Conservatives Without Conscience

Milgram devised various methods to test and measure points of individual resistance to authoritative commands. He discovered that most people who resist those commands go through a series of reactions, until they finally reach the point of disobeying. The decision of whether to follow an order is not a matter of judging it right or wrong, he learned, but rather a response to the unpleasantness of “strain” (a natural reaction, for example, to the moaning and eventual screams of a putative victim). When “a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate his standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense,” Milgram concluded. Rather, that person simply places his moral views aside. His “moral concern shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations of the authority figure.”

Milgram believed that Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) was correct in its analysis. She took issue with the Israeli war crimes prosecutor’s efforts to depict Eichmann as a sadistic monster for his horrific role in exterminating Jews during World War II. She in turn described Eichmann as “an uninspired bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and did his job,”[4] a compliant cog who had set aside his conscience. “Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine,” Milgram observed. In fact, the lesson of his work was that “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terribly destructive process.” Stated a bit differently, Milgram revealed that for a remarkable number of people, it is very difficult to disobey authority figures, but quite easy for them to set aside their conscience.

Milgram’s research explained how someone like Chuck Colson was able to set aside his conscience when Nixon wanted a break-in at the Brookings Institution, and Colson became a dependable and unquestioning lieutenant for following orders.[5] Colson, a former Marine, was a click-the-heels, salute, and get-the-job-done type. But after he had left the White House, had become a born-again Christian, and had acknowledged Nixon’s disgraceful conduct, the Milgram model became less than satisfactory in explaining Colson’s efforts to promote a bogus history of Watergate.

Milgram’s notion of an agentic conscience, however, appears to explain how, under Bush and Cheney, National Security Agency employees can turn their powerful electronic surveillance equipment on other Americans without objection. It can also account for CIA employees’ and agents’ willingness to hide so-called enemy combatants (that is, anyone they suspect of terror connections) in secret prisons, not to mention engage in torture—all contrary to law. Gordon Liddy, in contrast, pretends that he is obedient to the orders of his superiors, when exactly the opposite is the truth, as a close reading of his semiconfessional autobiography reveals. When in the FBI Liddy made illegal entries—“black-bag jobs”—searching for clues in an auto theft case, even though such activity was authorized (under the Fourth Amendment) only for certain national security cases, and even then had to be approved by FBI headquarters in advance. Liddy describes his illegal activity as “a simple extrapolation from FBI procedure in security cases.” Rather than follow orders, he has consistently “extrapolated” and regularly disobeyed and deceived superiors.[6]

Milgram’s work does not explain Liddy’s behavior, or for that matter the obedience of the conservative Republicans who agreed to vote to impeach Clinton because their leaders instructed them to do so. And it does not even begin to illuminate the question of what drives authority figures, for Milgram focused only on those who compliantly follow orders, not on those who issue them. To really understand the conscience of contemporary conservatism we must turn to the study of authoritarianism, which explores both those who give orders in a political setting, as well as those who obediently follow such orders.