Riffing on Dick Cheney’s remarks this past Sunday on Meet the Press about the CIA’s torture program, American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman speculated in a Monday post that two factors explain growing support among Republicans for so-called enhanced interrogation.
One factor, Waldman asserted, is that “conservatives tend to be more punitive…and are more motivated than liberals by a kind of tribalistic morality in which different standards can be applied to Them than are applied to Us.” The other is that rank-and-file right-wingers have been influenced by conservative “elites” arguing “that the kind of torture the CIA engaged in was perfectly legal, morally unproblematic, and spectacularly effective.”
From Waldman’s post (emphasis added):
[W]e now understand better just how morally infantile [Cheney’s] thinking is…
…[I]t seems that Cheney believes that there is literally nothing the United States can do to prisoners that would be morally objectionable. If everyone is agreed that "torture" is bad, then he'll just insist that nothing the United States ever does is torture. Torture is only when foreigners do bad things to us.
While it's true that there are some conservatives offering a more nuanced view of this issue, what the average person is seeing right now is an entire party mobilizing to defend the use of torture, whether they will call it by that name or not. And that looks to be having an effect on public opinion…
…The current debate about the CIA program, which is being presented to the public largely as an argument between Republicans and Democrats, may be widening the partisan differences even further. Look at the results of this YouGov poll taken last week. Seventy percent of Republicans said that torture is always or sometimes justified against suspected terrorists, and 56 percent of Republicans said that the information you get from torture is reliable...
The coffin-specific stress position falls just short of majority GOP support, but other than that, rectal feeding is the only technique Republicans have a problem with. Waterboarding? Terrific! Punching? Sure! Threatening family members? Go right ahead!
So it sure looks like the GOP has indeed become the torture party. There were partisan differences before now—conservatives tend to be more punitive in general, and are more motivated than liberals by a kind of tribalistic morality in which different standards can be applied to Them than are applied to Us. And today when you ask about torturing prisoners, everyone knows that you're talking about Them.
But this baseline difference is being magnified by the debate we're having. Regular people take cues from the elites who represent them, and if you're an ordinary conservative, right now you're seeing all the elites you like—the politicians you voted for, the radio and TV hosts with whom you spend hours every week, the pundits whose opinions you value—telling you over and over again that the kind of torture the CIA engaged in was perfectly legal, morally unproblematic, and spectacularly effective.
So it isn't unexpected that Republicans would become more and more pro-torture as the debate proceeds. That doesn't make it any less ghastly, though.
