The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump

by Corey Robin

Not better in the sense of meritocratic achievement—institutional measures of worth can reward only the institution man—or in terms of an economic contribution—a new product, more jobs, higher shareholder value—but in the sense of besting another in the field of battle.

That fakery, that play to fantasy and bravado, is not a sideshow to the economy, to the sphere of real production or honest exchange. It is the economy. “A lot of attention,” says Trump, “alone creates value.”52 A lot of attention—not the productivity of labor, design of the engineer, vision of the entrepreneur, risk of the investor, or genius of the advertiser—that alone creates value.

The secret of Trump is that there is no secret. That is the truth about capitalism that is revealed in The Art of the Deal: there is no truth. It’s a show about nothing.

neoliberalism is, among other things, the conquest of political argument by economic reason.69 The dominant rationale for public policy is not drawn from the idiom of political philosophy but from the literature on economics: choice, efficiency, competition, exchange.

While the fissiparous nature of American institutions has helped stop Trump, it’s important to remember that those institutions have often served the agents of tyranny—from the defenders of slavery and Jim Crow to the forces of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO—remarkably well.

the right increasingly relies upon the most anti-democratic elements of the state: not merely the Electoral College and the Supreme Court but also restrictions on the vote. As it tries to overcome this deficit of the popular by means of the unpopular—as opposed to its heyday, when it overcame the popular by means of a counter-popular—today’s conservative movement calls to mind its predecessor in early-nineteenth-century, pre-Reform Britain, dependent upon a combination of rotten boroughs and stale rhetoric.

Unless and until there is a genuine new left to oppose, unless and until there is a real emancipation of the lower orders and dispossession of the higher orders to contend with and against, Trump and his brethren will be reading from a script.