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The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin

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Are you dumbfounded by what right-wingers like Sarah Palin say and do--but even more so by the fact that so many people are buying what they're selling? Are you still wondering what's the matter with Kansas? You simply must read this book to understand conservatism today: what it is, why it has such a hold on Americans--and how those of us to the left might think and act to effectively counteract it.

The beauty of Robin's book is that he doesn't get sidetracked by typical liberal-conservative debates over things like gun control, taxes, or whether "conservatives are just stupid." Instead he takes conservatism seriously at its theory and practice, traces its roots and, in so doing, ultimately reveals the bankruptcy and nihilism at its core. What conservatism is really about, he argues, is the belief in fundamental, "natural" inequality: between the rich and poor, CEO and worker, husband and wife, white people and people of color. Conservatism is the fight to re-assert and preserve those hierarchies--and the privileges that come with them.

But Robin's argument wouldn't be worth much if the task of reading his book were dull and deadly. Fortunately the author has that ability--so depressingly rare in academics--to produce crisp, lively prose that is blessedly clear of jargon and social-science-speak. At times, such as the chapter on Ayn Rand (find out what she had to say about Charlie's Angels!), the book is downright entertaining. After reading it, I felt better able to make sense of the lunacy that is contemporary American politics, and even a little more hopeful that change is possible.

I'm so glad I ignored the NYTimes review of this book. Corey Robin provides a coherent synthesis of a whole host of thinkers and thinking, bringing them under one "conservative" umbrella. Robin connects each piece of his argument to an overarching logical framework and I therefore don't understand what it means that he is preaching to the "converted" and this is just red meat for lefties. While progressives may be more open than a conservative to Robin's ideas, this book doesn't preach or rally leftist troops at all. Rather, his book provides a comprehensive explanation, that sort of which I've never run across before summarized in this fashion, of conservative motives and thinking. Just because he pops Ayn Rand once or twice doesn't take away from a solid book.

Simply put; this is must-read. I heard the author talking about his work on Australian Brodcastimg Company radio, on a show dedicated to decoding the tea-party movement. I was pleaseantly surprised with the well researched and academically presented work. Political hubris lacking, this is a masterful piece that attacks the question of conservatism with an ethmograhic and historical lens. Worth every minute and penny.

A lot of people seem to think that is book is an anti-conservative screed. In fact, it's a pretty sympathetic portrait of conservatism that gets to the appeal of conservative philosophy, in particular its inherent romanticism. As a political observer, I've always had trouble understanding how conservatives think. This book helped me a lot with that.

The introduction is the strongest part of the book, in my opinion. There is a bit of meandering in the middle -- in particular the discussion of two former conservatives and of American policy in Latin America seem a bit tangential to the overall discussion. Still, a very good, informative read overall.

There is not much literature on what it means to be conservative (outside the very specific US context). OK, there is an essay by Michael Oakeshott, but it was written in ... 1956.

So Corey Robin has written the most enlightening book on conservativism there is. In contrast to romanticized perspective of Michael Oakeshott, in this book conservativism is being viewed more as a revanchist outlook which develops as a reaction against emancipation initatives of the left.

Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia are treated quite harshly in the book - it is not for me to decide whether such attitude is or is not justified, but those two chapters are quite entertaining to read. The author does not insist that all conservatism is bad or silly though, the idea that stuck in my mind after having finished the book is that "the conservative speaks for a special type of victim: one who has lost something of value". I consider this to be a profound observation that in itself would have been a sufficient reason to read the book.

This is a stunning book, the freshest take on the conservative revolution that I have read. Every debate in American politics will have a different flavor after reading this book. Robin takes conservative ideas seriously, and with troubling, sometimes shocking results.

The conservative intellectuals discussed in this book include Edmund Burke, Jean de Maistre, Thomas Hobbes, Ayn Rand, Antonin Scalia, Friedrich Hayek, John Gray and Edward Luttwak.

According to Robin, the most basic desire driving conservative thought is to defend economic, political or social inequality. Burke and de Maistre strove to defend elite privileges under attack by the French Revolution. John C Calhoun and other southerners worked to reinforce slavery against the attacks of abolitionists. Ayn Rand argued that economic elites were the supreme benefactors of the human race and thus did not deserve to have their wealth redistributed to the unfit masses. A major reason for the respect accorded to Antonin Scalia, Robin suggests, is that his judicial philosophy is conducive to reinforcing the power of privileged groups. Racism is another tool used to defend hierarchy as when the National Review (Buckley himself?) editorialized in 1957 that blacks deserved to be subordinate in the south because southern whites were clearly the advanced race.

Robin describes some of the ways that conservatives seek to reinforce established hierarchies. For example, in the antebellum south, planters tried give whites of modest income a stake in the slave system by encouraging them to own slaves. If whites were too poor to own slaves, the ideology of the planters provided them with the consolation that they were racially superior to blacks. This consolation encouraged the non-elite whites to support the continued subjugation of blacks.

When circumstances change, conservatives, like those of other political persuasions, modify some of their tactics. For example, after the 60's, it was no longer possible for white politicians to use explicitly racist messages. Thus the Republicans adopted the "southern strategy", mobilizing working class white people with attacks on welfare and crime, which were codes for attacks on black people. Southern whites tried to maintain school segregation after the mid-60's by transferring their children to whites' only private religious schools. When the federal government began denying tax exempt status to these schools, the resistance of southern whites evolved into the birth of the modern Christian evangelical movement.

In 2000, the author interviewed William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol. According to Robin, both believed that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer a major enemy bent on American destruction and that this fact caused the conservative movement, and American society, to weaken. Buckley, along with Kristol and other neo-conservatives, feared that, in the absence of existential threats, Americans were growing flabby and complacent under the peace and prosperity of the Clinton years. This is a not untypical example of conservative intellectuals violently championing the free market but also worrying that citizens have become so engrossed in material prosperity that their ability and willingness to defend hegemonic institutions and values have weakened. Buckley and Kristol, Robin shows, reflected the belief of such diverse conservatives as Ayn Rand, John C Calhoun and Edmund Burke that existential threats provide the best opportunity to strengthen the institutions and values they seek to defend. 9-11 of course provided conservatives with the titanic battle against evil that they had longed for since the end of the Cold War.

I think the best chapter in the book is on Guatemala. This was a place where a conservative world power, the United States, sought to prevent social change. The US overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected government in 1954 after the government, with a few Communist advisors in the lead, started redistributing land to the peasants. Robin points out that Guatemala's government, in implementing land reform was attempting to help move Guatemala out of feudalism and into a capitalist mode of development. The government set up mechanisms to give the peasants a political and social voice, uplifting them from the horrendous slavery they had endured for centuries. Conservative forces in Guatemala hated it, and so did the CIA. After 1954, the US installed dictators unleashed a hell on earth in Guatemala with American backing. Robin cites an example from 1966 of the terror unleashed: the Guatemalan security forces kidnapped 30 leftists, tortured them, killed them, and then dumped them into the Pacific Ocean. CIA officials were quite aware of this atrocity, Robin notes, and approved of it. In 1978, in another atrocity cited by Robin, Mayan villagers with aid from a union organizer gathered in the town square to petition the mayor for redress of grievances against local planters. The military came in and started firing, killing between 34 and 100. In the early 80's, the military launched a campaign of virtual genocide against Guatemala's Indians with Ronald Reagan's support. Robin notes that the day after Reagan proclaimed that Guatemala's military dictator Rios Montt was totally dedicated to democracy and getting a bum rap on human rights, the military launched a particularly horrific atrocity. The military entered a Mayan village, seized small children and infants for the purpose of smashing their heads against walls; forced people to kneel before a well where they were executed, some buried alive. Women of the village were raped; the pregnant ones were punched in the stomach to kill their fetuses and they all were executed and buried in the well. From 1954-1996, 200,000 civilians died in Guatemala, virtually all of them killed by the US backed government. Robin relies on works by academics Daniel Wilkinson and Greg Grandin for this chapter on Guatemala.

The author clearly enjoys discoursing in an expansive manner about philosophical subjects. That is what he does in this book. It is a fairly readable book, with prose that is certainly not dry, though it consists of much abstract discussion. There was one strand of the author's discussion about Ayn Rand's claim to have been influenced by Aristotle that I didn't fully comprehend, me being not well versed in Aristotle.

By the way, Robin is quite harsh on Rand, saying she was a fraud and quite lowbrow. He compares her social Darwinism to that of the Nazis.

Corey Robin's book is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the complex mechanisms and tortuous evolution of conservative thinking.

The general sections of the volume have been a revelation to me. I had always sensed and intuited that conservatives (as well as fascists) operate in some sort of dialectical relationship with the left. And Robin's book indeed demonstrates that right-wingers exist precisely as a result of, in response to and in reaction to, the left. It all starts with Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre's virulent anger at the French Revolution, combined with a grudging admiration for its effectiveness and power.

Hence, in our time Phyllis Schlafly starts out as a virulent anti-feminist, but she later has to modify her stance to show that, actually, she IS at heart a feminist. For an analogous phenomenon, see Sarah Palin in this regard. (As you may remember, her defenders actually accused her critics of being "sexists!")

In another familiar instance, many naive, gullible, or cynical libertarians, taken in by the word "Socialist" in Hitler's party name as well as by some of the Nazis' pageantry, have really thought of fascism as a variant of socialism rather than what it was: a violent mass movement aimed at making war on communists and socialists.

And so, in their public statements and actions, militant and outspoken conservatives go so far as to replicate the rhetoric, the romanticism, the tactics, and even some of the terminology of their left-wing adversaries. Not for them just a static defense of the status quo, or a nostalgic longing for some idealized past (however much these are in fact part of their mind set).

Robin captures very vividly and eloquently the conservatives' desire for struggle, for danger, for some grandiose, sweeping, apocalyptic battle to define them--in marked contradistinction to the boring, predictable routines of politics as usual. His discussion puts into perspective the self-conception of e.g. those Randians who see themselves as revolutionaries fighting "the system," or of Rand herself saying at one point on a talk show, "I am not a conservative." The book also sketches quite clearly the conservatives' self-conception as victims who've somehow been left out (the fundamental template for all those conservatives who claim to be running "against Washington").

At one point, Robin quotes von Hayek's praise for Gen. Pinochet--and it will give some readers the willies. I knew that Hayek had defended the Chilean military regime, but to see it cited so starkly, in black and white, was pretty creepy. It was like discovering in the biographies of TIME-LIFE founder Henry Luce his frank and enthusiastic praise for European fascism throughout the 1930s.

Not all of Robin's book is on the highest theoretical level; its middle portions consist of book reviews first published in journals, gathered here in support of his general arguments. But the opening sections and the concluding chapter shed much-needed light on 200 years of conservative thought and practice.

And the volume is very nicely and elegantly written--Robin is not one of those political scientists whose prose is many shades of gray and all in a ponderous C minor. There is melody and grace here. Again, this is essential reading for getting a broad look at the right-wing world view. Highly recommended!

Robin provides one of the most insightful and coherent analysis of the fabric of conservatism. It outlines the conservative thought from its foundation to its modern manifestations.

So much for the Utopianism of the left, we have to understood 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.