Right is Wrong

Since the founding of the Moral Majority Coalition by Jerry Falwell in 1979, members of the American conservative movement and what has become its electoral vehicle, the Republican Party, have presented themselves as proponents of what they like to call “family values” and as leaders in the cultural wars they have unilaterally declared on liberalism and its (in their view) hedonistic, ’60s-like ethos. They have railed against premarital and extramarital sex, championed the virtues of chastity and fidelity, promoted abstinence-only sex-education programs in high schools, condemned homosexuality and tried to write a prohibition against same-sex marriage into the Constitution, waged an intense and sometimes murderous struggle to outlaw abortion, and even demanded the resignation of a U.S. surgeon general because she spoke approvingly of masturbation as a safe sexual outlet for teenagers. Two of their stalwarts (Falwell and Pat Robertson) tried to blame the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on the sexual indulgences of gays and lesbians.

But in the late 1990s, there began to be signs (which escalated dramatically in number in the first decade of the new century) that all was not as it seemed in this ostensible realm of moral fervor and superiority. Republican Party officials and conservative movement spokespeople were implicated in sex scandals involving adultery, sexual abuse of underage girls, an extramarital affair with a lobbyist, sex touring abroad, sex club visitations at home and abroad, sexual harassment, spousal rape, Internet trolling for underage male sex partners, bestiality, male prostitution, instant messaging flirtation with House pages, autoerotic asphyxiation, solicitation of gay sex in an airport bathroom, and use of prostitutes, male and female.

Moral self-righteousness among the Right wing had reached such inflated proportions in the 1990s that sooner or later it had to be punctured, for, as the Good Book says, a haughty spirit goeth before a fall. But who could have imagined the depth of that fall?

When Tin House Books commissioned an in-depth research project on Republican sex scandals, we really had no idea of the statistics that would be unearthed. Here are some of them: 22 examples of adultery; 10 transactions with prostitutes; 3 occurrences of incest; 4 acts of indecent exposure; unwelcome advances resulting in 6 reports of sexual assault and 4 of sexual battery; 15 cases of child molestation, 13 of involvement with child pornography, 7 of soliciting sex with minors, 3 specifically concerning children 5 years old, and one concerning a 3-year-old. The grand total amounts to 110 instances of sexual misconduct by the Right, 46 of them — nearly 42 percent of the total — classifiable as pedophilia. This conduct involved 32 federally elected Republican officials or candidates for federal office, 41 state and locally elected Republican officials, 8 nationally known Republican Party figures, and 23 Republican or conservative activists.

What could possibly explain this overwhelming deviance from professed moral standards? I will explore what I see as two complementary answers to this question, one psychological and one philosophical, which mirror and reinforce each other. First I will turn to the psychological.

In his classic 1950 work, The Authoritarian Personality, T. Adorno and his team of researchers establish a link between repressed sexuality and Right-wing politics. “If the anti-democratic individual is disposed to see in the outer world impulses which are suppressed in himself,” Adorno writes, “and we to know what these impulses are, then something may be learned by noting what attributes he most readily, but unrealistically ascribes to the world around him . . . it seemed that the greater a subject’s preoccupation with ‘evil forces’ in the world, as shown by his readiness to think about and to believe in the existence of such phenomena as wild erotic excesses, plots and conspiracies, and danger from natural catastrophes, the stronger would be his own unconscious urges of both sexuality and destructiveness.”

Subjects of Adorno’s study with strong authoritarian tendencies tended to agree with statements such as the following: “Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished”; “No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason”; “The sexual orgies of the old Greeks and Romans are nursery school stuff compared to some of the goings-on in this country today, even in circles where people might least expect it”; and “Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped.”

“A strong inclination to punish violators of sex mores (homosexuals, sex offenders) may be an expression of a general punitive attitude based on identification within group authorities,” comments, “but it also suggests that the subject’s own sexual desires are suppressed and in danger of getting out of hand. A readiness to believe in ’sex orgies’ may be an indication of a general tendency to distort reality through projection, but sexual content would hardly be projected unless the subject had impulses of this same kind that were unconscious and strongly active.”Adorno and his colleagues also associate this “moralistic and punitive attitude toward the supposed sexuality of others” with a “sexual inhibition and backwardness” they found in many of their authoritarian-inclined subjects.

A study conducted by Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright, Jr., and Bethany A. Lohr that they describe in a 1996 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology under the title “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal” might also be relevant here. The abstract of the article reads: “The authors investigated the role of homsexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who admitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men (n=35) . . . they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia (W.W. Hudson and W.A. Ricketts, 1980). The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes . . . Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli . . . Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.”

Adorno describes what he calls the “pseudo-conservative.” The pseudo-conservative, he writes, shows “‘conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness’ in his conscious thinking,” but “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere . . . The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.” In others words, the psychologically repressed authoritarians he calls pseudo-conservatives may not only be sexually problematic but may also constitute a political danger to the community.

The above is an excerpt from the book You Don’t Know Me: A Citizen’s Guide to Republican Family Values by Win McCormack.

Win McCormack is the publisher and editor in chief of Tin House magazine and a political activist in the Democratic Party. He has written for Oregon magazine, the Oregonian, Oregon Humanities magazine, Tin House, and the Nation and was the winner of a William Allen White commendation for his investigative coverage of the Rajneesh cult. He resides in Portland, Oregon. His book, You Don’t Know Me: A Citizen’s Guide to Republican Family Values is available now from Tin House Books.

For more, visit youdontknowmebook.com.