Back in the early ‘60s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of famous experiments highlighting the conflict that can arise between personal conscience and obedience to authority. It was still a time in the flush of the Nuremberg war crime trials (Eichmann, 1960—look it up!) during which the trial defense had famously failed in portraying Nazi war criminals as participants “just following orders.”

In the face of all kinds of explanations for the wretched behavior of those who participated in these most heinous crimes against humanity, Milgram conducted his novel experiment. In a masqueraded laboratory setting, subjects were firmly ordered to administer increasing electric shocks to people who got wrong answers on a memory test. The authority figure and those receiving the apparent shocks were actors; those ordered to administer the shocks were the real subjects of the study. Just how long would they obey orders and inflict life-threatening electric shocks to others who simply got wrong answers on a memory test?

The results: Despite feigned screams and protests of the actors, when forcefully ordered to increase voltage, notwithstanding their personal qualms, a significant majority of the subjects obeyed and increased the pain to maximum voltage. 

The results challenged the notion that there was some special feature in German culture that made Germans more likely to submit to authority. Here were 40 average New Haven, CT males, 65 percent of whom, when so ordered, willingly administered 450 volts (the highest level) of electric shock to their supposed subjects. Remarkably, when ordered to do so, all 40 (100 percent) of the real subjects administered the 300-volt level of “pain.”

Republican profiles in courage

Now, virtually the entire Republican party has submitted to someone they recognize as an authority figure. Whatever their personal beliefs, I don’t expect too many strays to meander their way toward the decency and morality that many might have otherwise expected from them. Following an authoritarian regime has its rewards, even though it increases pressure as we morph away from democracy as we have known it and toward a redefinition of dictatorship as a new faux democracy. 

But Miligram makes the lack of Republican heroes more understandable. Likely, there is no one coming to save us. Cutting food and medicine from the desperately poor, kicking people off Medicaid, clawing back funds for public broadcasting, and giving billionaires more billions are all part of the “following orders” condition of Republican toadies and supplicants. Their morals cannot hope to cope. In the end, the rest of us have only our determination to make it otherwise.

John Pace lives in Honesdale, PA. He writes on Substack at John in the Woods.