Conservatives Without Conscience

that their children are especially wonderful, etc. It wouldn’t make too much sense to say that someone is “motivated” to believe that 2 + 2 = 4.” (Interview with author. Unless otherwise stated, the comments about the study are based on my interpretations of it, not Dr. Jost’s.)

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Most recent Gallup Poll figures show about 53 percent of Americans oppose gay marriage. See http://www.pollingreport.com/civil.htm/.

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I do not believe I know any communitarians, but I am not unfamiliar with their outlook, which here is helpfully illustrated. Communitarianism is defined by Janda, Berry, and Goldman, who rely on the Oxford English Dictionary, as an ideology that envisions “a community formed to put into practice communistic or socialistic theories.” While this philosophy is beyond the focus of my study, it should be noted that Janda, Berry, and Goldman use the term in its more restricted sense, as reflective of the movement founded in 1990 by sociologist Amitai Etzioni, and it nicely completes their chart for its juxtaposition with liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism. For anyone seeking more information on communitarianism see Amitai Etzioni, Rights and the Common Good: The Communitarian Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).

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To fully understand the Freedom-Order-Equality dynamics, I urge you to visit the Web site that Ken Janda and Jerry Goldman have created. It provides a tutorial, and a self-test that will show you where you fall on their chart. See http://idealog.org. For comparison, you might also visit a libertarian site that also offers a self-test at http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html.

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I have provided only a brief summary of Milgram’s key thoughts on conscience. See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Perennial, 1969), 588, 127–34, which I have either paraphrased or quoted.

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It is important to appreciate that the term “authoritarianism” as used by the social and political psychologist is different from the authoritarianism of the political scientist or the typical journalistic reference. Political scientists and journalists typically view authoritarianism as a form of government. This authoritarianism is not what is meant by political and social psychologists who use the term, and it is not how the term is used in this chapter. When an “authoritarian personality” prevails, authoritarianism can exist in a home, in a classroom, in a church, or in a courtroom. Theoretically, a very unauthoritarian person could function as head of an authoritarian government, although that would be unusual; likewise, an authoritarian leader could easily be head of a democracy. As I point out in the next chapter, authoritarian personalities can also push democracy toward political authoritarianism. In this chapter, however, authoritarianism refers to the thinking and behavior of authoritarian personalities.

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Throughout this chapter I have quoted or paraphrased Altemeyer, and so noted in the text. This material is based on an extensive exchange of e-mails over a seven-month period, and to not excessively clutter this chapter, I have not added endnotes or footnotes in each instance. However, when I have relied on other material by Altemeyer, I have provided a citation.

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See http://www.mts.net/~gcg/.

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However, “right-wing authoritarians openly admit their hostility when they perceive strong social support for being aggressive—for example, against homosexuality. They also admit to a bit more hostility when they feel safe doing so, as when they are anonymous. But their social comparison process may prevent them from learning how relatively aggressive they really are.” Bob Altemeyer, Enemies of Freedom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1988), 190.

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In 1986, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science awarded Altemeyer its prize for behavioral science research for his essay “Authoritarian Aggression.” The prize encouraged development and application of verifiable empirical research methodologies in the social sciences. This is a highly prestigious recognition by scientific peers, and no higher accolade is given to social scientists. See http://archives.aaas.org/awards.php? a_id=24.

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Joseph de Maistre’s conservatism (and his Catholicism) was, in fact, brutally authoritarian. However, Owen Bradley’s work, A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) seeks “to make of Maistre the ambiguous, equivocal, un-decidable figure…rather than a monster plain and simple” (viii). According to the book’s editor, “Bradley makes a convincing argument that, far from wallowing in a morbid fascination with violence, as is often suggested, Maistre sees ritual sacrifice as spiritualizing and minimizing violence needed to maintain social order” ( American Historical Review [December 2000] at http://www. historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?). However Maistre is viewed, his authoritarianism raises troubling questions for any modern democracy.

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There appears to be no national poll of Republicans indicating how many identify themselves as “authoritarians.” I did, however, locate an informal poll taken by libertarians at the Texas GOP conventions in 2002 and 2004. While less than scientific, it is suggestive. Some 339 attendees at the 2004 convention indicated whether they were: “conservatives” (like George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Jack Kemp), “social conservatives” (like Dan Quayle and Pat Robertson), “authoritarian conservatives” (like Pat Buchanan and Bill Bennett), “liberals” (like Kennedy, Clinton, Kerry, Gore, and Gephardt—it seems liberals do not have first names in Texas), “centrists” (like Colin Powell, John McCain, and Ross Perot), or “moderate libertarians” (like Milton Friedman, Jeb Bush, Jesse Ventura, Steve Forbes, and Barry Goldwater). The examples provided for each category make the poll less than accurate, because some of the examples do not necessarily match their labels. The poll revealed, however, that 6.8 percent of those responding declared themselves “authoritarian,” with 9.9 percent of these being women and 4.6 percent being men. Very similar scores were recorded at the 2002 convention. See: “The Republican Liberty Caucus of Texas” at http://tx.rlc.org/events/2004_06_04_result.htm.