Conservatives Without Conscience

by John W. Dean

  Neoconservatism’s authoritarian strategies and its militarism have taken us into a preemptive war in Iraq, have encouraged us to wage war in Iran and North Korea as well, and have been the foundation for a foreign policy that has made America loathed all over the world.[15] It does not take the National Security Council but common sense to understand that the blowback for these actions may well be terror attacks on our children and grandchildren, not to mention ourselves. Many people believe that neoconservatives and many Republicans appreciate that they are more likely to maintain influence and control of the presidency if the nation remains under ever-increasing threats of terrorism, so they have no hesitation in pursuing policies that can provoke potential terrorists throughout the world.[16] Indeed, this is precisely the type of amoral, Machiavellian behavior that socially dominant personalities are known to employ.

  Most conservatives have not publicly objected to the neoconservative, militaristic foreign policy of the Bush/Cheney administration,[*] a predictive failure in light of the fact that social scientists have established that authoritarians as followers tend to be relatively submissive to and unquestioning of presidential authority, particularly when they perceive the president’s beliefs to be consistent with their own views—beliefs which they are expressing their support for. Thus, when the Bush/Cheney presidency adopted neoconservative policies and made them their own, they also became the policies subscribed to by their unquestioning authoritarian followers, the largest bloc of which is made up of Christian conservatives. American-style despotism is possible only if it has a large and influential base, and that potential exists in the religious right’s active role in the political arena.

  Authoritarian Origins of Social Conservatism

  Appropriate recognition is seldom given to the authoritarians who launched social or cultural conservatism and made it an increasingly significant influence on conservative thinking. (As noted earlier, I believe the terms can be used interchangeably, notwithstanding efforts by some to define them separately.) Any representative list of the major players in launching this movement should include J. Edgar Hoover, Spiro T. Agnew, Phyllis Schlafly, and Paul Weyrich. Each, in his or her way, has made significant contributions by adding to the work of their predecessors; all are authoritarians. These individuals took what was but a thread within conservatism, and collectively their influence made it into the rope that now controls conservatism and Republican politics.[*]

  J. EDGAR HOOVER

  As the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hoover ruled like a despot. At each stage of his career, he also worked methodically at terrifying Americans and he appears to have been well aware that fear is a wonderful manipulator, particularly with authoritarian followers. Hoover ran the FBI from 1924, during the time of Coolidge, until he died in 1972 during Nixon’s presidency. One FBI historian observes that “Hoover’s conviction of his own righteousness and his insistence on compliance with his personal idiosyncrasies is graphically captured in his first manual of instructions, which he prepared immediately after becoming Director. Unlike later manuals, which were prepared with assistance, this one exudes Hoover’s vigorous authoritarianism, his exaggerated sense of his own importance, his intolerance of individuality, and his extreme narrowness of vision.”[17] Hoover biographies in fact reveal him to be a classic Double High authoritarian, a manipulative demagogue, with the worst traits of both right-wing authoritarians and social dominators.[18]

  I myself witnessed Hoover successfully manipulate Attorney General John Mitchell, during one of my own more memorable meetings with the director. We had gathered in the attorney general’s conference room following the death of four students and the wounding of nine others at Kent State University, when Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire during a noontime antiwar demonstration on May 4, 1970. Our agenda that day was to assess whether the Department of Justice should investigate aggressively what had happened at Kent State and why, but it became clear quickly that Hoover wanted to keep the FBI out of it, for reasons that were astounding. Hoover held forth at some length about how one of the young girls who had been killed was a “slut,” and indeed he seemed to know more about her sex life than the events that had transpired during the shootings. His harangue was so disturbing that after the meeting I spoke with an attorney friend in the Civil Rights Division, which had jurisdiction over the situation. Hoover, he said, did not know what he was talking about, and many in the FBI were aware that he was trying to give President Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell a way of avoiding a federal investigation.[*] Without Hoover’s approval nothing happened at the bureau. His associate director, William Sullivan, later reported that Hoover was the only person “who could make decisions in the FBI.” Sullivan added, “All the well-meaning people in the bureau did exactly what he told them, for if they didn’t, they’d be pounding the pavement. They had to carry out his orders if they didn’t want to sell their homes and take their children out of school.”[19] After studying Hoover’s behavior and activities, Dr. Harold Lief, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded he was “what is known as an Authoritarian Personality. Hoover would have made a perfect high-level Nazi.”[20]

  For decades, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, Hoover was a public presence to be reckoned with in America. Presidents, who came and went, protected the nation from foreign invasion; Hoover, who held his post for almost a half century, protected the nation’s “internal security” from mobsters, Nazis, communists, hippies, and antiwar protesters. He intimidated (and blackmailed) members of Congress and presidents (about whom he gathered information); and he helped foster McCarthyism by feeding often dubious information to the maniacal red-hunting senator. Hoover influenced the Supreme Court by using background investigations to disparage potential nominees he did not like and to promote those he did. He also aided Nixon’s efforts to remove Justice Abe Fortas from the Court, and hoped to do the same (but failed) with Justice William O. Douglas. Hoover trained his FBI agents in the black arts of burglary and other surreptitious skills, and had them employed at his whim. He was a racist who sought to disable the civil rights movement; he refused to hire black FBI agents; and he tried to get Martin Luther King, Jr., to commit suicide. He rigged the Warren Commission investigation in a manner that still colors the nation’s understanding of President Kennedy’s assassination. How many innocent people were framed by Hoover’s FBI—a prototype of authoritarian government—will never be known.

  The peak of Hoover’s career—the period when conservatives almost genuflected at the mention of his name—was during his crusade against communism. Conservative historian Paul Johnson describes McCarthyism, in which Hoover was deeply involved, as a time “when the hysterical pressure on the American people to conform came from the right of the political spectrum, and when the witch hunt was organized by conservative elements.”[21] It was a time when Hoover preached a terrifying gospel about communism. His FBI hacks cranked out endless articles (regularly placed in national as well as local publications) and speeches (for FBI agents, members of Congress, Justice Department lawyers, and other government officials) explaining how communists, if they managed to infiltrate, would destroy the American family—its lifestyle, its homes, its ability to provide food for the table, and even the time parents had to dote on their children. And because the godless communists sought to destroy America’s religions, Hoover warned that no American dare lose faith in God, for should they do so, communism would fill the void, and this would place them in hands worse than those of the devil. But luckily for his beleaguered countrymen, Hoover had solutions. For example, his ghost-written Masters of Deceit; The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It, published in 1958, offered a six-point defense for defeating communism.[*] Hoover called for “[t]he sanctity of the individual, the need for mutual responsibility among Americans, a life transcending materialism, responsibility to future generations, that humans and not political parties should establish moral
values, and that love triumph over hate,” which all should be “part of a larger value system that guided the thoughts and actions of upstanding, moral Americans.”[22] So loyal were Hoover’s conservative followers that neither John F. Kennedy nor Richard Nixon dared to fire him, fearing conservative wrath.[23]

  Now, however, Hoover has become so tarnished that both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to remove his name from the FBI headquarters in Washington, the most visible remnant of his legacy.[24] Hoover’s true legacy, however, is more subtle and insidious, for it was he with his fanaticism who planted the seeds from which contemporary social and cultural conservatism has grown. Hoover’s focus on the American family and Christianity attracted an earlier generation of adamant anticommunists, who have become today’s zealous social conservatives.

  SPIRO T. AGNEW

  One particularly enthusiastic Hoover admirer was Nixon’s vice president, Spiro T. Agnew. His charismatic style and high office gave him a certain marquee appeal, and he was an early leader of the cultural war.[25] As governor of Maryland, Agnew had been a moderate, but by the time he became vice president he had moved toward the hard right. He appears to have been a solid right-wing authoritarian with social domination tendencies.[*] He certainly was not a Double High authoritarian like Hoover. At the Nixon White House Agnew had the job of currying conservative favor. Employing the rabble-rousing rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Nixon dispatched Agnew to fight the cultural war, and the vice president delighted in unloading depth charges and assorted munitions assembled by Buchanan and others. In the fall of 1969, the war was escalated, and Agnew became the first high-profile conservative to go after the mainstream news media. For a half hour the vice president tore into the unaccountable power of the unelected newspeople, who decided what forty to fifty million Americans would learn of the day’s events.[26] Nixon later wrote in his memoirs, with some delight, that “at the networks, there was pandemonium; all three decided to carry the speech live.”

  Agnew loved his work. “My mission is to awaken Americans to the need for sensible authority, to jolt good minds out of the lethargy of habitual acquiescence, to mobilize a silent majority that cherishes the right values but has been bulldozed for years into thinking those values are embarrassingly out of style.”[27] His recurring themes and targets were “avowed anarchists and communists,” “elitists,” the “garbage of society,” “thieves, traitors, and perverts,” “radical liberals,” and, of course the news media, whom he called “an effete corps of impudent snobs, a tiny fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government. They are nattering nabobs of negativism.” (They were also, for Agnew, the “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”) Agnew’s avowed aim was “dividing the American people,” which he called “positive polarization.” He was delighted when he caused a ruckus. “I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it.”[28] Conservative media loved Agnew’s authoritarian aggression as well. A Wall Street Journal editorial approvingly noted that “Mr. Agnew’s targets—the media, war protesters, and rebellious youth—are representative of a class that has enjoyed unusual moral and cultural authority through the 1960s.” (The editors proceeded to detail the failings of these authorities, the “highbrows, the intellectual—the beautiful people—Eastern liberal elite.”)[29] Thus, with Nixon in charge and taking the high road, the early skirmishes of the cultural war were launched by Agnew taking the low one. But the forced resignations of both men put the cultural war on hold. Others, meanwhile, quietly went about the work of building an army and drawing up future plans.

  PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY

  The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress on March 22, 1972, and was sent to the states for ratification, with a seven-year deadline. Within the first year, it was quickly approved by twenty-two of the necessary thirty-eight states.[30] Then came Phyllis Schlafly. Whether one agrees or disagrees with her politics, she is a remarkable woman.[*] She appears to have a moderately right-wing authoritarian personality, but she does not carry much of the unpleasant baggage that many of these authoritarians do. Her authoritarianism is more akin to that of the strict schoolmarm.

  With miraculous managerial skills, Schlafly assembled and trained women in key remaining states to block ratification of the ERA. In a standard authoritarian ploy, she relied on fear, claiming that the ERA would deny women the right to support by their husbands, that it would eliminate privacy rights and result in unisex public toilets, that it would mean that women would be drafted into the military and sent into combat, and that it would fully protect abortion rights and homosexual marriages. None of this was true, but her powerful propaganda got the attention of a lot of women who had never been particularly interested in politics. The authoritarian leader’s use of misleading information to gain control is a consistently successful technique for them. As a New Yorker profile observed of Schlafly’s style, “While Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham were still playing tea party, she recognized that deliberation was no match for diatribe, and logic no equal to contempt. She was, in this way, a woman ahead of her time.”[31]

  Schlafly did not just organize women, but also persuaded businesses (like the insurance companies) and various religious groups to join her effort.[32] By 1980 Schlafly had successfully killed the ERA and had given birth to an antifeminist, so-called profamily movement that supported other social conservative causes. Schlafly’s activism evolved way beyond her allegiance to the “Goldwater-Reagan” (her term) school of conservatism (which she sums up as “lower taxes, limited government, fiscal integrity—and American military superiority, because everybody is safer that way”), and provided a corps of trained volunteers whose grassroots efforts have changed conservatism.

  Not unlike Pat Buchanan, however, and notwithstanding her authoritarian conservatism, Phyllis Schlafly regularly takes issue with radical Republican proposals relating to domestic policy and foreign affairs. She also attacks the Bush/Cheney big-government policies and fiscal irresponsibility. Importantly, she remains a guardian of civil liberties at a time when other conservative authoritarians have willingly and unquestioningly trusted “the authorities’” claim that only the terrorists need worry. She has tried to correct abuses in the USA Patriot Act, explaining that “the problem that confronts America today is foreign-sponsored terrorism, and we must draw a bright line of different treatment between U.S. citizens and aliens. Our government should monitor the whereabouts of aliens, but not require U.S. citizens to relinquish our freedom”[33] (bold emphasis is in her original). To oppose the extension of the Patriot Act, Schlafly joined with former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia and the ACLU in forming Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances. Schlafly’s example illustrates that authoritarians can be effective leaders without being social dominators.

  PAUL WEYRICH

  The same cannot be said of Paul Weyrich, whose early work complemented that of Phyllis Schlafly in the development of social conservatism. Both Schlafly and Weyrich were once strident anticommunists, Hoover’s vigilant Americans. They continued the culture war that Agnew and Nixon had started, and their principal contribution was mustering the troops, working from the bottom up.

  Weyrich has been described by friendly observers as “the Lenin of social conservatism—a revolutionary with a rare talent for organization,” and while his stature within social conservatism is waning, it remains significant.[34] Weyrich is a master of the art of direct-mail fund-raising and is best known as the “funding father” of modern conservatism. He believed conservatives needed a Washington-based think tank comparable to the once liberal (now moderate) Brookings Institution, so along with a colleague from Capitol Hill, Edwin Feuler, Weyrich established the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Today Heritage is the wealthy granddaddy of conservative think thanks.[35] These organizations have become the marketing arms of contemporary conservatism, providing various factions an imprimatur of scholarship, and no
ne more than social conservatives. Much of their “thinking” supports their particular “authority,” and in this sense they are efficient authoritarian tools. They devote significant resources, and intellectual firepower, to demolishing policies and programs on the liberal agenda.[36]

  Barry Goldwater described Weyrich as “a bull-headed, stubborn, son-of-bitch,” and observed that “Weyrich doesn’t really understand how Washington works, but he thinks he does.”[37] In his memoir he worried that Weyrich and other social conservatives were “pushing [their] special social agendas…at the risk of compromising constitutional rights,” an agenda that threatened to splinter Republicans. Weyrich “preached little or no spirit of compromise—[no] political give-and-take.” He “failed to appreciate that politics is the ordinary stuff of daily living, while the spiritual life represents eternal values and goals.” Goldwater added, “Public business—that’s all politics is—is often making the best of a mixed bargain.” Social conservatives, nonetheless, stressed “the politics of absolute moral right and wrong. And, of course, they are convinced of their absolute rightness.”[38] The senator was addressing the second phase of Weyrich’s activism, when the latter helped organize the religious right. In a profile that recognized his authoritarian influence, the Washington Times noted that Weyrich “helped bring [conservatism] structure, discipline and, gradually, dominance” over the Republican Party.[39] Weyrich may be a Double High authoritarian, and his authoritarianism is, at times, brutal.

  Weyrich once admitted, and many believe only half in jest, that “to gather all of [his] enemies together” would require “RFK Stadium.”[40] He calls himself a “cultural conservative,” and in doing so he explains that what is important to him is opposition to legal abortion, stricter divorce laws, and prayer in public schools. Washington Post reporter E. J. Dionne described Weyrich’s outlook as a “dour, almost medieval, pessimism.”[41] Not unlike many Christian authoritarians, Weyrich has not hidden his anti-Semitism. At the outset of the Bush administration, Weyrich published an Easter message in which he stated, “Christ was crucified by the Jews…. He was not what the Jews had expected so they considered Him a threat. Thus He was put to death.”[42] (It is impossible to believe that Weyrich, a deacon in the Melkite Catholic Church, does not know that the Romans crucified Jesus, and that his libel has been responsible for the persecution of Jews throughout history.)