I am really pleased that Bob Altemeyer invited me to provide a brief foreword to the audio edition of his remarkable and timely book – The Authoritarians.  It is timely because of the election of Barack Obama to be President of the United States.  An election in which Obama defeated a poster boy and poster girl for authoritarianism: Arizonian Republican Senator John McCain, who sought the presidency with Alaska Republican Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate.  When you listen to the material that follows you will understand why they both are authoritarians, and what that could have meant for the country had they been elected.  Their negative and nasty campaign was a usual bag of unpleasant authoritarian tactics and tricks. 

Barack Obama and his running mate Senator Joe Biden soundly defeated not only the authoritarianism of McCain and Palin, but also that of President George Bush and his partner Vice President Dick Cheney.  Allow me to be blunt about Bush and Cheney. Without hesitation I can tell you – and indeed I have written about it in my books [Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush and Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches] – that eight years of authoritarian rule by Bush and Cheney has nearly ruined the United States.

For example, they used false evidence and lies to take the United States to war in Iraq, they shamed all Americans with their efforts to deal with terrorism by creating our first gulag at Guantanamo, not to mention secret prisons scattered around the world, and the use of renditions and torture to deal with anyone they declared to be an enemy combatant.  To top off their disastrous rule they have shattered the world’s economy because of their failure to regulate America’s financial markets.  Unfortunately, these are only a few of the glaring consequences of their authoritarian rule, but they make the point.

Still, you might ask, if Obama has defeated this type of authoritarian rule by winning over McCain and Palin, why should anyone be concerned?  As you will learn in the material that follows, authoritarians do not go away when they are defeated, they do not hear the massage that voters sent them, rather they merely regroup, redouble their effort, and go at it again because they are convinced of the correctness of their self righteous and dogmatic beliefs.  As Bob Altemeyer once told me, authoritarians are like Energizer Bunnies and they never give up or run out of energy.  

Although the Republican Party has been decimated by the Obama victory, and the polling data shows American have overwhelmingly rejected their thinking, the authoritarian conservative ideology that binds the core of the Republican Party together is busy preparing its come back, likely by becoming even more authoritarian.  In truth, no one needs to listen to the material that follows more than Republicans, for if they better understood the nature of authoritarianism, they might think twice before allowing those who are the bell ringers when tested for authoritarian traits from again becoming the driving force of their party and politics.  But as you will further learn, this is not the way the authoritarians will likely see it, for they are not very good at self-analysis.

Regardless, the only way to deal with the authoritarians is to understand them and their nature, how they think and act, and why they do so.  That is what you will discover from this audio book.  And in the event you are an authoritarian yourself, I can assure you that Dr. Bob, as he became known by his students, is not out to trash you, rather he understands you, for he is a social scientist, a psychologist, who is most interested in understanding people based on sold evidence about the way people think and act and then describing it.  In short, this book is not pejorative; rather it is explanatory.  This book is not a political tract, although it deals with political matters, nor is it a polemic.  Rather this book is synthesis of decades of research and empirical study.  It is about the way the world is, and the way some people are.

By training, I am an attorney and not a social scientist.  I discovered Bob Altemeyer’s work when researching a book about what had happened to conservatives – a book I had planned to write with the late Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the man who launched the conservative movement but had witnessed it evolve in ways he felt were anything but good conservatism.  Senator Goldwater disagreed when conservatives began embracing and pushing policies to abolish abortion or calling for school prayer, and demanding that so-called family values were the most important issues facing the nation, for he knew that matters like the economy and national security were far more important.  Goldwater was offended when conservatives embraced attitudes of incivility and tactics to literally destroy political opponents as their standard operating procedures.  And he felt the religious right, which was responsible for these changes in the conservative outlook and behavior, had corrupted conservatism and the Republican Party.  For this reason he wanted to understand how and why this had happened, why these people act as they do, and together we set out to find the answers and write a book we would call Conservatives Without Conscience, that title being a play on his 1960 classic The Conscience of a Conservative, which had launched the modern conservative movement.

Unfortunately, Senator Goldwater passed away before we found the answers, which I discovered in the decades of research work by Bob Altemeyer and others.   When I found this work I immediately recognized its value, for it explained these people, not to mention many of my former colleagues at the Nixon White House, from the president to other key members of his staff, as well as those I knew who would later take command of the contemporary Republican Party.

But when I first found Altemeyer’s work it was not in an easily digestible form like that found in this audio book; rather it resided in countless academic monographs and books written for other social and political psychologists, his professional peers and graduate students studying the social sciences.  This material was loaded with the technical jargon that is the norm for such academic writing, not to mention laced with statistical analysis supporting his findings.  Frankly, this material was over may head, but because I sensed it might help me understand conservatism, I ordered a dictionary of technical psychological terms and to refresh my knowledge of statistics – which I had not dealt with since graduate school forty some years earlier and had long forgotten – I ordered the Idiots Guide to Statistics and dove in and plowed my way through. 

After making my way across this foreign terrain, I realized I had found real answers which I had not known existed because this information had never been presented for the general reader.  Altemeyer’s research was startlingly revealing.  It explained why so many conservative Republicans (and a few very conservative Democrats) act as they do. When I examined whether I could trust this material, I discovered not only was Bob Altemeyer’s work verified by other studies, but his professional peers considered him a leader in this field of research.  They had even awarded him the equivalent of an academy award for his work.  The American Academy for the Advancement of Science had awarded him its highly prestigious prize for behavioral science research.  No higher accolade exists among social scientists.  So I knew not only did I have answers but they were based on solid science.

After getting my head around this work, and to be certain I understood it well enough to explain it to others – since the material for the general reader that you are about to listen to did not exist – I tracked Altemeyer down at the University of Manitoba, and sent him an email to ask if he would answer a few questions.  He graciously replied and we began a correspondence that would last to this day.  Not only did he guide me through his scientific studies to help me translate it into layman’s terms, but he thoughtfully read my manuscript as it related to his material, which assured me that I had correctly understood and translated his work.  It was about this time that I also began nudging Dr. Bob to write about his findings for the general reader, and before I knew it, he had done just that.  When I published a paperback edition of Conservatives Without Conscience in 2007, I was able to send readers to his online edition of his book, The Authoritarians, which he has written for general readers and you are about to listen to.  When I last checked over 100,000 people had visited his website where he first published The Authoritarians.  You can find it with a simple Google search.

For all these reasons I am delighted this book is now in audio so it can reach even more people.  Should anyone doubt the importance of Dr. Bob’s findings, allow me to share what he told me as I was concluding Conservatives Without Conscience.  I quoted him as follows on the last page of that book:

"Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American popula­tion is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds," Altemeyer told me. He added, "They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had im­proved as a result. The problem is that these authoritarian followers are much more active than the rest of the country. They have the men­tality of 'old-time religion' on a crusade, and they generously give money, time and effort to the cause. They proselytize; they lick stamps; they put pressure on loved ones; and they revel in being loyal to a co­hesive group of like thinkers. And they are so submissive to their lead­ers that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going to go away.”

Now listen to Dr. Bob as he shares a lifetime of study and explains why he has reached these troubling conclusions, which are not based on hunches or partisan feelings, rather on empirical evidence he developed over many decades of testing thousands upon thousands of people throughout the world.