Understanding the Contemporary Republican Party:

Authoritarians Have Taken Control

Part One in a Three-Part Series
By JOHN W. DEAN
<http://writ. news.findlaw. com/dean>----
Wednesday, Sep. 05, 2007

This is the first in a three- part series of columns in which FindLaw
columnist John Dean discusses his most recent book, Conservatives
Without Conscience
<http://www.amazon. com/exec/ obidos/ASIN/ 0143038869/ findlaw-20>. - Ed. /

Last year, I published Conservatives Without Conscience
<http://www.amazon. com/exec/ obidos/ASIN/ 0143038869/ findlaw-20>, but it
struck me as a bit too self-promoting to use this space to talk about
the book. The core of the book examines a half-century of empirical
studies that had never been explained for the general reader. Not being
a social scientist, I was thrilled when the book became a bestseller and
countless political and social psychologists wrote to thank me for
translating their work for the general reader.

At this point, I feel that this material is simply too crucial to
understanding current politics and government for me to continue to
ignore it in my columns for FindLaw. In addition, I want to refer to
these findings throughout my commentary on the 2008 presidential and
congressional elections, so it is time to set forth a few basics from
this work.

Conservatives Without Conscience
<http://www.amazon. com/exec/ obidos/ASIN/ 0143038869/ findlaw-20> ("_CWC_")
sought to understand the modern conservative movement, and in particular
it's hard turn to the right during the past two-and-a-half decades.
Conservatives have taken control of the Republican Party, and, in turn,
the GOP has taken control of the government (all three branches, until
2006).

Who are these people? Of course, we know their names: Jerry Falwell, Pat
Robertson, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Dick Cheney and George
W. Bush - to mention a few of the obvious. More importantly, what drives
them? And, why do their compliant followers seem to never question or
criticize them? Here, I am thinking of people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean
Hannity, and Ann Coulter - to mention a few more of the conspicuous.

In this column, and those that follow, I hope to explain the rather
remarkably information I have uncovered. It explained what for me what I
had previously thought inexplicable. And based on my mail, it seems to
have done the same for a lot of _CWC_ readers. So let me see if I can
extract a few key points that may help to understand what happened, and
why it happened.

In the first two columns of this three-part series, I will offer some
basics to provide context, and some of the relevant data. In the last of
the three, I will drive home the points I believe are most relevant.

*How Conservatives Think (Or Fail To Do So)*

Most conservatives today do not believe that conservatism can or should
be defined. They claim that it not an ideology, but rather merely an
attitude. (I don't buy that, but that point is not relevant here.)

Conservatives once looked to the past for what it could teach about the
present and the future. Early conservatives were traditionalists or
libertarians, or a bit of both. Today, however, there are religious
conservatives, economic conservatives, social conservatives, cultural
conservatives, neoconservatives, traditional conservatives, and a number
of other factions.

Within these factions, there is a good amount of inconsistency and
variety, but the movement has long been held together through the power
of negative thinking. The glue of the movement is in its perceived
enemies. Conservatives once found a common concern with respect to their
excessive concern about communism (not that liberals and progressive
were not concerned as well, but they were neither paranoid nor willing
to mount witch hunts). When communism was no longer a threat, the
dysfunctional conservative movement rallied around its members' common
opposition to anything they perceived as liberal. (This was, in effect,
any point of view that differed from their own, whether it was liberal
or not.)

To understanding conservatives thinking, it is important to examine not
merely what conservatives believe, but also why they believe it. I found
the answers to these two key questions in the remarkable body of
empirical research work, almost a half-century in the making, undertaken
by political and social psychologists who study authoritarian personalities.

*Authoritarian Republicans: Understanding the Personality Type*

While not all conservatives are authoritarians, all highly authoritarian
personalities are political conservatives. To make the results of my
rather lengthy inquiry very short, I found that it was the
authoritarians who took control of the conservative movement in the
1980s, and then the Republican Party in the 1990s. Strikingly, these
conservative Republicans - though hardly known for their timidity --
have not attempted to refute my report, because that is not possible. It
is based on hard historical facts, which I set forth in considerable
detail.

Authoritarian control continues to this day, so it is important to
understand these people. There are two types of authoritarians: leaders
(the few) and followers (the many). Study of these personalities began
following World War II, when social psychologists asked how so many
people could compliantly follow an authoritarian leader like Adolf
Hitler and tolerate the Holocaust. Early research was based at the
University of California, Berkeley, and it focused primarily on
followers, culminating in the publication of a The Authoritarian
Personality
<http://www.amazon. com/exec/ obidos/ASIN/ B000OC36X2/ findlaw-20> (1950) -
a work that broadly described authoritarian personalities. The book was
quite popular for decades, but as the Cold War ended, it had been on the
shelf and ignored for a good while.

Given the strikingly conspicuous authoritarian nature of the
contemporary conservative movement, and in turn, of the Republican
Party, those familiar with the work of the Berkeley group thought it
time to take another look at this work. For example, Alan Wolfe, a
political science professor at Boston College, observed that the fact
that "the radical right has transformed itself from a marginal movement
to an influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party" called
for a reexamination of this work. That is exactly what I did, although I
did not discover Dr. Wolfe's call for it until well into my project.

_The Authoritarian Personality_ relied heavily on Freudian psychology,
which was not without critics, although neither Dr. Freud's work nor
that of the Berkeley scientists has been proven incorrect. The weakness
of this early work was the lack of empirical data backing up its
conclusions. But in the half-century since its publication, that
weakness has been removed, based on others' empirical work. A number of
researchers have examined and reexamined the Berkeley Group's
conclusions, and no one more thoroughly than Bob Altemeyer, a Yale and
Carnegie-Mellon- trained social psychologist based at the University of
Manitoba.

*Professor Altemeyer's Findings*

Altemeyer's study addressed flaws in the methodology and findings of
_The Authoritarian Personality_ , and he then proceeded to set this field
of study on new footings by clarifying the study of authoritarian
followers, people he calls "right-wing authoritarians. " The provocative
titles of his books -- Right-Wing Authoritarianism
<http://www.amazon. com/exec/ obidos/ASIN/ 0887551246/ findlaw-20> (1981),
_Enemies of Freedom_ (1988), and The Authoritarian Specter
<http://www.amazon. com/exec/ obidos/ASIN/ 0674053052/ findlaw-20> (1996) --
and of a few of his many articles found in scholarly journals -- such as
"Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities" in the /Journal
of Social Psychology /(2004) and "Why Do Religious Fundamentalists Tend
to Be Prejudiced?" in the /International Journal for the Psychology of
Religion /(2003)--indicate the tenor of his research and the range of
his interests.

Working my way through this material, with the help of a copy of the
_Idiot's Guide to Statistics_, for Altemeyer writes for professional
peers, I realized that, since I do not have a degree in psychology, I
should get guidance to be certain I understood the material correctly,
because it seemed to me that the information he had developed was
exactly what I needed to comprehend the personalities now dominating the
conservative movement and Republican Party. Altemeyer, who is the
preeminent researcher in the field, graciously agreed to tutor me in his
work. I introduced him to FindLaw readers in an earlier column, when I
thought it would be interesting to get his take
<http://writ. news.findlaw. com/dean/ 20061020. html> on the writings of the
very authoritarian Tom DeLay, as he explained himself in _No Retreat, No
Surrender_.

At the outset of _Conservatives Without Conscience_, I provided a quick
and highly incomplete summary of Altemeyer's findings, explaining that
his empirical testing revealed "that authoritarians are frequently
enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, anti-equality, highly prejudiced,
mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian, and amoral." To be clear,
these are not assessments that Altemeyer makes himself about these
people; rather, this is how those he has tested reveal themselves to be,
when being anonymously examined.

Altemeyer has tested literally tens of thousands of first-year college
students and their parents, along with others, including some fifteen
hundred American state legislators, over the course of some three
decades. He has tested in the South and North of the United States.
There is no database on authoritarians that even comes close in its
scope to that which he has created, and, more importantly, these studies
are empirical data, not partisan speculation.

About a year after I published my outline of his work, Altemeyer
prepared a digest of his research for general readers, The
Authoritarians <http://home. cc.umanitoba. ca/%7Ealtemey/>, which he has
posted online for one and all to examine at no cost. In his book he
walks readers thorough his research in a manner that requires neither an
advanced degree nor a copy of the _Idiot's Guide to Statistics._

In the next two columns, I will examine the implications of Altemeyer's
findings, for they explain a great deal about the operations of the
Republican Party as presently constituted.

End, Part One