# Conservatives Without Conscience *Conservatives Without Conscience* (Viking Press, 2006), by John W. Dean — [[Watergate Scandal]] figure and former White House Counsel to Richard Nixon — is the book that brought [[Bob Altemeyer]]'s empirical authoritarianism research to a mass political audience. Dean collaborated directly with Altemeyer to apply the [[RWA Scale]] and the concept of [[Double Highs]] to the contemporary [[Republican Party]], arguing that the party had been captured by authoritarian personalities who fit Altemeyer's most dangerous profile. ## The argument ### The Goldwater origin The book was originally conceived as a collaboration between Dean and Barry Goldwater, intended as a critique of what both men saw as the Republican Party's departure from its libertarian-conservative roots. Goldwater died in 1998 before the project was completed. Dean continued alone, but the Goldwater connection is significant: the critique comes from *inside* the conservative movement, from two men who had been central to it, arguing that something had fundamentally changed. ### The Altemeyer framework Dean encountered Altemeyer's research while searching for a scientific framework to explain what he was observing in the Republican Party. The two men corresponded extensively, and Altemeyer provided Dean with data, scale results, and analytical guidance. Dean's book applies three of Altemeyer's key concepts to American political elites: **[[Authoritarian Followers]]** — the high-RWA base that the Republican Party had learned to mobilize through fear-based messaging, moral-values campaigns, and enemy identification. Dean argued that the party's shift toward cultural-war politics (anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion maximalism, anti-immigration) was a deliberate strategy to activate the authoritarian-follower population. **[[Authoritarian Leaders]]** — the high-SDO political operatives and movement leaders who used the follower base instrumentally. Dean identified specific Republican leaders and operatives as fitting the social-dominator profile: power-seeking, manipulative, amoral in their political methods, and willing to exploit the followers' moral certainty for strategic advantage. **[[Double Highs]]** — the most dangerous combination. Dean argued that the Republican Party's leadership cadre increasingly consisted of people who scored high on *both* scales — individuals who believed in the moral-values agenda *and* were willing to use Machiavellian methods to advance it. He saw the Double High profile as the key to understanding why the party had become simultaneously more ideologically rigid and more strategically ruthless. ### The conscience problem The title's thesis: the conservatives who had taken over the Republican Party were operating "without conscience" in a specific, measurable sense. They were not simply people who disagreed with liberals on policy — they were people whose personality profiles predicted willingness to violate democratic norms, support extralegal action against political opponents, and subordinate procedural fairness to partisan advantage. The "without conscience" framing is not rhetorical — it maps onto the empirical finding that high-SDO individuals score lower on empathy and higher on [[Machiavellianism]] than the general population. ### The Watergate parallel Dean's unique authority on this subject comes from his role in Watergate. As Nixon's White House Counsel, he participated in the cover-up before becoming the key witness whose testimony helped end the Nixon presidency. His argument in *Conservatives Without Conscience* is that the authoritarian dynamics he saw inside the Nixon White House — the submission to authority, the willingness to break laws on behalf of the leader, the moralization of illegal conduct — were not aberrations but personality-driven patterns that the [[RWA Scale]] could now measure. What he experienced subjectively in 1972–73, Altemeyer had operationalized as a replicable empirical finding. ## Reception and significance The book was a *New York Times* bestseller and introduced Altemeyer's work to an audience far larger than academic psychology journals could reach. Altemeyer credited Dean with popularizing his research and subsequently released *The Authoritarians* (2006) as a free online book, partly in response to the public interest Dean had generated. Critics from the right dismissed the book as partisan psychologizing. Critics from the left questioned whether Dean — a convicted Watergate conspirator — was the right messenger for a book about political conscience. But the book's lasting contribution was methodological rather than polemical: it demonstrated that empirical personality research could be applied to real political movements and that the resulting analysis was more rigorous than the usual ideological critique. ## KB significance *Conservatives Without Conscience* occupies a specific niche in the vault's authoritarianism literature: it is the bridge between Altemeyer's academic research and the KB's applied political analysis. The vault tracks [[Authoritarian Followers]], [[Authoritarian Leaders]], and [[Double Highs]] as analytical categories — and Dean's book is where those categories were first applied to the American right in a sustained, empirically grounded argument. ## See Also - [[Bob Altemeyer]] — the research collaborator whose framework structures the book - [[Double Highs]] — the central analytical concept - [[Authoritarian Followers]] — the base Dean argues the GOP learned to mobilize - [[Authoritarian Leaders]] — the elite profile Dean identifies in Republican leadership - [[RWA Scale]] — the instrument underlying the analysis - [[Watergate Scandal]] — Dean's origin story and the book's historical anchor - [[Republican Party]] — the institution under analysis - [[Authoritarianism]] — subject hub