In 2004 Gold published Take Back the Right: How the Neocons and the Religious Right Have Betrayed the Conservative Movement (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), where he refers to the neocons as “the America-must-lead-because-America-must-lead; let’s-go-thump-somebody crowd,” and the religious right as “the Christ-died-so-we-could-tell-you-what-to-do brigades.” His book is a lament for today’s conservatism by a man who spent much of his life promoting a conservative agenda. “It would be many years before I realized that conservatism was content with the lowest common denominator, and that, in the end, conservatism would rather complain than create,” he concluded.
I discussed with Bob Altemeyer the applications his findings to persons who had not been tested anonymously, and while authoritarian traits may be obvious in their behavior, precisely categorizing them can be difficult. Altemeyer advised, “We know about right-wing authoritarians, and social dominators, in general, based upon how most of them have acted in various studies. But in every study some authoritarians acted differently, and when you take an individual person, you can expect he too will act differently some of the time—just as it is much easier to predict where a herd of cattle is heading than to predict whether any particular steer is presently going this way or that, frontward or even backward. Then social sciences produce generalizations, which a lot of people find useful information. But any generalization means there will be exceptions, and you will almost always run into some when you study the complexity of an individual. Almost all generally authoritarian people thus will have some nonauthoritarian wrinkles in their behavior.” Accordingly, I have not attempted to get too precise in labeling the conspicuous authoritarian behavior of people like Scooter Libby and others. On the other hand some authoritarian behavior is too obvious not to label appropriately.
We may never learn the full extent of the objections expressed by “realist” Republicans. For example, it is only reluctantly that former Bush I national security adviser Brent Scowcroft has spoken out, because he is a close friend of the former president Bush. But because none of his old friends, who now control American foreign policy, were listening, he wrote an August 15, 2002, Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Don’t Attack Saddam: It would undermine our antiterror efforts.” James Risen writes in State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006) that the president “angrily hung-up the telephone” on his father, when he was expressing concerns about the “neoconservative ideologues” controlling the Bush II foreign policy.
Social and religious elements, however, have been present from the outset. When writing The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk, it will be recalled, declared “the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity.” And Kirk’s first canon called for belief in “a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.” Inherent in Kirk’s conservatism is the Burkean notion “of the state as ordained by God.” George Nash, in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, explained that one segment of the modern conservative movement “urged a return to traditional religion and ethical absolutes and a rejection of the ‘relativism’ which had allegedly corroded Western values” (xv).
While there have been several excellent books, not to mention a President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, addressing the Kent State shootings, the facts remain contested as to exactly what happened that spring day. Hoover’s slanders reveal a great deal about the man who should have sorted the facts out when memories where fresh by undertaking a full investigation.
Given what is known about Hoover it is difficult to believe that he actually believed much of what he preached.
The Eastern liberal establishment is not an “established authority” for an authoritarian conservative like Agnew, so his attacks were not against what he believed acceptable authority.
Schlafly graduated from college in 1944 at nineteen years of age with a Phi Beta Kappa key, and received her master’s degree in government from Harvard a year later. She twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress. She has long been involved in Republican politics at the state and national levels, once chairing the Illinois Federation of Republican Women. Ms. Schlafly obtained a law degree at Washington University Law School, and worked with her husband in a legal assistance (ACLU-type) organization for conservative causes. To date, she has written over twenty books; her monthly “The Phyllis Schlafly Report” to conservative activists is now in its thirty-eighth year; her syndicated column appears in about 100 newspapers; her radio commentaries are heard daily on some 460 stations; and her radio talk show on education, called Phyllis Schlafly Live, appears on 45 stations. She has also raised six children.
“Acceptance of traditional religious beliefs appears to have more to do with having a personality rich in authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism, than with beliefs per se…. Authoritarians just absorb whatever beliefs their authorities teach.” Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 146–47.
Today the National Association of Evangelicals claims to represent an astounding thirty million members and to speak for over forty million evangelicals in the United States. See: http://www.nae.net.
The observations of evangelicals like Noll, Thomas, and Carter are corroborated in studies such as John C. Green’s The Christian Right in American Politics: Marching to the Millennium (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003) and Geoffrey Layman’s The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). The latter scholarly study drops the rhetoric and uses the best polling data available to analyze exactly what its title describes. Layman illustrates the religious right’s polarizing impact on the nation, and correctly, it appears, predicts this will continue into the new millennium.
