Conservatives Without Conscience (5 page)

I have not written this book with the slightest expectations of ending the vile attacks of these authoritarian conservatives or of changing their Machiavellian attitudes. They cannot be stopped because their behavior is simply a function of the way they are and how they think, their dispositions, and the way they deal with the world. However, they can be understood, exposed, and watched, and there is compelling reason to do so. While their attacks on me and my wife may be considered harmless in the scheme of things, their larger undertaking is of great concern.

Certainly, not all conservatives are the same, and not all of them are authoritarians or without conscience. In addition, many of them do not actually know very much about the belief system to which they supposedly subscribe. While some conservatives will take visceral offense at this book, for I have recast the dominant contemporary conservatism in its true light as “authoritarian conservatism,” my hope is that for others—particularly this movement’s “followers,” a category
into which most conservatives fall—it will encourage reflection. As I see it, there are three kinds of conservatives: the good, the bad, and the evil. And this book is about the bad and evil ones. Many of my friends are conservatives, and they will remain my friends after reading this book, and some may even thank me for writing it. Moderates, progressives, and liberals may appreciate that someone with inside knowledge of conservatism has finally explained what the hell has happened to these people.

For those interested in learning more about the disposition, beliefs, and actions of those who presently dominate American politics, some understanding of conservatism is required. Providing this information is easier said than done, as contemporary conservatism is a jungle of twisted thoughts and strange growths. From earlier travels I know the terrain, but I know only a few of the people now occupying it. Now that I have explained how they got my attention, it is necessary to clarify what conservatism is and what it is not, which I believe will show why it has been so easily manipulated and corrupted by authoritarians.

In Chapter 1, I explain how conservatives think, and highlight the structural weaknesses that have allowed it to be pulled from its roots by authoritarian conservatives. Chapter 2 explores authoritarians, many of whom are conservatives without conscience. This material is derived from almost half a century of scientific study, which has been inexplicably ignored outside of academia and so has not been readily available to the general reader. In Chapter 3, I illustrate how authoritarians operate in their own images, when I examine neoconservatives and Christian conservatives, who currently dominate Republican politics and policy. And in Chapter 4, I conclude with examples of the ugly politics and evil policies resulting from current authoritarian rule, the work of people who are conservatives without conscience and who are taking America in an undemocratic direction. Finally, I have placed some additional information and analysis in appendices.

Much of what I have to report is bad news. But there is some good news, because while authoritarians have little self-awareness, a few of them, when they learn the nature of their behavior, seek to change their ways. Thus, by reporting the bad and the ugly, it may do some good. At least that is my hope.

T
O UNDERSTAND
contemporary conservative thinking it is essential to understand authoritarian thinking and behavior in the context of traditional political conservatism, for authoritarianism has become the dominant reality of conservative thought. During its Paleolithic period, as those early days of the modern movement are now known, conservatism was easy to grasp. I recall those days well, because I signed on back then, before every schism became a new -ism, and long before authoritarians had taken control of conservatism. In the past four decades, with varying degrees of proximity, I have watched with dismay as conservatism has fallen into its present state of cluttered ideas and beliefs. It has become a potpourri of political philosophies that embrace any number of often incompatible thoughts on the right side of the political spectrum. Today’s conservatism is both complex and confusing.

National Review
writer Ramesh Ponnuru, who is well versed in all matters conservative, said that many people believe that there are just “two, or at most three, kinds of conservatives.” Needless to say, there are many more. Accordingly, Ponnuru advises that before talking about conservatives one should know whom one is discussing.
¹
It is good advice that can best be followed by addressing the key realities of modern conservatism. By examining them it becomes apparent how easily authoritarians have so effectively reshaped conservatism to their own liking.

Conservatism Cannot Be Meaningfully Defined

National polls today reveal that more people identify themselves as “conservative” than they do any other political outlook. Pollsters do not ask respondents to spell out what they mean, only whether they think of themselves as “conservative” or “liberal” or some other political position. Overwhelmingly, Republicans identify themselves as conservatives, although most cannot come up with a meaningful definition of the term. For almost a decade I have asked countless people to explain their understanding of conservatism, but my admittedly unscientific survey utterly failed to produce a good definition, which is not surprising, because there is none. Even leading conservative intellectuals acknowledge that trying to define conservatism is a futile and not particularly useful exercise.

Conservative scholar Russell Kirk wrote, “Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few pretentious phrases; he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm of radicals.” He added, “[C]onservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogmata; conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time.” Kirk offered as a working premise, however, that “the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity.” He also liked to quote Abraham Lincoln’s rhetorical question about conservatism: “Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?”
²
George Nash, another favorite scholar of conservatives, once asked, “What is conservatism?” He answered that “this is a perennial question; many are the writers who have searched for the elusive answer.” Nash concluded, “I doubt that there is any single, satisfactory, all-encompassing definition of the complex phenomenon called conservatism, the content of which varies enormously with time and place. It may even be true that conservatism is inherently resistant to precise definition.”
³

William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of the
National Review
and a ma
jor force in modern American conservatism, is almost always articulate to a fault. Yet he, too, has difficulty defining conservatism. When asked to do so by Chris Matthews on NBC’s
Hardball,
Buckley became tongue-tied. “The, the, it’s very hard to define, define conservatism,” Buckley stammered, before proceeding to offer his favorite but meaningless definition: “A famous professor, University of Chicago, was up against it when somebody said, ‘How do you define it?’ He didn’t want to say, well, he said, he said, ‘Conservatism is a paragon of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is continuing approximation.”
*
National Review
editor Jonah Goldberg hinted that Buckley has made a career of looking for a definition of conservatism but has not really succeeded.
⁴

In their recent book,
The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America
, John Micklethwait (U.S. editor of the
Economist
) and Adrian Wooldridge (Washington correspondent) sought to explain current Republican conservatism to Europeans, if not Americans altogether. They concluded that “conservatism has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged”—especially since conservatives insist “their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.”

In
Safire’s New Political Dictionary
(1993), however, the former
New York Times
columnist and well-respected conservative William Safire defined a conservative as “a defender of the status quo who, when change becomes necessary in tested institutions or practices, prefers that it come slowly and in moderation.” The
Oxford Companion to Philosophy
(1995) explained that the “conservative approach is empirical as opposed to rationalistic, cautiously skeptical rather than dogmatic, and, in certain circumstances, seeks to preserve the status
quo rather than engage in wholesale revolution or overthrow existing institutions.” This source added, “It is a matter of judgment how far so-called conservative political parties are conservative in the wider, philosophical sense.”

Michael Deaver, former aide to President Ronald Reagan, asked a number of high-profile and active conservatives with varying degrees of allegiance to the former president about the source of their conservatism. Deaver published brief essays from fifty-four people in
Why I Am a Reagan Conservative
(2005).
⁵
Paradoxically, only a few actually claimed to be “Reagan conservatives,” whom Deaver rather narrowly described as those favoring “limited government, individual liberty, and the prospect of a strong America.” More strikingly, none of the contributors made an effort to meaningfully define or even describe conservatism, and only a few of them could say “why” they were conservatives, although several explained “how” they became so. Perhaps a conservative—or anyone else, for that matter—is intimately incapable of the introspection necessary to understand the psychological reasons for his own beliefs and why he is a conservative. That may also explain the fact that many conservatives have easily rejected the findings of social scientists who have recently reported many of the reasons why people become, or remain, conservatives. (A subject addressed shortly in this chapter.)

Conservatives Have No Ideology,
According to Their Leading Thinkers

Leading conservative scholars reject the notion that their thinking or beliefs can be described as an ideology. For conservative scholar Frank Meyer, for example, it is heterodoxy to conclude that the “American conservative movement” is anything but just that, “a movement.” Meyer insisted conservatism is “inspired by no ideological construct.”
⁶
Similarly, conservative intellectual icon Russell Kirk has adopted the mind-set of John Adams, the first “conservative” president, in refusing
to classify conservatism as an ideology. Adams claimed that the “proper definition” of ideology “is the science of Idiocy. And a very profound, abstruse, and mysterious science it is…taught in the school of folly.”
⁷
Michael Oakeshott, another prominent conservative political philosopher, has remarked that “conservatism is not so much an ideology as it is a disposition to enjoy the fruits of the past and to distrust novelty.” Ronald Reagan, throughout his political career, sought “to downplay ideology and translate the tough theory of conservatism—its libertarian harangues and traditionalist asceticism—into accessible anecdotes and sunny sloganeering.”
⁸
William Safire quoted Reagan as saying, “I think ‘ideology’ is a scare word to most Americans.” Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania claimed: “Conservatism is common sense and liberalism is an ideology.”
⁹

In fact, conservatism now fits the definition of ideology quite aptly, according to the
HarperCollins Dictionary of American Government and Politics.
*
But regardless of how any of these terms is defined, asserting that conservatism is not an ideology is, of course, sophistry. Meyer’s belief that conservatism is a “movement” by no means precludes
it from being an ideology; Kirk’s reference to Adams’s claim that ideology is idiocy has no substance; Oakeshott has inadvertently defined conservatism as an ideology rather than distinguishing the two concepts; Reagan’s claim that the word “ideology” scared people indicates only his aversion to the term, not the notion that conservatism is not an ideology.

As is typical of conservatives’ inconsistency, however, countless conservatives do refer to their set of beliefs as an ideology. In fact, numerous leading conservative publications, including the
National Review, Human Events, The America Spectator, The Weekly Standard,
and
The American Conservative,
have all called conservatism an ideology.
¹⁰

No Classic Conservatism, Or Movement Moses

A classic is something accepted as definitive, never out of fashion (like a blue suit or a black dress), and whose excellence is generally agreed upon. Within that framework, there is no conservatism that can be considered classic. Conservatives can trace their history, but they don’t always agree upon it when doing so. There have, from time to time, been periods when there was widespread agreement among conservatives, only to have this fleeting harmony later fall apart. There is no genuine founding father of American conservatism, although Edmund Burke, the British Member of Parliament, who set forth his conservative views in
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(in 1790), comes close. Burke’s influence on American thinkers is indisputable (he favored the American Revolution but opposed the French Revolution), but his defense of monarchy and aristocracy never played well with American conservatives. Thus, Burke’s conservatism is not, for Americans, classical.

Conservatism is a movement with no Moses, although William F. Buckley is sometimes considered to be an analogous figure, as John B. Judis’s biography of him, subtitled
Patron Saint of the Conservatives,
would attest. Buckley’s support of conservatism’s latter-day saints, like
Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Friederich Hayek, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham, through his
National Review,
have certainly invigorated modern conservatism. Kirk and Burnham have always been the most significant among these formative voices, although by 1986, when Russell Kirk prepared his last edition of
The Conservative Mind,
young conservatives were already coming to consider his work as “Old Testament” conservatism, and his once well-known canons of conservatism now reside in the dustbin of history.
*
In retrospect the only things that tie all these early thinkers together are a dark view of human nature, their strong dislike of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and an outsized fear of communism. This is about as close to “classic” conservatism as it gets.

While Russell Kirk focused on theory and philosophy, James Burnham addressed practice and process. An exemplary scholar who taught philosophy at New York University, Burnham cofounded the
National Review
in 1955. His
Congress and the American Tradition,
which describes FDR’s presidency overpowering Congress, has been called by a leading scholar of conservative intellectual history “one of the most penetrating works of political analysis produced by conservatives since World War II.”
¹¹
Burnham understood the ebb and flow of power between the legislative and executive branches, and he appreciated the expansion of the presidency under strong presidents such as Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson. He believed that FDR, however, overreached, by taking away every last vestige of Congress’s power as a peer to the president and reducing the legislative branch to “a mere junior partner.”
¹²

Conservative columnist George Will wrote in 2005 that the “president’s authorization of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency [that] contravened a statute’s clear language” was a striking
indication that conservatives had forgotten their roots. “For more than 500 years,” Will noted, “since the rise of nation-states and parliaments, a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power.” Will, thinking like the conservative he is, invoked history as a reminder to other conservatives willing to listen. “Modern American conservatism grew in reaction against the New Deal’s creation of the regulatory state and the enlargement of the executive branch power that such a state entails. The intellectual vigor of conservatism was quickened by reaction against the Great Society and the aggrandizement of the modern presidency by Lyndon Johnson, whose aspiration was to complete the project begun by Franklin Roosevelt.” Will closed by drawing on the wisdom of the distant past. “Charles de Gaulle, a profound conservative, said of another such, Otto von Bismarck—de Gaulle was thinking of Bismarck not pressing his advantage in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War—that genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. In peace and in war, but especially in the latter, presidents have pressed their institutional advantages to expand their powers to act without Congress. This president might look for occasions to stop pressing.”
¹³