John Dean's Election Analysis of Authoritarianism

John Dean wrote the book book Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches, in which he set forth the facts regarding the consequences of the Republicans' controlling government for too many years. His latest column summarizes those facts and uses them to analyze McCain and Palin. Some will think it over the top. I don't. There is too much evidence that must be faced unflinchingly.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidates, have shown themselves to be unapologetic and archetypical authoritarian conservatives. Indeed, their campaign has warmed the hearts of fellow authoritarians, who applaud them for their negativity, nastiness, and dishonest ploys and only criticize them for not offering more of the same.

The McCain/Palin campaign has assumed a typical authoritarian posture: The candidates provide no true, specific proposals to address America's needs. Rather, they simply ask voters to "trust us" and suggest that their opponents - Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden - are not "real Americans" like McCain, Palin, and the voters they are seeking to court. Accordingly, McCain and Plain have called Obama "a socialist," "a redistributionist," "a Marxist," and "a communist" - without a shred of evidence to support their name-calling, for these terms are pejorative, rather than in any manner descriptive. This is the way authoritarian leaders operate.