Conservatives Without Conscience

Psychology, vol. 144, no. 4 (2004), 422–25.

24.

Ibid.

25.

Ibid.

26.

Marc Stewart Wilson, “Social Dominance and Ethical Ideology: The End Justifies the Means?,” Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 143, no. 5 (2003), 549 (citing Sidanius et al.).

27.

Ibid.

28.

Bob Altemeyer, “What Happens When Authoritarians Inherit the Earth? A Simulation,” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, vol. 3, no. 1 (December 2003), 161.

29.

Ibid. See also Bob Altemeyer, “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities,” 431–35.

30.

Ibid., 439.

31.

Ibid.

32.

Bob Altemeyer, “What Happens When Authoritarians Inherit the Earth?,” 161.

33.

Altemeyer, “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities,” 445.

34.

In Altemeyer’s formulation, “Our conscience is the part of our minds that makes us feel guilty: (1) we can feel guilty because we did not do the right thing (but instead did nothing), and (2) (more commonly) we can feel guilty because we did something wrong. Conscience, or (perhaps more usefully) the strength of someone’s conscience, is a very tricky thing to measure. It is a very private experience, and no one can know exactly how someone’s guilt feels to him. And guilt usually means feeling shame, and for some reason people don’t like to reveal how ashamed they are of themselves.”

35.

There are some indirect ways to make measurements, for example, “by using anonymous surveys in good testing circumstances with the ‘Hidden Observer’ technique”—a metaphorical concept based on the suggestion that such an observer exists within each of us—Altemeyer made some intriguing findings. He asked a group of high- scoring right-wing authoritarians he had tested earlier—who almost across-the-board had strongly agreed with a statement about the existence of “an Almighty God who will judge each person after death”—whether the “Hidden Observer” in them agreed with this statement. He got surprising answers. About a fifth said they had some doubts about God’s existence, which they had shared with someone else, and about a third conceded that they had secret doubts about God’s existence that they had shared with no one. Altemeyer said he felt this to be one of the most amazing things right-wing authoritarians have ever admitted in his surveys.

36.

Bob Altemeyer, Enemies of Freedom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1988), 147–51.

37.

Ronald J. Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005), 17.

38.

Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, chapter 5.

39.

Lance Morrow, “The Brawlers,” National Review (October 25, 1999), 20.

40.

Charles Lane and Jennifer Bradley, “Daddy’s Boy,” The New Republic (January 22, 1996), 15.

41.

U.S. Senate, “Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972,” Hearings Before the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Book 10 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1973), 3922–24.

42.

Ibid.

43.