John Dean in Miami

John W. Dean with Shirley Alexiou, president of Democrats of South Dade Club

File this under Club News: One way to get a good turnout for a club meeting is to band together with other clubs and have John W. Dean come for a speech and book-signing. Almost 300 people will show up, and they’ll have a really good time and leave their names and addresses for followup.

So it went Tuesday night, as the crowd came close to filling the main hall at Temple Judea in Coral Gables. The sponsors were the Coral Gables Area Democratic Club, Democrats of South Dade Club, and Democracy for America Miami-Dade.

“I’m surprised that Republican clubs didn’t sponsor me,” Dean joked as he launched into an analysis of our present political pickle from his point of view as a registered independent.

“I am a partisan for one thing, and that’s good government. I know when it’s broken and I see when the processes are not functioning properly,” he said.

To him, Dick Cheney is at the center of all the problems that come with the Bush administration, and it derives partly from Cheney’s experience in the Watergate era, which Dean knows oh too well, partly from Vietnam, partly from 9/11 – all of which made Cheney think the power of the presidency needed to be strengthened.

“It’s going to get worse if this so-called ‘unitary executive theory,’ which no one had heard of until Samuel Alito was nominated for the Supreme Court, and then became known in the press, goes on,’’ Dean said. It had been “dreamed up by a bunch of lawyers in the Reagan Justice Department” to control regulatory departments.

The result is the title of his new book,” Broken Government,” with the subtitle “How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches.” Also available for signing were earlier books including “Conservatives Without Conscience” (2006), in which Dean describes the authoritarian personality behind the current type of conservative.

There are not only authoritarian leaders but also authoritarian followers who submit too easily, are intolerant, arrogant, likely to pick on the weak, “and they will follow the leader off the cliff,” Dean said.

He cited work by Theodor Adorno and Robert Altemeyer on the authoritarian personality. Altemeyer’s recent book, “The Authoritarians,” is available on the internet free at this link.

Republicans are good at winning elections because of their authoritarianism, Dean said, “and there is no such thing as a left-wing authoritarian.”

I guess the lesson is that to win elections we need to throttle down our eternal need to squabble about details – witness the current swamp about the early primary date – and concentrate like good little soldiers.