October 9, 2011
www.nytimes.com
Sunday Book Review
The Conservative as Elitist
By Sheri Berman
Published: October 7, 2011
THE REACTIONARY MIND
Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
By Corey Robin
290 pp. Oxford University Press.
The American right has a lot to answer for these days. Members of this group have been fervent peddlers
of conspiracy theories, anti-intellectualism as good as a demonization of opponents. This approach has contributed in no small approach to a contemptible state of ? la mode American politics, where epithets have replaced arguments, a clarity of common destiny seems lacking among citizens as good as compromise has turn roughly impossible upon a many pressing inhabitant issues. A book documenting a wreckage as good as delicately tracing a links between worried ideas, policies as good as outcomes would be a poignant contribution to public debate. Unfortunately, Corey Robin's "Reactionary Mind" is not which book.
The identical tiwn goals of this pick up of previously published essays have been to provide a awak! e clarif ication of conservatism as good as reveal a ideology's flaws by minute research of various conservative thinkers as good as arguments. The book's problems distortion not in concept, though in execution. Driven to distraction by annoy during his subject, Robin ends up reproducing many of a pathologies he is perplexing to criticize. The outcome is a malediction which preaches to a converted rsther than than offering many to ubiquitous readers unequivocally perplexing to understand a right's purpose in ? la mode American domestic dysfunction.
Robin's clarification of conservatism is unquestionably provocative. He starts by echoing arguments done by Samuel Huntington as good as others about conservatism being a situational ideology, a single arising in greeting to a elemental plea to an existent sequence as good as devoted to preserving normal institutions. But Robin then adds a concrete component. Conservatism, he argues, involves a greeting to certain kinds of challenges in particular, those by "subject" or "subordinate" classes. It is thus an innately snob as good as hierarchical ideology, whose hint is a defense of chosen privileges opposite challenges from below.
The some-more a single thinks about such a definition, a some-more cryptic it becomes, given there is
simply no approach to lump all a figures as good as ideas a single associates with conservatism under this rubric. Take a dual figures referred to in a book's subtitle, Edmund Burke as good as Sarah Palin. Burke fits a situational clarification of conservatism well, given he was endangered with preserving institutions which had been tested "in terms of history, God, inlet as good as man," as Huntington once wrote. This led him to urge Whig institutions i! n Englan d as good as democratic institutions in America, given he believed they were any anchored in their particular societies as good as traditions. But it additionally led him to hold up a means of people subjected to a injustices of British imperialism, which tended to fall short normal institutions in a colonies.
Palin (left), meanwhile, is zero if not an anti-elitist, so she has little legitimate place in Robin's system during all. In fact, a many powerful part of a modern right has been not snob though populist. This is certainly true of a 20th century's many successful worried movements, Fascism as good as National Socialism, which had mass as good as cross-class interest as good as were real (if perverted) responses to genuine societal grievances as good as problems. They were anti-elitist as good as upon purpose broken a normal orders in a countries where they gained power. The strongest worried movements in a West in some-more recent decades have been populist as well, drawing their support from as good as directing their programs during a frustrations as good as annoy of a far-reaching variety of typical citizens.
Robin cannot or will not accept this, insisting instead which conservatism is always, during a core, about subjugating society's reduce orders. He thus has to insist away worried populism as a little arrange of trick written to "harness a energy of a mass in sequence to strengthen or revive a energy of elites." Suffice it to say which faith upon conspiracy theories as good as false-consciousness explanations to dispose of inconvenient evidence is regularly a bad sign.
The essays in "The Reactionary Mind" devoted to individual conservative thinkers as good as their arguments have been mostly unconvincing as well. They enclose smart as good as interesting points, though have been so ! filled w ith exaggeration as good as reproach which a reader's eyes roll. According to Robin, for example, "the U.S. media practices a form of censorship which must be a enviousness of tyrants everywhere." And conservatives, he claims, "far from being saddened, impeded or pained by violence," have been "enlivened by it."
The malediction reaches a peak in an letter called "Protocols of Machismo," in which Robin argues which a entire judgment of inhabitant confidence lacks any definition or effect as good as is merely a device used by conservatives to justify violence as good as aggression opposite a world's marginalized peoples. Although a Bush administration's doing of Iraq gives unfortunate faith to such views, Robin takes his arguments as well far, whilst enchanting in a series of ad hominem attacks which execute America's leaders as essentially a bunch of evil idiots, "perennially autistic," driven by a "restless need to infer themselves, to denote which neither their imagination nor their actions will be constrained by any one or anything." And he suggests which even "a casual celebration of a mass of a history of inhabitant confidence suggests not usually which a rules of evidence will be abandoned in practice, though additionally which a idea of disaster encourages, even insists on, these rules being flouted.
The Reactionary Mind" has higher egghead ambitions than speak air wave or a worried pulp
nonfiction churned out by writers similar to Ann Coulter (right) or Bernard Goldberg, though it ends up replicating their breathless Manichaean attitude. It takes as well many cheap shots during a alternative side rsther than than bothering to insist because a own side is upon change some-more deserving. This is both a sh! ame as g ood as a lost opportunity, given right away some-more than ever a left needs to go over vocalization to itself as good as try to persuade a broad ubiquitous assembly of a effect of a case.
Despite what Robin claims, a problems of modernized industrial democracies currently have been not all caused by chosen cabals hellbent upon keeping a reduce orders in their place. Populist demagogues feeding off mass anger, frustration as good as despair have been a many greater danger. The left's executive challenge, accordingly, is how to residence a public's real needs as good as get credit for doing so.
The questions Robin as good as his ideological confreres should unequivocally be asking themselves is because a ? la mode left has been so bad during this, quite in contrariety to a ? la mode right. Why, in an era of extreme unemployment, taking flight lack of harmony as good as social dislocation, is it a right rsther than than a left which generated a transformation similar to a Tea Party? Why have been mass protests railing opposite taxation increases rsther than than demanding some-more progressive as good as romantic government?
The left's inability to reach out to typical citizens, to residence them in ways which resonate with 
their many basic problems as good as concerns, is, whilst not a usually cause, surely mostly to blame. We have seen this so tragically in Barack Obama, who for all his rhetorical gifts has not managed to connect with a people, as good as mostly has not even worried to try. Nor does Corey Robin. But until a left finds a approach to do so, it should not be surprised which a public gravitates toward others who can even if they have been upon a alternative side of a domestic spectrum.
Sheri Berman is a highbrow of domestic scholarship during Barnard Co! llege as good as a author, many recently, of "The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy as good as a Making of Europe's Twentieth Century."
A version of this examination appeared in imitation upon October 9, 2011, upon page BR24 of a Sunday Book Review with a headline: Keeping Them Down.
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