Conservative John Dean did American culture a truly beneficial service, in his book Conservatives Without Conscience, by identifying the true nature of the Dick Cheney types -- they are authoritarians. In the book he speaks about how authoritarians have taken over the conservative movement, and while people like Cheney call themselves conservative, their actions follow a very authoritarian pattern, not a conservative one.
Growing up in a conservative household in the 1960s, I would not have believed that 4 decades later, someone calling himself a conservative would start an unnecessary war, champion torture techniques and institute a major domestic spying program. We saw and expected this kind of behavior from the Soviet Union, and other Communist states, but surely no American leader, of any party or political leaning, would do that, would they? I couldn't imagine anything more un-American, and more un-conservative.
Mr. Cheney did not try to disguise his obvious contempt for democracy, and the will of the people, when he uttered his famous single-word reply to a reporter's mention about majority opposition to the Iraq War in 2007 (So?), but Dick will not call himself an authoritarian, even though he would have wished to rule by dictate, because he knows that American culture does not respect or value authoritarians. He and others like him want to give the orders, and have those orders followed without question, regardless of what the majority, or even significant minorities, might think of those orders, but these authoritarian types can't openly admit that.
So how to draw the line between the genuine conservatives and the autocrats who call themselves conservatives? Actually, they draw that line themselves, and unknowingly reveal themselves, when they defend, make excuses for, or try to promote what they usually call enhanced interrogation techniques, which can be clearly understood as torture. Quite simply, anyone who believes that you can beat the truth out of someone is not conservative -- they are authoritarian.
I remember laughing along with my classmates in grade school when we heard the absurd confessions of the Salem witch trials, where women who had been tortured admitted to turning themselves into cats and birds. In the 1970s, the Spanish Inquisition was a favorite Monty Python joke as well. Among the baby boom generation, it was understood across political lines that torture was an anachronism from the Dark Ages that only survived in the modern world under autocratic regimes like China. I could not then have predicted that an American government autocrat calling himself a conservative would resurrect a technique from the Spanish Inquisition and insist that it has a useful modern application. I don't know if Mr. Cheney believes that the Spanish Inquisition did a good job of ferreting out heretics, or if he's convinced that some women in Salem really did turn themselves into cats, but given his fantasies about yellow cake and Iraqi WMDS, perhaps he does believe these other crazy things.
The men who, by their labor, crafted the basic structure of the U.S. government in the era that followed The Age of Reason, understood the folly of cruel and unusual punishment, and so they wrote a prohibition against it into the foundation of American law. They understood, by virtue of reason and logic, that torture serves mainly to command obedience and yield false confessions. Anyone who speaks in favor of harsh interrogations does so not from a desire to conserve basic American principles, but from an autocratic impulse to control people in whatever way possible. No matter what the guy calls himself, if he says torture works, he's an autocrat, not a conservative.
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