| CONSERVATIVES WITHOUT CONSCIENCE John Dean New York: Viking, 2006 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-670-03774-2 | ||||
| ISBN 0-670-03774-5 | 246pp. | HC | $25.95 | |
After a long spell away from politics, John Dean came back into that field because of disquieting changes he saw occurring, beginning about the time of the Republican "Contract with America" in 1994. With Barry Goldwater, he began writing a book to trace the development of conservatism and investigate the reasons for the radical changes in it and the Republican Party over the past decade. When Goldwater died in 1998, Dean continued the project alone. But let him describe his purpose in his own words:
My venture here is not to expose more malfeasance, misfeasance, or nonfeasance in places high or low in Washington, nor even to try to catalog it, for the gist of what is occurring under conservative Republican rule is all too obvious. Although this is a report that cannot be given without frequent references to the administration's disquieting politics and governing, my effort, fundamentally, is to understand them, to explain why they are happening, while placing them all in a larger context, including the particular events that prompted my inquiry about people with whom I once thought I shared beliefs. – Page xii |
Dean has done a lot of research into this question, and he presents it well, as the passage quoted below reveals:
No question hovered at the front of my mind more, reading through Altemeyer's studies of authoritarian behavior, than, why are right-wingers often malicious, mean-spirited, and disrespectful of even the basic codes of civility? While the radical left has had its episodes of boorishness, the right has taken these tactics to an unprecedented level. Social science has discovered these forms of behavior can be rather easily explained as a form of aggression. Altemeyer's studies of authoritarian aggression are groundbreaking and have been recognized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Altemeyer discovered that the aggression of right-wingers seems to be not merely instrumental—that is, expressed for some political purpose—but engaged in for the pure pleasure of it. Torture is an extreme example, yet apparently authoritarians can find even that enjoyable, as the Abu Ghraib photos tragically illustrate. But on a more pedestrian level, he found it difficult for most right-wingers to talk about any subject about which they felt strongly without attacking others. – Page 66 |
But, for me, the most valuable part of the book is the listing and discussion of such "malfeasance, misfeasance or nonfeasance", along with the profiles of the principals responsible — men1 such as I. Lewis Libby, Dennis Hastert, Bill Frist, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Pat Robertson, Paul Weyrich, and Charles Colson. This is done mostly in chapters 3 and 4.
The book thus does double duty. Not only does it present, in clear layman's terms, analysis of the history and sociology of authoritarianism, but it also identifies current authoritarian players and describes what they have done and are doing to establish and maintain the current, dangerously lopsided state of affairs in our political system. It has a few grammatical errors, a few confusing passages. Those defects do not greatly diminish this thoroughly researched and well written book. It contains extensive endnotes, a good index, and some useful appendices. Even more than Dean's previous work, Worse than Watergate, I consider it essential reading on American politics and give it my highest recommendation.
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