Conservatives Without Conscience

John Dean takes a sobering look at how radical elements have been destroying the Republican Party along with the very foundations of American democracy.

John Dean's last New York Times bestseller, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, offered the former White House insider's unique and telling perspective on George W. Bush's presidency. Once again, Dean employs his distinctive knowledge and understanding of Washington politics and process to examine the conservative movement's current inner circle of radical Republican leaders -- from Capitol Hill to Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street and beyond. In Conservatives without Conscience, Dean not only highlights specific right-wing-driven GOP policies but also probes the conservative mind-set, identifying recurring qualities such as the unbridled viciousness toward those daring to disagree with them, as well as the big business favoritism that costs taxpayers billions. Dean identifies specific examples of how court-packing seeks to form a judiciary that is biased by its very nature, how religious piety is producing politics run amok and how concealed indifference to the founding principles of liberty and equality is pushing America further and further from its constitutional foundations.

By the end, Dean paints a vivid picture of what's happening at the top levels of the Republican Party, a political party corrupted by its leaders who cloak their actions in moral superiority while packaging their programs in blatant propaganda. Dean finds disturbing signs that current right-wing authoritarian thinking, when conflated with the domineering personalities of the conservative leadership, could take the United States toward its own version of fascism.