2016 Postmortem

...about in the first sections of his book "Conservatives Without Conscience" ( a very good book, btw) and the authoritarian streak rampant in conservatives.

Google: John Dean Bob Altemeyer "the Authoritarians" and you should find the research Altemeyer has been doing for more than 30-years on the authoritarian personality. His conclusion is that authoritarians are overwhelming conservative. (Altemeyer is a professor at Canada's U. of Manitoba.)

A snip from a article Dean wrote in Boston.com:

What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, "enemies of freedom, anti-democratic, anti-equality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by authoritarians.

Link: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/07/john_dean_autho.html