Text 1739, 105 rader
Skriven 2006-07-17 16:04:00 av Alan Hess
Ärende: authoritarians?
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Has conservatism been replaced by authoritarianism?  Here's John Dean's take.

Boston.com     

The Boston Globe
JOHN W. DEAN
Triumph of the authoritarians

By John W. Dean  |  July 14, 2006

CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM and its influence on the Republican Party was, until
recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics,
their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies
that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest -- none of this struck me as
based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told,
today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.

For more than 40 years I have considered myself a ``Goldwater conservative,"
and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing
conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon
``imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the
best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal
judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of
cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative
precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans
imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks
primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of
legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative
process?

How can those who claim themselves conservatives seek to destroy the
deliberative nature of the US Senate by eliminating its extended-debate
tradition, which has been the institution's distinctive contribution to our
democracy? Yet that is precisely what Republican Senate leaders want to do by
eliminating the filibuster when dealing with executive business (namely
judicial appointments).

Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative
fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or
disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal
responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping,
finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell
Krik's classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham's guides to
conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry
Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in ``conserving" this planet,
not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And
neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in
federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDs
through abstinence.

Candid and knowledgeable Republicans on the far right concede -- usually only
when not speaking for attribution -- that they are not truly conservative. They
do not like to talk about why they behave as they do, or even to reflect on it.
Nonetheless, their leaders admit they like being in charge, and their followers
grant they find comfort in strong leaders who make them feel safe. This is what
I gleaned from discussions with countless conservative leaders and followers,
over a decade of questioning.

I started my inquiry in the mid-1990s, after a series of conversations with
Goldwater, whom I had known for more than 40 years. Goldwater was also
mystified (when not miffed) by the direction of today's professed conservatives
-- their growing incivility, pugnacious attitudes, and arrogant and
antagonistic style, along with a narrow outlook intolerant of those who
challenge their thinking. He worried that the Republican Party had sold its
soul to Christian fundamentalists, whose divisive social values would polarize
the nation. From those conversations, Goldwater and I planned to study why
these people behave as they do, and to author a book laying out what we found.
Sadly, the senator's declining health soon precluded his continuing on the
project, so I put it on the shelf. But I kept digging until I found some
answers, and here are my thoughts.

For almost half a century, social scientists have been exploring
authoritarianism. We do not typically associate authoritarianism with our
democracy, but as I discovered while examining decades of empirical research,
we ignore some findings at our risk. Unfortunately, the social scientists who
have studied these issues report their findings in monographs and professional
journals written for their peers, not for general readers. With the help of a
leading researcher and others, I waded into this massive body of work.

What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as
a researcher told me, ``enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality,
highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And
that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have
consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of
thousands over the past several decades.

Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question.
Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil)
implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this
issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of
their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American
voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done.
We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the
modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by
authoritarians.

John W. Dean, former Nixon White House counsel, just published his seventh
nonfiction book, ``Conservatives Without Conscience."  
+ Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
 

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