AS THE REPUBLICAN Party lurches toward nominating a presidential candidate to run against Barack Obama, we are likely to hear talk of deep splits within the conservative movement. Tea Party activists, who hate state intervention into the economy, will be distinguished from social conservatives, who love state intervention into matters of sex. Ayn Rand’s militant atheism, so attractive to one half of the party leadership, will be contrasted to the equally warlike Christianity that appeals to the right’s other half. Pundits will discover that aggressive interventionists touched by neoconservatism are not the same thing as America-first nationalists influenced by isolationism. Some liberals will cheer. Long accustomed to divisions within their own ranks, they will for once take glee in the splits and bitter exchanges of their antagonists.

Don’t be fooled by any of this, argues Corey Robin. Against nearly all other leftists writing about rightists, Robin believes that there is only one kind of conservatism. Whether expressed in the lofty words of Burke or the rambling ravings of Palin, conservatism is always and everywhere a resentful attack on those who seek to make the world more fair. Take away the left and you destroy the rationale for the right. It is only because the modern world takes justice seriously, at least in theory, that we have thinkers and activists determined to put their bodies on the gears to stop the machinery from moving forward.

Robin treats conservatives as activists rather than as stand-patters. “Conservatism,” he writes, “has been a forward movement of restless and relentless change, partial to risk taking and ideological adventurism, militant in posture and populist in its bearings, friendly to upstarts and insurgents, outsiders and newcomers alike.” Burke, in Robin’s view, began this tradition, and figures such as de Maistre, de Bonald, and Sorel carried it forward. If we take all of them as the genuine articles, there is no need to draw a line between conservatives and reactionaries: all conservatives are reactionary. Conservatives are unified, and united in their rage. Their most passionate hate is directed at those they believe were assigned by God or nature to second-class status but still insist on their full rights as human beings.

For Robin, what began in the late eighteenth century has reached a kind of culmination in the early twenty-first century. Republicans in love with Ayn Rand express the same romantic protest against modern complexity as evangelical Christians lamenting for families of yore. Whatever their differences, both movements are counter-cultural, even counter-revolutionary. That is why they are the rightful heirs of all the European thinkers whom Robin evokes. Everything about these contemporary right-wing activists—their militant theatrics, their artificial populism, their refusal to compromise—was anticipated two centuries ago. “Far from being a recent innovation of the Christian Right or the Tea Party movement, reactionary populism runs like a red thread throughout conservative discourse from the very beginning.”

Robin adds a distinctive wrinkle to the common claim of Burke’s responsibility for modern conservatism. He says that it was not his Reflections on the Revolution in France but his Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful that deserves the most attention. Power, as Robin summarizes Burke, “should never aspire to be—and can never actually be—beautiful. What great power needs is sublimity.” Owing to this emphasis on the sublime, Burke ought not to be read as a defender of the old regime. Not only had the Bourbons lost both their beauty and their sublimity, they had also become pathetic and decadent, lacking the capacity to justify themselves (and thus requiring thinkers such as Burke to carry out the thankless task).