This is a quick diary to note how our nation suddenly became the home of a large faction of people who are in favor of wasting American lives by engaging in the ineffective and grossly immoral act of attempting to gather intelligence by torturing detainees.
If you didn't understand conservatives, this would be confusing. Fundamentally, torture does not "work." It does not produce intelligence. It only produces false confessions. So the Bush Administration, largely aware of this like all sane human beings, tortured Al-Qaeda members in an effort to produce false confessions of connections to Iraq. In this, they were partially successful.
The question is, how did this grossly cynical usage of American lives and treasure become part of the conservative canon?
The tribal model* predicts that conservatives will wish to cause terrible harm to outgroup members. In addition, they will want to signal their conservativeness by being excited by a particular form of causing harm. Once the Bush Administration actually began torturing people, the tribal conservative mindset required them to rally around their authority.
In addition, because American conservatives consider themselves to be at war with both Muslim extremists and liberal (out-group) members here at home, the fact that our military capacities were harmed by our usage of torture is irrelevant. Both the Iraq War and the GWOT are excellent tools against liberal foreign policies.
Thus, it is almost inevitable that support for torture, once begun by a conservative authority figure, would spread like wildfire among conservatives. Even those who are not particularly fond of the loss of American life caused by false information gathered through torture are required to signal their membership in the conservative tribe (and against the liberal tribe) by loudly proclaiming their support for this method of harming out-group members. In a society where conservatives felt comfortable in their power, they would have a more serious debate about the utility of a given form of intelligence gathering. But liberal opposition to torture, rooted in both ideology and practicality, means that that debate cannot begin.
I hope that this example will help others apply the tribal model to other aspects of conservatism and that it will help all of us understand our fellow Americans who have fallen into the traps of this way of thinking.
*shameless diary plug: "The Tribal Model of Conservatism."