In Your Heart, Not Quite Right

CONSERVATIVES WITHOUT CONSCIENCE

John W. Dean

Viking, 246 pp., $26

John W. Dean, the top lawyer in the Nixon White House, has turned his criticism of his former party into a cottage industry.

Take Dean's appearance in the spring before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was asked to testify about the legality of President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program by Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), one of the most liberal members of the Senate: "No president that I can find in the history of our country has really ever adopted a policy of expanding presidential powers for the sake of expanding presidential powers," Dean said. "And I think that's what we have going on in this presidency."

That idea has germinated into "Conservatives Without Conscience," a follow-up to Dean's 2004 "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush" in which he argued that the Bush administration had done more harm than even Tricky Dick.

"Conservatives Without Conscience" was envisioned as a collaboration between Dean and former senator Barry M. Goldwater (R-Ariz.) -- the acknowledged godfather of the conservative movement and the 1964 GOP presidential nominee -- with the aim of deconstructing the social conservatives who had come to dominate Republican politics. "We would attempt to understand their strident and intolerant politics by talking with people like Chuck Colson, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell," Dean wrote.

Unfortunately for Dean (and readers of this book), Goldwater fell ill shortly after the two began the project. (The senator died in May 1998.) Despite that setback, Dean said he felt compelled to continue with the writing because of the "serious deterioration and disintegration of conservative principles under Bush and Cheney."

As you might guess from the sentence above, "Conservatives Without Conscience" is less an examination of the forces behind social conservatism than a screed against them. Dean quickly deals with the validity of the movement to spend the bulk of the book showing how and why it is not just wrong but "evil."

That argument relies heavily on the work of academics and reads like a textbook in spots. It is jam-packed with linguistic studies and behavioral analyses; it bursts with definitions.

Need an explanation of the book's title? Conservatism, to Dean, is best defined by Goldwater (author of "The Conscience of a Conservative," a primary text of the modern conservative movement) as a belief that "the solutions of the problems of today can be found in the proven values of the past"; conscience, says Dean, "checks the unfettered expression of impulses."

At its core, the book argues that the growing power of social and neoconservatives within the Republican Party has created an army of guileless followers -- willing to swallow whatever medicine GOP leaders spoon out. Blind loyalty has allowed the Bush administration, as well as congressional Republicans, to run roughshod over formerly sacred civil liberties with an approach that borders on "American-style despotism."