Second Edition, Same Problem: The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin

If liberals, progressives, and even Marxists are most common in history and political science departments within universities, then it goes to reason that these fields and the scholars might have deep anti-conservative, anti-libertarian, and anti-capitalist biases.

Corey Robin’s book The Reactionary Mind manages to be all three: anti-conservative, anti-libertarian, and anti-capitalist.

When a scholar (or passionate author) seeks to analyze “the other side” in politics, the results are inevitably mixed and often contaminated by the biases of the writer. Some of the challenges of studying the other are common to anthropology and ethnography: we naturalize our experiences and beliefs, making the viewpoints of others seem more alien. We wonder how they cannot see the world as we do. This happens at the local level as we try to understand other philosophies, economic theories, political ideologies, and so on. How could “they” be so wrong?

Books purporting to reveal what is wrong with the other side tend to embrace one or more of the following theories:

• Ignorance: The supporters of Belief System X are too ignorant to recognize their mistakes or to properly analyze information.
• Bad Faith / False Hope: The supporters believe they will benefit from implementation of Belief System X.
• Manipulation: Dark forces are behind Belief System X, manipulating the masses who are ignorant and eager for false hope.
• Deep Flaws: The supporters of Belief System X are neurologically, psychologically, or in some other way genetically predisposed to embracing the bad ideas of Belief System X.

Robin hits the four theories above, theorizing that conservative intellectuals and leaders are not actually about any single idea or theory. Instead, conservatives are reactionaries dedicating to preserving their dominance over other groups. To preserve this oppressive power, the conservatives persuade the ignorant masses to believe that they too can win within the existing system — or that in some way, they are already winners.

I have several problems with Robin’s approach, beginning with his connecting of quite disparate schools of thought. The Austrian School of economists were not conservatives in a traditional sense, having resisted Fascism and the Nazi movement much as their colleagues in the Frankfurt School did. It’s not surprising that members of both groups sought refuge in the United States, either. And both groups were, in their own way, elitists who preferred classical European culture to a popular culture they viewed as debased.

Also, Robin associates the term “libertarian” broadly with “conservative” and this presents a problem, at least globally if not within the United States. There are left-leaning libertarians, especially within the economic schools of thought. I am among the “libertarians” who do not believe companies can own natural resources, but I am also for limited government and Utilitarianism’s personal freedom.

Robin isn’t intentionally making mistakes about conservatives, even when he lumps too many thinkers under the umbrella. Instead, he is working from within his personal biases, hearing and reading into statements what he wants to believe about conservatives. He has a viewpoint and has written a book to support that viewpoint. By comparison, Nancy MacLean is a sloppy scholar who’s Democracy in Chains contains many errors, omissions, and questionable assumptions. (Worst of all, MacLean suggested libertarians are “autistic” — a disgusting use of neurological condition as an insult.)

Though more such books and articles are published by progressives analyzing conservatives at the moment, the right has its own list of such books. There are three major reasons more books examining conservatives are more widely reviewed:

• The current Republican Party, led by President Donald Trump, offers plenty of reason to ask “How did this happen?”
• The major media and more online spaces skew from center-left to progressive and into the fringes — most being center-left, not radical.
• Scholars in the humanities and social sciences skew more to the left, as reflected by numerous studies of higher-education.

Regarding the media and academia, the conservatives create their own conspiracy theories when simpler explanations exist. Professors are more liberal in the humanities, by a ratio of 11.5:1 based on voter registration data compiled in 2016. History professors are liberal by a 33.5:1 ratio, an estimate supported by a famous 2007 paper by Neil Gross of Harvard University and Solon Simmons of George Mason University.

What is it with these historians? Nothing. As with any career, people with similar interests and similar beliefs have come together in a profession. You’re unlikely to find a Communist working at a hedge fund or a Democratic Socialist overseeing a leveraged buyout. Historians self-selected as the nature of the discipline changed; those interested in traditional Western history were relegated to the margins of history departments, while new forms of history, including historical theorizing (Marx was searching for a scientific history, after all), took hold.

The highly educated conservatives and libertarians I know are economists, doctors, lawyers, engineers, farmers, and small business owners. I know few conservatives or even centrists within the humanities, but many within business departments and in the STEM fields. It is self-selection bias, reflecting the changing natures of many fields in the humanities.

Robin’s view reinforces the assumptions and biases of his most likely readers, those people following Vox, Slate, Salon, The New Republic, and so on. The various book review publications also have a narrower readership than other publications. (I thought about including Mother Jones, but even my friends who did read that storied progressive journal now prefer to follow Vice for some reason. I like Mother Jones.)

It isn’t nefarious that reviewers from similar backgrounds and with similar ideologies as Corey Robin embrace his interpretations of the history of conservatism. It is people reading like-minded scholarship, which lends academic authority to their biases against anything conservative or libertarian.

From a recent review in The Los Angeles Review of Books:

Conservatives and Counterrevolutionaries: Corey Robin’s “The Reactionary Mind”
By Lily Geismer

JANUARY 19, 2018

WHAT SHOULD WE MAKE of conservatism in the Trump era? Last spring, Rick Perlstein, a historian of the American right, published a mea culpa in The New York Times Magazine explaining how the election of Donald Trump had led him to reconsider the settled narrative of modern American conservatism. Perlstein bemoaned the fact that 20th-century political historians mostly restricted their attention to establishment figures like William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan. Instead, he exhorted his colleagues to look fringeward, to “conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage,” in order to understand the foundations of Trumpism.

Sadly, we know that Democrats and Republicans played race politics, and the Republicans embraced the libertarian mantra of “states rights” to appeal to the worst of the Dixiecrat South. This contamination of both conservatism and libertarianism has harmed the GOP and the libertarian movement in the United States to no end. I’ve argued that libertarians can and should more loudly reject people who would use “freedom” as a cloak for hatred. It is this Southern Strategy, embraced by political operatives for too long in the GOP (at least since 1964, and most obviously since 1968) that allowed Trump to become the standard bearer for the party.

But, what the GOP has for 50 years, as much as it should be reviled, does not suggest that conservatism or libertarianism lack philosophical foundations. Instead, I would argue the GOP has abandoned its roots as a religiously conservative group dedicated to rights and liberties, morphing into the religious intolerance the original GOP rejected. Basically, Republicans became what they fought against, at least the social conservatives did.

The distinction between social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives is obvious within economics departments, but less so in practiced national politics. Libertarians, especially those who were within the Republican Party, complicate matters further. Add in British, Canadian, Australian, and European conservatives and libertarians and there are few if any coherent connections between the theorists and someone like Sarah Palin or Donald Trump. Intellectual conservatism and libertarianism, the theories associated with negative rights, property rights, free will, and free markets, don’t appeal to Palin or Trump in the abstract. Palin, Trump, and the core of the GOP stand for something else… fear.

Though much of its contents were written and published prior to this call to arms, the updated edition of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind can be read as a powerful rejoinder to Perlstein’s argument. Robin posits that the roots of Trumpism are not on the right’s fringe but rather among its standard-bearers, going back as far as Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, and winding through respected figures like Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich Hayek, and Antonin Scalia.

Lily Geismer’s review isn’t uncritical, but it embraces the basic theory that conservatives are more about retaining power than managing social stability. Such conflation of conservative faith in slow change with a fear of losing power is common among my colleagues in the humanities. They do not believe, nor do they understand, why conservatives would want moderately paced social change. (Again, it does not help that the GOP has ruined the image of conservatism by embracing the fear of change as a campaign device.)

The educated conservatives I know point to Canada compared to the United States: graduate change versus revolution. Canada has its problems, some the same as its southern sibling, but it is stable and prosperous. Conservatives prefer such stability to the violence of the American or French Revolutions.

My preference for changing laws from within the system do not mean that I endorse the biases currently codified and defended by the system. My faith in the democratic system to eventually work is not blind faith — after all, we’re stuck with a Pres. Trump at the moment. Instead, as with all markets, I have faith that the market will return to the mean and improve. Too often, it seems that progressives lack a faith in democracy and markets, two forms of crowdsourcing.

Robin would not believe my commitment to theories, or he would find ways to associate those theories with my perceived privilege as a white male. He does not accept what conservatives or libertarians say or write at face value. His cynicism means he would not trust my history of writing and commenting on philosophy and economics. For Robin, my acceptance of some economic theories (backed by various Nobel laureates) masks a commitment to conservatism and power.

He has refocused on the economic ideas of the right, adding a chapter on the Austrian School and reworking his earlier chapters on Burke to emphasize that ideas about capitalism have long been central to conservatism.

Geismer notes:

…Robin sees conservatism less as an autonomous intellectual tradition than as a series of reactions to the progressive left. He defines conservatism as “a meditation on — and theoretical rendition of — the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” The sequence begins with Burke’s outrage at the French Revolution, which Robin argues was due less to the revolution’s violence and more to the ways in which it called for inverting the obligations of deference and command.

Robin rejects those who define conservatism as a commitment to limited government and liberty; these ideas, he allows, are perhaps “byproducts of conservatism,” but they are not its “animating purpose.” In one of his most provocative formulations, he contends that the fundamental difference between the left and the right is not that one values equality and the other freedom, but rather that “the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders.”

The theories of the economists I read and those I know personally are not byproducts of their ideologies. In fact, several were Marxists, Democratic Socialists, or progressive Democrats before their work in economics changed their opinions of markets and the benefits of capitalism. One can read HumanProgress.org for data on the benefits of capitalism, even though the media and our politicians might make it feel like life is the worst it has been.

Geismer offers something of an excuse for Robin, noting that, “Robin is a political theorist, not a historian….” If capitalism is so bad and all about power, why has it increased equality more than other systems in the world? The market-based economies of Europe, with social safety nets, are quite conservative and resistant to change, yet they do well because they are stable.

I dislike what Robin does by associating the Austrian School of economics with conservatism, but I also must admit that racists and other intolerant individuals have embraced the Austrians. It does not help that the “American” Austrians did not reject association with racists and hate-mongers. Then again, do we reject all phenomenology and existentialism because Heidegger was a Nazi? If anything the Austrian School was shaped by a fear of fascism and servitude.

Robin discusses Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the “Chicago Boys” associated with the University of Chicago School of Economics. Robin discounts any claims by economists that they hoped for political change driven by economic change. While I recognize that faith in change through economics was naive, I do not discount faith in markets. Many people supported better relations with China and now Cuba for the same reason: change through economic relations. That doesn’t always happen, though.

Geismer doesn’t critically examine the claims Robin makes against the Austrians and other economists. The Freshwater Schools of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Chicago, New York University, Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Rochester are apparently not engaged in economic theory and quantitative testing of these theories. For Robin, these scholars are motivated by the conservative desire to retain power and influence — economics being merely a means to an end.

The Austrians were not Nietzschean in their philosophy, though they did believe that leaders should be well-educated and cosmopolitan. How does that differ from what many on the left now say about wanting a “more qualified” president? I certainly want a president and congressional leaders better-prepared than the average citizen.

For instance, Robin offers an original interpretation of the Austrian School that illuminates both the aristocratic dimensions of their ideas and the parallels in their vision to that of Nietzsche. While he notes that this connection is one of “elective affinity” and not “direct influence,” Robin sees key similarities in the ways that both aimed to address the challenge of socialism and labor and called for “a new ruling class in and for an age of mass politics.”

If conservatism (and libertarianism) are all about power, then it must be intrinsically linked to all the horrible forms of power abuse. Conservatives are the oppressors — and only oppressors — in Robin’s world and in that of many reviewers. If it is ugly, it is conservative.

The Reactionary Mind argues that the right has increasingly come to understand, over the course of the past few centuries, that in order to defend the old regime and preserve the power of elites they have to build alliances with the masses, and practice a form of “upside-down populism.” He argues that “conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something,” and to be politically successful the elites need to convince the masses that they have lost something, too. This is why conservatism, though fundamentally concerned with economics, has also been inextricably linked to forms of patriarchy and white supremacy: what unites them all is the effort to protect power in both the public and private sphere.

Recall that in my introduction I noted that such claims about conservatives inherently rely on arguments that supporters of conservative politicians are ignorant lemmings, led over the cliffs by masterful con artists and evil robber barons. On this point, Geismer offers a critique:

The exclusion of the voices and experiences of the working- and even middle-class conservatives from The Reactionary Mind makes it seem that any non-elite who votes Republican or adheres to conservative ideas must be suffering from a bad case of false consciousness. This problem is by no means unique to Robin; this is often the default assumption of scholars of the right and intellectual historians more generally.

If you do not trust voters, you cannot support democracy. Not that I am for direct democracy, as I fear mob role, but I do have faith in our system to self-correct over longer periods of time. I discussed this earlier in this essay: democracy is a marketplace of ideas, the ultimate form of crowdsourcing. Like other crowdsourced projects, democracies learn from mistakes and evolve. I have faith that, over time, people will understand that we need better-qualified leaders. Then again, our “least-qualified” were among our best leaders and the “most-qualified” were often horrible leaders. The voters seem to understand credentials aren’t markers of leadership.

I deeply dislike Donald Trump. He has no core values. Sarah Palin also lacks core values, based on how fluid her allegiances have been. Trump is not an anomaly within the contemporary GOP (precisely why I am not a Republican), but he is not a fiscal conservative, either. He believes what he says, which saddens me. He is a racist, a sexist, xenophobe, and worst. I cannot understand why any true fiscal conservative or any libertarian would remain within the GOP.

On the following, I do agree with Robin: Trump does embody the GOP of the last 50 years. That’s appalling and heartbreaking. However, 50 years are not the whole of the conservative or libertarian traditions.

Though Trump was frequently portrayed by both liberals and conservatives, especially during the campaign, as an unholy anomaly within the history of the modern Republican Party, Robin has little trouble assimilating him to the broader reactionary canon. All the things that supposedly separate Trump from the conservative tradition — his racism, his populism, his inconsistencies and contradictions — are in fact, in Robin’s eyes, central features of that tradition.

Let is look back to the first edition of The Reactionary Mind and an exchange between Robin and Mark Lilla, another scholar of history, which was published in the New York Review of Books when the first edition was published in 2012.

‘The Reactionary Mind’: An Exchange

Corey Robin, reply by Mark Lilla
FEBRUARY 23, 2012 ISSUE
In response to:
Republicans for Revolution from the January 12, 2012 issue

To the Editors:

Mark Lilla [“Republicans for Revolution,” NYR, January 12] makes three claims against my book The Reactionary Mind: it fails to take seriously the statements of “conservative intellectuals who lay out benign-sounding political principles”; it’s simplistic, situating the opposition between left and right in a “not overly complex” history of oppressor versus oppressed; it elides changes and cleavages on the right. It’s difficult to find my argument amid these claims, so let me restate it here.

My book argues that conservatism is a reaction against movements of the left—from the French Revolution to feminism. While this is a revisionist claim, it required no elaborate digging on my part to make it. I simply looked at what conservatives have said about themselves. Robert Peel, who practically invented Britain’s Conservative Party, defined its aim as opposition “to the restless spirit of revolutionary change.” Russell Kirk, one of the intellectual architects of the American conservative movement, described conservatism as a “system of ideas” that “has sustained men…in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation.” George Nash, court historian of that movement, identified conservatism as “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary.” All this, and more, I cite in my book.

As I noted earlier, Robin does look at the words of conservatives and libertarians, but he reads them as he wants to read those words. His biases shape how he reads, as it does for all of us. Even those things I consider to be sarcastic utterances, Robin takes seriously. Conservative authors do this to liberals and progressives, and it bothers me when anyone takes words out of context or misses obvious hyperbole and humor. Robin is certain of his argument that conservatism is all about preserving power. He analyzes conservative works accordingly.

Lilla is correct that I believe conservatives oppose these movements because they threaten public and private hierarchies of power. Again, I provide ample evidence for this. But he seriously distorts my position when he says that I depict conservatives as “black-hatted villains” whose ultimate vision is “simply a defense of privilege.” As I write in the introduction:

“No simple defense of one’s own place and privileges…the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, base, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. When [Edmund] Burke adds…that the “great Object” of the Revolution is “to root out that thing called an Aristocrat or Nobleman and Gentleman,” he is not simply referring to the power of the nobility; he is also referring to the distinction that power brings to the world. If the power goes, the distinction goes with it.

Robin makes use of the word emancipation to imply conservatives oppose emancipating the oppressed. Yes, the Party of Lincoln and the original party of Women’s Suffrage apparently opposed emancipation. The same party of Eisenhower, who continued and completed Truman’s integration of the United States’ armed forces. The GOP did accept the Dixiecrats by 1968, but before that the “conservatives” were religiously conservative and compelled to fight for equality based on their understanding of faith.

It’s also true that the GOP of old resisted federal aid during disasters and believed in self-sufficiency under Calvin Coolidge. I’d argue that the conservative values were a moral vision of self-reliance and local community over federal government.

Conservatism is a moral vision in which excellence depends upon hierarchy. Inequality is the means, not the end—that is a belief, I show, shared by everyone from Burke to Ayn Rand, the slaveholders to Ludwig von Mises.

No. No. And no again. Conservatism in the United States traces its roots to our founding and Calvinist values of self-reliance as a community responsibility. You take care of yourself and your family so others won’t have to do so. You take in friends and family when they need help. You rely on people close to you and you support them when necessary. Tossing in “slaveholders” is another rhetorical move by Robin, reinforcing my view his biases run deep.

As I have written many times, mention Ayn Rand when you wish to attack conservatives or libertarians. I cannot imagine someone more outside the tradition of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Still, at least The Fountainhead promoted being authentic to yourself over wealth and power. If you didn’t realize the hero of Rand’s only good story would rather be poor than create mediocre art, then you probably should read the book or watch the film.

At least Robin recognizes how strange it is that the groups so many different individuals together as conservatives.

“Some conservatives criticize the free market, others defend it; some oppose the state, others embrace it; some believe in God, others are atheists. Some are localists, others nationalists, and still others internationalists. Some, like Burke, are all three at the same time. But these are historical improvisations—tactical and substantive—on a theme.” (p. 36, first edition)

Ah, yes, it is all about manipulation, not authentic beliefs in various philosophies, ideologies, or economic models. No, the conservative only embraces what is useful to retain power. I would despise all conservatives if they were indeed so malevolently creative. Thankfully, the conservatives I know (and with whom I often disagree) are the among the best-intentioned and most committed people I have met.

Mark Lilla’s reply to Robin is worthy of some excerpts.

‘The Reactionary Mind’: An Exchange

Corey Robin, reply by Mark Lilla
FEBRUARY 23, 2012 ISSUE
In response to:
Republicans for Revolution from the January 12, 2012 issue

Mark Lilla replies:

Though, as I said in my review, Corey Robin can be insightful when he writes profiles of some individuals on the right, his letter confirms my main point: when it comes to thinking about “the right” he’s hopelessly confused. The main confusion is conceptual and arises because he has no clear idea of what he means by “conservatism.” He could argue that there are genuine conservative principles that provoke conservatives’ “reaction against movements of the left,” and then criticize those principles and the people who hold them. This he does not do. Instead he argues there are no such things as conservative principles, only ideological “improvisations” for defending hierarchy and privilege shared by a heterogeneous cast of characters running from Tocqueville and Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt and Phyllis Schlafly. So his real claim can be reduced to this: “those who react against movements of the left” react against movements of the left—which is a tautology, not an argument.

Lilla properly points out that you cannot reduce conservatives to self-serving power-hungry oppressors of other men. In fact, many conservatives have sought to improve the lives of others. Do we ignore these efforts as manipulations? Did George H. W. Bush sign the Americans with Disabilities Act because he assumed it would win him votes? Did Richard Nixon create the Environmental Protection Agency for the power it might offer? Sometimes, we need to assume that the good conservatives have done was because they believed in the causes. Nixon also supported mandated insurance. There was a good economic reason for this, yes, but also a benefit to the workers. Robin ignores such social causes or considers them cynical ploys. Lilla writes:

Robin’s Manichaeanism distorts the historical reality of the conservative tradition, which includes the Disraeli who shepherded through the Reform Act of 1867, the Bismarck who laid the foundation for the German welfare state, and the Heritage Foundation, which first floated the idea of mandating that adult Americans all carry some form of health insurance. Though these proposals met challenges from the left, they were shaped by a recognizable conservative sensibility. Robin also ignores the liberal tradition, which gets no mention in his letter and barely a nod in his book. (The book’s index entry reads “liberalism, see left.”) There are good liberal reasons to resist “the restless spirit of revolutionary change,” too, since it can so often lead to despotism in the end (which is liberals’ great worry about the Arab Spring). Liberals stress the need for individual liberty, the rule of law, and stable constitutional structures, which are not revolutionary principles; does that make them reactionaries? In Robin’s eyes, perhaps it does.

Like Lilla, I take the conservative politicians and voters at their word. They believe in what they say, generally. Unfortunately, the modern GOP doesn’t hide its anti-intellectualism and its lack of philosophical depth. But, the voters aren’t stupid or manipulated: they are just like the politicians they support. They don’t trust the academic elites and are pushing back against them. The GOP base also pushed away its own intellectual supporters, most of whom want nothing to do with Donald Trump.

He is correct, though, to note that I didn’t engage with his explanation of right-wing populism—for the simple reason that it was too weak and condescending to take seriously. Robin believes in false consciousness and in intellectuals’ ability to see through it; that’s why he can claim that a conservatism seeking to free the world from all that is “ugly, brutish, base, and dull” gives “the lower orders…a taste of lordly power” and gives arriviste Irishmen and Jews their Napoleonic moments in the sun. I, like most people, take the populists at their word. When figures like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (and now Newt Gingrich) demonize educated elites and praise the wisdom of “soccer moms” and plumbers, they mean it. And those on the bottom rung who cheer and vote for them know what they are cheering and voting for.

The original review in The New York Review of Books appeared as “Republicans for Revolution” by Mark Lilla in the January 12, 2012 issue. In that review, Lilla wrote:

But the current public dissatisfaction with our parties is not just about partisanship. It also reflects a sense that the labels we use to distinguish factions, principles, and programs have lost their value. What does it mean to call oneself a liberal or conservative today? Does it make sense to distinguish “progressives” and “reactionaries,” or are those just terms of abuse and self-flattery? It’s hard to know how to talk about the new classes of rich and poor created by the global economy, and their strangely overlapping political commitments. Or where on the linguistic map to put the new populisms spawning around the world, some anti-global, some anti-immigrant, some libertarian, some authoritarian. Words are failing us.

Apparently, words aren’t failing Sarah Jones, who wrote a “review” praising The Reactionary Mind for the November 21, 2017, issue of The New Republic. Jones’ suggests that it is the capitalism of conservatives that must be challenged. After all, Trump is a businessman and business is to blame for most social ills, which only government can address. Conservatism for Jones is the crony, corporatist capitalism that libertarians generally despise. It is the capitalism without failure that gave birth to both the Tea Party and Occupy movements as banks weren’t allowed to fail. It is an un-conservative capitalism Jones critiques using Robin’s work as a gateway.

A Book for Reactionary Times
Corey Robin’s studies in the conservative tradition explain the rise of Trump.
Sarah Jones
November 21, 2017

[…]

The conservative fixation on the market, and the market’s ability to lock society into the correct order of life, means that any ideological response to a conservative president must feature economics prominently in its analysis. It’s impossible to counter either near-religious fervor in the market’s liberatory potential or Trump’s grotesque materialism without a competing, egalitarian economic vision. If equality is a turn in the seat of power, as Robin defines it, we must take on the economic forces that keep it out of reach just as we take on racism, sexism, and homophobia.

In this effort, we will find no allies in the conservative movement. Moderate conservatives are mostly useful as a vote against the worst of Trump’s legislative agenda. Otherwise, the drive to anoint a William F. Buckley or an Irving Kristol some lost avatar of sensible intellectualism is a pathological one and it will condemn any resistance effort to failure. Conservatives will never work for you, unless you are already rich or pious or white or male. The problem is not particularly egregious conservative politicians like Trump or Palin, but conservative politics. Ours must be better. We can only respond to a show about nothing with something; with substance, and with political force.

Jones embraces Robin’s cynical view of conservatives and the associations with all things abhorrent to many of us, particularly intolerance of others. It is impossible for Robin — or Jones — to imagine that conservatives might earnestly believe that free-market capitalism and limited government might be the best way to offer opportunities and equality to all people. Again, the GOP doesn’t help my position, since the GOP supports many things I find problematic as a classical liberal and libertarian. But I’m not going to abandon my core values or beliefs.

The GOP’s problems are not problems with conservatism or libertarianism. They are problems with the GOP and a voting base that is driven by fear. Conservatives fear revolution, yes. They dislike instability and change for the sake of change. But, the GOP has turned caution and reason into something dark. Robin merely takes the fear that is present among Trump voters and applies this much too broadly.

As I argued at the very opening of this essay, the problem of seeing what he wants to see isn’t unique to Robin. It is a problem in the humanities — and within history in particular. From the New York Times in 2012, when the first edition was published:

Online Fracas for a Critic of the Right
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

January 18, 2012
Corey Robin’s ‘Reactionary Mind’ Stirs Internet Debate

For Corey Robin the author it’s been a bruising few months. Shortly after his essay collection “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” appeared last fall, The New York Times Book Review published a review by Sheri Berman dismissing the book as “a diatribe that preaches to the converted,” “so filled with exaggeration and invective that the reader’s eyes roll.” Then in late December, The New York Review of Books ran a withering assessment by Mark Lilla, who dismissed the book as “history as W.P.A. mural, ” if not the left-wing scholarly equivalent of Glenn Beck’s blackboard scribblings.

For Corey Robin the blogger, however, the past few months have been quite excellent. Since starting CoreyRobin.com in June, Mr. Robin, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College, has established himself as a lively and combative online presence. He has racked up links from prominent bloggers and this month [Robin] won the 2011 “best writer” award from Cliopatra, the blog of the History News Network, which called him “the quintessential public intellectual for the digital age.”

If you want to be celebrated in the humanities, if you want to win awards as a historian, offer biased critiques of conservatives and libertarians. Reflect the ideological biases of your discipline and the progressive hegemony of departments within our elite institutions.

Again, I do not doubt the conviction of Robin, nor do I question he was honestly trying to explain how others could oppose his worldview. It is a shame there are so few conservatives and libertarians within the humanities to write about the intellectuals within the movement. Instead, historians are depending on each other, outsiders to the conservative and libertarian movements, to explain how “the others” came to be so brutish and savage.

Of course, I’m not employed in the humanities, either. No surprise there.