Late in life, 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."
With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray
into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly
at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites
them? Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction
against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is
fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower
orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose
it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these
differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against
movements demanding freedom and equality. Despite their opposition
to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of
politics and society-one that involves self-transformation,
violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges
and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for
reinvention has been critical to their success. Written by a keen,
highly regarded observer of the contemporary political scene, The
Reactionary Mind ranges widely, from Edmund Burke to Antonin Scalia
to Donald Trump, from John C. Calhoun to Ayn Rand. It advances the
notion that all right-wing ideologies, from the eighteenth century
through today, are historical improvisations on a theme: the felt
experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win
it back. When its first edition appeared in fall 2011, The
Reactionary Mind set off a fierce debate, in the New York Review of
Books, on academic blogs, and throughout the internet. So intense
was the controversy that it became the subject of a profile in the
New York Times. Now updated to include Trump's election and the
rise of global populism, The Reactionary Mind is more relevant than
ever.
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