Thanks very much to TPM for hosting this discussion of Snitching. The book is about the secretive deals that permeate the U.S. criminal system, in which offenders can avoid liability or punishment by giving the government information. The term "snitching" has taken on a life of its own these days, so let me be clear that the book is not about whistleblowers or people who call 911 or even people who get paid money for their tips. Rather, it explores the very specific, widespread policy that permits the government to barter away guilt in exchange for information.

Even though it's almost invisible to the public, the use of criminal informants is everywhere and it influences every facet of the justice system. Snitching affects street corner encounters between police and suspects, as police decide whether to arrest or "flip" suspects and turn them into informants. Snitching permeates the culture of jails and prisons, in which offenders know that if they come up with information about each other they can get a deal. Snitching plays an important role in prosecutorial decision-making, for example about which suspect in a case should get to be the witness and which one should be the defendant. It drives FBI investigations, it's crucial in plea bargaining, and is one of the single most important factors that courts consider at sentencing, particular in federal court. In other words, criminal informant practices reveal a lot about how the American justice system really works.

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Our knowledge of the colloquial term "snitching," which arrives largely from popular culture, is fairly inadequate. The reality behind the practice is far more nuanced. It is also deeply integral to our criminal justice system, as the law professor and author Alexandra Natapoff demonstrates in her new book, Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice.

Natapoff teaches at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She is considered an expert on snitching, the widespread practice of police or prosecutors offering deals to criminal offenders in exchange for information. Her book examines the detrimental spread of this practice into our legal system. TPM is pleased to kick off our newest book club discussion of Snitching.

Since Max Blumenthal raised the issue of the Democratic Party and the religious right, I thought I'd add a few more thoughts on that and Republican Gomorrah.

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Max Blumenthal is onto something significant here with his idea, laid out in his last post, that the enthusiasm shown for Obama during the presidential campaign by progressives stemmed from a sort of secular salvation narrative. I suspected something like that during the campaign, just gauging from my own emotional response to Obama's campaign speeches. If I, a jaded reporter, was getting that lump in my throat, then how much more deeply were activists feeling the Obama magic?

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All politicians cultivate an image that they are the one to fix the mess we're in and stand up to enemies of all that is good and just in the world. In Max Blumenthal's most recent post, he discusses messianic narratives that drive the religious right, but then veers off into what I think is a diversion: whether some (often unspecified) supporters of Obama were enthralled with a "secular salvation narrative," which Blumenthal argues ultimately "created false expectations while establishing political space for the right to undermine and delegitimize him."

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In responding to my initial post, Sarah Posner, Todd Gitlin, and Fred Clarkson make some very important points about the appeal of the Christian right to ordinary Americans. I think their points dovetail with one another. Posner argues quite correctly that those who I described as giving up their individual freedom for the authoritarian structure of the right believe they are gaining new life in the Kingdom of God, along with a sense of community and belonging. She illustrates this trend in her excellent book on the rising trend of prosperity gospel theology in evangelical churches, God's Profits.

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I want to pick up on the point Sarah Posner raised about salvation narratives. They are indeed key to understanding the dynamics of this particular subculture. David Wilkerson in many ways invented the genre -- with his 1963 book The Cross and the Switchblade, about how his ministry transformed street gang members (Pat Boone played Wilkerson in the movie). I recall a similar story of redemption told by a politically oriented ally of Pat Robertson, the late Rev. John Giminez whom I encountered in the 80s who told of being a gang member and a heroin addict. A key part of the narrative is 'look how low I sank, and look how high God has lifted me!' It is always a story of hope and the possibility of transformation and a better life. We are all flawed, even depraved creatures -- but if God can do this for me, consider what He can do for you! But what can seem like an apolitical idea takes on a whole new dimension under the influence of dominion oriented theologies that have come to lead the charismatic and Pentecostal wing of evangelicalism since Wilkerson.

Now, project the salvation narrative onto a society seen as wracked by tremendous problems, infused with evil and depravity, and fallen away from God's laws -- and therefore consdier what it could mean if only we had a Godly government. Add psychological and political authoritarianism to the mix, informed by some variant of dominion theology, and we have a theocratic political movement which promises ongoing challenges to constitutional democracy. Max connects the dots of how this works in Republican Gomorrah, and helps us to understand how exploitation of personal crises serves to propel this dynamic social and political movement.

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Genesis has more to say about Sodom's specific iniquities than about Gomorrah's, though it leaves no doubt (in 19:24) that Gomorrah's fate was as dire as its sister city's: brimstone and fire. This grim destiny of unrestrained sinners plays no small part in the theology of the Christian Right, for they believe that tribulation is the price--and proof--of salvation to come. In their mental universe, tribulation is a very sign of rectitude, for God only tests those who are sufficiently advanced to need testing in the first place. Millennialists of various stripes have long borrowed such scenarios from the Old Testament prophets, who sounded far more convincing when they thundered against the sins of the Israelites than when they tried to paint a luminous future.

So the fact that the Vitters, Ensigns, Haggards, Sanfords, and Craigs are brought low for their Gomorrhic tendencies doesn't, at least yet, shatter the Party of Palin. Neither does their plain ignorance and confusion. They are the Brimstone and Fire Party. Tribulation is their middle name. Hypocrisy to them is proof that the Lord works in wondrous ways. The time they spend in the wilderness is time well spent--divinely sanctioned.

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Max opens our conversation with a question: "can a shattered Republican Party reunite in time for 2012, or will its fixation on ideological purity and the histrionics of its leaders prevent it from returning to national power?"

His starting point: his extensive and colorful reporting on the litany of scandals and hypocrisies that have come to define the modern Republican Party, and in particular, its Christian right base.

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While covering the radical right over the last six years, I began to notice a shared sensibility among the movement's followers that went far deeper than politics or religion. Many of the movement's most fervent activists had suffered existential personal crises ranging from struggles with homosexual urges to alcoholism to mental illness that propelled them into far-right politics. For these trauma-wracked personalities, who ranged from reclusive movement financiers like Howard F. Ahmanson Jr, a resident for two years in a mental institution before he became the self-proclaimed sugar daddy of the Christian right, to key Republican Party leaders like Tom DeLay, a philandering drunk known as "Hot Tub Tommy" before his rebirth as an evangelical Christian, authoritarian politics served as a balm for their psychological anxieties.

In my book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party, I show how a culture of personal crisis has animated the right's politics of resentment, and how those who control the radical right have projected their crises onto the Republican Party that they substantially control, throwing it into conflict with itself. At the center of my narrative is James Dobson, the leading figure of the Christian right for the past two decades. Despite having commanded a supposedly religious movement, Dobson has no religious training or theological credentials; he is a child psychologist who has exploited the private sufferings of his followers to mold them into unflinchingly loyal, uniquely fervent political shock troops. By setting his flock against Republican moderates like Bob Dole and Colin Powell, Dobson and his allies set the stage for the transforming of the Republican Party from a big tent into a one-ring circus.

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By now the internal combustion of the national Republican party is clearly evident. The fringe has overtaken the center, led in part by a powerful alliance of religion and politics. Journalist Max Blumenthal has been chronicling this takeover meticulously -- and TPMCafe is pleased to feature his latest book, Republican Gomorrah, in the Book Club discussion this week. Max is currently a senior writer at The Daily Beast and a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at The Nation Institute.

His book has particular resonance right now, as talk turns to the 2010 elections. Though Republicans hope for next year to be a repeat of 1994, it remains to be seen whether or not they can keep it together: a Rasmussen poll last week showed the strength of the so-called 'Tea Party' against the GOP.

Joining the discussion this week are Frederick Clarkson, co-founder of Talk To Action, a website dedicated to reporting on and discussing the religious right; Sarah Posner, associate editor at Religion Dispatches where she covers the messy intersections of faith and politics; Adele Stan, Washington bureau chief of AlterNet; and Todd Gitlin, regular Cafe contributor, author of The Bulldozer And The Big Tent (among others), and professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

One last thread we wanted to pick up on was the degree to which the worldview-based divide, as we call it, has begun to suffuse issue debates not previously structured by authoritarianism. Bill mentioned health care in an earlier post and we wanted to elaborate on how that debate has played out against the authoritarianism-based backdrop we describe. We looked at the link between health care and racial attitudes, analyzing survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks, focusing on how much effort blacks make to overcome their circumstances, for example. Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We found an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo. No such relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on health care existed in the mid-1990s during the Clinton effort.

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With the week coming to an end, we don't have too much time to respond to a couple of the threads our colleagues have raised for us. We have a couple more posts, which we will add in turn. This one takes on some of the excellent critiques that John Sides raised.

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Cognitive development is a topic that Marc and Jonathan touch on only briefly in Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, but I think it can do a great deal to provide insight, and point to further directions of inquiry and action. Not least, I think it can also help shed further light on their identification of the need for order as a central factor in authoritarianism.

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Two findings from Marc and Jonathan's book strike me as both significant and persuasive. First, authoritarianism is a crucial ingredient in American public opinion on contemporary issues from terrorism to immigration to gay rights. Second, authoritarianism's effects are muted, not exaggerated, by threats, as long as those threats truly threaten all citizens, non-authoritarians and authoritarians alike. In other words, universal threats make non-authoritarians act more like authoritarians, not the reverse.

But I am not ready to go much further than this. Let me push Marc and Jonathan on two points.

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One of the most important things that Marc and Jonathan do in Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics is increase the focus of attention on the opposite of authoritarianism, a focus that has previously been so lacking that they simply choose to describe is as "nonauthoritarianism." (I prefer the hyphenated version, which I'll use from here on.) Two things are particularly important to them: First, developing a sense of non-authoritarianism as not simply a negative category, but something positive in itself, capable of representing a coherent worldview in opposition to authoritatarianism. (More on this is just a minute.)

Second, they are concerned with understanding the crucial role played by changes in the attitudes of non-authoritarians. Robert Altemeyer long ago pointed out that virtually everyone takes on authoritarian attitudes if the situation becomes threatening enough--pointing to support for strengthening police state powers in response to terrorism, for example, as well the variations of response in Stanley Milgram's famous experiments on obedience. Altemeyer pointed out that the most famous experiments isolated the subjects with only an authority figure telling them what to do in a setting wholly supportive of their authority. Less well known were other variations, which showed much higher levels of resistance to authority when another person was present who resisted following instructions. Although Altemeyer made these observations some time ago, they have really penetrated as they should have. The authors here make sure to drive this point home over and over again: authoritarians are quite constant in favoring authoritarian responses, non-authoritarians, or those in the middle, not so much. The classic example of this in recent years is the strong support for President Bush and his policies immediately after 9/11, followed by gradual declines in support from those outside his authoritarian base over the years.

Turning back to the nature of non-authoritarianism, in Chapter 3, the authors identify four characteristics associated with non-authoritarianism: "Fairness as Outgroup Preference", "Accuracy Motivation", "Aversion to Ethnocentrism" and "Personal Autonomy".

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The reoccurring theme in American society is geographic inequality.

People and places aren't simply growing more different from one another economically, politically and culturally. Average incomes at the county level have grown more unequal since the '70s. People are segregating geographically by the way they form families or discipline their children. The vote in presidential elections has sorted geographically since 1976. Heck, there's even evidence that regional accents are increasing, that we are separating by the way we talk.

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Thanks to Paul and Bill for their thoughtful discussions of our work. There are a couple threads from their posts that we'd like to pull out a little further because their observations are so important.

We much appreciate Paul's thoughts about our work to define what authoritarianism is. It is a very slippery concept, and we came to think that it had just become a name to call people on the right who you didn't like. We tried to think through what unified the things that authoritarians didn't favored and opposed, and it became clear to us that it was a need for order that did the trick. Of course, certain types of authorities can provide that order. But authoritarianism is not generically about following a "cult of personality" figure. It only applies to leaders who promise a return to past traditions and the like.

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Demographics ain't no kind of king. A step-child prince, maybe. But demographics aren't in charge of our politics these days.

One message of Marc's and Jonathan's book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, is that what we are (blue collar or white, high school or college) is far less important to our politics than how we live. After all, if you wanted to know a person's politics, is it more helpful to know that a voter is a white, college-educated, middle-class male -- or that he spanks his kids? Most political reporting is about the former. Hetherington and Weiler show that people vote more by how they spank than by any of that demographic stuff.

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Perhaps, after all these decades, authoritarianism is about to get the kind of attention it deserves. Not that it hasn't been noticed before--nods to The Authoritarian Personality still can be found. But authoritarianism and related concepts such as were surveyed in the 2003 meta-analysis "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition" have remained intellectually ghettoized. Even just mentioning authoritarianism is likely to draw funny looks, although the authors of Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics make an overwhelming case that it's simply far too important a factor for anyone in politics to remain ignorant of.

The data they present is impressive, but impressive data gets ignored, misinterpreted or misunderstood all the time (most often by authoritarians, but often enough by nonauthoritarians as well). So for those who are skeptical (a good thing, generally, any nonauthoritarian should agree), I want underscore one of the book's fundamental strengths--the way they've clarified a number of basic concepts required to set the stage for the main event.

I decided to write about this even before I saw one of the early commentators question the very use of the term "authoritarian", but the comment calls attention to just why this sort of stage-setting is so crucial. As a math major long ago I heard the saying, "hard definitions make easy theorems." More generally, this means that if you think hard enough about the basic foundations of what you're doing, you will make things run much more smoothly once you get rolling. This is particularly true for the three main concepts in this book--polarization, worldview and authoritarianism.

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When we were just beginning work on our book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, we stumbled on a curious but compelling relationship. In a state level analysis, we found a very high correlation between favoring corporal punishment of children and the 2004 Bush vote. To begin our TPM post, we thought it might be interesting to see whether the result replicated in 2008. It does.

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This week at Book Club, two astute political scientists, Jonathan Weiler and Marc Hetherington, join us for discussion of their book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. Weiler directs undergraduate studies and serves as a professor of International and Area Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hetherington, a professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, has written previously on the central role of political trust in the U.S.

Joining the discussion are Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor at Random Lengths News and weekend frontpage editor at OpenLeft.com; John Sides, Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University; and Bill Bishop, a Texas-based journalist and co-author of The Big Sort.

A friend of mine who is the publisher of a very successful news site has a joke: In the future the Internet will consist entirely of Sarah Palin slide shows. Anyone who's ever had occasion to look at traffic statistics for a news website understands what he's saying. Few things draw in readers and garner clicks more reliably than articles (or, even better, pictures) of Sarah Palin. We can't look away. We can't stop talking about her even when we desperately want to. The very fact that we've been blogging about her all week attests to that.

My first experience of this Sarah Palin effect came during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. As a progressive opinion journalist who routinely reports on conservatives, you come to develop a kind of practiced disassociative state when behind enemy lines. You'd never be able to gain any understanding whatsoever if you spent all your time arguing with and hectoring people at evangelical colleges or anti-immigration rallies, so it's both psychologically and professionally necessary to put yourself in a state of mind where you simply listen.

On the night Palin gave her big debut national speech, I sat through the speeches that preceded hers in that same slightly removed state. Then Palin came to the stage. The crowd grew more and more raucous, and the room began to feel like a Roman Colosseum. When Palin went after the "reporters and commentators" in the "Washington elite" for having disparaged and condescended to her, the crowd erupted and began pointing and jeering at Tom Brokaw, sitting in the NBC booth. I watched all this still, I thought, with equanimity.

About a third of the way through the speech, when she delivered her infamous potshot at community organizers--

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities"--

I suddenly felt like the room was 100 degrees. Realizing my face was burning with heat, I went to touch my cheeks, which felt feverish. I couldn't for the life of me understand what was going on, and was about to get up for a breath of fresh air or water until it hit me: I was furious.

My father is a community organizer and spent years toiling in some of the poorest neighborhoods in New York, doing the painstaking, unglamorous work of attempting to build power among people who were routinely getting screwed over. And Sarah Palin had just spit in his face.

Despite my best efforts, she had gotten to me.

What I was experiencing was a strange kind of dislocation: Palin had managed to bypass one part of my brain and reach down deep into another. There are two kinds of politics: There's politics of the prefrontal cerebral cortex, the politics of analysis and facts and discussion, and there's politics of the limbic system, the sub-rational, emotional, ancient part of the brain that controls the bodily responses like the blood flushing my cheeks in that seat in the Xcel Energy Center.

As degraded as our politics may be, it's impossible for me to imagine a politician as purely limbic as Sarah Palin ever managing to ascend to the White House. But democratic politics in a heterogeneous society like ours is inevitably tribal, and millions of Americans view her as their vessel and their chief. The political potency of someone who can provoke that kind of visceral reaction shouldn't be underestimated.

Chris Hayes, along with Jane Hamsher, Amanda Marcotte and Michael Tomasky, speculate more on Palin's political future and a 2012 run for the Presidency in the closing forum of "Going Rouge: An American Nightmare," from OR Books. Comments and discussion are welcome though: After all we've seen this week, what is she up to? Is she running in 2012, or just trying to cash in?