The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump

by Robin

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Psychology, Political Science, Sociology

330 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2017

About the author

single-name author and
single-name illustrator

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 4 out of 5]

Right-wing parody as strategy...

The Good:
--This book’s 1st edition later became hyped in capitalist media as “the book that predicted Trump”. Make sure to read the 2nd edition (2017), which has updates such as replacing Palin with Trump, and focusing more on reactionary economics.
--I was worried this would be another mainstream centrist Liberal fluff-piece. While we roll our eyes at capitalist media and must be wary of the author's limitations (detailed below), here is what’s useful:

1) Reactionary methodology: the main thought-experiment is seeing pass the docile “traditionalist” garb of the Right and focusing on the dynamism of reactionary forces as it:
a) Critiques parts of existing power as becoming complacent (think Trump bashing other Republican candidates).
b) Co-opts symbols and techniques from the emancipatory challenges (“populist”).
--The author focuses on a handful of figures, and loosely ties their reactionary antics together with the ebbs and flows of history.

2) Reactionary Economics: probably due in part to my background (political economy, not philosophy), I was most interested in the antics involving “economics”:
--Chapter 6 details Burke’s reactionary push away from mainstream Adam Smith, who actually considered power relations and the needs of laborers in his conceptions of the free market (The Theory of Moral Sentiments).
--Chapter 7 starts with Nietzsche’s challenge of mainstream values/morality opening the door for the reactionary push of reactionary Marginalists away from the (mainstream!) labor theory of value. This is an interesting angle to add to the common narrative of the Marginal Revolution as a reaction to the direction Marx was leading political economy towards.
--Schumpeter’s noble entrepreneur was soon diminished by gigantic corporations socializing innovation (although this myth seems to have been revived in later stages of Neoliberalism, after it restored class power and needed to build some optimism), but it was Friedrich A. Hayek’s reactionary pivot to market aristocracy that was the most chilling:
1) Irrational consumers require avant-garde elites to set tastes (thus defends inherited wealth!).
2) Working masses prefer condition of limited creativity to fulfill desire of security and less responsibility (when labor becomes the norm, culture has no chance!).
...It’s funny, these market fundamentalists are always raving about “freedom” and “liberty”, but they literally see society as comprised of a) innovative/industrious entrepreneurs and b) working automatons (who only desire limited freedoms anyways).
…Working in IT and public health, to assume profit-maximizing business-people (ironically looking to privatize services and make them less accessible to everyone) are the drivers instead of the workers (maintenance "essential workers"/clinicians/engineers/scientists/researchers/public administrators/unpaid social reproduction etc.) is a painful joke.

The Hilarious:
--After the dense Chapters 6/7 of reactionary economics, the remaining chapters are a breeze as we knock off Ayn Rand (Hollywood-wannabe egomaniac), Barry Goldwater (Conservative victimhood), neocons rejuvenated by terrorism, Antonin Scalia (pampered crusader against pampering), and Trump (“A Show about Nothing”).
--We all have our faults and demons, but the Right gets the prize for making a competition out of flaunting theirs; Ayn Rand’s prize is extra special.

The Bad/Missing:
--Another reviewer raised the frustration that the author does not really offer constructive proposals, stopping at basically saying “the left’s next new emancipatory movement, whatever that may be”; while I can accept limiting the book's scope to diagnosing the problem, let's take this opportunity to further dispel Liberal illusions:

1) Liberals are not “Left”: having watched Robin’s lectures on the book, he really comes off as a liberal reformist who divides the political spectrum between US party lines. However, Liberals/Democratic Party have been preserving their half of the same vested interests (A People's History of the United States); I would like to challenge Robin to use the same methodology in this book and apply it to Liberals, but I assume his social imagination would run into a (blue) wall.

2) Capitalist crises and Reactionaries: had Robin considered Left critiques of Liberal capitalism, he would diagnose the paralysis of Liberalism to global capitalism’s structural crises opening the door to reactionary “populist” scapegoating:
-Vijay Prashad (The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World) summarizes: https://youtu.be/z11ohWnuwa0
…linking fascism and (liberal) colonialism: https://youtu.be/R6PnB7bnLFY?t=223
…which is inspired by: Discourse on Colonialism
-Yanis Varoufakis (And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future) on the structural Euro Crisis and the rising Right: https://youtu.be/PjrjO0d7fvI
…detailed in: And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
-Michael Parenti on Great Depression capitalism, WWII Fascism, and purging communists: Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
-(critical) reformist Mark Blyth on “Global Trumpism”: https://youtu.be/Bkm2Vfj42FY?t=136

3) Empire and the rest: Liberal meritocracy and positive-sum/peaceful commerce competition becomes even more of a scam on the global stage. In fact, Democrats come off so poorly in militaristic imperialism (let alone economic imperialism) that Right-wing capitalist-libertarians easily outflank them on anti-intervention (Rothbard, Ron Paul). Pathetic being outflanked by those who placate former KKK Grand Wizards.
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
-Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II
...Trade domination: do as we say, not as we do:
-The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

4) Media Literacy:
--There's been some focus on how Trump was made for capitalist media so they could not turn him off because he was great for ratings: Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus
--We should take this opportunity to distinguish between:
a) "Fake news": simply cherry-picking what to believe from the news, as Trump popularized.
b) Leftist critiques of propaganda: recognizing that different media output target different audiences. We still rely on journalists for gathering news on the ground. Media targeting elites (ex. business journals) may indeed have useful info since capitalists/military need to know how the real world works. Media targeting the public (headlines/op-eds) receive more manipulation.
-Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
-Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
-Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. It's great for academics and the general reader both. Even if you are in the field there's a lot you'll get out of it. His reading of Edmund Burke is superbly and subtly argued. I wrote a much longer review on my blog here. If/when I have time, I'll try to scale it down here, but here are the first few paragraphs:

In the new edition of 2011’s The Reactionary Mind, Cory Robin updates what is sure to become a classic in the history of political thought.

As I write this the populist, Trump-lite and thuggish, Boss-Hogg lookalike Premier of Ontario has invoked what is called the “Notwithstanding Clause” to overturn a judge’s overturning of a bit of legislation that sought to reduce the number of elected representatives on the Toronto city council—a bit of parochial political dirty tricks that make Doug Ford (brother to Rob Ford, the infamous late Mayor of Toronto) seem the most small-minded conservative ever. Yet he has great support from his base for attacking the courts, those “unelected” challengers to the power of (cough cough) the supposed will of the People. Ford is in fact just playing from the conservative (that is, the “reactionary’s”) playbook, which is analysed in great depth and to superb effect in Cory Robin’s 2017 re-issue and revision of his 2011 book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (which originally stopped at Sarah Palin, who is absent from this edition (alas?)).

The perennial aim of conservatism, Cory Robin claims, is to “build a broad-based movement of elites and masses against the emancipation of the lower orders”(xi)—to build a movement of the masses in support of the aims of the elite, in other words, to get the have-nots to campaign in favour of the haves. To do this, conservatives deliberately appeal to our worst natures, to “racism, populism, violence, and a pervasive contempt for custom, convention, law, [and] institutions”. And the first part of the book, “A Primer on Reaction”, brilliantly analyses the anatomy of this perennially self-reanimating corpse. What is the political “right” reacting against? In a word, “emancipatory movements of the left”(xvi), movements that yearn for ever-increasing freedom for the oppressed. What does the right desire to protect? What Robin calls “the private life of power”. Conservatism above all loves submission to hierarchy, and maintains its status by giving almost everyone in that hierarchy a sense that they are superior to at least someone else. Movements of the left threaten, with their appeal to “equality”, the stability of hierarchies everywhere—not only in the political arena, but between employer and employee, between men and women, and between races and nationalities. Robin spends a lot of time on Edmund Burke here—and to great effect, as that 18C pamphleteer and philosopher embodies much of the contradictory spirit of that family which has Burke as its patriarch.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 3 out of 5]

A philosophically entertaining examination of the reactionary roots of contemporary conservatism, from Burke and Hobbes to the impresario antics of Donald Trump. I liked Corey Robin's short definition:

Conservatism is an elitist movement of the masses, an effort to create a new-old regime that, in one way or another, makes privilege popular.

A couple months ago I read Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land, which aimed to explain why a community of white southerners supported an economic system that poisoned their lands, destroyed their towns and their health and left them impoverished – a phenomenon that makes progressives go crazy. Why do so many people betray their own interests to benefit the very few? Robin quotes Rousseau:

Citizens only allow themselves to be oppressed to the degree that they are carried away by blind ambition. Since they pay more attention to what is below them than what is above, domination becomes dearer to them than independence, and they consent to wear chains so that they may in turn give them to others.

Similarly, the argument of Hobbes's Leviathan "was an inspired move, characteristic of all great counterrevolutionary theories, in which the people become actors without roles, an audience that believes it is onstage." Make America Great Again.® From this psychodynamic angle white supremacy becomes intelligible. It also illuminates "what is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood, arguably for the first time in history."

As is always the case with political history, analysis erupts in irony. Robin points out – as many others have done – how the right draws its power, its rhetoric, its tactics from the left, using its own commonplaces against it. A baker forced to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple? An outrage! Discrimination! Take it to the Supreme Court. And so it goes…

[Public Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fairly uneven book - but the good parts are truly excellent. Reading the first two chapters, newly added for this edition, I was blown away. I found Robin's critique of conservatism absolutely devastating - it was soooooo friggin great! The early section of the new edition makes this book worth the price of entry. If Robin had been able to maintain that level of incisiveness and deadliness this would have been not a five star book but a six or seven star book. We would have to add gradations on Goodreads.

Sadly the middle chapters, when Robin goes back to the stuff from the earlier editions, were not as great in my estimation. This is probably my fault, but I find digging really deep into the philosophies of Burke and Nietzsche kind of tedious. There are interesting observations along the way but to me nothing in the middle section of the book matched the beginning.

However, the book picks up steam again as it reaches its conclusion. The chapter on Ayn Rand is laugh out loud hilarious. I also enjoyed the chapter on Antonin Scalia. Robin doesn't let these lights of modern conservative intellectualism get away with anything. I loved that! Finally, the new section on Donald Trump is very smart and perceptive.

Robin's thesis that the definitive through line in conservatism is a dedication to preserving hierarchy was a revelation. This is one of the best books I've ever read about the conservative movement.

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all-time favs. This most recent edition draws the lineage of thought in ever starker relief. The new Trump bits are great, but nothing will ever match Robin’s savage evisceration of Ayn Rand. I purchased the audiobook, so I could listen to it each morning, and let the brutal owns wash over me like an enlivening allegro vivace.

[Pavol Hardos · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first encountered Robin’s thesis about the nature of conservatism, I was both thrilled and skeptical about the extent of its purchase, but now, having finally read his Reactionary Mind in its second, revised edition, I believe he is essentially correct. His contention is that the guiding animus of conservative thought is a reaction against emancipatory forces that threaten established hierarchies.

Part of my initial skepticism probably derives from the pleasure I had reading this book – for reasons I better leave unexamined - I felt I had more fun than I should. At the same time, I do wish Robin would spend less time with the easier – one is tempted to say cheap – targets like Ayn Rand or Justice Scalia, illustrative and instructive they may be, and focus on the thinkers conservatives themselves would point to when brandishing their own intellectual credentials: their Oakeshotts, Nisbets, Minogues, Voegelins, Strausses, and even Scrutons. He does mention Oakeshott and Leo Strauss in his analysis in passing, but it would benefit the book, and his central argument, if more time were spent on their intellectual projects too. Less entertaining, to be sure, but perhaps more well-rounded (and perhaps less parochial in its US-centrism).

A conservative might bristle at what s/he might perceive as the sheer reductionism of Robin’s approach, but to convince an uncommitted reader with a passing knowledge of the conservative intellectual project, more work will probably need to be done to map out the extent to which the thesis applies across the board.

(But I am already looking forward to the inevitable third edition, no doubt with clever work on the waning of the conservative intellectual embodied in online charlatanism of the likes of Jordan Peterson.)

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

This books responds to a need. What's been needed is a theoretical elaboration of political conservatism. There have been plenty of those but, for the most part, they have been provided by conservatives so they were partisan and they were attempting to redefine the movement.

What Corey Robin provides is a survey of conservative theory and some practice. In chronological order, Robin takes his survey through Hobbes, Burke, Nietzsche, Hayek and the Austrian school, mid-century American reaction, Ayn Rand, Bush-era neocons, Scalia, and Trump. Robin posits a unifying definition of reaction throughout.

The biggest shortcoming is the episodic nature of the survey. As this plays out throughout the book, the chronology is not as clean as it should be and the consistency of the episodes changes throughout the survey. For instance, after moving on from Burke, Robin circles back to him in subsequent chapters for additional excursions. This time and space would have been better spent flushing out one of the main premises of the second half of the book, where Robin posits two strains of reactionary types, following in the lineage of Nietzsche and the militaristic type on the one hand and on the other hand the Austrian school and the captain of industry entrepreneur type.

Despite these shortcomings, it is still an enjoyable book. Robin was responding to a need and he contributed to the literature on conservatism and reaction by doing so. While he didn't write the definitive guide to conservatism and reaction, he did provide an edifying and at times stimulating tome.

[Lena , süße Maus · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5⭐
I truly am unable to care about anything related to Burke at this point, but the more ~general~ sections were very solid and the part on Ayn Rand went hard (read: informative but also funny bc the author bullies Rand -- as he should)

[Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first edition of this book was published in 2011, when author Corey Robin argued that conservatism, having achieved its major goals, was now in retreat in the age of Obama. Those goals included crushing the labor movement, destroying Soviet Communism, and shifting wealth to the richest at the expense of everyone else. Some goals had notably failed such as the imperial dreams of George Bush Jr’s neo-cons, left for dead on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, in the wake of Trump’s victory of 2016, Robin returns for a re-assessment. He says he’s not surprised by Trump, only by his victory. Unfortunately, he probably rushed to print too quickly in his assessment of Trump, before it became apparent just how thoroughly Trump had routed the old guard of the GOP.

In many ways, Trump is a continuation of the old guard, which had been long content to rouse its culturally conservative base from the South and from rural and small-town America with symbolic red meat issues—guns, god, gays and abortion -- but reluctant to deliver any economic substance to it. Trump takes that strategy, throws in a large dose of demagoguery and white ethnic nationalism, and continues to make economic conditions worse for the base. He seeks to demolish Federally regulated and subsidized health insurance, slash taxes on the rich, remove environmental protections for clean air and water, and drive up prices through protectionism. He rants and raves on Twitter and on the podium as much as he ever did on the campaign trail, but only ramps up the “carnage” he claimed he was the only one to be able to fix.

Trump has three major points of departure from the old guard GOP: a complete lack of any pretense of decent behavior and discourse, a blatant disregard for the rule of law, and a determination to destroy the country’s traditional trading and military alliances with its friends in NATO and NAFTA while cozying up with assorted autocrats worldwide. I think Robin underestimated the impact of Trump, simply because Trump hadn’t yet manifested by mid- 2017 the full extent of his cynicism and, arguably, sociopathic tendencies.

As Robin describes himself, he is a political theorist and not a political scientist. You won’t find a lot of analysis of political survey data, voting behavior, and the like. You will find a lot of rumination about conservative theorists and would-be theorists from Edmund Burke to Theodore von Hayek to Ayn Rand to Antonin Scalia. Robin claims to see the roots of modern conservatism dating all the way back to the reaction against the French Revolution of 1789 (Burke, author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, gets a lot of airtime in the analysis of this early phase of conservatism). He sees the same traits in modern conservatives: violence, contempt for the lower orders, admiration of the strongman, disregard for the rule of law, and so forth. More generally, he sees one overarching theme: a love of subordinating the other. The “chain of subordination” takes many forms: aristocratic rule, veneration of wealth, patriarchal domination of the family and of women, the hierarchy of the military and of the workplace, the superiority of the privileged white race ... “Every man a king”, as the populist Huey Long proclaimed in the 1930’s, gave every white man his own slice of power to dominate others, however gigantic the difference in the size of the slices – and of course, leaving women and every person of color outside looking in.

The author takes a long meander through various political theorists up to the present. Some are given a respectful treatment (Burke, von Hayek), some are savaged (Ayn Rand, Antonin Scalia).

Von Hayek is given a much more respectful treatment than he deserves, perhaps because he was not very fond of conservatives. But his dire predictions from the depths of wartime Britain in 1944 in his most famous work, The Road to Serfdom, that the centralized planning controls (wage, price, production) of that crisis era would inevitably result in the destruction of democracy proved to be utterly wrong.

Ayn Rand, with her novels filled with cardboard characters and her utter failure to understand trust and cooperation as the basis of a democratic society and a high-functioning economy, created a simple-minded philosophy of selfishness and elitism. It’s ironic that she, the elitist, should have found herself successfully peddling mass-market novels to starry-eyed young conservatives.

The chapter on Justice Antonin Scalia is unsparing in its portrayal of a man who abused the collegiality of the Court to mock and insult his fellow justices, while peddling a constitutional theory of unchanging, static “originalism”. In reality, he was almost always completely predictable in trying to transplant the rights of the privileged classes of yesteryear into the present.

Like Scalia, modern conservatives nurture a sense of loss, a sense that their privileges are under assault and are slipping away. Women are gaining economic status and power, immigrants (especially non-white immigrants) are growing their share of the population, developing countries such as China are gaining an ever larger part of the global economy … Many Americans are not happy about any of this. Many are enraged. Why? Robin sees much of this rage being understandable in light of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s prospect theory, which says that people feel the pain of a loss twice as much as the pleasure of an equivalent gain. Predictably, the losers (real or self-perceived) have been even more angered than the winners have been delighted. For those with a sense of entitlement (whether based on male gender, social class, ethnicity, race, religion …) to the perks of dominating others, this anger drove them to the polls in droves in 2016. And Donald Trump, as unlikely a champion of the downtrodden as this country has ever produced, channeled those emotions into votes.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

A history of conservative thought in the Manichean style, wherein the essence of conservatism is not the maintenance of tradition or conformity with Natural Law, but rather the oppression of the powerless.

"I seat philosophers, statesmen, slaveholders, scribblers, Catholics, fascists, evangelicals, businessmen, racists, and hacks at the same table: Hobbes is next to Hayek, Burke across from Donald Trump, Nietzsche in between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia, with Adams, Calhoun, Oakeshott, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and George W. Bush interspersed throughout.”

And there you have it. From Robin's perspective, all those right-wingers - be they racists, fascists, or Burkeans, are all pretty much the same.

Which is not to say that Robin doesn't score some legitimate points here and there. But even when he's criticizing relatively easy targets - like the philosophy of Ayn Rand - he has suffers from an apparently irresistible tendency to overplay his hand. Expounding on Rand's idea that life is the standard of value, for instance, Robins writes (and this is worth quoting at length):

“If this idea has any moral resonance, it will be heard neither in the writings of Aristotle nor in the superficially similar existentialism of Sartre, but rather in the drill march of fascism. The notion of life as a struggle against and unto death, of every “moment laden with destruction, every choice pregnant with destiny, every action weighed upon by annihilation, its lethal pressure generating moral meaning—these are the watchwords of the European night. In his Berlin Sportpalast speech of February 1943, Goebbels declared, “Whatever serves it and its struggle for existence is good and must be sustained and nurtured. Whatever is injurious to it and its struggle for existence is evil and must be removed and eliminated.”27 The “it” in question is the German nation, not the Randian individual. But if we strip the pronoun of its antecedent—and listen for the background hum of Sein oder Nichtsein—the similarities between the moral syntax of Randianism and of fascism become clear.”

So if you just ignore the fact that Rand is talking about individuals, while fascism is talking about sacrificing the individual for the good of the race, they're basically saying the same thing. Right.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's get this out of the way first: these are linked essays, not a sustained treatise. They are snapshots of the individuals whose thinking sustains conservative political theory and, as such, present Robin moments of capture: to see the scintillating pulse of a consistent vein: the reactions of power.

More intelligent people than me will give better appraisals than I, but I can say confidently that these essays run a narrow gamut: they are uniformly excellent and well-written; they take up themes that appear minor, at times, but have the accretionary effect that sustains Robin's critical contentions; and, best of all, they maintain a clear and healthy relationship with historical context and contemporary relevance. Throughout the whole and in part because of his own principled political views, Robin maintains respect for the claims made by the tradition he trains his eyes on, although this comes at a sharp cost to those adherents whose legacies are simply ridiculous, as is the case most spectacularly with Ayn Rand -- this essay deserves special attention. There aren't many writers as lucid as Robin on the subject of American and, occasionally, English conservatism. This book is a gem.

[Christian Holub · Rating 4 out of 5]

First book of 2018 down the hatch! I've been hearing about this book for awhile, but I'm glad I waited until the new edition came out, incorporating the rise of President Trump into Robin's theory of conservatism. I gotta say, Robin's explanation (that conservative politics always arise out of a counter-revolutionary impulse, and borrow left-wing tactics and ideals in order to reconstruct the hierarchy that liberation movements seek to overthrow) is pretty convincing, especially here amidst the Trump era. For anyone who bemoans the lack of "good Republicans" or "sensible conservatives," I highly recommend reading this. It'll really help you understand the world around us.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent interpretation of the rise of Conservatism and how the internal contradictions of its own tenets lead to Trump being viewed as a viable candidate. The genius of Conservativism is to create a populist movement that seeks to validate the hierarchy of power- and money-rich elite who rule over them, as "traditional values"—values that also tend to disenfranchise women, people of color, etc.

[Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

An alternative definition of conservatism framed around its attitude toward power. Robin says “I use the words conservative, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary interchangeably” as “all conservatives are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary" and that “racism, populism, violence, and a pervasive contempt for custom, convention, law, institutions, and established elites” are “constitutive elements of conservatism, dating back to its origins in the European reaction against the French Revolution.” Reactionism isn't a reflexive power grab but rather "begins from a position of principle — that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others — and then recalibrate that principle in light of a democratic challenge from below.” It also involves a dualistic worldview (“Conservatives thrive on a world filled with mysterious evil and unfathomable hatreds, where good is always on the defensive and time is a precious commodity in the cosmic race against corruption and decline") and a positive relationship with violence, at least in theory, if not in reality (“Far from being saddened, burdened, or vexed by violence, the conservative has been enlivened by it”). Being “adventurous, fanatical, populist, ideological” isn’t a recent decline of conservatism. Conservative movements always saw these features as its “virtues.” As such, Robin finds Trump “entirely legible as both a conservative and a Republican,” meaning it made sense to him that Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination.

Twentieth-century American conservatism had “serial triumphs over communism, workers, African Americans, and to some degree women” and seemed to have no further goals, which implied that it would decline unless the left gave it something new to fight. “Conservatism is about power besieged and power protected.…If power is to achieve the distinction the conservative associates with it, it must be exercised, and there is no better way to exercise power than to defend it against an enemy from below.” Robin argues: "Far from telling ‘people what they don’t like to hear,’ as he [Justice Scalia] claimed, he [Scalia] told 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." Trumpism is a revival of racism in politics. Robin notes that, under Trump’s presidency, “the Republican Party, despite its control of all three elected branches of the federal government, consistently fail[s] — at least thus far — to advance its agenda with regard to healthcare, taxes, and spending,” demonstrating its continued “weakness and incoherence” of which Trump “is its leading symptom”. Robin's chapter on Trump focuses on the man's character flaws and the mystery of why he is appealing to evangelical Christians who have historically rejected politicians with similar public image problems.

This 2018 edition amends the 2011 book that originally had "Sarah Palin" instead of Donald Trump in the subtitle. To create this new edition, Robin says he cut four chapters on war and added three on economic theory. Economic theory is not my personal cup of tea, but Robin's arguments are nuanced and well written and should appeal to many.

In trying to understand conservatism, Robin focuses on “the demarche," that is, what they say they want to march backwards to regain, "and the political ideas — variously called conservative, reactionary, revanchist, counterrevolutionary — that grow out of and give rise to it.” He defines conservatism as “a meditation on — and theoretical rendition of — the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” Conservatives do not always want to conserve existing culture. “All conservatism begins with loss," as Andrew Sullivan put it at the beginning of The Conservative Soul, and Robin adds: “The chief aim of the loser is not — and indeed cannot be — preservation or protection. It is recovery and restoration.” If conservatives are to adhere to their own narrative “that the left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending on who’s counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation,” then they “must declare war against the culture as it is" and perceive themselves "as the voice of the outsider.” Dinesh D’Souza explained this as a requirement to be “philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical.” Thus conservatism, Robin says, is about wanting a power shift:

“For the conservative, equality portends more than a redistribution of resources, opportunities, and outcomes — though he certainly dislikes these, too. What equality ultimately means is a rotation in the seat of power.
The conservative is not wrong to construe the threat of the left in these terms.”

I learned about this book from a great forty-minute episode dated May 15, 2018 on Chris Hayes' podcast "Why Is This Happening?" in which he interviewed Corey Robin. Whether or not you're sold on Robin's book, I recommend listening to the podcast audio. Introducing his guest, Hayes says: "So Corey Robin's point is that conservatism from the very beginning hasn't been about limited government, hasn't been about individual liberty, hasn't been about freedom, hasn't been about restraint, hasn't been about prudential approaches to risk; it's been about fundamental opposition to movements that seek to restructure who has power in society, particularly from the bottom up. It has been a reaction to movements of liberation that seek to undo hierarchy." Robin explains his reading of Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British statesman, as having offered a new kind of defense of hierarchy using "this extravagant language that very often mimics, in a really unsettling way, the very revolution that it's opposing." Today, conservatives' feeling of loss of power and status is real — "you wouldn't have a Right if that experience weren't real" — however, "it doesn't bubble up from the bottom," but originates rather as an ideological message that elites feed to the poorer majority (especially to white people) as an invitation to join the conservative movement, one that is often well received. Trump's public self-contradictory statements do not injure him politically because "the whole apparatus of conservatism has always been oriented around that hostility to reason, that hostility to factual fidelity, because that was the whole apparatus of counterrevolutionary thought....There's always been a real hostility to the world as it is. 'We, the Right, are going to imagine a different world and create it.'" Trump offers a "vulgarized" example. And he argues that today's Right is weak for several reasons: first, because they already won their major economic and racial battles and there's nothing left for them to do; second, because today's politicians haven't had to come to their ideology as real underdogs (as, perhaps, Reagan did during his formative years) but rather have simply had it prepackaged and handed to them from their recent predecessors; third, because they (thankfully) aren't interested in violent domestic tactics to accomplish racist agendas (as indicated by the selection of Trump, a man who has great personal experience in lawsuits). They have a story without a project.

(I also recently read Stephen Mansfield's Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him and Katherine Stewart's The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children, both of which indirectly support the idea that the Religious Right doesn't currently have a significant political project. Mansfield talks about how evangelical leaders want to repeal the Johnson Amendment which currently prevents them from endorsing political candidates in their churches, a change that most congregants probably don't even want. Stewart talks about an organized effort to proselytize in public elementary schools, an activity that does set up a "culture clash" between secularism and religion that puts many evangelical Christians in a reactionary frame of mind but doesn't have an obvious political agenda or ideology of its own.)

The risk of this political weakness of the Right is that it creates a "vacuum" for a new Bannonesque fascism to take hold. If the left wants to win long-term, Robin suggests, it should seize not upon Trump's character but on the right's failure to run the country like a business.

This explanation is compelling to me, though I recognize it is a vast simplification, and I would be interested in reasoned challenges or added nuance.

[Sam Whitehill · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of reactionary ideas from Burke to Trump. Many think of conservativism as a cautious defense of the tried and true, but Robin shows that most defenders of the old regime actually despise it as much as the revolutionaries they oppose. Conservatives would rather remake and reestablish the privileges and power that the rabble aim to topple. One way to do so is to democratize privilege: every man a king in his own domain. Hierarchy and inequality are packaged as goods that allow us to stay in our lane as long as there’s someone beneath us to spit on. The first edition of this book was written before Trump’s rise to power, but it perfectly applies to his rule and describes his appeal.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

For book club (somehow I’m now only in one book club) we picked Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, a book I have heard good things about and have been vaguely intending to read for several years now.

Robin’s main argument is that conservatism, as a political movement, isn’t really about tradition, or incrementalism, or even resistance to change per se, or any of the other things one could use the term small-c “conservative” for in everyday language. Instead, the thing that unites basically all of conservative thought since the French Revolution is an active defense of hierarchies that are perceived (rightly or wrongly, although usually at least somewhat rightly) as under threat. Conservatives believe that some people are just better than other people and are eager to retain some aspect of political life–the battlefield, the market, the monarchy–as a proving ground not just for some people to show off that they more skills or to accomplish more than other people (that, after all, would lead to a politics of trying to ensure a level playing field), but for the strong to dominate the weak. Robin argues that conservatives are largely concerned with “the private life of power,” which is why they tend to react hugely when oppressed groups make even very modest demands–the notion that their lessers have the right to speak at all upends their sense of the proper order of things and raises the specter of uppity backchat in all areas of life. He also argues that the central challenge of modern conservatism, as opposed to the actual traditionalism of old politics, is that they have to make elitism popular and, in a sense, democratized, in order to be competitive in mass politics–which they do with an arsenal of rhetorical and psychological tricks that Robin walks us through.

The book is structured as a bunch of more or less discrete essays on this theme, each profiling different key players in the conservative movement. The first part of the book concerns classic conservative theoreticians, like Edmund Burke and Nietzsche; the second part concerns figures of more immediate and recent impact on American conservatism in particular. One thing that was noticeable to me was the way the tone changes from discussing long-dead European guys that we only know through their writings to the essays that focus on more recent plagues on American politics–the profiles of Ayn Rand, Antonin Scalia, and Donald Trump are more overtly sneering and editorial, framing them less as formidable opponents because they are wrong but smart than as formidable opponents because they are wrong and dumb but cunning and also coddled by an American political culture that is far too willing to let them get away with their shit. Burke was “brilliant” but Scalia was just surrounded by people too polite to talk about him as nastily as he talked about them. The result is that the earlier chapters are more informative but the later chapters are more cathartic.

I’m excited to talk about this on Sunday and hope that I can put my brain back into my ears by then. This was maybe not the thing I would have chosen to read while recuperating from whatever I’ve been sick with all week if I were not on a deadline, but as far as having to read theory while huddling your aching joints under a weighted blanket and regretting that you can’t put the weighted blanket on your mandibles too goes, it was eminently readable! There were only a couple of words that I should have looked up earlier than I did (my man really loves the term “agonistic”), and overall I found myself engaged enough to almost forget how crappy I felt, which is fairly impressive for nonfiction.

Originally posted at The psychoanalytical is political.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this collection of thematically-linked essays in the week that preceded the 2020 presidential election. I'm writing this review just days after Joe Biden's inauguration, a little over a week after Donald Trump became the only president to be impeached twice, and a little more than two weeks since the Jan 6, 2021 Capitol coup, in which a mob that was part cosplaying yahoo and part violent, white supremacist paramilitary - at the urging, incredibly, of the President of the United States - attempted to overthrow our lawful government by force. By every indication, only chance and incompetence prevented this national disgrace from devolving into a horrorshow.

On the day following the riot, I was listened to the Talking Feds legal podcast and there was hopeful talk about how this shocking incident might provoke a return to traditional conservatism. While I have considered myself no friend to conservatism on the whole, I was certainly one of those people who liked to tut about the devolution of the Republican party. "These Trumpist rascals," I would fulminate (All right,I admit it -I just wanted to use the word fulminate) are no conservatives!" As though that were something any decent person would want to be.
Because, as Corey Robin very convincingly argues, conservatives have always been this way: cruel, entitled, hysterical, intellectually incoherent wack jobs.

Conservatism, as we understand the term today, began with reaction to news of the French Revolution and specifically with the speeches and essays of the Anglo-Irish politician, Edmund Burke. Burke was an arriviste, an ambitious upstart who yearned to be accepted by a ruling class that he simultaneously idolized and despised. He laments the passing of the ancien regime, which he nevertheless characterizes as "sluggish, inert, and timid" and no match for the "invasions of ability" from below. I couldn't help but think about contemporary Trumpist rhetoric, which envisions the political left as comprising folks who are at once tearful, sensitive "snowflakes," and terrifyingly disciplined anarchist warriors ready to storm the castle for non-binary bathrooms.

Robin examines the ideas of other notable theorists of the right, including the Savoyard monarchist Joseph de Maistre, Nietzsche, and Antonin Scalia. They all, he maintains, essentially argue for the same thing. "All conservatism begins with loss," Robin quotes Andrew Sullivan. Conservatism is an eternal lament for a lost Eden of hierarchy. A conservative doesn't love tradition or law or good husbandry, despite his ideas about himself. He loves the pecking order and he'll take any amount of shit from above as long as he's allowed to send some downhill. This was the heartbreaking insight of The Reactionary Mind that finally enabled me to understand what has happened to our country, why we have deliberately chosen to head back into the darkness.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5.

Books that attempt to cover as wide a concept as "conservatism" are bound to please some and annoy others; those on the left (Corey Robin himself being one of them) may read 'The Reactionary Mind' with pleasure, nodding along to Robin's excoriations of key conservative figures, while those on the right will no doubt offer their own vociferous protestations. Ideology is much like a religion; both ideology and religion orient our lives, values, and actions. As a Christian, I can rightly hold up the teachings of Jesus, the social advocacy of the Pietists, abolitionists, and ministers involved in the civil rights movement, but along with claiming August Hermann Francke, William Wilberforce, and Martin Luther King Jr., I also have to acknowledge that professing Christians have subjugated other races, allied with strongmen, and been guilty of gross hypocrisy (even IF I want to insist these did not practice "true Christianity"). When it comes to conservatism, I would personally balk at being associated with Ayn Rand and Donald Trump, but it can be hard to pick and choose one's ideological bedfellows, especially when the bed is as wide as "conservative" and not something narrower like "paleoconservative" or "libertarian." I suspect conservative readers of 'The Reactionary Mind' will see their own positions held by some but not all of the figures presented in this book.

For instance, one of Robin's key claims is that conservatives are desperately seeking to maintain power and ensure the continuance of hierarchy. This is of course a complicated question; what a liberal might regard as an aggressive striving to preserve power could be to a conservative an attempt to continue an established tradition. Robin does rightly analyze the intimacy between capitalism and the right but the left is often guilty of its own machinations to create hierarchy. This has been witnessed in the divide between urban, educated, tech-savvy liberal elites and the "uneducated" and the rural working poor. Whereas liberals seek to transcend all obstacles in the individual's path, conservatives are more content, not with a strict hierarchy per se, but with a sober acknowledgment that some people may not be suited to white-collar fields of work and might thrive better in a different line of work such as the trades.

Near the end, Robin simply gets contemptuous, particularly against Rand, Scalia, and Trump. I would not find much affinity between myself and Rand and Trump is an embarrassment to the office, but Robin's tone becomes that of a tabloid "gotcha!" journalist and not a nuanced and perceptive scholar writing for a university press.

[La Central · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Trazar una historia del pensamiento conservador, intelectual, desde Edmund Burke hasta Donald Trump puede parecer imposible, dada la naturaleza del actual inquilino de la Casa Blanca. Sus contradicciones, su doble faceta de guerrero con incontinencia verbal y hombre de negocios de dudoso éxito, puede parecer un accidente histórico, alguien que improvisa, irreflexivo. Un modelo de político que, en general, parece ajeno a la derecha tradicional. Corey Robin nos demuestra que no lo es en absoluto, ya que la tradición conservadora nunca ha sido sobria y comedida, poco amiga de aventuras inciertas que pongan en riesgo una supuesta estabilidad social basada en la tradición.

Robin lo tiene claro: el punto de partida es la Revolución Francesa. O, más exactamente, la reacción en contra que suscita el pensar que uno puede perder el poder y como recuperarlo. Así, el autor nos describe a un movimiento activo, que aprende de la izquierda revolucionaria y que desdeña a los perezosos, un grupo de insurgentes que se rebelan ante la pasividad aristocrática y el inmovilismo, una foto de grupo que incluye a De Maistre, Hobbes, Rand, Oakeshott, Hayek, entre otros, y hasta el propio Trump. Y sí, resulta muy convincente. Y estremecedor." Oriol Pastor

[Frank Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not unenlightening, but as the subtitle reads 'Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump', I was expecting to read a book about the history and development of conservatism from the French Revolution to the present. However, as Robin points out in his preface, the structure of the book is 'episodic rather than strictly historical.' But if you leave a gap between Burke and Hayek, this is putting it very mildly. Like, how do you even justify using 'Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump' as a subtitle?

Some of the essays are really tedious too. Some of them are just dozens of pages of Robin throwing a whole bunch of cherry-picked quotes at us that never really prove the general point about conservatism he's making, just about the handful of conservative thinkers he's quoting in particular.

And I'm kind of sorry to say this, because I've always liked Robin as a tweeter, blogger, and political commentator in general, but this book, to me, was a huge disappointment.

[Shima · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book’s central premise—that conservatism is fundamentally a defense of hierarchy, not tradition, and that its waves can be traced as backlashes to left-wing emancipation movements—is brilliant and convincingly argued. Robin weaves history, philosophy and political analysis with depth, though the writing can be dense and at times difficult to get through. The final chapter on Trump hasn’t aged well; it misreads him as a passing phenomenon rather than the political force we now know he represents. That section needs a full rewrite to reflect what Trumpism became and is. Otherwise, this book remains a very important contribution to modern political analysis and has completely changed how I view conservative movements.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entirely worth a re-read. The author does a great job of providing not a history of conservative politicians (which you could get anywhere), but a history of the philosophy of conservatism, and the ways in which the underlying tendencies of conservatism (belief in a ruling class defined and justified by natural ability or struggle) expresses itself throughout history.

[Jonathan Jalbert]

Pretty sure "Mike Chamberlain" is an AI...

[Matas Maldeikis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Apie nieką.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provocative account of modern conservatism as a revolutionary project against equality, not, as commonly though, a philosophy of pragmatism and incrementalism. I see where he's going here, but I'm not fully on board.

For one thing, the theory has an impossibly broad scope. Robin writes, "I treat the right as a unity, a coherent body of theory and practice that transcends the divisions so often emphasized by scholars and pundits." In doing so, he lumps together historical figures with vastly different political positions--from an ur-conservative like Burke to a progressive like T. Roosevelt, from an outright fascist like Schmitt to a committed democrat like Churchill. What's important to Robin is that each of these figures endorsed, at some point, anti-egalitarian revanchism. But it's not as if "divisions" between figures like Schmitt and Churchill--who had decidedly different takes on, among other things, genocidal authoritarianism--are mere pedantry.

Such a blunt instrument has limited application when moving from theory to practice, ideas to history. How to categorize the Reconstruction Republicans, for example? On the one hand, they effectively advanced the cause of emancipation and egalitarianism--eradicating slavery and expanding the franchise to Black men. On the other, they served as soldiers for the "captains of industry," lauded by Robin's conservatives, thereby enacting a different kind of inequality--between the haves and have-nots.

The book does draw out something important. Foundational thinkers of the right from Burke to Scalia used philosophical and rhetorical conceits from their adversaries--the revolutionaries--in their defense of traditional social order. But even that has its limits. The problem is this counter-revolutionary "alchemy" doesn't strike other conservatives as particularly conservative: "Orthodox custodians of the old regime often mistake the counterrevolutionary for the opposition. They can't grasp the alchemy of his argument. All they sense is what's there--a newfangled way of thinking that sounds dangerously like the revolutionary's--and what's not there: the traditional justification for authority." So who, other than Robin, gets to decide which one is the conservative?

Still, worth the read. While not fully baked, Robin's ideas do have a spring to them. And no book with the following zinger about Scalia should be overlooked:

"[R]ules and laws had a particular frisson for him. Where others look to them for stabilizing checks or reassuring supports, Scalia saw exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers."

[Rich Uncle Pennybags · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robin's basic thesis is that the common denominator and animating principle of all the disparate conservative movements is a desire to either restore or protect some form of privilege. He argues this well, although I would not say definitively. But what I most liked about this book is the way it goes back through the history of conservative thought to show how the various ideas we think of as part of modern American conservatism (e.g., evangelical Christianity, free-market ideology, miltarism, defense of inherited wealth, a modern-day social Darwinism, a defense of individual liberty) are, far from being naturally harmonious, actually in conflict with each other, and only have been made to appear otherwise through the heroic efforts of conservative thinkers. I found it particularly striking how many conservative thinkers heaped scorn upon Christianity because its version of morality was, to their way of thinking, namby-pamby nonsense. These tensions aren't dead -- conservative critics roundly mocked John Kasich for defending his decision to expand Medicaid in explicitly Christian terms (Kasich said, "When I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor").

Robin is also indubitably successful in arguing one of his secondary claims -- that, contrary to their own self-image, far from being stolid and unchanging, conservative thinkers have been endlessly malleable and adoptable to the zeitgeist in the service of their political goals. He cites, for instance, Phyllis Schafly's defense of the role of a "traditional" housewife in the language of women's rights. More recently, he cites the rise of terms like "ideological diversity," which co-opt ideas from the left in service of a right-wing agenda. A question he doesn't examine that I think is of interest is why the right's attempts to co-opt left-wing language have been so successful while the left has ended up being co-opted by the terms themselves, twisting itself in knots and writing thin gruel about how the death penalty should be abolished to increase economic efficiency.

[Ryan Fohl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This helps to make sense of all the contradictions in conservatism. Preserving power not traditions, a high value on freedom but only for a select few, and violence for violence’s sake. The writing was dry and academic. More philosophy than I expected. Long excerpts of Burke and Nietzsche which are boring. I’m glad he read all that stuff so I don’t have to. It’s important to know the enemy. It’s interesting that the reactionary fights ideas from the Left while also co-opting those same ideas.

“Neither is Conservatism a makeshift fusion of Capitalist, 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.”

“The conservative speaks for a special type of victim, one who has lost something of value, as opposed to the wretched of the Earth, whose chief complaint is that they never had anything to lose.”



What I learned: Justice Scalia thought that overturning state laws banning gay sex was a slippery slope to masturbation. That’s how out of touch with the culture he could be. A-list Hollywood actors are fans of Ayn Rand. Actors like Angelina Jolie and Rob Lowe. Ayn Rand got a college education thanks to the Russian revolution which opened universities to women and Jews, and made tuition free.

[Meridian Taussig · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave this book a lower rating because it was hard to read! I did not finish it though I'm glad to have tried tackling it! Things I learned that were fascinating: Conservatism seems to have been first defined during the French Revolution. Edmund Burke allowed that men had a great many rights - to the fruits of their labor, their inheritance, education and more, but the one right he refused to concede was "...the share of power and authority ...in the management of the state." He believed that equality ultimately meant a rotation in the seat of power - not a replacement of those in power. Victimhood was a talking point of the right ever since Burke decried the mob's treatment of Marie Antoinette - conservatism speaks to those who have lost something - land, privilege of white men, authority of the husband, rights of a factory owner. The aim is recovery and restoration. Conservatives believe that the liberal obsession with the rule of law disables American power and that the events of 9/11 were a result of this loss of power-the peace and prosperity of the Clinton years weakened American society. Conservatives, through the belief that they have or will loose their power, need a catalyst to fight against.
My apologies for my meager attempt to digest some of this book!

[Christoffer Garland · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really stimulating book in a bunch of ways. Corey Robin makes you see conservatism afresh. Robin diverges from many stale accounts by treating conservatism seriously as a creed and engaging with the substance of conservative thought (often treated as a contradiction in terms) from Burke and Maistre, through Nietzsche and Hayek to Buckley and Trump. Taking the journey chronologically and with great prose style he really pulls back the draperies to reveal the interesting, creative and quite often disturbing aspects of conservatism. Robin thereby shows that there is deep continuity between the many versions of conservatism that have been on offer throughout the last couple of centuries without collapsing into ahistorical essentialism. The breaks and continuities are woven together with great explanatory power. The last chapter on Trump stood out as an intelligent depiction of Trump in his first term and for the marked difference between the disorganised and confused Republican Party described there and the cultish movement painfully familiar to us today. In a conjecture like what we are living through in this moment this book is a great place to start to understand the many seemingly paradoxical elements of the reactionary mind.

[Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know that I necessarily loved this book, or even had a great time reading it on balance. But I it was certainly an important and necessary read that I do not regret. The structure effectively went:

Part 1: Thesis
Part 2: Philosophy/Political Theory Analysis
Part 3: Thesis and Theory Application to modern american politics

I enjoyed the first two essays of Part 1 quite a bit. Part 2 was fine. I'm not very familiar with that type of writing and analysis, so it was a bit more difficult to read than expected. However, I thought analyzing historical European conservative thought was pretty interesting all things considered. It certainly helped add and support his initial thesis, as intended. Though part of me couldn't help but feel a little tired and bored of his prose at times. Part 3 I loved. This is where he brought everything together and became much more incendiary in tone towards the right. It was more explicit in its analysis and overall felt more applicable than some of the tiring verbiage analysis in prior essays. I found the Ayn Rand, Scalia, and Trump essays to be the best.