Conservatives Without Conscience

This past Thursday, I got to hear John W. Dean, former White House Counsel to Richard Nixon, speak at the library. He was the first insider in the Watergate conspiracy to stand up and speak out against what is happening. Since then, he has become very disillusioned with the Republican party, and the Bush administration in particular. He writes weekly columns for FindLaw, and has recently written 2 books, Worse Than Watergate, and Conservatives Without Conscience.

His talk was absolutely incredible. He talked a little about his time in the White House: how he tried warning Nixon about what could happen if the scandal got out to the public, and how Nixon said that he was content to just try covering it up more—he and the rest of the conspiricists were apparently prepared to spend millions of dollars in hush money, if it came to that. Dean then went to everyone he still respected, warned them about what he was going to do, and then testified against most of the White House (once his testimony was confirmed by the surveillence tapes, it was the main evidence that brought Nixon down).

Dean talked about how at the beginning of the Clinton scandal, 60% of the country didn’t want to go to impeachment, and most of the Republican congresspeople didn’t, either. However, some high-up Republicans started playing hardball: they went to many Republicans and said that unless they voted for impeachment, they would lose their committee seats, campaign donations, etc. This occurred because the ~25% of America in the extreme religious right was all for the impeachment, and this was the Republican base. This was the beginning of the real shift in Republicanism to the far right (rather than the typical conservatism they had previously stood for). He drew parallels to Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, which was apparently extremely partisan, as well.

He talked about how these days, the Bush administration is using pretty much the same playbook as Nixon, but with some even more galling additions. Bush is the only president who has ever publicly confessed to an impeachable offense (warrantless wiretaps—FISA was set up just after Nixon’s resignation specifically in order to prevent what Bush is doing right now). His justifications are very similar to Nixon’s: both claimed that they had the power to do these things because they were the Commander In Chief, which gives them the power to perform any actions necessary for the safety of the country. They both drew comparisons to Lincoln, who authorized troop deployments and suspended habeus corpus without congressional approval during the Civil War (congress was out of session at the time, and waiting for them to reconvene would have been too slow during the war). However, Lincoln later went back to congress and got authorization when they were back in session. Bush has resisted all attempts by congress to regulate the wiretapping, prisoner treatment/rights, or practically anything else.

Dean says that the main difference between Nixon’s actions and Bush’s is that no one died as a result of Nixon’s crimes. Bush, however, has started an unjustified war, mismanaged a half-justified one, and has authorized the torture of hundreds if not thousands of people. and he has so far gotten away with it because of the authoritarian nature of the Republican party. There have been psychologists looking at the typical personalities of political parties, and they have found some striking trends. Dean says that at first he didn’t believe the studies, so he took a course in statistics and met for several weeks with the people who did these studies (I unfortunately forget their names). They asked people to describe themselves by picking words from a list, and found that the Republican leaders all had the following traits: bullying, intolerant, homophobic, authoritarian, bloodthirsty, and other similar traits. The Republican followers all had these traits: insecure, having trouble dealing with daily life, intolerant, uneducated, among others (interestingly enough, Dean says that the study found that these traits do not show up in Democrats). Again, these are terms that these people used to describe themselves, rather than any labels other people placed on them. I wish I could remember more of the adjectives Dean mentioned, but I can’t. Hopefully I’ll be able to find this study at some later time.

In a nutshell, Dean says that the modern Republican party works through protofascism: the leaders say what they want to do, morals and scruples aside, and are willing to smear, bully, intimidate, etc to get it. The rest of the Republicans prefer to have someone else make decisions for them, and prefer to go along with and blindy follow such strong, loud, commanding personalities. Democrats, on the other hand, try to do things for themselves, and consequently pull the party in many different directions (which is why the Democrats appear so weak in comparison to the Republicans). Personally, I have certainly known some of these Republican followers: I know a woman who loved Bush because although his policies were despicable, he was such a charismatic person. She preferred to have our allies slightly pissed off at us so that they didn’t try anything with us (or something like that?). She liked the Republicans as a whole because they were such strong leaders who had a real direction in which they wanted to take the country, and she preferred this style of leadership where other people tell you how to live. Dean was hesitant to make any allusions to Nazis, but certainly said that Germany was in a similar political state in the mid to late 1930s.

Several weeks ago, I had considered buying one of Dean’s books to get it autographed that evening, and decided against it, since I didn’t really know much about him or what he stood for. The talk impressed me so much that at the end of it I bought Conservatives Without Conscience and got it autographed anyway. If John Dean ever ran for president, I’d probably vote for him. Should you ever get the chance to hear Dean speak, do not miss it! He was absolutely fantastic. I’d like to see him again.

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