The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Corey Robin. 2011.
Corey Robin’s book is a collection of his essays and hence does not provide a straight-line analysis explaining conservatism. Part one focuses first on historical topics like the French Revolution, American slavery, Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, and the rise of Thatcher and Reagan. Then it focuses on intellectuals like Hobbes, Burke, Maistre, Nietzsche, Buckley, Rand, and Scalia. Part two explores the linkage of conservatism and violence.
I did not find the book particularly enlightening as an explanation for the origins of conservative thinking and behavior. I don’t think modern conservatives choose their politics from reading earlier philosophers and intellectuals. I think their conservatism comes from the interaction of their social and economic context with inherited personality traits like dominance, territoriality, and level of empathy. Reportedly political preference is up to 40% genetically determined. In my view, books like The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff are more to the point for this subject.
Nevertheless, I did find that this book provides many satisfying quotes, at least for those with my political persuasion. Some of these quotes are listed below:
Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism have much in common. Both exhibit scant sympathy for the casualties of economic progress. (John Gray)
That is what conservatism is: a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.
More than the reforms themselves, it is the assertion of agency by the subject class that vexes their superiors.
Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.
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.
“The real object” of the French Revolution, Burke told Parliament is “to break all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination.”
Conservatism (is) the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere.
Reaction…begins from a position of principle that…some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.
The conservative defends particular order—hierarchical, often private regimes of rule—on the assumption, in part, that hierarchy is order. “Order cannot be had,” declared Johnson, “but by subordination.”
Conservatism is about power besieged and power protected. It waxes in response to movement from below and wanes in response to their disappearance…”
For that is what the capitalist is: not a Midas of riches but a ruler of men.
…Conservatism invariably arises in response to a threat to the old regime or after the old regime has been destroyed.
Conservatives are hostile to the goals of the left, particularly the empowerment of society’s lower castes and classes…
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. (Lee Atwater commenting on Nixon’s Southern Strategy)
Conservatism adapts and adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.
That is the task of right wing populism: to appeal to the mass without disrupting the power of elites or, more precisely, to harness the energy of the mass in order to reinforce or restore the power of elites.
Far from being an invention of the politically correct, victimhood has been a talking point of the right ever since Burke decried the mob’s treatment of Marie Antoinette. The conservative, to be sure, speaks for a special type of victim: one who has lost something of value, as opposed to the wretched of the earth.
…Conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.
…We’re still left with a puzzle about (Ayn) Rand: How could such a mediocrity, not just a second-hander but a second-rater, exert such a continuing influence on the culture at large?
What is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood.
Making privilege palatable to the masses is a permanent project of conservatism.
…Conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom. It threatens the submission of the subordinate to the superior.
In the United States, the free market has generated a long economic boom from which the majority of Americans has hardly benefited.
After the Soviet empire fell…Western free-marketeers applied shock therapy to formerly Communist countries with disastrous results.
Watching Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF in Russia, he (John Gray) could not help but see the free market as “a product of artifice, design and political coercion.”
I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency—love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes. (Edward Luttwak)
He (Scalia) tells the power elite exactly what they want to hear, that they are superior and that they have a seat at the table because they are superior.
When we talk about America’s victory in the Cold War, we are talking about countries like Guatemala, where Communism was fought and defeated by means of the mass slaughter of civilians.
Ken Feinberg, head of the September 11 Victims’ Compensation Fund, announced that families of victims would receive compensation for their loss based in part on the salary each victim was earning–$300,000 for a $10,000 a year grandmother and $3,870,000 for a Wall Street trader.
David Cole theorized a dual justice system in America: Granting maximal rights to all citizens would have a high cost in terms of safety, he observed, while denying those rights would have a high cost in terms of freedom. So what does America do? It does both: It formally grants rights to all, but systematically denies them to blacks and the poor.
…Hierarchy, with its twin requirements of submission and domination.
Since 9/11, many have complained, and rightly so, about the failure of conservatives—or their sons and daughters—to fight the war on terror themselves.
…The most visible effort of the GOP since the 2010 midterm election has been to curtail the rights of employees and the rights of women.
Modern conservatism came onto the scene of the twentieth century in order to defeat the great social movements of the left. As far as the eye can see, it has achieved its purpose.
As long as there are social movements demanding greater freedom and equality, there will be a right to counter them.