The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin

by Corey Robin

As late as 1957—during the era of the Warren Court—a standard legal treatise could state, “A man does not commit rape by having sexual intercourse with his lawful wife, even if he does so by force and against her will.” If a woman (or man) tried to write into the marriage contract a requirement that express consent had to be given in order for sex to proceed, judges were bound by common law to ignore or override it. Implicit consent was a structural feature of the contract that neither party could alter. With the exit option of divorce not widely available until the second half of the twentieth century, the marriage contract doomed women to be the sexual servants of their husbands.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. —Friedrich Nietzsche,

Pioneers of the Southern Strategy in the Nixon administration, to cite a more recent example, understood that after the rights revolutions of the sixties they could no longer make simple appeals to white racism. From now on, they would have to speak in code, preferably one palatable to the new dispensation of color blindness. As White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman noted in his diary, Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to.”

Alexander Stephens, vice president of the U.S. Confederacy, proudly declared that “our new government is the first, in the history of the world” to be founded upon the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”

But to appreciate fully the inventiveness of right-wing populism, we have to turn to the master class of the Old South. The slaveholder created a quintessential form of democratic feudalism, turning the white majority into a lordly class, sharing in the privileges and prerogatives of governing the slave class. Though the members of this ruling class knew that they were not equal to each other, they were compensated by the illusion of superiority—and the reality of rule—over the black population beneath them.

Hobbes’s idea of private liberty pervades libertarian discourse, while Leviathan casts a long shadow over the conservative ideal of a night watchman state—where the government’s primary purpose is to protect the citizenry from foreign attack and criminal trespass; where people are free to go about their business so long as they do not interfere with the movements of others; and where contracts are enforced and security is ensured. Libertarians will blanch at that association: whatever resonance Hobbesian ideas may find in their writings, the Hobbesian state is a good deal more repressive than any government a libertarian would ever countenance. Except for the fact that it’s not.

Hayek admired Pinochet’s Chile so much that he decided to hold a meeting of his Mont Pelerin Society in Viña del Mar, the seaside resort where the coup against Allende was planned.

The marriage between free markets and state terror cannot be annulled so easily. As Hobbes understood, it takes an enormous amount of repression to create the type of men who can exercise their “Liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another” without getting stroppy.30 They must be free to move—or choose—but not so free as to think about redesigning the highway. Assuming an all-too-easy congruence between capitalism and democracy, the libertarian overlooks just how much coercion is required to make citizens who will use their freedom responsibly and accept distress without turning to the state for relief.

“I’ll always think of ‘Dagny Taggart’ as the best role I was supposed to play but never did,”

The chief conflict in Rand’s novels, then, is not between the individual and the masses. It is between the demigod-creator and all those unproductive elements of society—the intellectuals, bureaucrats, and middlemen—that stand between him and the masses. Aesthetically, this makes for kitsch; politically, it bends toward fascism. Admittedly, the argument that there is a connection between fascism and kitsch has taken a beating over the years.

what truly distinguished Rand was her ability to translate her sense of self into reality, to will her imagined identity into material fact. Not by being great, but by persuading others, even shrewd biographers, that she was great.

Nietzsche exerted an early grip on Rand that never really loosened. Her cousin teased Rand that Nietzsche “beat you to all your ideas.” When Rand arrived in the United States, Thus Spake Zarathustra was the first book in English she bought. With Nietzsche on her mind, she was inspired to write in her journals that “the secret of life” is “you must be nothing but will. Know what you want and do it. Know what you are doing and why you are doing it, every minute of the day. All will and all control. Send everything else to hell!” Her entries frequently include phrases like “Nietzsche and I think” and “as Nietzsche said.”

Since the nineteenth century, it has been the task of the left to hold up to liberal civilization a mirror of its highest values and to say, “You do not look like this.” You claim to believe in the rights of man, but it is only the rights of property you uphold. You claim to stand for freedom, but it is only the freedom of the strong to dominate the weak. If you wish to live up to your principles, you must give way to their demiurge. Allow the dispossessed to assume power, and the ideal will be made real, the metaphor will be made material.

Making privilege palatable to the masses is a permanent project of conservatism; but each generation must tailor that project to fit the contour of its times.

Goldwater rejected racism (though not nationalism); but try as he might, when discussing freedom he could not resist the tug of feudalism. He called states’ rights “the cornerstone” of liberty, “our chief bulwark against the encroachment of individual freedom” by the federal government. In theory, states protected individuals rather than groups. But who in 1960 were these individuals? Goldwater claimed that they were anyone and everyone, that states’ rights had nothing to do with Jim Crow. Yet even he was forced to admit that segregation “is, today, the most conspicuous expression of the principle” of states’ rights.19 The rhetoric of states’ rights threw up a cordon around white privilege. While surely the most noxious plank in the conservative platform—eventually, it was abandoned—Goldwater’s argument for states’ rights fits squarely within a tradition that sees freedom as a shield for inequality and a surrogate for mass feudalism.

“The most distinguished persons,” Shaw wrote in 1903, “become more revolutionary as they grow older.”

“Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism have much in common.” Both, he writes, “exhibit scant sympathy for the casualties of economic progress.”

Alan Greenspan earns Luttwak’s special contempt: “Alan Greenspan is a Spencerian. That makes him an economic fascist.” Spencerians like Greenspan believe that “the harshest economic pressures” will “stimulate some people to … economically heroic deeds. They will become great entrepreneurs or whatever else, and as for the ones who fail, let them fail.”

Scalia’s philosophy of Constitutional interpretation—variously called originalism, original meaning, or original public meaning—is often confused with original intention. While the first crew of originalists in the 1970s did claim that the Court should interpret the Constitution according to the intentions of the Framers, later originalists like Scalia wisely recast that argument in response to criticisms it received. The intentions of a single author are often unknowable, and in the case of many authors, practically indeterminate. And whose intentions should count: those of the 55 men who wrote the Constitution, the 1,179 men who ratified it, or the even greater number of men who voted for the men who ratified it? From Scalia’s view, it is not intentions that govern us. It is the Constitution, the text as it was written and rewritten through amendment. That is the proper object of interpretation. But how to recover the meaning of a text that can careen from terrifying generality in one sentence (“the executive Power shall be vested in a President”) to an uneventful precision (presidential terms are four years) in the next?

in Latin America, it was the left who took up the Enlightenment’s banner, leaving the United States and its allies carrying the black bag of the counter-Enlightenment.

First, as far as we know, no one at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or any of the other prisons in America’s international archipelago has been tortured in order to defuse a ticking time bomb. Second, at the height of the war in Iraq, anywhere between 60 and 90 percent of American-held prisoners there either were in jail by mistake or posed no threat at all to society. Third, many U.S. intelligence officials opted out of torture sessions precisely because they believed torture did not produce accurate information.21 These are the facts, and yet they seldom, if ever, make an appearance in these academic exercises in moral realism.

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

As Orwell taught, the possibilities for cruelty and violence are as limitless as the imagination that dreams them up. But the armies and agencies of today’s violence are vast bureaucracies, and vast bureaucracies need rules. Eliminating the rules does not Prometheus unbind; it just makes for more billable hours.