We end up with the irony that the people who think they are so very good end up doing so very much evil, and, more remarkably, they are probably the last people in the world who will ever realize the connection between the two.” There is no better explanation for the behavior of many Christian conservatives, for it accounts for their license to do ill, Christian beliefs notwithstanding.

Certainly, not all authoritarian conservatives are without conscience. There is no better example of an authoritarian conservative with a high political profile than Pat Buchanan. Lance Morrow, writing in the National Review, observed: “Buchanan emerged from Gonzaga [High School in Washington, DC] an authoritarian and dogmatist, possessing something of the Jesuit’s fierceness and delight in argument. I cannot see that he has changed in the 40-odd years since then. About America he has instincts of a sometimes paradoxical dynamic: aggressively defensive, militantly wistful.”[39] Likewise, in a less than flattering piece, the New Republic claimed, “In many ways, Buchanan’s authoritarian personality—although far less complex than Nixon’s tortured motivations—was a perfect political instrument for the dark, polarizing side of Nixon.” Its authors added that “Buchanan’s authoritarian mania was the key to high ratings for shows like ‘Crossfire,’ ‘The McLaughlin Group,’ and ‘The Capitol Gang.’”[40] While such characterizations are fairly typical assessments of Buchanan, he has in fact shown himself to have a strong and consistent set of principles. During Watergate, Buchanan was part of the Nixon White House defense team but since the Nixon tapes emerged, he has acknowledged, “I think what Nixon did, clearly, was wrong. And he made terrible mistakes. And partly as a result of his mistakes, he was destroyed, but he was destroyed also by his political enemies…. We weren’t saints.”[41]

Nixon White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman, along with John Ehrlichman and Chuck Colson, had asked Buchanan to create what would become known as the Plumbers Unit to investigate the leak of the Pentagon Papers and to drive the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg, both criminally and in the court of public opinion. Buchanan refused to take the assignment, but had he accepted it, it is difficult to imagine his hiring Gordon Liddy or Howard Hunt, who together incubated the mentality behind the Watergate break-ins and ensuing cover-up. When testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee Buchanan made this telling statement: “Charles Colson was quoted as saying, ‘I would do anything the President of the United Sates would ask me to do, period.’ I would subscribe to that statement for this reason: The President of the United States would not ask me to do anything unethical, improper, or wrong, or illegal.” (Nixon’s tapes later confirmed Buchanan’s testimony.) Committee counsel pressed Buchanan, asking, “What tactics would you be willing to use?” To which he responded, “Anything that was not immoral, unethical, illegal, or unprecedented in previous Democratic campaigns.” He did not hesitate to describe dirty politics he considered unacceptable. “Now there is a line across which political tricks should not go, quite clearly. One of them obviously was in Florida. The salacious attack on Senator Jackson and Senator Humphrey.” (This dirty campaigning had in fact been sponsored by the Nixon White House, which was unknown at the time by Buchanan.)[42]

Profile of Authoritarians

No question hovered at the front of my mind more, reading through Altemeyer’s studies of authoritarian behavior, than, why are right-wingers often malicious, mean-spirited, and disrespectful of even the basic codes of civility? While the radical left has had its episodes of boorishness, the right has taken these tactics to an unprecedented level. Social science has discovered these forms of behavior can be rather easily explained as a form of aggression.

Altemeyer’s studies of authoritarian aggression are groundbreaking and have been recognized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[*] Altemeyer discovered that the aggression of right-wingers seems to be not merely instrumental—that is, expressed for some political purpose—but engaged in for the pure pleasure of it. Torture is an extreme example, yet apparently authoritarians can find even that enjoyable, as the Abu Ghraib photos tragically illustrate. But on a more pedestrian level, he found it difficult for most right-wingers to talk about any subject about which they felt strongly without attacking others. This heightened level of aggressiveness has a number of psychological roots. Right-wing authoritarians, as we have seen, are motivated by their fear of a dangerous world, whereas social dominators have an ever-present desire to dominate. The factor that makes right-wingers faster than most people to attack others, and that seems to keep them living in an “attack mode,” is their remarkable self-righteousness. They are so sure they are not only right, but holy and pure, that they are bursting with indignation and a desire to smite down their enemies, Altemeyer explained.

When one examines authoritarians closely, their propensity to attack others by any means fair and foul is not surprising, for they are fundamentally fierce people. Yet Altemeyer’s studies indicate that if they could see themselves as others do, which they are seldom able to, they might gain perspective on their conduct. Their blinders, however, help make them who they are. Because there is so little information available for the general reader about authoritarians, notwithstanding literally reams of scientific reports that have accumulated since 1950 when this work commenced, it is as if the public has been hindered in understanding authoritarians by its own set of blinders. This is risky, for authoritarianism, which is a key but overlooked reality of contemporary conservatism, can be ignored only at our collective peril. Social scientists would do well to make more of their work in this area accessible to the general public, and journalists and political writers should avail themselves of this data.

“Typologies” are a controversial methodology, yet some types are simply too obvious not to recognize, particularly when decades of scientific research have established and confirmed them. Princeton political scientist Fred I. Greenstein has cautioned about the uses of personality in analyzing political activity, and employment of “typologies”; in fact, he directly addressed “the tangled history of studies of authoritarianism.” He noted, however, that what once seemed to be at a “dead end” in studying authoritarian personalities has proven not to be the case. Rather, “in the 1980s an ingenious and rigorous program of inquiry by Altemeyer (1981, 1988) furnished persuasive empirical evidence that the original authoritarian construct was an approximation of an important political- psychological regularity—the existence in some individuals of an inner makeup that disposes them to defer to authority figures.”[43] Since Greenstein made these observations the science has, as noted, significantly progressed. Not only has Altemeyer added to his empirical data, but a significant number of social scientists have confirmed his findings.

In closing, what follows is a summary of types of traits typically found in social dominators and right-wing authoritarians, based on extensive testing. Although these collations of characteristics of authoritarians are not attractive portraits, they are nonetheless traits that authoritarians themselves acknowledge. An asterisk indicates