Currently reading: The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin

This is Corey Robin’s scholastic polemic on the philosophical, historical and sociological incision into the minds of intellectual conservatives, slavery apologists, neoliberals, fascists, nativists, theocratic tyrants, white supremacists, libertarians, authoritarians, imperialists, neoconservatives, ethnonationalists, free-market ideologues and absolute monarchists. It emphasizes the political theory of reactionary forces through examining its upstarts, pitfalls, deviations and contradictions. Conservatives have a narrowed and selective view into history where their actions are seen as epistemological and rightful while the costs are naturally ordained on others. Conservative intellectualism finds its voice in recreating and eulogizing a revisionist past devoid of any past ills to bring into the present. It is an anti-progress and contradictory enterprise insipid of political, scientific and socioeconomic intellectualism. It defines the “social” in human existence to be “static institutions” irrespective of the innate human need for “progress, freedom and equality”. There are common threads through history that defines the reactionary mind and its prerogatives including social hierarchy, absolute power, economic exploitation, obsessive disgust of societal progress condemned as decadant decay, blind loyalty in the form of nationalism, rejection of modernity, mythologized violence, singular identity for a designated will, disdain for critical thinking, utmost economic inequality, intolerance of the tolerant, rugged individualism for the submissive majority in contrast to the bequeathed few, mythologized and romanticized view of the past, masculine virality, obscure-divide–obfuscate tactics to coral the masses in the form of democratic feudalism, abstract to apocalyptic sense of violence, an exaggerated sense of dispossession, shameless adaptability through hypocrisy (absorbing the energy of rising revolution) appealing to the masses by redirecting the anger of societal socioeconomic inequalities towards “external actors and/or domestic agitators” and condemnation of the “decadent, weak and cowardly” old regime then building a new power structure that whimsically mimics the old regime. Essentially, aristocracy, tyranny, social darwinism, nihilism, obliteration of knowledge, immoral interpretation of traditionalism, theocracy, the subjectivity of capital/class, the adovocation of markets, devaluation of labor, quantification of humanity as utility, pseudo-scientific racism/eugenics, hubris, social control and paternalism are the reactionary ideologies evoked to stave off their  perception of civilization decline through rising calls for egalitarianism of opportunities. These are their dogmatic virtues in the pursuit of the so-called “sublime”. Positioning on the rigid hierarchy is defined by class, gender, capital, military ranks, labor, race, and education. This caste system provides different access to  liberty, capital, civil-human rights, freedom and state protection. Therefore, it is socio-economic-political feudalism for absolute order and submission at all costs. This power structure stretches from the public to the private parts of society.  

Policies aren’t their animated vehicle for action but instead instigated to act “unequally and oppositely to any rising egalitarian democratic forces and focusing on their disgust against the societal change of their old order of social mores”. Freedom to oppress, subjugate or dominate not the freedom from wants nor inhumanity is the governing principle of a reflexive conservatives. The usurpation of the hierarchical order of the private to the public square evokes fear that evokes melodramatic scenes of an anarchic, defanged, dystopic and lackluster society in the mind of reactionaries. Therefore such usurpation needs to be quenched through by any means necessary. Simply, the reactionary mind is the defined by the “polity of a melodramatic fear and victimhood”.  “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely and such attained corrupted power becomes a source of incoherence, delusional statis and contradictions“ should be a  bumper sticker of the reactionary movement.  The pursuit of reinstituting power over an insurgent left bereft of understanding its implications is the sole vigor for the rise of counterrevolutionaries. They mimic the mass movements of the left but arm their following with delusional, immaterial and superfical power to oppress the “others” and protect the dominating power. Upon achieving success with the annihilation of the left, the precipitation of incoherence, inertness and incompetence comes to bear. It is therefore apparent that the counterrevolutionary movement is cynically “quixotic”. In dealing with the incoherence and contradictions in its philosophies and governance, they choose to become insincere, bored, visceral, apathetic, and non-reflective; in a short form, they resort to “gaslighting”. This inability of ideological self reflection nor policy advocation could lead into the downward spiral of evolving from megalomania into cultish-fanatic nihilism. This is a predicate for spectacular mass violence of the fascistic order devoid of humanism, liberty, progress and rationality”. Thus an an Orwellian state is born. 

William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is “boring,” said the founding father of the American right. “Devoting your life to it,” as conservatives do, “is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.”

This hierarchy is manifest destiny for reactionaries because the “others and lessers” lack personal virtue, have a poor work ethic, culturally deficient, lack discipline, unintelligent, show weak competitive animal spirits, biologically inferior and are easily captured by personal vices. Social hierarchy is therefore a natural order of which opportunities, wealth, capital and status should always be given, taken, owned and protected for the professional-managerial class, aristocrats, whites, elites and monopolists. Edmund Burke, Georges Sorel, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ayn Rand, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Hobbes, Ludwig von Mises, Antonin Scalia, John Calhoun, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol and Francis Fukuyama are some of the reactionary figures of which Corey Robin builds his coherent political theory. It is unusual that he didn’t delve into  William F. Buckley, Newt Gringrich, Southern Strategy practitioners and white Christian evangelicals. It is the top ten best political books I have ever read.

This book affirms my belief that Donald Trump is not heterodox from the conservative toolbox but instead, another bombastic machination of the arc of counterrevolutionaries. Trump simply is an incoherent and incompetent neo-fascistic vulgarian. 

The difference is—-more malignant narcissism, more blatant white nationalist appeal, more willful incongruence to science and truth, and more rampant incompetence. The keyword is “more”. Trump is simply an accelerant to an already burning fire. Trump in my view is the perfect conservative; the hybrid of white identity politics, conspiratorial theories, melodramatic cultural resentment, megalomania, bottomless unscrupulousness, plutocracy and authoritarianism. Robin pointendelty stated that caveat to his strain of conservatism is that he openly exposes how rigged, vacuous and casino-like capitalism is, moral emptiness in politics, the fake bravado of the elites and foreign relations is centred on economical transactions not humanitarinism.   

As Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs magazine postulated isn’t “right-wing populism” just fascism?

It is not a coincidence that social democratic societies ooze of the egalitarianism of opportunities not an outcome, radical economics, dynamic pluralism, symbiotic relationship of citizenry/society with the state, intellectualism and morality within the bounds of contextual rationality while conservative-totalitarian-fascistic societies bathe in the pool of visceral, incoherent, amoral, anti-democratic, plutocratic/oligarchic, repressively hierarchal and nihilistic characteristics in a loop of incoherence.