The Architects of Fear

These last eight years of the Bush Administration felt very familiar to me. I suspect the same is true for many survivors of the terrors and degradations of religiously sponsored child abuse. Nor are we ready to celebrate now that a promising new administration waits on the political horizon. Five years after World War II ended, a group of scholars published a landmark analysis under the title The Authoritarian Personality. These scholars, who included Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Nevitt Stanford, Daniel Levinson, and Theodor Adorno, wanted to know how a progressive nation like Germany could be taken over by the barbarous Nazi Party. It was obvious that a small group of psychopaths could not have subverted established institutions unless their propaganda resonated deeply with a large sector of the German population. Further research laid bare the psychodynamics involved. According to this research, people who favor authoritarian politics and succumb to reactionary rhetoric exhibit a consistent personality pattern of "antidemocratic tendencies and fascist potential." In other words, they tend to share common psychological characteristics, including some or all of the following: * An entrenched obsession with safety, security, and order. * Rigidly absolutist "black-and-white" thinking (e.g., us against them). * An overemphasis on "strength," power, and control; a "might makes right" orientation. * Authoritarian submission: a willingness to blindly obey the rules of authorities. * Authoritarian aggression: an aggressive attitude towards individuals or groups disliked by the authorities; bullying individuals or groups perceived to threaten traditional values. * A belief that negotiation, understanding, empathy, and compromise are weak. * A belief in the need to punish those who do not follow rules to the letter. * Scornful rejection of the subjective, imaginative, and aesthetic dimensions of life. * Superstition, cliché-mongering, stereotyping, and fatalism. * A belief in fixed, unalterable, and traditional roles for women. * Secret insecurity when unable to live up to high standards imposed publicly on others. * Identification with those in power, with excessive emphasis on posturing toughness. * Destructiveness, cynicism, general hostility, and a habit of putting down perceived opponents. * Projection: the tendency to see evil, exploitativeness, and danger in others instead of in oneself. * An exaggerated concern with other people's sexual activity. The authors also found a very high correlation between possessing a number of these traits and demonstrating a consistent and malignant prejudice against out-groups. I know these characteristics, having seen them up close throughout eighteen years of child abuse that left me scarred and my sister quasi-psychotic. A Portrait of Conservative Abusers I am adopted, and when the agency handed me over to my adoptive family, they did not suspect a potential for abuse. Both my parents held college degrees and made a decent income. My mom managed a hospital laboratory, and my dad underwrote insurance after having served in the Navy. Both came from families that practiced a fundamentalist form of Lutheranism, and they were resolved that my sister and I should receive a Christian education. I still recall being shown films of the Saved vanishing from the planet as the damned went to hell. My parents were and are faithful Republicans who voted for Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, and McCain. We know from studies of abusive families that abusers use terror to control family members. The scare tactics of the second Bush Administration are familiar to me from my upbringing and from six years of counseling work with male and female perpetrators of domestic violence. A primary goal of domestic terrorism is to implant in the victim a sense of utter helplessness in order to increase the victim's psychological dependency on the perpetrator. In our home this included a level of constant fear so intense that I could hear my dad's car from several blocks away as he drove home from work in the evening. I suffered from an ulcer at age 12; my sister was prone to dissociative episodes that made her speech and behavior erratic. My mom worked during the evenings we were maltreated and exercised the conservative prerogative of pretending that nothing was wrong even after she was beaten up on the weekends. Perpetrators also paint the world in frightening colors and present themselves as strongman saviors who will "protect" the people they terrorize. As I write this, the tactic has passed over into extortion: a bail-out of banks presented as a necessity to prevent the economic collapse already apparent in the news. Another tactic is to convince the victim that the terror and violence is for their own good. In my men's groups, traditionally raised fathers often talked about instilling "respect" in their frightened children, but what they really meant was "fear." They too had been terrorized as boys, and this time (so went their unconscious logic) they would sit in the driver's seat. They would be the object of fear instead of its sad victim. The extreme of this dynamic is the sadomasochistic reality of torture: the externalized recreation of the unresolved pain of interior injury. Hypocrisy is necessary to prolong abuse and fear. The "family values" I saw up close included being spit on and backhanded, watching my mother and sister being slapped around, having my hair pulled, being bounced off walls, and of course an unremitting stream of verbal abuse of a level of filth I won't repeat here. My dad was careful to leave no visible marks, but on one occasion, when he drank too much beer and forgot to stand on my feet to keep me from running away, he chased me through our yard with a knife until I got safely away in the streets. The police were called but did not arrest him (they are better trained nowadays); as a result, I was pummeled and spat on for a week. My sister was similarly mistreated, but in her case the relief she sought in religion led her into the arms of a church counselor who molested her throughout her childhood. The church elders ignored the evidence of this until several more girls came forward, at which time the pastor was defrocked for failing to report evidence of child abuse. The molester got off on a technicality. My sister grew up to be a crazy mother and chronic liar who has been vomiting herself to death for years despite decades of therapy"this time with a Christian counselor. When confronted my parents accepted no responsibility for any of this. Are all conservatives abusers? No. But many who supported the prior administration's psychopathic war on human and environmental rights demonstrate the red warning signs of the Authoritarian Personality. This makes them extremely dangerous, the more so when their rhetoric of patriotic fervor and Christian decency goes unchallenged. We Americans ought to have learned by now that the politician who hides behind such masks while pointing the finger and crying, "Associates with terrorists!" or "Extremist!" is merely projecting his own potential to terrorize and giving us a look at his own threatening extremism. Nor should any ecocidal candidate with a vested "religious" stake in the end of the world be allowed anywhere near a position of political power. Ever. The Reign of Terror is Not Over Yet When the Bush regime came to power, I was the only liberal I knew who felt no surprise whatsoever. The mass surveillance, the concentration camps, the endless war, the sacking of the national treasury, the destruction of the biosphere, the branding of opponents as unpatriotic: these onslaughts make perfect sense when viewed as outcomes of a perpetrator mentality. They are the historically expectable moves of authoritarians who view the world through the dark lenses of deep paranoia and unacknowledged rage. They give frantic speeches about protecting the family against gays and secularists; but who will protect our families from these architects of fear, whose real god is not gentle Jesus but impulsive, bloodthirsty Mars? Given the level of my personal and professional education, I know that the "good father figure" of a newly elected president, although a welcome development for many reasons, will not usher in a brave bright day of protection and sanity, especially once all the savior projections wear off. The architects of fear will not hand President Obama the keys to the Oval Office and quietly disappear. I know how they think, and I know they will continue to scheme and deceive, smear and manipulate, fulminate and terrorize until they either take total control of what's left of the Republic or end up behind bars. Terrorizers, bullies, and perpetrators must be openly discredited and held firmly accountable for their actions; for once they are pardoned and appeased by those who are too fearful"or too implicated"to stand up to them, they will seize their advantage and strengthen their systems of stalking and intimidation until every last vestige of personal freedom disappears into the maw of their insatiable craving for power.