About ten years ago, on the evening of May 6, 1997, Terry Washington was executed by the state of Texas for the murder of a restaurant manager. Governor George W. Bush had met that morning with his legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and the two had spent (at most) thirty minutes discussing the condemned man’s plea for clemency. As Alan Berlow pointed out in "The Texas Clemency Memos" (The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003), several grounds for clemency indeed existed. Terry Washington was mentally retarded, having the communication skills of a seven-year old. As well he had undergone horrific parental abuse while growing up. His defense attorney had clearly been inept, and had brought up none of this during the trial. But Gonzales did not mention any of these things in his three page memo to Bush about the appeal. Instead he focused on the brutality of the murder; Bush denied the appeal; Terry Washington was put to death.
Bush denied virtually all appeals for clemency from inmates on death row. In his six years as governor, 152 people were executed by the state–far more than in any other state. His handling of Terry Washington’s case was typical. He usually dealt with the petitions at the last minute, on the day of execution, and denied them in short order after what could only have been a superficial consideration of the facts prepared for him by his counsel. As he said in his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep, if a person had a fair trial and had been found guilty, and the courts had found no reason for clemency, it was not his place to second-guess the courts.
Seen in this context, when hundreds of people’s very lives were at stake, President Bush’s commuting of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby’s 30-month sentence for lying to a grand jury because the sentence seemed "excessive" puts him right up there for Hypocrite of the Century–and we’ve still 93 years to go! But it’s par for the course, because George W. Bush strikes me as being a prototypical authoritarian leader, and everything in his latest mind-numbing action fits right into findings that have emerged from research on authoritarian personalities.
Bush is what I call a "Double High," as presented by John Dean in Conservatives Without Conscience last summer. That means he combines a strong drive for personal dominance with many of the traits commonly found in authoritarian followers, such as being religious (in a fundamentalist way), highly ethnocentric, highly dogmatic, and enormously self-righteous. Double Highs are the natural leaders of the religious right, and they have shown a terrible penchant in studies for combining the worst qualities of being an authoritarian leader with the worst qualities commonly found in the people who gladly follow them. Knowing this helps one understand, I think, why the President "did it, again" and why he will continue to do more disturbing things in the future.
First, Double Highs are about the most prejudiced people you can find in society, and their prejudices are based upon a profound ethnocentrism–the tendency to separate the world into an in-group and out-groups. I wonder if George Bush ever felt a bond with or commitment to the American people as a whole. Instead it seems likely he divides the country into his "base supporters" and everyone else–with a strong tendency to see "everyone else" as enemies. He will occasionally offend his base over something like immigration, when other supporters push hard enough in the opposite direction. But as events have made clear, he does not care very much what the rest of the country thinks, and whether it prospers or suffers.
This ethnocentrism probably lay at the heart of his sympathy for Scooter Libby, who was "one of us," a "member of our team," and who took the rap to protect Bush’s indispensable, powerful vice-president over the Plame leak. Authoritarian leaders demand strong loyalty within the in-group, and Libby delivered. Libby in turn may have known the president would ultimately protect him, and it’s noteworthy that Bush acted before Libby had exhausted his legal appeals. Bush simply wouldn’t allow him go to prison, not even for a day, which suggests to me that Libby knew from the start that he was safe from imprisonment. Morale is no doubt higher now among other culpable administration officials as a result.
This means Bush’s thinking involves a huge double standard, but lots of experiments have found that authoritarians are often highly unfair in their judgments. If a "bad guy" does something wrong, authoritarians want to lower the boom. If a "good guy" does exactly the same thing, well, it’s not so bad then, it’s understandable, punishment can easily seem "excessive." Of course, a president who commutes, and does not commute, sentences imposed on felons according to who they are is unjust and a hypocrite. But Double Highs are marked by their injustice and hypocrisy.
Bush’s short-circuiting of the justice system must be sending a chill through the legal community, but it will be just the latest in a long series of shakes and shivers. The president appears to have no concept of justice as a value, as an end in itself. Instead, "justice" (and the federal department named after it) are simply means to attain other goals. Research shows that Double Highs–despite all their supposed religiousness–are pretty amoral, unprincipled characters. The end does justify the means for them, as the use of torture, unwarranted domestic surveillance, usurping of habeas corpus, and so on all show. Authoritarian leaders long for power, they privately tell us, and when they get it, they use it. I suspect Bush commuted Libby’s sentence partly to show everyone he could if he wanted to. "I’m the Decider, nobody else." (And that’s pretty frightening, when you think about it.)
The public’s reaction to the commutation has been largely negative, which will not help the president’s standing in the polls, nor Republicans in general in 2008. Corruption was the No. 1 issue on the minds of voters last fall according to the big exit poll study, and Scooter-gate reeks of corruption. But Bush, who has been marked by his intransigence on issue after issue, does not seem to realize that further loss of public support makes it easier for opponents to challenge him. He seems not to learn from experience, at home or abroad. But this also is characteristic of authoritarians, who show a marked rigidity in their thinking in experiment after experiment. It’s as though they sense that if they move one thing, the whole house of cards will tumble down.
I could go on, but instead I’ll close with some observations about the "army" that Bush leads. Quite a howl went up when Libby was convicted, and then sentenced. A Survey USA poll of 825 Americans familiar with the case, taken right after Bush commuted the sentence, found that 21% agreed with the reduction and another 17% thought Libby should be completely pardoned. That’s a lot of Americans. Now some of them will not be Bush supporters, but instead be voicing their displeasure at Libby having been the fall guy for upper-ups who slunk behind him. But the president has an ardent following that still thinks he’s doing a great job. He can do no wrong in their eyes, no matter what he does.
Studies show that these authoritarian followers have remarkably compartmentalized thinking. They are not likely to realize that if a president can use his power to commute in this way, that means an administration can do whatever it wants, because the leader of the gang is also the final judge. The "fix" is in. They’re not likely to think how they would feel about a liberal politician who deliberately unmasked a CIA undercover agent. They are not likely to recall all the times they have bemoaned criminals "being let off with probation and a fine" by a judicial system they see as coddling criminals--and Libby may not even face probation, since he is not going to jail. They easily ignore such things when it’s convenient.
On a deeper level, we know from research that Bush’s followers, and many Republican politicians in general, have very little interest in democracy. They believe (the proper) authorities should be above the law, and free to act as they see fit. They have no love of the Bill of Rights, and would often gladly scuttle it. They want the government to impose their norms and religious beliefs upon everyone. They approve when authorities go beyond the law to persecute "the bad guys." They hold such authorities blameless. Compared with the majority of the country, they can easily be induced to help persecute whomever the government targets.
Some day we shall be free of George W. Bush. But his tens of millions of ardent authoritarian followers will still be there, ready to work with all their might to put other wannabe dictators in power. Liberals, moderates, and conservatives-with-conscience need to recognize the ongoing threat posed by such inclinations, and unite to limit its influence.
(The research that I refer to in the paragraphs above is available in my on-line book, The Authoritarians.