Corey Robin's Blog, page 25

Clarence Thomas’s Straussian Moment: The Question of Slavery and the Founding, and a question for my political theory and intellectual history friends

A question for the political theorists, intellectual historians, and maybe public law/con law experts. The question comes at the very end of this post. Forgive the build-up. And the potted history: I’m writing fast because I’m hard at work on this Clarence Thomas book and am briefly interrupting that work in order to get a reading list.

In the second half of the 1980s, Clarence Thomas is being groomed for a position on the Supreme Court, or senses that he’s being groomed. He’s the head of the EEOC in the Reagan Administration and decides to beef up on his reading in political theory, constitutional law, and American history. He hires two Straussians—Ken Masugi and John Marini—to his staff on the EEOC. Their assignment is to give him a reading list, which they do and which he reads, and to serve as tutors and conversation partners in all things intellectual, which also they do.

These are West Coast Straussians. Both Masugi and Marini hail from the Claremont orbit in California (Masugi was in the think tank, Marini was a student). Unlike the East Coast Straussians—the Blooms and Pangles, who champion a Nietzschean Strauss who’s overtly celebratory of the American Founding but is secretly critical of natural law, natural rights, and the Framers—these West Coast Straussians follow Harry Jaffa, arguing that the American Founding is the consummation of ancient virtue in a modern idiom.

But what’s also true of these West Coast Straussians is that they are intensely interested in race. Jaffa’s great work is on Lincoln’s battle with Stephen Douglas over the question of slavery, and many of the West Coast Straussians dedicate themselves, in the 1970s and 1980s, to developing a view of the Constitution that, while acknowledging its embeddedness in slavery, nevertheless sees it as being redeemed by the egalitarian promise and natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence.

This, of course, is an old struggle in American constitutionalism. Figures like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips saw the Constitution as inherently a pro-slavery document (ironically, agreeing with Chief Justice Roger Taney); Garrison said it was “dripping…with human blood.” Figures like Lincoln, Charles Sumner, and the later Frederick Douglass dissented from that view, seeing the possibilities of an anti-slavery Constitution.

The West Coast Straussians take up the latter view. Interestingly, many of them are at the forefront, in the academy (or at least among white political scientists), of introducing African-American thinkers—Douglass, DuBois, King, even Malcolm X—to the canon of American political thought. Consider, for example, this classic anthology from 1970, though as Jason Frank pointed out to me on Facebook, it’s edited by Herbert Storing, who wasn’t a West Coast Straussian. I’ve heard from not a few political scientists who got their undergraduate degrees or PhDs in the 1960s and 1970s that their first encounter with African-American political thought was in the classroom of one of these Straussians.

So these are Thomas’s tutors in the late 1980s. They lead Thomas to a natural law interpretation of the Constitution, in which the various passages of the Constitution should be interpreted (redeemed) by the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence.

This, needless to say, is a somewhat heterodox view, not just on the left but also on the right. It gets Thomas into a lot of hot water during his Senate confirmation hearings—before the revelations of Anita Hill—as Joe Biden, chair of the Judiciary Committee, grills Thomas on his view that a strict defense of property rights, for example, is justified not so much by the literal words of the constitutional text but by the natural law philosophy that is said to inspire the text. (Political theory folks will be excited to learn that Thomas’s citing of Steve Macedo in various speeches plays a critical role in these contretemps. Biden thought he had Thomas in a gotcha, but it turned out to be a gotcha for Biden. But that’s another story for another day.)

Up until this weekend, I hadn’t planned to do much with this natural law moment in Thomas’s development. For the simple reason that once he’s on the Court, I see little evidence of its presence in his opinions. Despite what some scholars have claimed, I don’t find many references to natural law thinking in Thomas’s judgments, and I don’t think the real action of his opinions lies anywhere near that.

But a conversation with my friend Seth Ackerman convinced me that I should deal with this moment in my book. Not because it has any lasting impact on Thomas’s jurisprudence but for two other reasons.

First, because it shows that Thomas’s first sustained engagement with constitutional law, after law school, is motivated/inspired/animated by a single, solitary question: How is it possible to reconcile a document that is so imbricated with the institution of slavery with a fidelity to that document? From the very get-go, the most important, most pressing issue for Thomas, when it comes to the Constitution, is the question of race and slavery. Needless to say, there aren’t many recent Supreme Court justices one can say that about.

What the natural law episode reveals is precisely what Thomas told Biden during his confirmation hearings:

My purpose [in resorting to natural law] was this….You and I are sitting here in Washington, D.C., with Abraham Lincoln or with Frederick Douglass, and from a theory, how do we get out of slavery? There is no constitutional amendment. There is no provision in the Constitution. But by what theory? Repeatedly Lincoln referred to the notion that all men are created equal. And that was my attraction to, or beginning of my attraction to this approach.

Second, Thomas had two sustained periods of engagement with conservative thought. The first was in the mid 1970s, when he read Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics, and became fascinated with the question of slavery, capitalism, and black freedom. The impact of that moment over time was made evident two decades later, in a fascinating profile Jeffrey Rosen wrote for The New Yorker, in which Thomas recounted for Rosen his intimate knowledge of books like Roll, Jordan, Roll and Time on the Cross, which are classics of the debate around the relationship between slavery and capitalism. The second was in the late 1980s, in these tutorials with the West Coast Straussians.

What’s common in both moments is the presence and centrality of slavery and race. In both instances, Thomas’s engagement with the right is entirely refracted through the question of race.

And so at last we come to my question: What are the best works (articles or books) on the salience of the race question (particularly the relationship between slavery and the Constitution) in the work of these West Coast Straussians? Feel free to answer in the comments or email me at corey.robin@gmail.com.

Politics in this country has never felt the way the it does now…

“The Vietnam War years were the most ‘politicized’ of my life. I spent my days during this war writing fiction, none of which on the face of it would appear to connect to politics. But by being ‘politicized’ I mean something other than writing about politics or even taking direct political action. I mean something akin to what ordinary citizens experience in countries like Czechoslovakia or Chile: a daily awareness of government as a coercive force, its continuous presence in one’s thoughts as far more than just an institutionalized system of regulations and controls. In sharp contrast to Chileans or Czechs, we hadn’t personally to fear for our safety and could be as outspoken as we liked, but this did not diminish the sense of living in a country with a government out of control and wholly in business for itself. Reading the morning New York Times and the afternoon New York Post, watching the seven and then the eleven o’clock TV news—all of which I did ritualistically—became for me like living on a steady diet of Dostoevsky. Rather than fearing for the well-being of my own kin and country, I now felt toward America’s war mission as I had toward the Axis goals in World War II. One even began to use the word ‘America’ as though it was the name not of the place where one had been raised to which one had a patriotic attachment, but of a foreign invader that had conquered the country and with whom one refused, to the best of one’s strength and ability, to collaborate. Suddenly America had turned into ‘them’—and with this sense of dispossession came the virulence of feeling and rhetoric that often characterized the anti-war movement.

…Of course there have been others as venal and lawless [as Richard Nixon] in American politics, but even a Joe McCarthy was more identifiable as human clay than this guy is. The wonder of Nixon (and contemporary America) is that a man so transparently fraudulent, if not on the edge of mental disorder, could ever have won the confidence and approval of a people who generally require at least a little something of the ‘human touch’ in their leaders. It’s strange that someone so unlike the types most admired in the average voter…could have passed himself off to this Saturday Evening Post America as, of all things, an American.”

—Philip Roth, 1974

Trump Everlasting

I’m glad I’m not a journalist. I don’t think I could handle the whiplash of the ever-changing story line, the way a grand historical narrative gets revised, day to day, the way it seems to change, week to week, often on a dime. Or a $1.5 trillion tax cut.

In my Guardian digest this week, I deal with the media’s memory, taxes, the state of the GOP, judges, sexual harassment, and leave you at the end with my assessment of where we are.

Here’s a preview:

Last week, after the victory of Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama’s senatorial election, the media began reporting that the Republican party was facing an epic disaster. Citing insider talk of a “political earthquake” and a “party in turmoil,” the Washington Post anticipated a Democratic takeover of Congress in 2018.

A year that began with dark premonitions of a fascist seizure of power, an autocrat’s total control of the state, seemed ready to end with sunny predictions of the Republican party losing one branch of the federal government to the opposition and a stalled right-wing agenda in Congress.

One week later, after the victory of the Republican tax cut, the media has changed its tune.

…

Like Trump, George W Bush lost the popular vote in 2000. Unlike Trump, Bush only won the Electoral College because of the US supreme court. Despite that added spice of illegitimacy, despite having smaller majorities in both houses of Congress (razor-thin in the Senate, almost razor-thin in the House), Bush still managed to push through massive tax cuts – and, unlike Trump, got 40 Democrats to vote with him. A full six months sooner than Trump did.

Cutting taxes is in the Republican DNA. Even an idiot can do it.

…

So that’s how we end 2017: on the one hand, a declining movement of the right, increasingly unpopular with the voters, trying to claim a long-term hold on power through the least democratic branch of government.

On the other hand, a rising movement of women and the left, trying to topple ancient and middle-aged injustices, one nasty man at a time.

You can continue reading here.

Moon Over Alabama: Elections and the left

My weekly digest for The Guardian, looking back on Tuesday’s Senate election in Alabama with the help of Brecht and Weill, Sheldon Wolin, Matt Bruenig, and Eddie Glaude.

Some excerpts:

Since Tuesday’s Senate election in Alabama, when the mild centrist Doug Jones defeated the menacing racist Roy Moore, social media has been spinning two tunes. Politicians tweeted Lynyrd Skyrnyrd’s Sweet Home, Alabama. Historians tweeted the 1934 classic Stars Fell on Alabama.

My mind’s been drifting to The Alabama Song. Not the obvious reference from The Doors/Bowie version – “Oh, show us the way to the next little girl” – but two other lines that recur throughout the song: “We now must say goodbye … I tell you we must die.”

It’s a lyric for the left, which can’t seem to let go of its sense of defeat, even when the right loses.

…

But the left doesn’t need to convince every last Republican of the error of their ways. It doesn’t need to put all Republican voters in the public square, forcing them to recant their beliefs. It doesn’t need Christian suasion, encouraging rightwingers to apologize and confess their sins.

In an electoral democracy, the way to break your opponents – especially opponents like these – is to demoralize them, to make them feel they are a small and isolated minority, that their cause is a loser.

On election day, the left needs to convince the right – not through voter suppression or intimidation but through rhetoric and speech – that their movement is going nowhere, so they shouldn’t either. That’s exactly what happened in Alabama, where “the biggest reason for the shift” in counties that voted for Trump last November going for Jones this December is that “GOP voters stayed home”, according to MCIMaps.

…

What black voters, particularly black women, have gotten instead is a lot of thank-yous. From liberals and Democrats, on Twitter and Facebook: thank you, black people, for saving “us” or America or democracy from “ourselves”.

It’s a weird move, with weird overtones. Rather than treating black people as political agents in their own right, acting in their own interest, rather than viewing black people as part of an inclusive movement of the left, the thank-you-note writers treat African Americans as if they were the indispensable helpmates of an addled white upper-middle class, a class that’s too harried, busy, or distracted to deal with the hassle of everyday life, the drudgery of daily upkeep, the housekeeping of democracy.

 Keep reading, there’s a lot more!

When it comes to domination—whether of race, class, or gender—there are no workarounds

Thomas Edsall says some frustrating, historically shortsighted things in this interview with Isaac Chotiner.

After calling for the Democrats to be more moderate, to trim on issues that divide the country—the presumption being that moderation in one party breeds moderation in the other or that moderation in one party checks the extremism of the other (we’ll come back to that)—Edsall brings up the infamous Boston busing battle of the 1970s. This exchange ensues:

Q: So what do you draw from the busing controversy then? What advice would you have given racial justice advocates in the 1970s?

A: The goal of school integration was a crucial and important one. The mechanism to achieve it—of pitting working-class whites against working-class blacks—was not the way to achieve it. Liberals in the 1970s should have struggled intensely for cross-county busing, and they should have tried to legislate that. Instead, all busing was done within single urban areas. It created extraordinary disruptions.”

Where to begin?

First, liberals did in fact push for cross-county busing. They were stopped dead in their tracks. By conservatives.

Cross-county busing, where you bus kids from the cities to the suburbs and vice versa, produced an infamous Supreme Court case, Milliken v. Bradley (1974), in which a 5-member majority of the Court (all Nixon appointees), ruled that the courts couldn’t order that kids be bused across district lines unless they could show that the suburbs and the city—or the state government—had maintained, through formal laws of segregation (de jure segregation), racially segregated school districts or what is called “dual systems” of education: one for whites, one for blacks. Such laws were fairly uncommon in the North in the postwar era.

There were many other ways that state and local governments in the North kept the suburbs white. As the plaintiffs in Milliken showed, and as Justices Douglass and Marshall pointed out in their dissents, state agencies in Michigan (the case came out of the Detroit metropolitan area) were involved in redlining, restrictive covenants, concentrating black neighborhoods in certain areas, and so forth. One of the mayors of Detroit’s surrounding white suburban ring had said, “Every time we hear of a Negro moving…in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire.” But the Court rejected that argument. So that was the end of the vision Edsall is talking about. Not because liberals didn’t try it, but because it was stopped by five Republican justices on the Supreme Court.

And while Edsall says liberals should have also pursued this vision legislatively, the facts of Milliken—where politicians in the North, Republicans and Democrats (the Dearborn mayor quoted above was a Democrat), were so actively involved in maintaining segregated schools—gives you an inkling why that never got off the ground.

Second, the notion that if the Court had approved the plan in Milliken, integration would have gone easier in the North, is questionable. The mere fact that the cross-county desegregation plan was opposed so strongly in the North should tell you something about the politics of these things. Edsall seems to believe that had liberals done cross-county busing, elite northern white liberals would have been participating in the same experience working-class whites were participating in. Instead, he says, they asked working-class whites in the cities—not elite white liberals in the suburbs—to do the work of desegregation.

Now, as a proposition of political morality, Edsall is absolutely right. And he’s also right that this is how busing should have been done. But Edsall is not making a moral claim; he’s making a strategic claim. That somehow the shared experience of busing across social classes would have softened the political blow. Because everyone’s participating, you get more buy-in.

Yet the very language Edsall uses belies the gauzy communitarianism of his vision. Elite white liberals, he says, bore “none of the costs” of busing. That’s true. But the fact that he uses the word “costs” indicates the depths of white hostility to integration, regardless of social class.

The notion that cross-county busing, across the urban/suburban divide, would have made things less rather than more explosive is fanciful. Whether you think whites moved to the suburbs in the postwar era because of race, the schools, crime, or property values, it’s hard to think how any of those factors would have produced a less ferocious battle if black kids were bused from the Bronx to northern Westchester (where I grew up) and white kids were bused from northern Westchester to the Bronx. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been done, but you can’t claim that the reason to have done it was that it would have massaged things politically.

(I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t an implicit political sociology behind this vision. Not Edsall’s per se—based on his shrewd reporting before the election, I definitely don’t believe he thinks this way—but among people in the media and elsewhere who might agree with his argument. A fair number of elite white journalists think wealthier whites in the professional classes are more liberal and socially tolerant. Perhaps the idea is had they been involved in this grand experiment of the 1970s more directly and personally, the forces of trickle-down morality would have made their way into working-class white communities.)

But the biggest problem with Edsall’s interview is the essential assumption that I already flagged: that moderation breeds moderation. Edsall has been pushing this argument, particularly when it comes to race, since the 1980s. And one could argue that he played a considerable role in shifting the Democratic Party’s positions to the center, beginning with the rise of the DLC and Bill Clinton. In the interview, Edsall cites Clinton positively—he knew how to “find middle ground”—and Obama—”he tended to be reasonable”—for these reasons.

But what has that moderation, that reasonableness, produced? Did the GOP get less moderate under Clinton, despite his move to the right on race and other matters? I think we know the answer to that.

And what about Obama, whose immigration policies Edsall praises? Obama took the border seriously, Edsall says, pushing hard on immigration enforcement. What did that do to the GOP? We now have a Republican Party adopting the most overtly anti-immigrant positions—and being led by the most anti-immigrant president—since the days of Johnson and Reed.

Edsall tries to blame this on Hillary Clinton not being as draconian as Obama was on immigration, but that merely sidesteps the issue. Obama’s attempt to meet the anti-immigrant sentiment of the Republican Party halfway did nothing to bring the Republican Party closer to the center—and nothing to avert the nomination and election of a candidate who took the positions Trump did.

When it comes to any program of the left—whether it’s racial or gender or class equality—there are no workarounds. Anyone who thinks you can eliminate domination, on whatever axis of social life, without a backlash and volatile resistance, is dreaming. The only way through it is through it.

If taxes are the thunder of world history, what kind of history did the GOP make this past week?

Schumpeter famously said that taxes are the “thunder of world history.” So what kind of history did the Republicans make this past week?

Here I am in The Guardian, answering that question with four takeaways on the GOP tax bill.

The piece is a kind of digest of some of my posting on social media this past week; increasingly as some of you have noted, I’m doing more of my posting on social media rather than on the blog. If you’re not on Facebook and/or Twitter—and who can blame you if you’re not?—you’ll have missed these posts, so The Guardian piece is a good digest to look out for.

When Libertarian Judges Rule

Prominent libertarian jurist Alex Kozinski has been accused of sexual harassment by six women, all of them former clerks or employees. One of the women is Heidi Bond. In a statement, Bond gives a fuller description of Judge Kozinski’s rule, sexual and non-sexual, in the workplace.

One day, my judge found out I had been reading romance novels over my dinner break. He called me (he was in San Francisco for hearings; I had stayed in the office in Pasadena) when one of my co-clerks idly mentioned it to him as an amusing aside. Romance novels, he said, were a terrible addiction, like drugs, and something like porn for women, and he didn’t want me to read them any more. He told me he wanted me to promise to never read them again.

“But it’s on my dinner break,” I protested.

He laid down the law—I was not to read them anymore. “I control what you read,” he said, “what you write, when you eat. You don’t sleep if I say so. You don’t shit unless I say so. Do you understand?”

The demands may seem peculiar, but the tyranny is typical. Employers control what workers read, when workers shit, all the time.

But Judge Kozinski has the added distinction of being one of the leading theoreticians of the First Amendment. And not just any old theorist but a libertarian theorist—he has a cameo in the film Atlas Shrugged: Part II—who claims that the First Amendment affords great protection to “commercial speech.”

Where other jurists and theorists claim that commercial speech—that is, speech that does “no more than propose a commercial transaction”—deserves much less protection than political or artistic speech, Kozinski has been at the forefront of the movement claiming that the First Amendment should afford the same levels of protection to commercial speech as it does to other kinds of speech. Because, as he put it in a pioneering article he co-authored in 1990:

In a free market economy, the ability to give and receive information about commercial matters may be as important, sometimes more important, than expression of a political, artistic, or religious nature.

And there you have it: Watching a commercial about asphalt? Vital to your well-being and sense of self. Deciding what books you read during your dinner break? Not so much.

Government regulations of advertising? Terrible violation of free speech. Telling a worker what she can read? Market freedom.

 

Trump and the Princeton Tory

Robert Kelner, the attorney for Former-National-Security-Advisor-For-A-Day Michael Flynn, just notified Trump’s people that Flynn will no longer be discussing Mueller’s investigation with them. People are taking this as a sign that Flynn is ready to cooperate with Mueller and tell all.

I hadn’t heard or thought of the name Robert Kelner in over 25 years. But when I checked, I discovered it’s the very same Rob Kelner I graduated with from Princeton in 1989. For some reason, that one “l” in Kelner always stuck with me. Kelner was a wiry, intense little guy, as I recall him, a College Republican who wrote for (and maybe helped found) a right-wing paper called The Sentinel, whose alums include Ramesh Ponnuru.

Kelner was one node in an extended network of Princeton conservatives I sometimes chatted with, one of the less intellectual but no less intelligent nodes, if memory serves. There were some super, self-consciously intellectual types in that crowd, so the competition was stiff. His profile says he won the Atwater Prize, which the Princeton politics faculty awards to the best senior thesis in poli sci. After he graduated Princeton, Kelner worked as Jack Kemp’s speechwriter for a couple of years. Then he did some time in Moscow, back during the early Yeltsin years. He’s now a member of the Federalist Society and teaches legal ethics at Georgetown.

People often ask me why I focus so much on the elite dimensions of conservatism, particularly in the Trump era, and why I insist on the continuities between the conservatism of the Reagan era and that of today. Kelner’s just one of many reasons why.

There’s a fascinating piece from 1989 in the Los Angeles Times on right-wing campus papers. It features a young Kelner, along with a young Marc Thiessen, a senior at Vassar who had graduated from the Taft School and would go on to serve as a speechwriter for George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, as part of this young, up-and-coming generation of conservatives at elite schools. It gives you a good flavor of their style and substance. Read it and ask yourself how much has changed.

 

I’ll be on The Leonard Lopate Show tomorrow—and here are a bunch of reviews and interviews

I’m going to be on The Leonard Lopate Show tomorrow, Wednesday, November 22, talking about the new edition of The Reactionary Mind. The show starts at noon, at least in New York. So while you’re readying for the Thanksgiving holiday, have a listen!

The book has begun to get reviews!

The inimitable Sarah Jones, one of my favorite journalists, gave it a thoughtful endorsement in The New Republic:

The book’s second edition, eagerly awaited, now swaps out Palin for the commander-in-chief.

Palin and Trump both demand some sort of unifying theory. How can it be that the party of Senator Ben Sasse—who enjoys a mostly-unearned reputation as a moderate—is also the party of Trump? The answer is even less difficult to discern than it was in 2011, yet the center-left seems befuddled by Trump, unable to describe his actions in any way more precise than in the mantra “this is not normal.”

The Trump presidency invited a re-evaluation of The Reactionary Mind: In 2016, a New Yorker headline called it “The Book That Predicted Trump,” while in March Bookforum recommended it as an “indispensable guide to how adeptly conservatives looked upon the age of Obama.” But the second edition is more truly a book for our time.

…

Robin’s new edition leaves Trump for the end, and builds inexorably up to his presidency through a combination of old material and newer essays….Robin’s second edition ties Burke’s conviction that the market, and the “monied men” who control it, should determine value to Nietzsche’s passionate attachment to the idea of an aristocratic, cultural taste-making class and both, eventually, to Trump.

In Salon, Paul Rosenberg had this to say:

Conservative intellectuals have led the way in denouncing Donald Trump as not a “true conservative.” Perhaps the most powerful rebuttal comes from the heavily revised second edition of political scientist Corey Robin’s book “The Reactionary Mind,”…

If the core of Robin’s argument remains unchanged from the first edition, the explication and implications are not. The new edition brings much deeper scrutiny to the economic side of conservatism, which Burke himself helped initiate (more on this below), including illustrations of internal tensions and ambiguities similar to those seen in Trump, who is the subject of the book’s concluding chapter. Trump’s contradictions and confusions may be more extreme, more outlandish, than those of most other prominent figures who have come before him, but they are not without precedent, as conservative intellectuals would like to pretend….

In this sense, Robin’s account challenges progressives as well. There have been recent progressive movements, he acknowledges, but they haven’t cohered to the point of scaring conservatives the way that Hobbes, Burke, Nietzsche, Hayek and even Antonin Scalia were scared by earlier movements.

…

In addition to these sorts of suggestions, there are others that cross over into different kinds of intellectual endeavors. Robin’s explanation of conservatism sheds a whole new light on the work of political scientists. His account helps provide a deeper explanation for why — as Grossman and Hopkins argue in “Asymmetric Politics” (Salon review here), the Republican Party is driven by conservatism as an ideological movement, in contrast to the Democratic Party, which they describe as a coalition of interest groups. In turn, the fragmented nature of that coalition helps provide a partial explanation for the weakness of the left Robin notes. That’s not to equate either party with left or right entirely — the messy world of party politics never works like that. But it does provide some insight into what’s been going on for the last 50 years or so of American party politics.

Another realm Robin’s work connects to is political psychology…

None of this proves anything more than tendencies and correlations, which is why Robin’s work based on close readings of classic conservative texts remains singularly important. Almost without exception, he is not imputing anything to conservatives that they have not said about themselves. But the clearer he manages to make the nature of conservatism, the more he makes it possible for other approaches to shed even further light, ask better questions and open more fruitful lines of inquiry. It’s why he deserves to be read carefully by people in multiple related fields.

Last, Damon Linker, a moderate centrist, had a more critical yet equally thoughtful take in The Week:

As a political centrist in a sharply polarized time, I’m sometimes asked by progressive friends to recommend contemporary conservatives they should read and wrestle with. Then there are the conservative friends who pose the equal and opposite question: Which writers on the left should I seek out to challenge my assumptions?

My answer is usually Corey Robin.

A blogger, essayist, and political science professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, Robin is the author of an erudite, bracing, and productively infuriating book about conservatives titled The Reactionary Mind.

…

Could Robin actually intend to draw continuities between such wildly disjunctive figures?

When skeptical readers opened the book, they found that he could and did exactly that….In the significantly revised second edition of the book that’s just been published by Oxford University Press, Robin has strengthened his case, rearranging the chapters and adding three new ones, including one on Donald Trump (who’s now replaced Palin in the subtitle)….

That few self-described conservatives will recognize themselves in this account doesn’t mean that Robin is wrong. Sometimes it takes the perspective of an outsider — and the sensibility of a synthesizer — to perceive certain foundational assumptions and motives buried deep within an ideology, and this is one of those cases. Robin marshals too much evidence from too many seemingly disparate writers and politicians to dismiss his case entirely. He’s identified something real and important that readers from all points on the political spectrum would do well to take seriously.

But not too seriously.

And then Linker gets into his criticisms.

Jon Wiener, the estimable historian of the US, did a brief interview with me, posing some tough questions for my thesis about Trump.

The interview I did with Dan Denvir, which I mentioned in an earlier post, has now been transcribed over at Jacobin. It gives you a flavor of some of the new material in the book:

Denvir: You write about his [Burke’s] concern with reconciling market and manor, capitalism on the hand and the old regime of aristocracy on the other. Explain how Burke dealt with these and tried to mold them into one conservative movement that could take on the upstart revolutionaries on the Left.

Robin: This is a very rich and complicated terrain. Before the French Revolution — which is really the crucible in which conservatism is born as an ideology — and throughout the eighteenth century, there is this struggle between conceptions of virtue and commerce.

Burke himself was involved in some of these pre-revolutionary struggles, particularly over the East India Company. He was a scorching critic of some parts of the East India Company, and he often invokes the threat of these new men of money as low men of character who are degrading the political virtues — what they were doing in India, in the British colony, was representative of the threat that money posed to this polity of virtue.

When the French Revolution happens, it throws established hierarchies into question. It shows that hierarchies don’t exist from time immemorial, they’re really created and they’re uncreated. As the counterrevolutionary argument gets going — and Burke is very much part of this counterrevolutionary argument — there is this notion that hierarchies can be recreated. They are not traditional or ancient; they are plastic, they are contingent, they are artificial.

Once the revolution happens, there is also a new round of popular contestation around questions of economics, both in France and Britain. Burke is at the center of debates about what we call today a “living wage.” Burke begins to articulate what we think of as a very modern free-market idea, whereby wages should not be regulated or supplemented by the state but should be settled completely by the free market.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is there’s an awful lot of scholarship and popular understanding of Burke that says that he was always hostile to the free market, money, and what today we’d call libertarianism.

Denvir: Not based on the passages you quote.

Robin: Yeah, that’s just simply not the case. Burke really was in the front of a movement on behalf of very aggressive free-market policies, particularly when it came to labor and wages.

Here is where he begins to lay out a very modern vision: that the men of the market — not the landed aristocracy, not the inherited aristocracy (who he becomes very critical of toward the end of his life) but the men of money in the market, setting the value of things at the market — that this can be a new kind of ruling class that will arise in this new revolutionary age to contest the Jacobins.

Now, as I say in the chapter, he doesn’t ultimately go there — he kind of pulls back from this vision for a lot of different reasons. But I do think you see the beginnings of this vision that I argue is going to find its fulfillment in the twentieth century.

John Holbo, one of my brilliant (truly truly brilliant) co-bloggers at Crooked Timber, had a lengthy post on the second edition, which was super-interesting, and it’s provoked a lengthy—and ongoing, as of this afternoon!—debate in the comments section. Have a read and join in!

Last, the historian Andrew Seal, who reviewed the first edition for n+1, offers a really fascinating take (and re-framing) on the second edition here:

The new edition of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind marks a leap forward in the scholarly understanding of modern conservatism. This is both because of what Robin has added—long and rich chapters on Edmund Burke’s late-career experimentations with a new theory of value, on the Nietzschean origins of Austrian economics, and on Donald Trump—and to some extent because of what he subtracted—mostly chapters that looked backward to the neoconservative moment of the 2000s. The removal of chapters mainly focused on war didn’t delete a concern with violence and with toxic masculinity: instead, it shifted and refocused it within the frame of the market. The market as war; the captain of finance or real estate as a warrior-prince.

…

But I would like briefly to try to put the book’s changes in contact with some of the historiographic changes that have occurred since the book’s first edition came out in 2011. The Reactionary Mind sparked some of those changes, of course, and so retracing this recent history is to follow something of a helical or dialectical path,  but it also means, I think, that we can look ahead and guess at some of the ways this second edition may come to inform emerging scholarship (and, hopefully, punditry) on conservatism, neoliberalism, and the Republican Party.

 

Stokely Carmichael and Clarence Thomas

“This [the opposition to segregated schools] reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that ‘white’ is automatically superior and ‘black’ is by definition inferior.”


 


—Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power


 


“This position [against segregation in schools] appears to rest upon the idea that any school that is black is inferior, and that blacks cannot succeed without the benefit of the company of whites.”


 


—Clarence Thomas, Missouri v. Jenkins