The psychoanalytical is political
Mar. 17th, 2023 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileFor book club (somehow I’m now only in one book club) we picked Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, a book I have heard good things about and have been vaguely intending to read for several years now.
Robin’s main argument is that conservatism, as a political movement, isn’t really about tradition, or incrementalism, or even resistance to change per se, or any of the other things one could use the term small-c “conservative” for in everyday language. Instead, the thing that unites basically all of conservative thought since the French Revolution is an active defense of hierarchies that are perceived (rightly or wrongly, although usually at least somewhat rightly) as under threat. Conservatives believe that some people are just better than other people and are eager to retain some aspect of political life–the battlefield, the market, the monarchy–as a proving ground not just for some people to show off that they more skills or to accomplish more than other people (that, after all, would lead to a politics of trying to ensure a level playing field), but for the strong to dominate the weak. Robin argues that conservatives are largely concerned with “the private life of power,” which is why they tend to react hugely when oppressed groups make even very modest demands–the notion that their lessers have the right to speak at all upends their sense of the proper order of things and raises the specter of uppity backchat in all areas of life. He also argues that the central challenge of modern conservatism, as opposed to the actual traditionalism of old politics, is that they have to make elitism popular and, in a sense, democratized, in order to be competitive in mass politics–which they do with an arsenal of rhetorical and psychological tricks that Robin walks us through.
The book is structured as a bunch of more or less discrete essays on this theme, each profiling different key players in the conservative movement. The first part of the book concerns classic conservative theoreticians, like Edmund Burke and Nietzsche; the second part concerns figures of more immediate and recent impact on American conservatism in particular. One thing that was noticeable to me was the way the tone changes from discussing long-dead European guys that we only know through their writings to the essays that focus on more recent plagues on American politics–the profiles of Ayn Rand, Antonin Scalia, and Donald Trump are more overtly sneering and editorial, framing them less as formidable opponents because they are wrong but smart than as formidable opponents because they are wrong and dumb but cunning and also coddled by an American political culture that is far too willing to let them get away with their shit. Burke was “brilliant” but Scalia was just surrounded by people too polite to talk about him as nastily as he talked about them. The result is that the earlier chapters are more informative but the later chapters are more cathartic.
I’m excited to talk about this on Sunday and hope that I can put my brain back into my ears by then. This was maybe not the thing I would have chosen to read while recuperating from whatever I’ve been sick with all week if I were not on a deadline, but as far as having to read theory while huddling your aching joints under a weighted blanket and regretting that you can’t put the weighted blanket on your mandibles too goes, it was eminently readable! There were only a couple of words that I should have looked up earlier than I did (my man really loves the term “agonistic”), and overall I found myself engaged enough to almost forget how crappy I felt, which is fairly impressive for nonfiction.
Robin’s main argument is that conservatism, as a political movement, isn’t really about tradition, or incrementalism, or even resistance to change per se, or any of the other things one could use the term small-c “conservative” for in everyday language. Instead, the thing that unites basically all of conservative thought since the French Revolution is an active defense of hierarchies that are perceived (rightly or wrongly, although usually at least somewhat rightly) as under threat. Conservatives believe that some people are just better than other people and are eager to retain some aspect of political life–the battlefield, the market, the monarchy–as a proving ground not just for some people to show off that they more skills or to accomplish more than other people (that, after all, would lead to a politics of trying to ensure a level playing field), but for the strong to dominate the weak. Robin argues that conservatives are largely concerned with “the private life of power,” which is why they tend to react hugely when oppressed groups make even very modest demands–the notion that their lessers have the right to speak at all upends their sense of the proper order of things and raises the specter of uppity backchat in all areas of life. He also argues that the central challenge of modern conservatism, as opposed to the actual traditionalism of old politics, is that they have to make elitism popular and, in a sense, democratized, in order to be competitive in mass politics–which they do with an arsenal of rhetorical and psychological tricks that Robin walks us through.
The book is structured as a bunch of more or less discrete essays on this theme, each profiling different key players in the conservative movement. The first part of the book concerns classic conservative theoreticians, like Edmund Burke and Nietzsche; the second part concerns figures of more immediate and recent impact on American conservatism in particular. One thing that was noticeable to me was the way the tone changes from discussing long-dead European guys that we only know through their writings to the essays that focus on more recent plagues on American politics–the profiles of Ayn Rand, Antonin Scalia, and Donald Trump are more overtly sneering and editorial, framing them less as formidable opponents because they are wrong but smart than as formidable opponents because they are wrong and dumb but cunning and also coddled by an American political culture that is far too willing to let them get away with their shit. Burke was “brilliant” but Scalia was just surrounded by people too polite to talk about him as nastily as he talked about them. The result is that the earlier chapters are more informative but the later chapters are more cathartic.
I’m excited to talk about this on Sunday and hope that I can put my brain back into my ears by then. This was maybe not the thing I would have chosen to read while recuperating from whatever I’ve been sick with all week if I were not on a deadline, but as far as having to read theory while huddling your aching joints under a weighted blanket and regretting that you can’t put the weighted blanket on your mandibles too goes, it was eminently readable! There were only a couple of words that I should have looked up earlier than I did (my man really loves the term “agonistic”), and overall I found myself engaged enough to almost forget how crappy I felt, which is fairly impressive for nonfiction.