John W. Dean - Conservatives Without Conscience

John Dean takes a sobering look at how radical elements are destroying the Republican Party along with the very foundations of American democracy

John Dean's last New York Times bestseller, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, offered the former White House insider's unique and telling perspective on George W. Bush's presidency. Once again, Dean employs his distinctive knowledge and understanding of Washington politics and process to examine the conservative movement's current inner circle of radical Republican leaders-from Capitol Hill to Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street and beyond. In Conservatives Without Conscience, Dean not only highlights specific right-wing-driven GOP policies and procedures but also probes the conservative mind-set, identifying a new authoritarianism that has become increasingly a part of the contemporary movement. Dean relies on five decades of often ignored social science research that has never before been made so accessible to the general reader and his personal knowledge and experience to explain the political behavior of conservatives, from their unbridled viciousness toward those daring to disagree with them to their religion-based piety politics which conceal an indifference to the founding principles of liberty and equality, as well as fundamental precepts like the separation of government powers.
By the end, Dean paints a vivid picture of what's happening at the top levels of the Republican Party, a noble political party corrupted by its current leaders who cloak their actions in moral superiority while packaging their programs as blatant propaganda. Dean, certainly no alarmist, finds disturbing signs that current right-wing authoritarian thinking, when conflated with the dominating personalities of the conservative leadership, and the compliant acquiescence of their followers, could take the United States toward its own version of fascism.