The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump

This is second edition of this book, subtitled Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. As Antifa diagrams the war against fascism at the ground level, this book explains it from the top. Part 1 is a Primer on Reaction. The private life of power is its desire for an ordered society, where the best and most creative are naturally at the top and there can be no talk of democracy, socialism or revolution (the book limits itself to the late eighteenth century and beyond). Reactionaries, conservatives and counter-revolutionaries are the same thing. Their existence comes because there has been change. When there is little revolution from the left, the right stagnates or sits on prior glories.While the gay marriage debate is essentially over, it has become an organizing principle on the right. Indeed, there were no amendments defining marriage as between a man and a woman until San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome decide (rather correctly in hindsight) that his constitutional oath required he perform such marriages, with cameras running. Before then, the issue was ignored as Catholic and other hospitals quietly denied access to long time companions to their dying partners. Conservativism triumphed without raising a fuss (my example).Reactionaries also have a thing for violent militarism. It is their ideal crucible to judge worth, although of late winning in capitalism is its surrogate. It is as if they all deeply admire the Guardians in Plato’s Republic (again, my example) and feel that they are the only ones worthy to rule.Part Two looks at Europe’s Old Regime Reactionaries (pardon the redundancy). Hobbes was the first reactionary studied (as long as there has been despotism, hierarchy or individualists, there has always been reaction). He battled the Democratals and defended Charles I of England. This did not go so well, as my Uncle Charles lost his head. Anyone who has taken history or political science is familiar with the Leviathan and the harsh state of nature. What they don’t know (private to Michael Sean Winters, pay attention) was that the Democratals claimed (as I do) that divinely given freedom of will implied a divine right for the people to rule, not the king.I suspect that because there was no one Democratal leader who is remembered, people ignore the theory, which is essence of the modern enlightenment and continues today, with a balance between the collective rights of democracy and the individual right to choose one’s path. Either way, it is a question of natural rights, not natural law. The one does not require the other, and certainly not in the forms that reactionaries wish to impose, whether they be political or ecclesiastic. I sometimes think that conservatives are afraid that God is Ogre to be placated rather than a savior whose only interest is our happiness, with justice for us, not from us. Indeed, obligations from God would be on the conservatives, not the revolutionaries (my illustration). Hobbes places moral superiority with those with wealth or power, who have the natural right to rule. I suspect he would prefer the Ogre, especially if it kept the peasants in line.Next is Edmund Burke. (I reviewed a book called Burke’s Politics in my undergraduate Political Theory Class. Burke’s writings and speeches seemed more situational than comprehensive because he was a working parliamentarian). While he is best known for his service to Crown and Country and his opposition to the French Revolution, Robin draws on his economic writings to make his points on reaction and value. While others have deemphasized the Speenhamland arrangements as parliamentary, Robin still believes it to be a subject of Burke’s thoughts on scarcity. The Speenhamland magistrates had drawn up a minimum wage system during a food crisis that not only supported the workers but was sensitive to their family size and debts. Indeed, one could argue that the current tax system is less generous, because while it takes $1000 per month to feed, house and care for a single child according to USDA estimates (which does not include daycare), the new tax bill provides roughly twice that for the entire year (again, my example). Burke would have no such regulation of wages. He would fit into the Freedom Caucus rather nicely.Theoretically, the market sets prices for goods sold and goods and services purchased, however both Adam Smith and Burke admit that it is the capitalists who set prices, thus rewarding risk and acknowledging wealth, power and the favor of law. Of course, the first capitalists, as often as not, were of aristocratic background. We can consider Trump a modern noble. He certainly has taken advantage of law, particularly bankruptcy law, as well as his inherited wealth.Burke also wrote on the value of his own service in terms of a pension, comparing his accomplishments to those of noble lords who had title and did nothing aside from venting from the cheap seats (the House of Lords). He almost got to the point where providing value was what led to value, but he could not throw away a life of justifying royal and noble privilege, even to justify a higher pension. I see Reaction is essentially loyalty over truth. I don’t seem them ever espousing any kind of standard labor hour regime, where base pay is equalized, and other allowances include dividends for getting a degree or allowances for family size. Still, we need to give them something new to oppose.Next, we have Nietzsche, the Marginalists and the Austrians. All of these acknowledge the superior role of capitalists and wealth over the economy, rather than working with models depending on free market assumptions. Progress comes from capitalists, not workers. Concentrated wealth creates and controls innovation. Invention does not come from the shop floor (and if you look at most modern compensation agreements, it hardly comes from the research department because the CEO gets the rewards rather than the inventors, who instead get a higher salary but not big and continuing bonus for racking up patents, at least not the engineers I know).Part 3 brings us back to the U.S. and into the mind of Ayn Rand. My friend Carl Milsted did a good job of Objectivism on his Holistic Politics web page. Corey and Carl do come to the same conclusion about this second-rate philosopher who depended more on Nietzsche than Aristotle (as she claimed), brings with her all of his elitism. Of course, she does create the architype of succeeding through bullshitting, which the American CEO class has perfected in its drive toward high personal compensation, most especially one Donald J. Trump.Next, we go to Goldwater and the development of right wing victimhood, which Nixon perfected. Beyond it all is the continuing justification for inequality. While it always comes in the guise of celebrating the capable, those that are capable are usually white. Anyone who doubts that there is such a thing as white privilege should read this chapter a few times. Privilege has become victimhood for most (although I would argue most were not that capable anyway).The Neocons march in as if on que. Robin could have mentioned the Defense Guidance Cheney wrote for Bush or his ready-made plan for the war in Iraq, but he sticks as much to the pundit intelligentsia who were almost pining for war when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union vanished into the New Year, with Clinton cutting defense and talking peace. Then 9-11 happened and the chicken hawks thought that maybe the national will be rescued and America would recognize its imperial dreams. Bad Republican management of the war, which was not much better under Obama, nipped that pipe dream in the bud. For me, the irony became thick when people came back from war, they did run for office…as Democrats. They were part of the 2006 wave that made Nancy Pelosi Speaker and Harry Reid majority leader (again, my example). So much for war as a reactionary virtue.Antonin Scalia, of recent memory, is next. He is called an affirmative action baby, probably because his colleagues put up with his nonsense, although there is now a version of Originalism that everyone can abide by, although they rule about the same way as before. Whether his Federalist Society friend, Neil Gorsuch, follows in his footsteps in reaction to privacy rights and the Fourteenth Amendment is still open, although I suspect the new Justice will follow Kennedy with time.Lastly, we come to the Dealmaker-in-Chief, who seems to be way above his paygrade. Indeed, his shoot from the hip deal making this past weekend leaves the government shut down as his stiff convinces him to backtrack on what was agreed to. It seems he was also not much of a fan of due diligence in his dealings with the Russians, which may yet lead to his ouster. He wrote at one point about going after countries that launder money for our enemies. Irony? He claims he is not a fascist, but there are parallels with Hitler on both the Big Lie and, oddly enough, his obsession with decorating his buildings. For him, image is value. He thinks his name adds more than the workmanship of his Chinese labor force. Sadly, he may be right, which is why he won the election.We are left with the madness of King Donald. I should not throw stones. Like Trump, I am a genius who does not sleep a lot (unless I take my meds). The difference is, I got my bipolar II diagnosis. What about Trump? You have to wonder what was in the medical file Trump’s Navy Flight Surgeon did not talk about or even share with his patient. Of course, there is no Deep State. Nothing stays hidden for long.The author asks whether Trump will follow through on an agenda (of course, if his agenda is to undo the first black president, he is surely trying) or face a fresh call for revolution. At this writing I am finishing my client list of employee-owned firms whom I will be offering a much more cooperative, democratic and, indeed, socialistic way to operate. Is the current tired old reactionary script good enough to counter a call for workers to (democratically) control the means of consumption? including consuming management and government services (which the reactionaries may like)? We shall see. I expect Trump will soon have his hands full with Robert Mueller and his own demons and his reactionary party does not have the moral strength to rescue us from Trump’s battle with either, as they assume that his financial worth gives him moral worth. Pity that.

Corey Robin’s The reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (2nd ed) is essential reading. I suspect the first edition of Robin’s work was essential reading before the election in 2016, but more so now. I have not read the first edition. I can only speak to this edition which has been re-ordered, had content struck, and had a new chapter added evaluating the unlikely rise of Donald Trump to the presidency as a member of the GOP in 2016. Indeed, the rise of Trump, who from the perspective of conventional wisdom was the unlikeliest of candidates for Republicans to hitch their wagon, is a crucial test to Robin’s assertions about what animates conservatives.Robin’s proposal is that conservatives of various stripes (religious, libertarian, neo-con, etc.) are held together and defined by a reactionary, counter-revolutionary impulse that sees in democratic challenges to social hierarchy a fundamental order that must be defended and re-established. ‘Nature’ (even when we concede the socially constructed nature of our understanding of it) reveals inherent inequality and any attempt to deny that nature and flatten inequality socially, politically, and economically is actually unfair even immoral to the strong and skillful. Inasmuch as the conservative seeks to defend “liberty” or “democracy” it is only in the service of preserving the “private life of power”—man over wife/household, boss over employee, parent over child. That promise of preserved power in private life serves to animate the support of larger systems of social inequality, something of a neo-feudal order, unfettered capitalism, governed ultimately by the market whose supreme citizen is the businessmen.I’m not a political theorist. As a scholar, I’m not a philosopher. My response to Robin’s book was and is intensely personal. Over the last two decades I have moved from a youthful, religious-inflected conservatism through a period of profound disenchantment and horror at the real, living, actual beliefs and practices of conservatives from the grassroots to the halls of Washington. Living now in something of a political, religious, and intellectual wilderness, Robin’s book helped make sense of things I had and have experienced as a conservative that had until recently remained intuitive and impressionistic.Contradictions I kept running in to especially as my religious, evangelical conservatism vied to maintain an uneasy peace with the largely right-wing political and economic conservatism in which that religious practice lived and breathed are both named and explained by Robin’s thesis. Strange bedfellows all, the rag-tag band of Rand Paul, James Dobson, and the Koch brothers makes much more sense when you put the counterrevolutionary frame over their movement as a whole and proposed (or tolerated) socio-economic/political programs.Robin helpfully traces this theme from the writings of Burke all the way to the figure of Antonin Scalia before pivoting to consider the curious case of Trump—revealing the conservative movement to be, in the end, a “show about nothing.” I cannot evaluate his reading of each of the theorists he engages. I defer to scholars of each in that regard. Whether he has read THEM correctly, I suspect he has correctly read the way they are received. One small example: As a young teenager in the 90s, given to playing video games with Rush Limbaugh playing in the background, I distinctly remember Rush making the point that the rich needed to be rich in no small part to drive innovation—they buy cutting edge technology so that it can be developed and refined and eventually mass-produced so that the rest of us could one day afford them. In Robin’s work, I discovered this point in Hayek (I don’t recall Rush ever citing his sources—I was under the impression at the time his were mostly original thoughts). More importantly Robin situates that point in a larger framework whereby for the conservative the market and the economy are “battlefields” of sort and the rich have proven their worth much like soldiers. To “limit” them by expansive democratic norms, regulation, or taxes is to defy them their rightful place at the top of the heap—and to threaten ever so subtly to take away the generous fruits of the modern market (for if the rich don’t buy iPads first—how oh how will we ever get them?!).That said, Robin does what the best synthesizers of others’ work do: develops a taste for reading them yourselves. Thanks to Robin, I have a renewed interested to go and read Hayek for the first time, revisit Burke and Hobbes, even Nietzsche. I’m curious to read a biography of Antonin Scalia, God help me. [Though I am even more excited to read Robin’s forthcoming book on Clarence Thomas. I refuse to try to re-read Ayn Rand, however. I’ve had quite enough of that bilge. Robin cuts down her philosophy/worldview such as it is quite gleefully—more importantly situating it into the dynamics he’s identified in conservatism. And that is enough for me, thank you very much.]I wish Robin had said more about how religious conservatism expresses the counterrevolutionary impulse in concert with more “economic” expressions of conservatism. The chapter on Scalia hints at how that part of the alliance works. From my own experience, his overall assessment rings true that conservatives seek anti-democratic hierarchy in their private lives and are thus prepared to support it in the broader society and economy provided that’s the payoff. Churches, family, para-church organizations were all tiny fiefdoms headed by at least one or a small cadre of men (never women). Their interest in maintaining their own authority at the expense of anything like truth becomes clearer the older I got. [As an aside: At the core of this drive—whatever sense of pride, self-importance, desire to prove themselves strong and worthy may lie at the heart of conservatism—I suspect is a deep abiding fear. I plan to check out Robin’s Fear: The history of a political idea having read The reactionary mind.]The specter haunting the world proposed by Robin’s assessment is the absence of a serious program of the Left in the world right now. Most clearly seen in the last chapter on Trump, conservatism’s reactionary dynamic subsists only in the face of an insurgent, effective Left—committed as they usually are in principle to broad-based, egalitarian democratic participation. Trump’s impotence as an Executive, Robin argues in the final chapter (and has continued to provide real time evidence in frequent public FB posts), is further evidence that conservatism is the victim of its own success. Neoliberalism having won (as evidenced by the capitulation of the Clinton and Obama administrations to its basic logic, the shrieking of conservatives notwithstanding) has left conservatives’ counterrevolutionary instincts lacking a substantive target. With its representative party essentially in control of all three branches of government, the movement still struggles to really accomplish much. The muscle memory for tax cuts and war has been hamstrung by the failures of the Bush administration and the personal indiscipline of the GOP’s de facto party head. That this weak a movement could not be defeated reveals an even weaker Left.If you’re a conservative, this isn’t a huge problem (though tying your fortunes to an erratic, barely literate plutocrat might make it challenging to keep a straight face with arguments going forward for the cool, disciplined realism of conservatism….). If you have any sympathy with the Left, it is indeed a problem. Robin has chronicled elsewhere the ways in which, despite all the huffing and puffing, Trump and his party is not in fact enacting some new, neo-Hitlerian resurgence but rather is singing the same old conservative songs, albeit with slightly more desperate and dumber arrangements. But if you want something other than the death of the counterrevolution, you will have to continue to make a case for the positive vision for an egalitarian, democratic world.So, in one respect, Robin’s thesis is extraordinary. In another, it is a very small step in a larger project. He has accurately named the specific core of an historically powerful ideological movement which at the moment is calling all the shots on the right and (I would argue) in the center and center-left. That is no small thing. But The reactionary mind is not a program for Resistance®. Robin, I think, provides an example for how to dismantle amidst the rhetorical guerrilla warfare of day-to-day ideological engagement the fundamental conceit of conservative’s claim to being “naturally fit” in the field of battle/market/etc. His chapter on Scalia is a very good example of how pointing out the ways in which even the most strident of conservatives is propped up by the good will of others (“that’s just Nino”) chips at the foundations of counterrevolution’s conceit. Relentlessly illustrating our social, political, and (if you’re so inclined) spiritual connectedness is part of the way to dismantle the core neo-social Darwinian, socio-political sadomasochism of the Right. But a competing vision will need more than that. And it will need it on a broad, democratic, grassroots scale.The insurgency of Sanders’ 2016 campaign, the growth of interest in The Jacobin’s evangelistic work for socialism are interesting and telling. Perhaps more hopeful is the effectiveness of BLM (a fiercely moral argument for democratic inclusion if ever there was one). Regardless, that vision will be necessary and is outside the scope of Robin’s work.Given my response and engagement with the book, my personal hope is that conservatives read it and wrestle with its central claims. I would like to think (perhaps against my better judgment) that most grass roots conservatives are not so cheerfully willing puppets of inequality. If you consider yourself a conservative in a social, political, and/or religious sense, I strongly recommend you read this book and confront that very real possibility.

Ineresting topic. Talks up well in interviews / book promos. But 3/4 / 9/10ths of book seem to be background on various political philosophers. Kept on thinking, “Get to the point ....” Maybe ‘the point’ is saved til the end? Didnt make it that far . . . . . Got fed up with Locke, Hume, Adam Smith . . . an entire chapter on Ayn Rand (several pages on her mutual admiration club with Farrah Faucett (Charlie's Angels?!! . . . really!?).

Robin has probably become the outstanding expert of all things Right-wing although Perry Anderson is still up there. Both leftists naturally and with the 'aberration' of Trump gone and history being rapidly re-written, needed now more than ever.

Good read. Informative.

Outstanding.

Corey Robin has written what is an interesting and engaging read, superior to much political writing being published at present and also one which I thought was, despite its first appearances much more balanced than may be expected, the style and pace of the writing is very good and it is all supported with citations, copious endnotes, there is a great contents and index too.Given the title it is likely to be more enthusiastically read by readers other than conservatives, which I think could be a shame as it should give any sincere conservative some pause for thought about what tendencies within their own movement are dominant presently, or what is the mainstay of their movement.It is Robin's main contention that the mainstay of conservatism is the defence of privilege and power, it is a sort of first principle whether it is openly stated or, more often, rationalised as beneficial not just to the privileged and powerful themselves but everyone else too. Essential to this position is the idea that the privileged and powerful are enjoying their just desserts, won by acts which have had benefice to others, no interference with their enjoyment of their just desserts is warranted as it may disincentivise further beneficient actions, so, for instance, no intervention in the distribution of wealth is warranted. There are a lot of citations from Hayek, Mise and the Austrian School about "spontaneous order", its presumed legitimacy and the foolhardiness of any interference with it. Although those are older theories now, those were the gurus of Thatcher and Thatcherism after all and some of Hayek's books were old even then, more recent thinkers are included too, some of which I was not entirely familiar with and it was interesting to read.However, Robin's main point is that there has been a remarkable consistency over time, different thinkers may but it different ways but the essential message is the same, it is a quite self-congratulatory, fawning and praising message for those who already possess great wealth (though I'd always thought that while Hayek was essentially good at condemning feudalism's trending in politics, particularly late liberalism but totally unconcerned about the same thing happening within the private sphere of wealth Robin makes a very plain that this is the case).The thing though is that reading this I get the feeling of it being an expose article which has come some time after the essential news story has broke already, I mean who does not know these essential things about conservatism?For instance, Nisbet, an American sociologist who wrote a few books on conservatism in the years before Reagan's terms in office, wrote in very unembarrassed ways about the views of earlier US conservatives who had responded to the violent labour history of the US as being too accomodating of labour resistance to the demands of industrialists, defending a sort of monumental (literally) efforts as providing lasting legacies where more mundane priorities, like the welfare of the general populace, do not. Russell Kirk, another great US conservative and author, authored a great anthology of conservative thought in a conservative reader, did acknowledge or suggest that the vice of conservatives was avarice but did not consider it as serious as totalitarianism or unfounded abstract belief in progress.Which is to say that I dont believe many conservatives would have a real problem with this particular expose of the reactionary, even if they did, as I would suppose some may, have honest and serious misgivings as to where the unlimited indulgence of reaction will lead conservatives, conservatism or those and what they hold dear (I would hope that reading this book would lead to conservatives giving over more of their time to thinking about those particular misgivings and seeking to redress that particularly serious imbalance).Readers who are not conservatives and are already critical of conservatism may find this read long on description and shorter on prescription. A cursory acquaintance with present day UK conservative policy in matters such as further and higher education, for instance, would be enough to confirm Robin's core premise, so it surely would not be a revelation to read the background to it all. Points made about the failures of the left to organise and present appealing alternatives are well made and fair, the weakness or absence of an opposition is as important to Trump's victory as anything what so ever as can be said about his appeal to or ability to represent reactionaries.The book is in its second edition, which may say something by itself, that it was worthy of a second print run. It is a good read and I would recommend it on that account whether you feel particularly motivated in opposition to reactionaries or not. Recommended.