Conservatives without co.., p.25
Conservatives Without Conscience, page 25
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61.
For example, Ms. Miers’s nomination caused howls of unhappiness from high-profile conservatives like Boalt law professor John Yoo, neoconservatives David Frum (a former Bush speech writer) and Bill Kristol (editor of The Weekly Standard), as well as columnists Charles Krauthammer and George Will. No less than the icon of conservatism’s perfect Supreme Court justice Robert Bork himself (who was rejected by the Senate when President Reagan named him for the high court) came out against Harriet Miers.
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62.
John Derbyshire, “The Corner: Hallmark Harriet,” National Review Online at http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_23_corner-archive.asp#080857.
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63.
Bernard Chapman, “Highest Common Denominator: An Interview with John Derbyshire,” at http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0503/0503derbyshire.htm.
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64.
John T. Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie W. Kruglanski, and Frank J. Sulloway, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 129, no. 3 (2003), 339–75. To offer an opposing view, the same issue of Psychological Bulletin published Jeff Greenberg and Eva Jonas’s “Psychological Motives and Political Orientation—The Left, the Right, and the Rigid: Comment on Jost, et al. (2003),” 376–82. Copies of the study (along with a response and a rebuttal) can be found at http://www. wam.umd.edu/~hannahk/bulletin.pdf; a response to the study is at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~hannahk/gjonas.pdf; and the authors’ reply to the response is at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~hannahk/reply.pdf.
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65.
John Jost, “Media FAQ’s: Answers by John Jost.” (Provided to the author by Dr. Jost.)
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66.
Kathleen Maclay, “A Look at the Psychology of Conservatism,” Garlic & Grass: A Grassroots Journal of America’s Political Soul (July 23, 2003). One self-identified “Burkean conservative,” J. J. Ray, a social scientist based in Australia, offered a few substantive comments, but none of his American peers (conservative, moderate, or liberal) thought he should be taken seriously. Ray wrote a response to the study for David Horowitz’s FrontPageMagazine.com, taking a surprising low road for a purported academic, in calling the Jost et al. study the work of “Academic Fakers.” (See J. J. Ray, “Academic Fakers,” FrontPageMagazine.com (August 27, 2003) at http://www. frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9544.)
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67.
Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.”
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68.
Ibid., 342–44.
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69.
Jost, “Media FAQ’s: Answers by John Jost.”
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70.
Jonah Goldberg, “They Blinded Me with Science,” National Review Online (July 24, 2003) at http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg072403.asp.
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71.
Ann Coulter, “Closure on Nuance” (July 31, 2003) at http://www. townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/ac20030731.shtml. When attacking the Jost study Rush Limbaugh based his comments not on the study, but on a press release written by Kathleen Maclay, who works as a publicist for the University of California, Berkeley. Limbaugh called the study “shockingly tolerant of anti-Semitism,” but there is nothing in the Maclay press release or in the study that is, in any fashion, directly or indirectly anti-Semitic. When Limbaugh posted this program on his Web site, he hyperlinked his reference to “anti-Semitism” to a Wall Street Journal column from a year earlier that has nothing whatsoever to do with conservatism or the study. See Collin Levey, “Anti-Semitism Goes PC: The Latest Campus Cause: Solidarity with Arab Terrorists,” WJS.com Opinion Journal (April 11, 2002). Had Limbaugh read the study he would have learned that the authors made a special effort to seek out and incorporate results obtained in twelve different countries, including Israel. They found with Israeli university students that intolerance of ambiguity scores were indeed significantly higher among moderate and extreme right-wing students compared with moderate and extreme left-wing students. How Limbaugh can read tolerance of anti-Semitism into the Jost study defies comprehension.
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72.
Arie W. Kruglanski and John T. Jost, in collaboration with Jack Glaser and Frank J. Sulloway, “Political Opinion, Not Pathology,” Washington Post (August 28, 2003), A-27.
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73.
Ibid. Kruglanski and Jost wrote: “It’s wrong to conclude that our results provide only bad news for conservatives” (emphasis added). In short, they acknowledge their news was bad for conservatives, but they had bad news for liberals as well; namely, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks had increased threat and death anxiety, which gets conservative juices flowing. In times of high uncertainty, the unambiguous good versus evil message of a conservative leader plays well.
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74.
Jack Block and Jeanne H. Block, “Nursery School Personality and Political Orientation Two Decades Later,” Journal of Research in Personality (2005).
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75.
Ibid.
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76.
Austin Bramwell, “Defining Conservatism Down,” American Conservative, vol. 4, no. 16 (August 29, 2005), 7.
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77.
Society Desk, “Weddings: Sarah Maserati, Austin Bramwell,” New York Times (September 7, 2003), 9-17. (They were married on September 6, 2003.)
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78.
See David D. Kirkpatrick, “Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future,” New York Times (July 17, 2004), and http://www.townhall.com/phillysoc/Gala40th.htm.
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79.
Sarah Bramwell, May 1, 2004, speech to the Philadelphia Society, at http://www.townhall.com/phillysoc/bramwellchicago.htm.
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80.
Perry Bacon, “Yale panelists spar over speech and sexuality,” Yale Daily News (November 17, 1999).
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81.
Austin Bramwell, “Pleading the Fourteenth,” American Conservative (January 31, 2005) at http://www.amconmag.com/2005_01_31/article2.html.
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82.
A University of Oregon history professor, Peggy Pascoe, pointed out that the “arguments white supremacists used to justify anti-miscegenation laws—that interracial marriages were contrary to God’s will or somehow unnatural—are echoed today by the most conservative opponents of same-sex marriage. And supporters of same-sex marriage base their case on the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, echoing the position the U.S. Supreme Court took when it declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia.” Peggy Pascoe, “Why the Ugly Rhetoric Against Gay Marriage Is Familiar to This Historian of Miscegenation,” History News Network (April 19, 2004) at http://hnn.us/articles/4708.html.
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83.
Bramwell, “Defining Conservatism Down,” 7.
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84.
David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 396.
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85.
David Horowitz, “A Conservative Hope” (undated, but according to the new footnotes, post-1996) at http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=156&type=issue.
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86.
David Nather and Seth Stern, “Classic Conservative Creed Supplanted,” Congressional Quarterly (March 28, 2005), 778.
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Chapter Two: Conservatives Without Conscience
1.
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Perennial, 1969), 1.
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2.
Ibid., 205. (When reviewing his experiments, Milgram did not identify any particular types of temperaments as corresponding with obedience or disobedience, for science at that time had not progressed sufficiently. Milgram, however, offered social psychologists one major lesson based on his study: “[O]ften, it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.”)
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3.
As requested by Dr. Milgram, I discussed my work at the White House, including how I had taken direction from superiors, but protested and foiled Colson’s plan to “firebomb the Brookings Institution.” When I had learned of Liddy’s illegal intelligence plans, I objected to my superior and did my best to foil those plans as well, but they were approved without my knowledge. Out of loyalty I went along with the initial Watergate cover-up, but when I realized that the illegality of the cover-up was becoming more serious than the matters being covered up, I tried from within to end it. When that failed I broke rank, after telling all my White House colleagues, including a key member of the White House staff, exactly what I was going to do. These are subjects I have addressed at length in testimony and in two books. See U.S. Senate, “Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972: Senate Resolution 60,” Hearings Before the Senate Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, U.S. Senate, 93rd Cong., 1st Sess., Books 3 and 4 (June 25–29, 1973); John W. Dean, Blind Ambition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976) and John W. Dean, Lost Honor (Los Angeles: Stratford Press, 1982).
I knew long before Milgram’s conference that I am not one who is easily inclined to simply go along with others. My notes from this conference show that I discussed two specific incidents that were probably revealing of my nature. One related to a favorite prank of the cadets at prep school, a collective act of defiance designed purely to annoy faculty members on duty as proctor during evening study hours. It was known as a “door slam.” At dinner, or before the study period commenced, the word was passed in hushed whispers throughout the dormitory that at a given time every person in the dorm would open his door and then slam it shut. I thought these drills senseless and juvenile, and disruptive of study time, so I refused to participate despite great peer pressure. In fact, I repeatedly told organizers of door slams that if asked, I would not protect them.
Until that conference I had forgotten about what had occurred when I was pledging a college fraternity. One evening I witnessed one of the upperclassmen, a little fellow who was drunk, taking great joy out of paddling a pledge brother twice his size until his bottom was bloody. The next day, when the upperclassman was sober, I told him that if I witnessed such senseless hazing again, I would leave the pledge class and try to take the entire pledge class with me. When he threatened to paddle me for my insolence, I told him to grow up, for this was just between us. He quickly backed down, but a few days later he was at it again, beating one pledge after another for invented infractions of impossible pledge rules (like failure to recite the Greek alphabet both forward and backward, flawlessly). After this incident I told the president of the fraternity that it was either the upperclassman or us, for by then I had the entire pledge class ready to walk. To cut to the end of the story, the hazing rules were changed.
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4.
Milgram, Obedience to Authority, 5.
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5.
Stanley L. Kutler, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: Free Press, 1997), 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, 17. (Repeatedly in the remarkable conversations Nixon demands a break-in at the Brookings Institution.)
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6.
G. Gordon Liddy, Will (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 77 (regarding black-bag jobs), 157–69 (Liddy describes how he concocted the plan to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, noting that he “was forbidden to participate directly in the mission,” but despite his orders, he did so, claiming he “was the only game in town”), 255. Liddy explains that, contrary to his orders and his promise to his superiors that his activities would not be linked to him or anyone with whom he was associated, he used the head of security for the Nixon reelection campaign, James McCord, as part of his burglary team at the Watergate, because “McCord was the only game in town.”
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7.
George Lakoff and John Jost radio interviews, “The Science of Conservatism,” WBAI-FM (November 12, 2005). See also George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 33. (Lakoff’s work is fascinating, and his credentials are strong, but his book really provides no documentation. He does provide a laundry list of references at the back of the book, but it is impossible to tell where his material comes from. It appears he speaks largely ex cathedra. Since there was no way to examine his sources, I found I could not use his material. I was unsuccessful in my efforts to contact him, with my e-mail resulting only in my being added to the mailing list of his foundation.)
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8.
T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Bruswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sandford, in collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and William Morrow, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950), v.
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9.
Ibid., ix.
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10.
Alan Wolfe, “‘The Authoritarian Personality’ Revisited,” Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 52 (October 7, 2005), B-12.
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11.
Ibid.
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12.
Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 8.
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13.
Bob Altemeyer is an American scholar who went to Canada to teach psychology at the University of Manitoba, where for several decades he has been a relentless researcher. An article written for Political Psychology described Altemeyer’s work since the 1970s as “convincing [other] scholars (in Canada and beyond) of the fruitfulness of [his] endeavors,” for he has undertaken literally “hundreds of experiments in the past three decades,” achieving “admirable robustness in terms of [his work’s] reliability and validity.” Paul Nesbitt-Larking, “Political Psychology in Canada,” Political Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1 (2004), 97, 106–7. The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology reported that Altemeyer’s work “powerfully predicts a wide range of political, social, ideological, and intergroup phenomena.” David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Because Altemeyer’s work is critically insightful to understanding contemporary conservatism, it is regrettable that the principal audience for his extensive writing is composed of other psychologists and social scientists. In an effort to translate his findings, I asked him many questions over an extended period that he was kind enough to answer. Any mistakes in presenting his work are mine, not his.
