A prisoner, a parricide, a man who has committed sacrilege is tossed to [the hangman]: he seizes him, stretches him, ties him to a horizontal cross, he raises his arm; there is a horrible silence; there is no sound but that of bones cracking under the bars, and the shrieks of the victim. He unties him. He puts him on the wheel; the shattered limbs are entangled in the spokes; the head hangs down; the hair stands up, and the mouth gaping open like a furnace from time to time emits only a few bloodstained words to beg for death. [The hangman] has finished. His heart is beating, but it is with joy: he congratulates himself, he says in his heart “Nobody quarters as well as I.”…Is he a man? Yes. God receives him in his shrines, and allows him to pray. He is not a criminal. Nevertheless, no tongue dares declare that he is virtuous, that he is an honest man, that he is estimable. No moral praise seems appropriate for him, for everyone else is assumed to have relations with human beings: he has none. And yet all greatness, all power, all subordination rest on the executioner. He is the terror and the bond of human association. Remove this mysterious agent from the world, and in an instant order yields to chaos: thrones fall, society disappears.[3]
Conservative scholar Peter Viereck examined authoritarian conservatism in his work
Dunn and Woodard paused in their study of the American conservative tradition to compare authoritarian conservatism with libertarianism and traditional conservatism. They provided an illuminating contrast.
