Re: [political-research] Right and Left Equally Authoritarian: Takeoff From John Dean's Book

Great stuff here. I think the main point to keep in mind is that authoritarian, totalitarian and messianic personality types can emerge from all across the political spectrum, from the extreme right to the extreme left, and from both religious and secular traditions. Getting a handle on this psychological phenomenon is matter of the utmost urgency. American politics is presently awash with authoritarian zealots and heading for the kind of disaster that typically concludes messianic ventures.

George W. Bush is a textbook authoritarian/totalitarian/messianic type, as are the neoconservatives and Christian Zionists who have brought him to power.

George W. Bush is not a conservative or a Christian in any traditional or meaningful sense. Many leading conservatives have already begun to figure this out -- although much too late in the game, after so much damage has been done.


bernard_pyron <bernard_pyron@...> wrote:

cultism-a-review/>

Opening:

The full extent and irreversibility of the damage to our country
wrought by the Bush administration will likely not be known until
well after George Bush finally disappears from our political life.
But understanding the dynamics and impulses of the movement which
have enabled these abuses is a critically important task, and that is
the project undertaken by John Dean's new best-selling book,
Conservatives Without Conscience (selected excerpt is here).
Fortuitously for Dean, this examination of what has become the so-
called "conservative" movement (composed of Bush followers,
neoconservatives and hard-core religious conservatives) comes at the
perfect time.
The review of John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience excerpted
below is from: http://www.crooksandliars.com/posts/2006/07/23/john-
dean-and-authoritarian-cultism-a-review/

John Dean and Authoritarian Cultism - a Review
By: Glenn Greenwald on Sunday, July 23rd, 2006 at 8:19 AM - PDT

"Dean contends, and amply documents, that the "conservative" movement
has become, at its core, an authoritarian movement composed of those
with a psychological and emotional need to follow a strong authority
figure which provides them a sense of moral clarity and a feeling of
individual power, the absence of which creates fear and insecurity in
the individuals who crave it. By definition, its followers' devotion
to authority and the movement's own power is supreme, thereby
overriding the consciences of its individual members and removing any
intellectual and moral limits on what will be justified in defense of
their movement.

Dean relies on substantial social science data to illustrate the
personality type that seeks out authoritarian movements. But his case
is made much more persuasively by what one can visibly see unfolding
before one's own eyes."

The excerpts from the article below shows that one of the main
starting points for "substantial social science data" in the area of
authoritarian personality "research" is the book, The Authoritarian
Personality (1950), by Theodor W. Adorno,Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and
Daniel J. Levinson.

Personality & Individual Differences. Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 277-279,
1987 Pergamon Journals Ltd

NEOCONSERVATISM, mental health and attitude to death By
J. J. RAY

Summary --- There is an extensive literature attempting to link
conservatism with various forms of ill-health. An example is Fromm's
attempt to link conservatism with necrophilia. A new scale to measure
Reaganite or Thatcherite conservatism was developed and correlated
with scales of self-esteem, anxiety and death-acceptance. The sample
was a random mail-out survey of 95 Australians. All scales showed
satisfactory reliability and internal consistency but there were no
significant correlations between neoconservatism and any of the other
scales.

"Ever since the work of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and
Sanford (1950), there appears to have been some undercurrent in
psychological writing directed towards finding signs of
psychopathology on the political Right. Adorno et al. themselves
labelled the right-wing syndrome they studied as a 'disease' (p.
974). Recent writing is a little more circumspect but Petersen and
Wilkinson (1983) label conservatives as 'despairing' and Glad (1983)
finds a whole host of psychological flaws in Ronald Reagan."

The work of Adono et al is the book, The Authoritarian Personality
(1950). Although this book was the most referenced book in the peer-
reviewed social psychology journals in the fifties and sixties, it is
primarily propaganda claiming to be social psychology. Adorno et al
used a paper and pencil questionnaire called the F Scale as their
supposed measure of "Authoritarian Personality." I used the F Scale
in a study published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1966, 22, 259-
272, along with some other similar personality questionnaires and a
measure of complexity-simplicity of constructs used to perceive other
people. That was before I realized that correlational studies using
such questionnaires is of little value and not good "science." Yet I
then held a Ph.D. in social psychology from Wisconsin. Some time
after 1966 I was vomited out of the academic world while I also
departed out from psychology as being 90 percent bovine scatology.
Psychology and psychologists are anti-Christian, and especially
anything to do with psychoanalysis or B.F. Skinner's behaviorism.

In his 1987 study Ray says : "A neoconservatism scale was devised
embodying the types of statements made by neoconservative thinkers
and politicians. It was included in a questionnaire together with a
slightly modified version of the Taylor (1953) Manifest Anxiety scale
(MAS) and the Rosenberg (1965) Self-esteem Scale. The choice of these
scales was influenced on the one hand by Eysenck's argument that
chronic anxiety (or 'neuroticism') is the most basic factor in mental
health (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1969) and on the other by the
increasingly prevalent view among psychologists (probably influenced
by the anti-psychiatry movement) that the labelling of any form of
behaviour as a disease is arbitrary and that it is more useful to ask
whether the person is happy with his/her life...A subsidiary goal of
the study was to look at one particular type of psychopathology that
conservatives have been accused of: A preoccupation with death and
dead things or 'necrophilia'".

The only correlation of any size Ray found was between the Taylor
Anxiety Scale and preoccupation with death (the correlation was .45),
that is, the people who admitted to having more anxiety also admitted
to having more preoccupation with death. The "necrophilia"
hypothesis was not supported by his data. Ray's questionnaire measure
of "neoconservatism" did not correlate with anything in his study.

Again, the main foundation of "research" on the authoritarian
personality type is the 1950 book, the Authoritarian Personality, by
Theodore W. Adorno et al. These people were all part of what is
called the Frankfurt School in Germany, and the Institue fur
Sozialforschung, or Institute for Social Research. They were German
Jews who left Nazi Germany for the U.S. in the thirties. They were
stealth Marxists who in part concealed their Marxis. The Frankfurt
School was a Wrecking Machine which focused not so much on economics
and violent revolution as the classical Communists, but on changing
the culture. They have been called Cultural Marxists, and were an
important origin of the Political Correctness that developed in the
universities first in the eighties or perhaps earlier. The marxists
had talked about political correctness, which is the authoritarian of
the left. And so the left has its authoritarian personalities just
as does the right, Milton Rokeach in The Open and Closed Mind (1960)
recognized this idea that both right and left are authoritarian, just
as the Soviet Communists were as authoritarian as Hitler and more
ruthless toward their own people. His Dogmatism Scale measures both
right and left-wing authoritarianism.

William S. Lind in "Further Readings On the Frankfurt School" says
that Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkeimer were, according to Rohmoser, the
terrorists "intellectual forster-parents, who were using cultural
revolution to destroy the traditions of the Christian West."

Adorno, in his 1950 book, says that the strong family and
Christianity cause fascism and the Authoritarian Personality.
Therefore cultural Communism or political correctness must wipe out
the strong family and Christianity, or at least that type of
Christianity that believes the Bible. Political correctness went hand
in hand with textual criticism of the Bible and the new Bible
translations to weaken Biblical Christianity, which was what was left
of the Reformation Culture in the 20th century America.

Where did the contemporary neocons that have helped lead us into wars
against Third World nations come from?

The current neocom movement came out of the Trotskyites and Marxists
at the City College of New York in the thirties, especially from
Irving Kristol, father of Bill Kristol, the important leader of
today's neocons, and Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell and Irving Howe.
Authoritarianism is a key part of Marxism and the neocon movement.
Milton Rokeach was right in 1960 that the left is just as dogmatic or
authoritarian as the right or fascists. Bernard