The Reactionary Mind, 2nd edition – Meet The New Boss

If you haven’t heard, there’s a new edition out [amazon] of our Corey’s The Reactionary Mind. I have duly purchased the updated version. He didn’t just drop Palin and add Trump. It’s better put together, as he says in the Preface. I bought the basic argument first time round. I found some things quite clear and compelling that I know others did not. Perhaps this time the more benighted shall see the light. Here’s hoping this new edition wins over skeptics.

It would have been funny if the new subtitle were: ‘I totally told you so and now LOOK!’ But I guess Oxford doesn’t play that way.

Let me try to be frank and blunt about the standard complaint against the book and why I think it misses the mark. Robin’s line seems too reductive, too quick to cast all philosophical conservatives as moustache-twirling villains. Conservatism is a bunch of reactionary bastards punching down. Always has been, always will be. But surely – especially in the realm of ideas! – better can be said on its behalf, hence should be said. Doesn’t he miss the interest and sophistication of the best conservative thinkers? Even the fact that, yeah, Trump fits the model may fail to seem so powerfully predictive. A stopped clock is right twice a day. Someone standing on the corner shouting ‘hey asshole’ at everyone isn’t necessarily a prophet or great student of the soul, even if he’s right a lot. (I’m looking you, Bob McManus!)

Passages like this set readers off:

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, and agency the prerogative of the elite. Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. “We are all agreed as to our own liberty,” declared Samuel Johnson. “But we are not agreed as to the liberty of others: for in proportion as we take, others must lose. I believe we hardly wish that the mob should have liberty to govern us.”

Even more so when you see the seating plan:

I use the words conservative, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary interchangeably: not all counterrevolutionaries are conservative — Walt Rostow immediately comes to mind — but all conservatives are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary. I seat philosophers, statesmen, slaveholders, scribblers, Catholics, fascists, evangelicals, businessmen, racists, and hacks at the same table: Hobbes is next to Hayek, Burke across from Donald Trump, Nietzsche in between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia, with Adams, Calhoun, Oakeshott, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and George W. Bush interspersed throughout.

Why isn’t this uselessly oversimplified? Why isn’t Robin an ‘Uber-lumper’, as some reviewer called him. (Lilla? Maybe that was him.)

First, I think Robin does a really solid job with the psychology – temperament – question. It’s classic to say conservatism isn’t so much a philosophy (we don’t do blueprints!) as an even-keeled temperament. Conservative philosophy is mellowed by mature attachment to the way things are. It is anchored by deep roots, not blow-away paper plans. Think Oakeshott, “Rationalism In Politics”. The problem is that this is just wildly false. A penchant for conservative political philosophy is, to a very noteworthy degree, negatively correlated with the temperament that is supposed to be its hallmark. From Burke to Maistre, all down the line – Kirk and Buckley, take your pick – we really have a bunch of excitable types, romantics, remnantistas, lost cause nostalgists, rebels, oddball outsiders, hothead eccentrics, ideologists, inky pamphleteers and all-around oozers of the fanaticism of the convert until it slicks every surface in sight.

Conservatives think the Ticktockman has taken over, so they go all Harlequin. (If Everett C. Marm could have stayed home with Pretty Alice, lived a nice, quiet life, he might have. But that wasn’t really an option by that point.)

It sounds weird but it’s true by the numbers. G.K. Chesterton. Huge favorite of mine, as you’ve probably noticed. (Robin never quotes him. That’s a damn shame. He could be Exhibit A.) The story is always same: to journey in a circle and know home as a magical place for the first time. Very conservative theme. Meanwhile, every protagonist is a chaos farmer, and that’s Chesterton all over. Least. Even. Keel. Ever.

I’m saying it nine different ways, so why stop now? Conservatives are supposed to be the ones who, unlike leftists, don’t think all of life should be politics. Conservatives are supposed to have healthy work-life balance. But, if you actually just look and see – I thoroughly recommend the exercise! – conservatives tend to be utterly convicted that the personal is political. They blame the other side for making it so. But there just wasn’t ever a moment where there was, as it were, healthy conservative political philosophy, recognizable as such, and then leftists attacked and it got personal. Conservativism as philosophy is what happens only after leftist politics gets intolerably but unavoidably personal in the sense that it is felt to threaten some or other private hierarchy of power that rightfully should stand as a rock against it. Conservatives are born pissed, not placid.

When the conservative looks upon a democratic movement from below, this (and the exercise of agency) is what he sees: a terrible disturbance in the private life of power. Witnessing the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Theodore Sedgwick lamented, “The aristocracy of virtue is destroyed; personal influence is at an end.” Sometimes the conservative is personally implicated in that life, sometimes not. Regardless, it is his apprehension of the private grievance behind the public commotion that lends his theory its tactile ingenuity and moral ferocity.

That’s more helpful than any damn thing Mark Lilla has to say in The Shipwrecked Mind. (Which is not a terrible book, honestly. But no great shakes.) This doesn’t just prove that Michael Oakeshott is the world’s least perceptive political psychologist. Beyond the persistent irony, this state of affairs is important to see for purposes of making damn sense of the scene.

Which brings me to the second thing Robin is good at: that seating plan. The only thing that is more often said about conservatism than that it is a prudent attitude (no mere spider-web of abstract ideas!) is that there really are all these different kinds of conservatism – to say nothing of reaction – and we just have to be ok with it being a very loose family resemblance concept. Libertarians and social conservatives and fusionists and on and on. That’s fine. I won’t say it’s false (like the temperament thing, which is just plain false.) There are, obviously, lots of deep, wide differences around that table. But it’s also true that we have some sense that there is some use to lumping a lot of these people under ‘conservative’ – at least loosely – and it’s worth asking: what are we feeling when we feel that way?

I get annoyed on Robin’s behalf when the likes of Mark Lilla will not put their damn Socrates hat on for a minute (they are too busy lecturing him about how he isn’t thinking clearly.) I’m old enough to remember when Socrates asked Meno whether, were he to define ‘bee’, he would say ‘oh, there’s big ones, small ones, fat ones, skinny ones, live ones, dead ones’. No, an account should look to similarities not enumerate differences within the set and leave it at that. Is there, or is there not, some property P, shared by members of the set, that is plausibly characteristic of that set, to a significant degree? Maybe we can’t go full necessary and sufficient. Maybe it’s just a very loose family resemblance concept. But let’s, you know, try to find some common feature, not assume its absence a priori.

And – lo! – the exercise is a significant if not utter success. There’s a significant reactionary strain running all around the table. Yes, it’s a bit weird to call Nietzsche a ‘conservative’, a bit off to call Friedrich “Why I am not a conservative” Hayek a ‘conservative’. But in my educated opinion it is true that Nietzsche is a reactionary – and Hayek, too. I actually got in an argument with Jacob Levy about the latter claim. I said that, just as it’s helpful to think that J.S. Mill is crypto-advocating a virtue ethics of cosmopolitan non-conformism, so it’s helpful to regard Hayek as crypto-advocating a vision of the virtuous life that is … kind of reactionary. Now maybe I’m right or maybe I’m wrong. (The Pinochet thing isn’t exactly a healthy sign, but I’m just talking about what you get from reading the books.) If I’m wrong, then Hayek doesn’t sit at the table, after all. Trying to work out whether he fits here is part of trying to size him up, get where he’s really coming from, not just dismiss him.

Psychologizing people, rather than just assessing their arguments, is valid – as far as it goes. ‘He’s a reactionary!’ is not the last word on what’s up with Nietzsche or Hayek. They are original geniuses and if you don’t read them because you heard they are reactionary, you are missing out on the good stuff. Nevertheless, it’s true. They are reactionaries. So at the table they go! That’s just being tidy. They are allowed to also be at other tables. The table isn’t jail. I happen to think that Robin’s reading of Nietzsche isn’t a very sensitive one, although I get why it would seem right to him. Nietzsche probably could have been clearer. But we could hash that out, perhaps profitably, around that table. And again, if someone has been mis-placed at the table – if they don’t belong – well, mistakes happen. It doesn’t mean the table is a bad idea.

If someone wants to argue that there is a significant school of philosophical conservative thinking – or some particular individual thinker – that doesn’t shape up a reactionary subset: make your case. That’s a good thing.

It is certainly the case that some abstract arguments that might be deemed ‘conservative’ won’t be inherently ‘reactionary’. The latter really is a psychologistic category; arguments, in the abstract, don’t have psychologies. That’s fine. Here’s a good case. G.A. Cohen’s paper, “Rescuing Conservatism”. Did Cohen have a reactionary mind? That is a totally interesting and valid question, within Robin’s framework. I think the answer is going to be ‘no’. But this is kind of the exception that proves the rule. We can imagine a sense of ‘philosophical conservatism’ that isn’t reactionary – that centers on the kind of attitude Cohen advocates. But this is at such odd angles to the term as we actually use it this is amounts to an argument that ‘conservatism’, as we use it, implies reactionary. Putting it another way: it makes sense to us that ‘conservative’ implies right-wing. It ought to be as intuitive that, if that’s how we use it, it also implies reactionary.

I am sure some people feel it’s a guilt-by-association cheat if the thing that all versions of conservatism have in common is not a shared virtue but a vice; a bad thing – or at least an dubious thing. Reactionism. Well, call ’em like you see ’em. Would it really be surprising if Nietzsche were great, and Hayek were great and Burke were great, but the common denominator, such as it is, is this distinctly dicey thing: reactionary attitude?

Suppose Robin had written – I dunno: Political Romanticism – and had drawn up some very expansive table full of mutually diverse yet individually likely suspects, plausibly fitting some stated account of what ‘Political Romanticism’ means. Now, a lot of useless books have been written about Romanticism, but some good ones. So this project could be a stinker. Or maybe it’s done well and you see enlightening, heretofore unnoticed features of these figures, forced to sit cheek-by-jowl for the duration of the exercise. You don’t just dismiss this as ‘lumping’. Proof is in the pudding. Maybe political romanticism is argued to be, on balance, bad – dangerous. I can imagine defending that thesis. That doesn’t make this just invalid guilt-by-associating. It doesn’t mean none of these characters are interesting or deserving of respect, despite kind of fitting the bill.

Obviously a lot of the interest here depends on filling out our sense of ‘what is a reactionary’ usefully. Fortunately, Corey wrote a book about it.

Bonus fun fact! My older daughter was home with a cold, just playing games on her iPhone so I decided to make life educational. Rather than reading my new book silently, I gave an audiobook performance of chapters 1 & 2. (My daughter likes podcasts and explainers, so this wasn’t as unlikely an option as it sounds.) Obviously he did the police in different voices. I did Burke using the plummy voice I use to do Nanny Ogg when we read discworld novels. Maistre is more a psycho Willem Dafoe. He would CUT you, man.

I did Hayek as Joshua the Dog. I’m kidding. I didn’t.