Let me now turn to the philosophical side of the equation.
A modern advocate of authoritarian government whose views have had a strong impact on important segments of the American conservative movement and, through disciples of his, on the administration of George W. Bush, is Leo Strauss. Strauss rejected the idea of liberal democracy, believing in the rule of "the wise" (or, as he also called them, "philosophers") rather than the rule of the wider populace, whom he believed completely incapable of achieving wisdom. Strauss advocated that the wise use religion to control the masses, while keeping to themselves their knowledge that there is no God and therefore no given moral order (Strauss' philosophy was a unique amalgam of classical foundationalism and the anti-foundationalist existentialism of the twentieth century that descended from Nietzsche). Strauss called such sham religious posturing a "noble lie" (a phrase he took from Plato).
Strauss also rejected the liberal democratic principle that a ruler should be bound by the rule of law like the rest of the citizenry. According to Shadia Drury (in her book Alexander Kojeve: The Roots of Postmodern Politics), Strauss advocated what he called the "tyrannical teaching" (which he claimed Socrates espoused). Drury writes: "Strauss regards that teaching as the cornerstone of ancient wisdom. It is the view that tyranny, or rule independent of law, is the best form of government when exercised by the wise." Drury says that for Strauss, "there is no moral truth independent of the construction of power" (a thoroughly postmodern view).
Here I think we should note the resemblance between the erudite philosophical musings of Strauss on the exercise of political power and the crude underlying philosophical views that Altemeyer ferreted out in authoritarian conservatives with social dominance orientation: "If you have power in a situation, you should use it however you have to, to get your way" and "There really is no such thing as 'right' and 'wrong'; it all boils down to what you can get away with."
In his article "Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception" (Harper's, June 2004), Earl Shorris writes that although most members of the Bush administration might not be followers of Strauss (or even familiar with his work), "a brief summary of Straussian doctrine suffices to demonstrate an affinity with what one might call 'the mind of the regime.'" Another thinker whose ideas seem to have an affinity with "the mind" of the Bush regime is the Nazi legal philosopher Carl Schmidt, Herman Goering's appointee as president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists. Schmidt argued the case for dictatorship over democracy on the grounds that a strong, centralized authoritarian government can better express the will of the people. And he believed that any government, to be effective--particularly in a "State of Emergency," also translated as "State of Exception"--must have at its disposal recourse to dictatorial means. Schmidt defined sovereignty thusly: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." It was on the basis of his theories that Hitler justified his suspension of the liberal democratic constitution of Weimar Germany.
In a July 2007 article in Harper's, "State of Exception: Bush's War on the Rule of Law," Scott Horton introduces the reading public to a new legal doctrine apparently current in the Bush administration and conservative legal circles: "lawfare." What is lawfare? Lawfare, according to a deputy judge advocate general of the U.S. Air Force whom Horton quotes, is "the strategy of using or misusing law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational objective." Or, as Horton quotes two neoconservative lawyers as having written, the purpose of lawfare is to "gain a moral advantage over your enemy in the court of world opinion, and potentially a legal advantage in national and international tribunals." Horton explains, "In the strange reasoning of the lawfare theorists, lawyers who defend their clients, or who present their claims to domestic or international courts, might as well be terrorists themselves. Human rights organizations that stand in court to insist that the Geneva Conventions apply to Guantánamo detainees are thus also guilty of lawfare."
Horton holds that "the lawfare doctrine is the conceptual framework that best reveals the degree to which the Bush administration has effectively declared war on the rule of law itself." The doctrine "has no antecedent in American practice, and in the end it is possible to find a precedent only if we look outside the United States to German conservative political and jurisprudential thinking between the world wars." Horton is, of course, referring primarily to the thinking of Schmidt. And couldn't Bush's reign since 9/11--with its attempts to deny the longstanding Anglo-Saxon right of habeas corpus not only to foreign prisoners at Guantánamo but also to U.S. citizens incarcerated on American soil, its assertion of the right to eavesdrop on American citizens without obtaining the court orders required by law, its official authorization of the use of recognized techniques of torture (techniques that violate not only articles of the Geneva Conventions but American law as well), and its invasion of a foreign country on a trumped-up, fear-mongering pretext--be viewed as an undeclared State of Exception (keeping in mind that this phrase can be translated as State of Emergency)? Or is it so undeclared?
In the chapter "Outlaw" from his book Bush on the Couch, psychoanalyst and clinical professor of psychiatry Justin A. Frank outlines what he sees as a consistent pattern of disregard for rules and law throughout Bush's life. The pattern extends in a continuum, in Frank's view, from Bush's teenage years at Andover, where he operated a business selling fake driver's licenses to fellow students, to his student days at Yale, when he was arrested by the police for disorderly conduct and detained and questioned by police in Princeton for similar conduct, to his refusal to fulfill the requirements of his military service in the Texas Air National Guard, to his arrest for drunk driving in Maine as a young adult (Frank does not mention Bush's widely rumored use of cocaine, though Bush has essentially conceded this usage by declining to deny it), to his violations of SEC reporting regulations at Harken Energy and almost certain insider trading in connection with his sales of Harken stock, to his flouting of international and domestic law as president.
Frank discerns a lifelong refusal by Bush to take responsibility for his actions and mistakes. Bush, he writes, has "comfortably and repeatedly conducted his life outside the laws of the land and the psyche." Frank believes that Bush belongs to a character type Freud called "The Exceptions." The Exception is someone who (unlike the ordinary criminal, who when breaking the law experiences an unconscious sense of guilt) feels that "normal laws don't apply to them," that they are "entitled to live outside the limitations that apply to ordinary people."
Let's now make a leap. Would it be going too far to suggest that the miscreants whose errant and sad behavior is chronicled in these pages have, ultimately, performed their misdeeds because they came to consider themselves privileged Exceptions, because they felt free to declare a personal State of Exception for themselves? That, to make use of Dean's memorable phrase, they granted to themselves a license to do ill?