The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump 2nd Edition
by Corey Robin (Author)
Modeled after The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk Corey Robin attempts to answer "what is Conservativism?". It has an intoduction and then a series of short essays covering a different main figure and how they were conservative.
Corey's core thesis of what conservativism is
Quote:
Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. 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. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom.
Quote:
If women and workers are provided with the economic resources to make independent choices, they will be free not to obey their husbands and employers. That is why Lawrence Mead, one of the leading intellectual opponents of the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s, declared that the welfare recipient “must be made less free in certain senses rather than more.” 13 For the conservative, equality portends more than a redistribution of resources, opportunities, and outcomes— though he certainly dislikes these, too. 14 What equality ultimately means is a rotation in the seat of power.
Quote:
Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty— or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be the byproducts of conservatism, one or more of its historically specific and ever-changing modes of expression. But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force— the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere. Such a view might seem miles away from the libertarian defense of the free market, with its celebration of the atomistic and autonomous individual. But it is not. When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees. 40
He then looks at the issues of conservatism. For instance, if Conservatism is an elitist movement how can it win in democracy?
Quote:
Beyond these contingent changes, we can also trace a longer structural change in the imagination of the right: namely, the gradual acceptance of the entrance of the masses onto the political stage. From Hobbes to the slaveholders to the neoconservatives, the right has grown increasingly aware that any successful defense of the old regime must incorporate the lower orders in some capacity other than as underlings or starstruck fans. The masses must either be able to locate themselves symbolically in the ruling class or be provided with real opportunities to become faux aristocrats in the family, the factory, and the field. The former path makes for an upside-down populism, in which the lowest of the low see themselves projected in the highest of the high; the latter makes for a democratic feudalism, in which the husband or supervisor or white man plays the part of a lord. The former path was pioneered by Hobbes and Maistre, and the latter by Southern slaveholders, European imperialists, and Gilded Age apologists. (And neo– Gilded Age apologists: “There is no single elite in America,” writes David Brooks. “Everyone can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus.”
He does go into what Conservatism hopes to build. In his sense conservatives are a kind of reverse liberal. Whereas the liberal wants to open freedom to the lower classes, conservatives want to build hierarchies. Different than a traditionalist because a traditionalist wants to maintain a specific hierarchy or way of life a Conservative is flexible creating new ways to build hierarchies. The process by which that usually happens is the Conservative feels some pain for the lost hierarchies of the past. He mentions Burke reminiscing about the monarchy, but the Conservative also loathes the old regime because it fell to liberalizing forces so mere return to the old regime isn't sufficient a new regime to retain power needs to be created.
From the introduction though it it's pretty weak. It's hard to know if the dots he's connecting are really there or are perhaps one off statements made and then connected later. I don't know enough of Burke or Hobbes to say that the conclusions he draws from the are warranted.
His section on Nietzsche and Hayek is really good though. He connects Nietzsche's philosophy directly to reacting to the events of his day from the fall of the old aristocratic orders, the rise of workers' socialism and the abolition of slavery. Nietzsche then emphasized the aristocratic values and wanted to demolish a key claim of socialism, that the worker's product had inherent value. While Nietzsche's claims were mostly political the marginalist revolution took Nietzsche's claim that nothing had intrinsic value but what we gave it and ran with it. The marginalists supposed that if nothing had intrinsic value but what we gave it, who gives labor its value? Capital does. And with that the object of focus became the capitalist, with whose gaze value came into the world. The capitalist and the higher orders became the center of economic and political life, the worker's work held no intrinsic value and become another tool, like a plow or sheer. Entrepreneurs created new tastes and new moralities, capital was deployed to make it happen. That's where value came from, not from the daily grind of the worker. Hayek goes a bit further and says that work itself is a detriment to imbuing things with value. If you work then your evaluations are inevitably tainted with that work and so a landed gentry who don't have to work are the best ones to effect change in the world. The policy changes are what we've been seeing. Abolition of the estate tax, removal of protections for workers, and less concretely a focus on innovators and visionaries who change the world as the center of moral and political life as opposed to the New Deal orientation of the average worker's sacrifice.
The section on Trump is a total wash and wasn't even needed in this edition. Robin says that the Art of the Deal wasn't written by Trump but then he proceeds to quote it abundantly to prove his points. But if it was ghost written then how much of it is authentically Trump vs whatever the ghost writer wanted. In the end there isn't any need to connect the dots that Trump is a conservative, he's the loudest, most boorish version of one.
Last edited by Huehuecoyotl; 12-20-2017 at 02:05 PM.