As a child growing up in Jim Crow Georgia — first in the tiny town of Pin Point and later in Savannah — Thomas experienced segregation firsthand. His young mother sent Clarence and his brother to live with their grandfather Myers Anderson, who was born poor but became the owner of a fuel-delivery company. In his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” Thomas recalled the humiliations Anderson suffered, which ranged from abjectly terrifying to grotesquely petty; he once got a ticket for the phony violation of driving with too many clothes on.

While white conservatives have since pointed to Jim Crow’s demise as evidence that the country has moved beyond its historic sins to become a colorblind society, Thomas’s views on race relations have always exuded a potent fatalism. “I am here to say that discrimination, racism and bigotry have gone no place and probably never will,” he told the graduating class of Savannah State College in 1985. But he wasn’t just saying that some things don’t change; he was saying that things had gotten worse. That same year, he told a group of black conservatives: “What we had in Georgia under Jim Crow was not as bad as this.”

By “this,” he meant what white liberals had wrought — integration and social reform, or what Thomas prefers to call “indiscriminate social engineering.” He acknowledges that he was a beneficiary of affirmative action, but insists that such programs are inevitably stigmatizing and demeaning to the people they’re meant to help. His position sets him apart from other conservatives, who typically cast affirmative action as tantamount to discrimination against white people — an argument Thomas doesn’t buy. “They must remember that if we are to play the victim game,” Thomas wrote in 1996, five years after joining the Supreme Court, “the very people they decry have the better claim to victim status.”

“Thomas believes that affirmative action is a white program for white people,” Robin writes, a way for liberal elites to perform a “patronizing indulgence” while still maintaining their control over who gets admitted into their ranks. State action cannot help African-Americans — it can only harm them. Robin shows how Thomas’s jurisprudence — curtailing voting rights and limiting regulatory powers — both assumes a political futility and exacerbates it, discouraging African-Americans from participating in the political realm and pushing them to focus their energies in the economic one. A capitalist economy might be unpredictable and risky, but at least it was ostensibly impersonal; better the mechanical indifference of the market than the capricious “punishments and preferments doled out by whites.”

The inspiration for this worldview is Thomas’s grandfather Anderson, whom the justice venerates for his persistence, his hard work, his self-sufficiency and his communal ties. Thomas’s vision is neither individualistic nor communitarian, Robin says; it’s patriarchal. The welfare state cushions men from adversity, softening and ultimately emasculating them; Thomas paints it as especially degrading to “the strength and the will of black men,” on whom he believes “the salvation of our race” depends. Robin quotes Thomas castigating white liberals who would set out “to destroy people like my grandfather and declare his manliness to be foolishness and wasted effort.”

All of this made Anita Hill, who testified at Thomas’s confirmation hearing that he had sexually harassed her, an “overdetermined figure” for Thomas; Robin describes him as so preoccupied with valorizing the black male provider that “there never was any room in this dreamscape for black women.”

Reading Robin’s book, you begin to wonder if this “dreamscape” is the future that Thomas and many of his fellow conservatives want: Women at home and out of sight, wealthy men providing for their families, with the “masses” (cited by Thomas as “my people”) competing for scraps.

Still, readers on the left who are inclined to feel a smug sense of moral superiority should pause; they might share something with Thomas’s bleak vision. “Thomas’s black nationalism is mirrored not only by the white nationalism of Trump,” Robin writes, “but also by the racial despair of the left.” I’m not sure I wholly agree with this diagnosis, but it isn’t every day that reading about ideas can be both so gratifying and unsettling, and Robin’s incisive and superbly argued book has made me think again.