Will Todd Blanche Get Confirmed? Ask Stanley Milgram

What the psychology behind "just following orders" tells us about changing course once you've already started down the wrong path.

You’ve probably heard the saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I’d extend that to asking the same question over and over and expecting a different answer. I’m referring here to the question of whether Todd Blanche will be confirmed as Attorney General of the United States. Will he? Won’t he? Perhaps, some optimistically suggest, GOP senators will FINALLY come to their senses and realize that making an unscrupulous opportunist sycophant into the nations chief law enforcement officer is Bad Idea Jeans. Could it really happen?

I doubt it.

Let me be clear: Anyone with a functioning moral compass should vehemently and loudly oppose Blanche’s confirmation. And perhaps this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back — there is nothing more I would like than to be wrong about my prediction. But from what I have learned so far about the psychology of complicity, drawing a line in the sand at this point would take a level of honesty, self-awareness, and humility that most ordinary people don’t possess…and which is in even shorter supply (if not nonexistent) in today’s Republican Party. For GOP senators, the choice on Blanche was likely made years ago, in a much less consequential decision that has long since been forgotten and at the time, probably seemed (to them) to be a small compromise in the grand scheme of things. But that one choice was everything.

To illustrate why, we need to revisit Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment on obedience to authority. For anyone who needs a refresher, Milgram’s experiment placed subjects in the role of “Teachers” who were ordered by “Experimenters” in lab coats to give (fake) shocks to a “Learner” in another room if they got a wrong answer in a memory game. The “shock” switch had 30 levels, beginning with 15 volts and increasing by 15 volts up to “XXX” (435-450 volts) — higher voltages had labels like “INTENSE SHOCK” (255 Volts) or “DANGER, SEVERE SHOCK” (375 volts). (The “XXX” switches, which had no label, were apparently self-explanatory.) In Milgram’s original experiment, the majority of subjects showed a willingness to continue administering shocks for wrong answers all the way to the XXX levels, despite their Learner’s increasing distress. Even when the Teachers pushed back briefly, the Experimenters would simply tell them, “The experiment must continue,” which was often enough to compel the subject to keep going.

Milgram’s “baseline” compliance rate from his original study was 65%, ostensibly supporting the conclusion that ordinary people would set aside their personal moral qualms when someone in a position of authority gave them orders. But subsequent studies revealed that the willingness to obey authority was more nuanced than it appeared in Milgram’s first experiment. Researchers have since replicated the study changing one of the variables each time, such as having the Experimenter wear street clothes instead of a lab coat, or planting peer “Teachers” who rebel against the experiment, or requiring the Teacher to physically administer the shock face-to-face, rather than remotely and anonymously. Under such conditions, compliance rates declined significantly, even close to zero.

All of these variations point to certain conclusions about obedience and complicity, like the importance of perceiving authority as legitimate and the impact of humanizing subjects and proximity. But one aspect of Milgram’s experiment is often underemphasized. It’s the phenomenon of “gradual escalation,” where individuals become incrementally acclimated to wrongdoing. In her book Why We Act, psychologist Catherine Sanderson describes how the amygdala, the part of our brain that processes emotion, initially has a strong reaction when we engage in behavior we know is wrong. But the intensity of the amygdala’s response decreases as the bad behavior is repeated. As a result, making the decision to perform a seemingly inconsequential unethical act can effectively script someone to repeat increasingly larger transgressions. Using the Milgram experiment to illustrate this phenomenon, Sanderson observes:

Most people would not be willing to give a 450-volt shock — marked XXX dangerous — right off the bat, even if ordered to do so by a respected authority. But if it was OK to give a 100 volt shock, what makes it not OK to give a shock of 115 volts? How do you decide when to stop?¹

In other words, when we act unethically or unconscionably, we initially feel guilty. But once we find a way to rationalize the first step so that we feel less guilty, we set ourselves up to take the next step more easily.

Those who work in intelligence understand this phenomenon very well. If you have spotted a potential foreign asset who is “vulnerable” to being recruited (meaning they can be easily tempted by money or some other inducement), you don’t hand them a suitcase filled with a million dollars the first time you meet and say, “Bring me all your classified information!” You start with something small, a minor transgression that their susceptibility to temptation makes it easy for them to justify. Once they cross that line, you’re set. From that point, your job is just to help them keep their own rationalization process going as they become increasingly compromised.

The literature on complicity describes how this incremental acclimation operates even with the most violent and brutal behavior. Psychologist Albert Bandura illustrates how the Greek military junta from 1967 to 1974 trained young men to become ruthless torturers through a “progressive disengagement of self censure”: the youth were first required to performed “mild” acts of torture and, as they were able to tolerate (i.e., rationalize) the feelings of guilt that ensued, were gradually trained in escalating levels of brutality. “Because of the gradualness of the transformation,” Bandura writes, “individuals may not even recognize the changes their moral selves have undergone.”² Similarly, in his account of the Nazi’s Reserve Police Battalion 101, Ordinary Men, historian Christopher R. Browning writes that many of the middle age men recruited into the battalion initially recoiled at what they were required to do, but “the horrors of the initial encounter eventually became routine, and the killing became progressively easier.”³

So what does this have to do with Todd Blanche? Well, if confirmations and compromises under Trump were electric shocks, Republican Senators are already at around 375 volts: DANGER, SEVERE SHOCK. I mean, you’ve confirmed Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem, you’ve funded ICE, you’ve stood by while Trump hollowed out the IC, fired thousands of people, drained the U.S. Treasury, hijacked the country’s semiquincentennial, trashed the White House lawn for a WWE event, and drained the reflecting pool. Twice. I could go on. Is Todd Blanche really going to be THE LINE? Come on.

Former FBI Director James Comey got a lot of things wrong in the early Trump era, but he did get one thing very right. In 2019, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the small compromises he observed the people around Trump making that were pushing them past a point of no return. “Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites,” he wrote. Comey's line captures exactly what Milgram’s experiment illustrated: complicity isn't one catastrophic decision. It's a long series of small, forgettable bites, each one making the next slightly easier to swallow.

1. Catherine Sanderson, Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels (New York: Belknap Press, 2020), 20-21.

2. Albert Bandura, Morał Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live With Themselves (New York: Worth Publishers, 2016), 97-98.

3. Christopher R. Browning, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London: Penguin, 2001), 161.