The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Reprint Edition

The Reactionary Mind Book ReviewCorey Robin’s book is a collection of his essays and hence does not provide a straight-line analysis explaining conservatism. Part one focuses first on historical topics like the French Revolution, American slavery, Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, and the rise of Thatcher and Reagan. Then it focuses on intellectuals like Hobbes, Burke, Maistre, Nietzsche, Buckley, Rand, and Scalia. Part two explores the linkage of conservatism and violence.I did not find the book particularly enlightening as an explanation for the origins of conservative thinking and behavior. I don’t think modern conservatives choose their politics from reading earlier philosophers and intellectuals. I think their conservatism comes from the interaction of their social and economic context with inherited personality traits like dominance, territoriality, and level of empathy. Reportedly political preference is up to 40% genetically determined. In my view, books like The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff are more to the point for this subject.Nevertheless, I did find that this book provides many satisfying quotes, at least for those with my political persuasion. Some of these quotes are listed below:**********Modern conservatism came onto the scene of the twentieth century in order to defeat the great social movements of the left. As far as the eye can see, it has achieved its purpose.…You say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. (Lee Atwater commenting on Nixon’s Southern Strategy)In the United States, the free market has generated a long economic boom from which the majority of Americans has hardly benefited.Since 9/11, many have complained, and rightly so, about the failure of conservatives—or their sons and daughters—to fight the war on terror themselves.Ken Feinberg, head of the September 11 Victims’ Compensation Fund, announced that families of victims would receive compensation for their loss based in part on the salary each victim was earning--$300,000 for a $10,000 a year grandmother and $3,870,000 for a Wall Street trader.When we talk about America’s victory in the Cold War, we are talking about countries like Guatemala, where Communism was fought and defeated by means of the mass slaughter of civilians.After the Soviet empire fell…Western free-marketeers applied shock therapy (to install market liberalism) to formerly Communist countries with disastrous results.Watching Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF in Russia, he (John Gray) could not help but see the free market as “a product of artifice, design and political coercion.”…The most visible effort of the GOP since the 2010 midterm election has been to curtail the rights of employees and the rights of women.**********The conservative defends particular order—hierarchical, often private regimes of rule—on the assumption, in part, that hierarchy is order. “Order cannot be had,” declared Johnson, “but by subordination.”Conservatism (is) the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere.Conservatives are hostile to the goals of the left, particularly the empowerment of society’s lower castes and classes……Hierarchy, with its twin requirements of submission and domination.For that is what the capitalist is: not a Midas of riches but a ruler of men.He (Scalia) tells the power elite exactly what they want to hear, that they are superior and that they have a seat at the table because they are superior.Reaction…begins from a position of principle that…some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.Conservatism adapts and adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.**********Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension.…Conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom. It threatens the submission of the subordinate to the superior.David Cole theorized a dual justice system in America: Granting maximal rights to all citizens would have a high cost in terms of safety, he observed, while denying those rights would have a high cost in terms of freedom. So what does America do? It does both: It formally grants rights to all, but systematically denies them to blacks and the poor.More than the reforms themselves, it is the assertion of agency by the subject class that vexes their superiors.Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.Making privilege palatable to the masses is a permanent project of conservatism.That is the task of right wing populism: to appeal to the mass without disrupting the power of elites or, more precisely, to harness the energy of the mass in order to reinforce or restore the power of elites.As long as there are social movements demanding greater freedom and equality, there will be a right to counter them.**********…Conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.Loss—real social loss, of power and position, privilege and prestige—is the mustard seed of conservative innovation. What the right suffers from today is not loss but success, and until a significant dominant group in society is forced to suffer loss—of the kind experienced by employers during the 1930s, white supremacists during the 1960s, or husbands in the 1970s—it will remain a philosophically flabby movement. Politically powerful, but intellectually moribund.Conservatism is about power besieged and power protected. It waxes in response to movement from below and wanes in response to their disappearance…”…Conservatism invariably arises in response to a threat to the old regime or after the old regime has been destroyed.That is what conservatism is: a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.Far from being an invention of the politically correct, victimhood has been a talking point of the right ever since Burke decried the mob’s treatment of Marie Antoinette. The conservative, to be sure, speaks for a special type of victim: one who has lost something of value, as opposed to the wretched of the earth (who have almost nothing of value).What is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood.**********Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism have much in common. Both exhibit scant sympathy for the casualties of economic progress. (John Gray)…We’re still left with a puzzle about (Ayn) Rand: How could such a mediocrity, not just a second-hander but a second-rater, exert such a continuing influence on the culture at large?I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency—love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes. (Edward Luttwak) “The real object” of the French Revolution, Burke told Parliament is “to break all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination.”

So much for the Utopianism of the left, we have to understand the inverse utopianism of the right? Indeed, The Reactionary Mind is a braid of linked essays divided into two related sections. The first section is the popular manifestation of conservative intellectual tradition, and the second is on the profound relationship between conservatism and violence.First, a few caveats: there are a few points in which I have somewhat profound disagreements with Robins, and second I found some of the essays slightly repetitive because they were written to be read individually so many themes and points are hit upon blatantly by restatement because it would have been necessary in the original printing of these reviews and essays. While Robin's style is punchy, often funny, and yet intellectually serious, the nature of the essays themselves sometimes grated on me when reading the book as a whole in a few sittings. When I read the book as a collection of essays and ignored that Robin's essentially laid out his thesis in the introduction, I enjoyed these much more as reading qua reading.Robin's thesis is highly illuminating: conservatism is not traditionalism of either capitalism or the ancient regime, although it is tied to both. Conservatism is the reactionary impulse to preserve real privileges and ways of life. Furthermore, conservatism maintains itself in the popular mode by mimicking left tactics to expand the circle of contempt: every man and every woman becomes lord of someone who they can take part in the oppression writ small. It's enough to make you wonder if perhaps David Brooks isn't really Calhoun with a friendly face.Robin's does show, quite convincingly, there is a consistency to the Euro-American right since it emerged after the French revolution. It was fundamentally different from the soft traditionalism that supported the ancient regime before the French Revolution. Oddly, however, my favorite essay on the topic was the departure from that theme: the essay on Edward Luttwark and John Gray which Robin's partially disowns. Indeed, in this essay, Robins seem to hint that some of the values of pre-capitalist world are antithetical to the world conservatives have actually created and the abandonment of people like Luttwark and Gray betray that vision. Yet in opposition to modernity in entirety, their may support the welfare state and accept the cultural contradictions of capitalism, as even Daniel Bell acknowledged, they cannot come up with a coherent politics to support it.Another theme touched upon by Robins, but only touched upon, primarily in his essays on the Anton Scalia and Ayn Rand, is that liberalism particularly has not been up to the job of actually opposing the right. Indeed, Scalia is allowed a rhetoric wit and scathing barbs in the court, but no liberal or moderate on the court returns the favor. In fact, when barbed Scalia is often thrown off his game. Furthermore, in the Ayn Rand section, "Garbage and Gravitas," Robins points out that often liberal and left readers of Ayn Rand have tried to give her more credit that she earns out of a want to show that large portion of the American public is enamored with someone as contemptuous as Rand. Yet as even a conservative friend of mine once said, "Rand is popular because she is elitism for the masses. It's that simple."Another thing the second half of Robin's book is good for is an antidote to Andrew Sullivan and Sam Tanenhaus (as well as lesser known and more radical conservatives like Thomas Woods) that conservatism has traditionally been anti-war. While there is a conservative tradition that Robin's ignores that does live up to this standard-Jay Alfred Nock and the America First tradition is explicitly anti-war-the practice of the majority of conservatives since Burke has to glorify in violence as an expression of sublimity even if that violence actually leads to a more mechanized view of power, which is essentially what the conservatives wanted to avoid.This, however, brings me to my critique of the book: to maintain a consistent view of conservatism in both sections, Robins did have to ignore parts of the conservative tradition and include other thinkers who reactionary credentials are questionable. As I have already noted, Robins does not comment on the traditional anti-war conservatives in America nor does he mention the anti-war conservatives who opposed George W. Bush and their libertarian allies. Indeed, one of the largest anti-war sites was run by primarily be paleo-conservatives and libertarians such as Justin Riamondo. Ron Paul got his street-cred, however questionable you find it, by opposing the warfare state. Furthermore, following Paxton, Robin's sees fascism as essentially conservative and enlists George Sorel's as part of his argument on the decadence cycle and the relationship to violence. I find this misleading, even in his so-called proto-fascist stage, Sorel's was essentially advocating anarchistic syndicalism and his relationship to both Marxism and anarchism is important. Fascism, while I think was a means of maintaining a form of capitalism which functioned like mercantilism, has much more than just a tactical similarity to left-wing thought. While idiots like Jonah Goldberg like to equate liberalism and fascism for incredibly facile reasons, fascism was not merely a defense of the ancient regime. It was an attempt to be both progressive and conservative at once: to ape socialism and keep a ruling class, but also to fundamentally produce a new society not rooted in old privileges. Also, Robins ignores the admittedly hyper-majority of the new far right such as radical traditionalism because these thinkers are not merely defending past privilege like Burke or even Reagan. They truly are inverse utopians.This flaws aside, Robin's book is still entirely worth engaging with and the overall thrust of his thesis is, in my opinion, correct. Conservatism may be on its death throw because it has nothing really to oppose: leftism has been thrown out of the sphere and is only reemerging from its own ashes, New Labor and Democratic Leadership committee has become the current traditionalism of the liberal establishment unable to do anything new but ape the right and empower the business class, and so the right has become decadent and overreaching. Robin's end note is one of hope rooted in conservative fears of the decline of their own movement in a lack of real opposition. Indeed the view idea of conservatism implies it: one must be on the defense to be interested in conserving something. This is obviously no longer the case in for most conservatives.

There are few, if any, books on modern conservatism as it has evolved from Burke on through what we now see going on in the US that are more explanatory than this one. If this is a subject that interests you or even if you have just a general interest in contemporary American politics, you really ought to read this book. Corey is a fine writer as well as being one hell of a scholar.

Well thought through, but would have benefited from being written in a more engaging style as it is as dry as dust and somewhat "worthy".