Nearly a decade ago, John Dean, who served as White House Counsel under U.S. President Richard Nixon, wrote a book entitled Conservatives Without Conscience. A self-described Goldwater conservative (indeed, Barry Goldwater had planned to collaborate on this book before his death), he railed against the influence of social conservatives and neoconservatives within his party.
Dean relied heavily on the research of a social psychologist, Dr. Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, who produced the test and scale for “RWA” or Right-wing authoritarianism. Dr. Altemeyer’s research was a refinement of the authoritarian personality theory originally pioneered by University of California at Berkeley researchers Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford.
John Dean and Barry Goldwater intended the book to be a wake up call, a warning about the rise of extremism and authoritarianism in conservative politics.
The warning largely went unheeded by the Republican Party, the media, and indeed the public. Since the publication of the book, the Republican Party has drifted ever farther rightward into radical extremism. As I have warned you many times, “This is not your father’s GOP.”
The Republican Party’s drift into far-right radical extremism is not by happenstance or coincidence. It is due to a decades long, well organized, well financed strategy by “Movement Conservatism.”
Last week the radical extremists of the GOP House Freedom Caucus engaged in a mutiny against the speaker of the House. John Boehner chose to announce his resignation rather than to put the House through the spectacle of on intra-Party coup d’état, an unprecedented action that would damage the speakership and the House.