Conservatives for torture

Michael Brendan Dougherty, in The American Conservative, writes that the devotion of many conservative pundits to the TV drama 24 and its protagonist Jack Bauer, and in particular their enthusiasm at Bauer's frequent use of torture as a counterterrorist tactic, indicates that "the conservative movement has become willing to sacrifice principle to passion and difficult moral reasoning to utility." (He also cites a New York Times article which stated that "Army Brigadier Gen. Patrick Finnegan, dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, let producers and writers know that the show exerted a strong and noxious influence over his students. The newest recruits have been watching Jack Bauer since they were 14 . . . . One former Army interrogator related how soldiers in Iraq watch DVDs of the show and then try to imitate Bauer’s interrogation methods on their own prisoners.")

It is a hollowed-out conservatism that no longer aims at conserving ethical principles. The German conservative Hermann Rauschning describes a perhaps analogous loss of principles in German conservatism, in the period before the rise of Nazism. The German conservatives were not Nazis, but they were sufficiently sympathetic to Nazism to expedite its ascent to power. (I should point out that I am not familiar with the TV show in question.)