| Federal courts should be staffed by judges who think and act like good conservatives, and if they do not, Congress should take jurisdiction away from lower courts, which it controls. | They oppose packing federal courts with ideologues and interfering with judicial independence. |
| Because most of the public does not really understand politics, elites must run the government, and equality goes to those who earn it. | They oppose elitism and encourage equality for all. |
| Government secrecy is necessary in an age of terror, and transparency makes it difficult to run the government. | They reject government secrecy and seek as much transparency as possible. |
| Terrorism has created an indefinite war, and, as Winston Churchill said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” | They believe honesty is not merely the best policy, it is the only policy. And terrorism must be viewed realistically. |
| America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, the Bible is an indisputable guide for government, and there is nothing in the Constitution creating a “wall of separation” between church and state. | Religious dogma is personal and private, and the Bible is not a basis for government policy; separation of church and state is essential in our pluralistic society. |
| Big government is here to stay, deficits do not matter, and if liberal social programs can be choked by cutting taxes, that is even better. | The national government should be limited, and should be fiscally responsible. |
| Voters who are kept anxious by fears of terrorism will become or remain conservatives and keep Republicans in power; it is time—and smart politics—to go back to a Department of War to deal with terrorists. | The politics of fear have no place in a democracy. A strong defense is the best offense, and the military-industrial complex should not control the Department of Defense. |
| So long as America remains the strongest nation, it can control the world and maintain peace by preemptively going to war to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. | America cannot police the world unilaterally and needs the good will and cooperation of other nations to prevent the spread of terrorism and WMD. |
| Tough times demand tough talk, and it is an unfortunate reality that mudslinging works in politics. | Civility is a sign of strength not weakness, and democracy cannot survive without it. |
It should surprise no one that when conservatism and authoritarianism are joined together the result is authoritarian conservatism. Here too are found right-wing authoritarian followers and social dominators, as well as conservatives without conscience. With science to assist as an analytical tool, the growing authoritarian conservatism can be more deeply probed.
CHAPTER THREE
AUTHORITARIAN CONSERVATISM
POLITICAL AUTHORITARIANISM in America still pales in comparison with that in countries like China and Russia, or in any of the many semidictatorial or quasi-totalitarian governments. This is as it should be; America’s founders rejected political authoritarianism when they rejected monarchy and it has no place in our history. But democracy is not simply the antithesis of political authoritarianism, for any government has an inherently authoritarian nature. The United States is a republic, meaning that authority resides with the people, who elect agents to represent them in making day-to-day political decisions. Our founding fathers understood that republics were vulnerable; they knew that “many republics in history, such as the Roman republic, had been replaced by despots,” political scientist Jay Shafritz of the University of Pittsburgh pointed out. Shafritz noted that when Benjamin Franklin was asked what sort of government had been created at the Constitutional Convention, he suggested that weakness in his reply, “a republic, if you can keep it.”[1] The vehicle that despotism rides is authoritarianism, and we have been fortunate that authoritarianism, until recently, existed only at the fringes of our government.
In fact, authoritarian conservatism has been present in American politics in some form since America’s founding. There has always been an authoritarian element in modern conservatism (which developed post–World War II), but only recently has it found widespread adherence, overpowering libertarian and traditional thinking. Nonetheless, there exists a symbiotic relationship between authoritarianism and conservatism, which today is concentrated in social conservatism and the policies of neoconservatism. Its presence in these factions is no small matter, though, for it is they who largely control the current political agenda in the United States. Keeping the authoritarian influence of conservatism in check, however, is vital to maintaining our republican form of government, and it can only be checked if it is recognized and its implications understood.
Alexander Hamilton, the monarchist-leaning founding father, can justifiably be considered America’s first prominent authoritarian conservative. Political scientists Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard reported in their study
A prisoner, a parricide, a man who has committed sacrilege is tossed to [the hangman]: he seizes him, stretches him, ties him to a horizontal cross, he raises his arm; there is a horrible silence; there is no sound but that of bones cracking under the bars, and the shrieks of the victim. He unties him. He puts him on the wheel; the shattered limbs are entangled in the spokes; the head hangs down; the hair stands up, and the mouth gaping open like a furnace from time to time emits only a few bloodstained words to beg for death. [The hangman] has finished. His heart is beating, but it is with joy: he congratulates himself, he says in his heart “Nobody quarters as well as I.”…Is he a man? Yes. God receives him in his shrines, and allows him to pray. He is not a criminal. Nevertheless, no tongue dares declare that he is virtuous, that he is an honest man, that he is estimable. No moral praise seems appropriate for him, for everyone else is assumed to have relations with human beings: he has none. And yet all
