Conservatives Without Conscience

were given five Fs, twelve Ds, and two incompletes in categories that included airline passenger screening and improvement of first responders’ communication systems. The bipartisan members of the 9/11 Commission found that “there has been little progress in forcing federal agencies to share intelligence and terrorism information and sharply criticized government efforts to secure weapons of mass destruction,” according to the Washington Post.[*] “We believe that the terrorists will strike again,” 9/11 Commission chairman Thomas H. Kean told reporters. “If they do, and these reforms that might have prevented such an attack have not been implemented, what will our excuses be?”[92] When the president and his cohort continue to raise the threat of terrorism but refuse to implement even the minimum measures recommended by the commission, it is clear they are playing the politics of fear. No one knows when, if ever, terrorists will use a weapon of mass destruction in the United States, but using the issue to frighten people while not addressing the 9/11 Commission’s concerns is worse than irresponsible; it is cruel.

It appears that most Republicans are content to allow the Bush White House to engage in fearmongering if that is what is needed to win elections. Many contend that terrorism, after all, is a real threat, and they feel safer with Republicans in charge, because they believe Republicans will deal with the issue more effectively than Democrats. Of course, demagoguery is not new; there have always been and always will be politicians who appeal to emotions rather than reason, because it works.

There are, in fact, relatively few people who are truly intimidated by the possibility of terrorist attacks.[*] Those few who are genuinely frightened, however, help Bush and Cheney. Dr. Jost and his collaborators, in the study reported in Chapter 1, found that fear of terrorism is a useful recruiting tool for Republicans. When the Bush administration reminds people of terrorism, it clearly works to their political benefit. Jamie Arndt, a psychology professor at the University of Missouri, reported, “Reminders of death create anxiety that causes people to cling to cultural and societal touchstones.” Because the president is such a touchstone, “he may benefit from keeping [terrorism] in people’s mind,” Arndt said.[93] This finding is corroborated by public opinion polls. While political exploitation of terror does not make a tremendous difference in voting behavior, it has been sufficient to keep Bush in the White House. At the outset of the 2004 presidential campaign, President Bush was more trusted than Senator Kerry to do a good job protecting the country from terrorists by a substantial margin of 53 percent to 37 percent.[94] A CNN exit poll taken at the end of the race, after Bush had repeatedly raised the issue of terrorism, showed that people voted for Bush over Kerry on this issue by a similar—but better for Bush—58 percent to 40 percent margin.[95]

Fearmongering has serious political consequences. Timothy Naftali, a diplomatic historian at the University of Virginia who worked as a consultant to the 9/11 Commission, is troubled by the ramifications of Bush, Cheney, et al.’s use of fear and their politicizing of policies needed to deal with terrorism. A reviewer for Foreign Affairs noted that in Naftali’s view, “the Bush administration’s reliance on a ‘politics of fear’ has stymied a mature national conversation about counterterrorism. He urges the government to keep terrorism at the forefront of its concerns and pursue a pragmatic foreign policy while helping the public put the threat in perspective and evaluate the difficult tradeoffs between national security and civil liberties.” [96] Al Gore, in his keynote address at the 2004 conference on fear, also noted the consequences of Bush’s preying on American fears. “Fear was activated on September 11 in all of us to a greater or lesser degree,” Gore observed. “And because it was difficult to modulate or to change in particular specifics, it was exploitable for a variety of purposes unrelated to the initial cause of the fear. When the president of the United States stood before the people of this nation—in the same speech in which he used the forged document—he asked the nation to ‘imagine’ how fearful it would feel if Saddam Hussein gave a nuclear weapon to terrorists who then exploded it in our country. Because our nation had been subjected to the fearful, tragic, cruel attack of 9/11, when our president asked us to imagine with him a new fear, it was easy enough to bypass the reasoning process, and short-circuit the normal discourse that takes place in a healthy democracy with a give-and-take among people who could say, Wait a minute, Mr. President. Where’s your evidence? There is no connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.’ At one point, President Bush actually said, ‘You can’t distinguish between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.’ He actually said that,” Gore added, and with disappointment explained how even he had trusted Bush to do the right thing, but that Bush had abused the trust people had in him.[97]

In short, fear takes reasoning out of the decision-making process, which our history has shown us often enough can have dangerous and long-lasting consequences. If Americans cannot engage in analytical thinking as a result of Republicans’ using fear for their own political purposes, we are all in serious trouble. I am sure I am not alone in worrying about the road that we are now on, and where the current authoritarianism is taking the country. I only wish more people would talk about it.

What’s Wrong with Authoritarianism?

The study of authoritarianism began during the Holocaust, as scientists could not understand why people in Germany and Italy were tolerating, if not supporting, Hitler and Mussolini. They wanted to know if that sort of blind allegiance could develop in the United States. Accordingly, they set about the task of finding out what types of people were susceptible to authoritarian leadership. After a half century, they have found answers, which I have outlined in this book.

I have discussed, in broad terms, the growing authoritarianism that conservatives are making part of American government and politics. Needless to say, I find this trend troubling. I am struck by how an understanding of authoritarianism explains the patterns of behavior that I have seen time and again during my years of observing government and politics. It answered questions about why people who call themselves conservatives act or respond as they do. I have only touched on the subject. Authoritarian behavior is often described as “protofascists,” which led me to read deeply and widely about fascism. For example, Professor Robert O. Paxton recently observed that a “fascism of the future—an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols…. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well.”[98] Are we on the road to fascism? Clearly we are not on that road yet. But it would not take much more misguided authoritarian leadership, or thoughtless following of such leaders, to find ourselves there. I am not sure which is more frightening: another major terror attack or the response of authoritarian conservatives to that attack. Both are alarming prospects.

Like Dick Cheney’s, my memory is seared by Vietnam and Watergate, and so it appears is Bob Altemeyer’s. His work initially caught my attention because he noticed that as Watergate unfolded, the public was very slow to react. For example, the Watergate burglars from the Nixon reelection committee were arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972. Polls conducted shortly before the 1972 elections showed that some 62 percent of the voters dismissed the Watergate break-in and resulting investigation as “mostly politics.”[99] Notwithstanding the growing and hard evidence of the president’s deep involvement, public opinion was slow to change or turn against Nixon. Americans want to believe in their president, and for that matter, their own representatives or senators—although they may hold Congress and politicians in general in low esteem. Altemeyer understood what few did: It was not public opinion that forced Nixon from office. He correctly noted that Nixon resigned “because [Nixon’s] attorney had forced the disclosure of evidence so damaging that it seemed certain he would be convicted of high crimes by the Senate.” This is true, but there is more to the story.

In fact, Nixon had many defenses that he could have mounted had he gone to trial in the Senate, many of which Bush and Cheney are promoting today under the rubric of national security and the inherent power of the presidency. The reason Nixon did not go to trial was not his loss of support on Capitol Hill, which he might have rebuilt, but rather because he lost the support of his defenders, principally on the White House staff. Other than White House counsel Fred Buzzhardt, and possibly chief of staff Al Haig (with whom Buzzhardt had roomed at West Point), no one was aware that Nixon was lying about what he knew and when he knew it once the cover-up had initially fallen apart. Nixon provided the lawyer he had hired to defend him in the House’s impeachment inquiry, James St. Clair, with false information, and St. Clair—as it happened—was a man of integrity and not a right-wing authoritarian follower. When he found out that his client had lied to him he had two choices: to resign or to join the new cover-up. He was, as it happened, interested in participating in the latter. Nixon at one point considered defying the Supreme Court ruling that he turn over his incriminating tapes (evidence that revealed that his defense