It's Beginning To Come Together

John Dean has a new book,Conservatives Without Conscience, and in he examines what kind of people we have running the country today. This from Booklist’s review:

… Dean takes a sincere, well-considered look at how conservative politics in the U.S. is veering dangerously close to authoritarianism, offering a penetrating and highly disturbing portrait of many of the major players in Republican politics and power. Looking back on the development of conservative politics in the U.S., Dean notes that conservatism is regressing to its authoritarian roots. Dean draws on five decades of social science research that details the personality traits of what are called "double high authoritarians": self-righteous, mean-spirited, amoral, manipulative, bullying. He concludes that Chuck Colson, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, and Tom DeLay are all textbook examples. Dean calls Vice-President Cheney "the architect of Bush's authoritarian policies," and deems Bush "a mental lightweight with a strong right-wing authoritarian personality." Dean maintains that conservatives without conscience have produced such a hostile, noncollegial environment in Congress that threats of resistance through filibusters have been met with threats of a "nuclear option" and that conservatives have used fearmongering about terrorist attacks to the point where the nation faces a greater threat of relinquishing its ideals of democracy. Dean appeals to conservatives to find their consciences and to all Americans to take serious heed of what is going on in the nation. Readers of all political perspectives will find this book riveting. Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Dean, interviewed by Olberman today, spoke of psychological and sociological research identifying a fairly constant 25-30% of the population who fall into authoritarian classification. These people are, as it were, wired to vote and identify themselves as conservative. Very few ever align with ‘liberals’. Those that do are currently trying to unseat Joe Lieberman.

In times of stress and cultural vulnerability (post 9-11, post-WW I) these people and their views, can and often do, become more influential.

I think we can see that these people are also the members of the faith community who I often call ‘The Fearful’, people whose faith is actually about controlling there own frightening impulses.

Now, let’s go look at what our old friend Andrew Sullivan has been enduring lately. Remember (or learn now) my first contact with Sullivan’s writing was his promo blurb in a piece of junkmail offering a subscription to The New Republic. He proudly identified himself as a Gay Conservative Irishman editing one of America’s most established Liberal magazines. How could I refuse such a provocative opportunity? To this day I have the issue in which he first outlined his belief that the only two things that matter in the movement bringing Gay people full franchise with American Life were Marriage and Membership in the Armed Services. Nothing was important as these two things because nothing else in America is open to everyone regardless of class gender or race and nothing else unites so many in common experience.

Andrew’s conservatism is of the Goldwaterian small government, strong defense and limited social involvement type. This traditional (can you say Edmund Burke? Do you know who he is? Find out) sense of conservatism is quite different from what is now called conservatism.

In Aspen last week at a Conference on Ideas many leading ‘lights’ (not all of which are very bright) of today’s conservatism seemed committed to excommunicating him from their club.

“I was also told by someone present at the Ramesh Ponnuru/Laura Ingraham discussion at Aspen that two other conservatives are now regarded as suspect by the ruling Republican intelligentsia: George Will and David Brooks. I imagine William F Buckley Jr, who has pronounced the Iraq war a failure, is also no longer a conservative in good standing. The attitude of people like Ponnuru and Ingraham and Levin is indeed Stalinist in form, if not content. But when you have to defend a massive increase in government spending and power in the name of conservatism, this kind of newspeak is necessary.”

They also don’t like Andrew’s aversion to torture (authoritarians really fear and attack signs of ‘weakness’)

“We have two competing narratives of the Bush administration out there. We have the court stenographer, Bob Woodward, and we have the dissident chronicler, Ron Suskind. His book, "The One Percent Doctrine," really is a must-read. Two things in particular stuck out for me. Suskind has CIA sources saying that, as part of the torture devised by Bush and Rumsfeld for Khalid Sheik Muhammed, they threatened to harm his wife and children if he did not talk. KSM told the interrogators to go ahead and kill his family, if necessary. I find it telling that the president, in this instance, became the moral equivalent of a mafia boss, committing what is clearly a violation of the Geneva Conventions, even if his motives were good ones. KSM is a disgusting, evil, Jihadist mass murderer. But he gave up no useful intelligence under this sort of tactic and succeeded in reducing the president of the United States to an evil thug, threatening violence against innocent children.

One recalls the following exchange between John Yoo and Doug Cassel at Notre Dame law school:

"Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that..."

Suddenly you see that Yoo's endorsement of evil had real life effect.

The second fascinating and completely convincing narrative is about the remarkable decision of Muammar Ghadafi to give up his entire WMD program. At the time, the president credited it to the psychological impact of the war to depose Saddam. He claimed it scared Ghadafi into compliance. Back in the days when I trusted president Bush's words, I echoed this analysis. It was a lie. I apologize to my readers for echoing it. It turns out Ghadafi had been entrapped by careful intelligence work long before the Iraq war was launched. The timing of the announcement was choreographed coincidence.

In the last few years, I have gone from lionizing this president's courage and fortitude to being dismayed at his incompetence and now to being resigned to mistrusting every word he speaks. I have never hated him. But now I can see, at least, that he is a liar on some of the gravest issues before the country. He doesn't trust us with the truth. Some lies, to be sure, are inevitable - even necessary - in wartime. But when you're lying not to keep the enemy off-balance, but to maximize your own political fortunes at home, you forfeit the respect of people who would otherwise support you - and the important battle you have been tasked to wage.

Friends, I am beginning to see how all this connects and our current state of affairs just begins to seem much more frightening. Those who know me know that I scoff at conspiracy theories and other hysterical or hyperbolic assertions. But, I suggest that we all look at post Weimar Germany. I suggest that we remember that after Pearl Harbor Americans placed Japanese immigrants (regardless of citizenship status) into internment camps. That during the war ignited by Pearl Harbor our enemies were depicted as simian and/or ursine rather than human. I ask that we think about the fact that congress has refused to actual check or balance any part of the administration’s security agenda, even the parts that have led to needless American death from thoughtless, no criminal, failure to plan and manage an actual war. Remember that we are a country born of revolution but unable to conceive even the slightest possibility that another people might not appreciate us occupying and running their homeland. We are a country where blood vengeance still guides our policy towards murderers (at least the black and brown ones) and sex-offenders and this blood-vengeance trumps any concerns about miscarriages of justice even as it drives the system to create those miscarriages. Remember that we are a country founded by deists shaped by The Enlightenment, not any of the numerous Great Awakenings that have followed eras of social growth with it’s concurrent upheavals.

We must remember these things. Then we must take responsibility that our fellow citizens remember. We must each pass these reminders on to others. We must commit to this duty, commit to passing this on to no less than ten people and that we must also pass on the commitment to educating others.

Progress can never be truly stopped, but the damage being done now to our country may possibly not be undone during our lives if we don’t act and get others to join.