On Conservatives Without Conscience

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As we discuss the radical Christian movement and its role in US policy in the Middle East, we're going to step back and get a broader perspective from a former Republican political insider -- Nixon White House counsel John Dean.

Dean served as Nixon's White House lawyer for the last 1,000 days of his presidency and was among the White House staffers implicated in covering up the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters inside the Watergate Hotel.

Dean agreed to testify to Congress that Nixon was guilty of covering up Watergate, even though he was certain to condemn himself. Dean was eventually charged with obstruction of justice and would eventually be sentenced to 127 days in detention for taking part in the cover-up. Today Dean has become a vocal critic of the Bush administration. He's written a new book. It's called "Conservatives Without Conscience." Dean writes of what he calls: "conservative authoritarianism." He warns that many of today's Republican and conservative leaders are: "conservatives without conscience who are capable of plunging this nation into disasters the likes of which we have never known."

• John Dean, served as counsel to President Nixon. Author of several books, his latest is "Conservatives Without Conscience."

AMY GOODMAN: We turn to John Dean, author of Conservatives Without Conscience. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

JOHN DEAN: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you -- well, you come from a very different place.

JOHN DEAN: But it's a great setup you just went through.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about, from your vantage point, from the man who spent the last thousand days of Nixon’s -- last hundred days of Nixon's White House with him, where did you go from there to here, to analyzing the conservatives?

JOHN DEAN: Well, actually, this started about 1994, so it was many years after I left the White House. I did realize after I left the White House and started doing the research for this book that it told me a lot about the White House I worked in. The genesis of this book was, curiously, a longtime friend of mine, Senator Barry Goldwater, and we were talking after the 1994 election, where he was actually both mystified and miffed at what had happened to conservatives. He said, “John, I don't understand this incivility. I don't understand why the religious right is dominating the Republican Party.” He said, “I’d like to find some answers.” And we thought we'd do this book together. And that's where it started.

Unfortunately, his health didn't hold up, but later I decided, well, this is a project I just can't drop, because I think conservatism is a mystery to me, too, notwithstanding the fact that I had been -- considered myself a longtime conservative, and it was just a different movement than I had any knowledge of.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your research, going back in time, what social science you drew from.

JOHN DEAN: Right. What happened in looking for answers, I first went down a lot of bad alleys, where nothing was there. Then I ran into this body of research that really commenced after World War II, where social scientists were trying to figure out if we could ever have in the United States what had happened in Italy and Germany under Hitler and Mussolini. And the short answer was, they found, yes, we could have that. There is clearly an authoritarian personality.

The initial research was very Freudian-based. Other researchers quickly, who debated that and didn't think that was the most solid, began asking empirical questions, asking surveys of people, and developing scales to determine, you know, which personalities were more likely to become followers and those that are leaders.

So they did develop -- now we have 40 years of this material, and it has been replicated time and time again, and we know an awful lot about this type of personality. There are people who submit very easily to an authority figure. They do it because they're frightened. 9/11 drove an awful lot of people into submitting to authoritarianism, and they're very aggressive once they submit. This explains a lot of the incivility, the nastiness, the mean-spiritedness. They're not self-critical, and they become true advocates, not unlike the clips you saw earlier in the show, of whatever position they're advocating and pushing.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the quotes you begin with is Jonathan Schell. “The administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form,” he writes.

JOHN DEAN: Yes, well taken. I must say that as somebody who was in a White House where it was dubbed an imperial presidency, which had its own authoritarian nature, we now have a presidency that is the imperial presidency on steroids. They have really bulked it up. It is unchecked by the Congress.

I found when I started looking and applying this research, Amy, that it really starts in the Congress, and it blossoms there in the congressional leadership, setting up a very almost dictatorial system within the House. And then, when Bush and Cheney come in in 2000, they give all this a new legitimacy. 9/11, they exploit that further and give it more legitimacy. And it’s a very troublesome thing, because it is proto-fascist behavior.

Now, are we on the road to fascism? No. The problem is we're not very far from it. And I’m told by the experts in that area that if it comes here, it will come with a smile on its face, and we'll give up things that we’ll wish we’d never given up.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at the cover of your book, Conservatives Without Conscience. You've got a black-and-white photograph of seven different Republican activists: you’ve got Scooter Libby; Tom DeLay; Jack Abramoff; Dick Cheney in the middle; you've got Karl Rove; Dr. Frist, head of the Senate; and you've got Pat Robertson.

JOHN DEAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Why this group of men?

JOHN DEAN: Well, the art department selected those out of the narrative, and I think they were pretty good. They ran it by me, and I said those are excellent selections, because they're all textbook examples of authoritarian personalities that are employing authoritarian tactics in government. And we don't think it in democracies in terms of authoritarianism. It is very real. It has a real presence in government today. It is the controlling group within the conservative ranks. And for that reason, it needs to be watched. The other thing is these people, Amy, don't change their behavior. Once they get into this mold, very few of them can be influenced or told to do anything other than what they're doing.