Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Episode 10: Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump

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Episode 10: Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, I will be speaking with Professor Corey Robin, distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: A leading contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and other publications, Professor Robin is the author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, Fear and The Reactionary Mind, the book we will be discussing today.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Corey, thank you so much for being in conversation today, and thank you for writing this wonderful book.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: As I understand it, the first edition was 2011, and then it was conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: It definitely took a decided turn further of the wheel as it became conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump in the second edition in 2018.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: I won't ask what the third edition is going to be.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know, but going from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump already tells us something.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Could you introduce the book a bit?
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, this is a vast history of conservative thought, and one of my questions is in what ways are Donald Trump and Sarah Palin conservatives?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe another question, in what ways do they have minds, uh, reactionary minds?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me, and uh just really thrilled to be here.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can get the thesis in some ways from the subtitle of the book.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh meant as a deliberate provocation, because I think traditionally most academics and journalists and people who pay attention to these things think of Edmund Burke as the towering summit of conservatism, a thoughtful conservative, and that what has come afterwards, particularly in recent years, has been this long decline.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And what I try to do in the book is to say, while there have been changes, obviously over time, there's a continuity there, and that the Edmund Burke we think we know, and by that I mean the traditional, reasonable, skeptical, cautious, careful man of prudence, was never anything like that.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not in his life or in his thought, and I'm more interested in the thought.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason for that goes to the heart of what is conservatism about?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: What is it?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what conservatism is, since the beginning, is a reaction, a counter-revolutionary, reactionary movement against movements for the emancipation of the lower orders.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Conservatism was born in the reaction against the French Revolution.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Virtually all historians and many conservatives themselves agree with that.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: That was its animating principle, and what it disliked in the French Revolution, fundamentally at its core, was precisely the idea of these subaltern classes that had previously been silent and obedient, that these people were suddenly acting in their own name, on their own behalf, and speaking in their own voice, and making a claim on behalf of themselves and on behalf of the political order that they should be a part of it.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: It has been that idea that conservatism has opposed from the beginning.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Where the Sarah Palin and Donald Trump part of this comes in is that conservatives, again going back to Burke, have understood that in order to oppose that formation, the entry of these subaltern classes, you cannot simply reiterate traditional defenses of hierarchy and order.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: You have to come up with new defenses of hierarchy and order that in some way, shape, or form speak to these very people who are now populating the stage, the political stage, who had not been there before.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: That has to include them in some way, shape or form.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that has given conservatism from its very beginning a very wild, populist, kind of democratic.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to say democratic in any sense of collective majority rule, but a kind of a touch of the common man and a touch of the common woman.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that has been the sort of magical elixir that conservatism from its very beginning has drunk from.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: A defense of hierarchy and rule by the elite, but in a way that seems inclusive and appealing to the people on the bottom.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Can you put that into the US context in history?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, I want you to help me figure out what is going on now.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: But one basic point that is fascinating from the start, as you say, this is to keep people out of the political system, but to do so in the American context in an ostensibly democratic system, which is a tricky kind of business.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what I would like to understand and tease out.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe you could take us through Burke, of course, when he was opposing the French Revolution in 1790.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Britain had some of the early beginnings of democratic governance, but still not much representation and so forth, and the elites dominated the politics.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: In the United States, it's been a weird ride, of course, with race and class being core issues of Americana from the start and core paradoxes of the United States.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, what has conservatism meant in American history different from how it evolved in British history?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: But I love the idea that it's all a continuity in a way, but in the specific context of the different countries.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: I would like to start a little bit with Burke and another reactionary against the French Revolution, Joseph Demesse, because I think it'll highlight some of the what's different about the United States and what's continuous.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the ways that I think from its beginnings, conservatism has reconciled this issue that we're talking about of, for lack of a better words, elitism and populism, aristocracy and democracy.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: How has it created done it?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: One way, and this goes back to Burke, is by the conservative being an outsider.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: People forget this, but Burke was an Irishman in England.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: He was from sort of a Catholic family that were recently converted to Anglicanism, and he was not from the aristocracy.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: He was from the middling classes.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And Burke is very conscious of this, and it becomes very much part of his appeal.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's a wonderful tract he writes in the middle of the battle over the French Revolution called Letter to a Noble Lord, where he repeats some of the things that you're going to hear from the modern American right.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: He goes after these guys who are defending the French Revolution from the House of Lords.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: So these are, you know, what we would call today limousine liberals.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: These are men of wealth, and but you know, they're politically correct.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: They're on the side of the French Revolution and they're sort of slumming in a way.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And Burke is thrown into a rage by this.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And he talks about himself.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: You people would never let me come through.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: At every pass of the turnpike, I had to show my passport, I had to prove my credentials to you, and here I am, the only thing that stands between you and the mob.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you dare to challenge me.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: So this outsider affectation.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Alexander Hamilton is another one, right?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Born in Nevis in the West Indies, you know, reputed, always had this rumor about him that he was of mixed-race descent.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: These outsiders have played this up.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sarah Palin, I'm from Alaska, I'm not part of the political, and of course, Donald Trump, the ultimate outsider, right?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: This has always been part of the way that the conservative has reconciled these two things.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the outsider is important.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Another way that Demeste in France, Joseph Demeste, who is a real arch reactionary, when he defends the king, the restoration of the king after the revolution, he said, look, this guy, he's been through the school of hard knocks.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Look at all he's suffered.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's like you.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: The king, the queen, as the victim, as the common man, someone who has not been cosseted and comforted with all the lap of luxury.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: No, somebody who's really had it tough.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And again, we see that.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I talk about this in the book, that it's, you know, the conservatives who really invent the politics of victimhood.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes they have a real referent there, you know, when Louis XVI and then Marie Antoinette are executed, they are not at the summit of power, they're at the bottom.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: But that idea of the victim has been extraordinarily important.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Just jumping quickly to the United States, the place where you see ground zero of how conservatism has created a populism of aristocracy, is really in the old masterclass of the South.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: They are the real pioneers in inventing racial ideology and very conscious that what they are doing in inventing racial ideology, the ideology of racial hierarchy, is giving every white man a sense that he is an aristocrat.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, James Henry Hammond, who is John C.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Calhoun's chief lieutenant, he's a senator from South Carolina, one of the key theoreticians of the position of the Old South, he says, in the South, every white man is an aristocrat.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for some of the Southerners, what that means is we've got to make sure that every white man owns a slave.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's fascinating, there are movements to provide tax subsidies in order to allow white men to own a slave, because the idea is if slaveholding is not accessible to all white men, they could very quickly become abolitionists.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one path, is to just make it easier for every white man to own a slave.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a program that you see in the South.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: The other, which is John C.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Calhoun's path, is no.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Start getting people to think that by virtue of that white skin, that's where their superiority lies.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so race is the I call it democratic feudalism.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: It is the classic means by which a social system that is extraordinarily hierarchical, even among white people in the South, right?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not as if there's a democracy of commoners among white men by any stretch.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: There are some real wealthy, powerful people.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's an extraordinarily oligarchical system.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: But race has been one of the key ways in which this has happened to reconcile, but not the only one.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I look a lot at gender ideology and also the democracy of the entrepreneur.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: That idea is another way.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, we could talk about all of these ways, but I think race is probably the foundational mode of conservative argumentation in this country.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: So, Corey, I guess a big question for me.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: America has always been deeply divided by wealth and income.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: So we have massive inequalities, unlike many other pure countries in Europe or even in Canada and so forth.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, we have massive racial inequalities, and obviously race uh has been the flashpoint of American politics from the very beginning.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: And more than the flashpoint, I think that's an understatement.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's been the basic axis of so much of American culture and politics from the start.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Is conservatism fundamentally about wealth and races instrumentalized?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: Or is conservatism about wealth, race, gender, all kinds of privilege, and it's all fundamentally wrapped up together?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is a debate that I think a lot of people, and it's not really about the right so much as everybody wants to know, you know, race versus class.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's important when understanding the right, conservatism, to get out of that matrix in the first place, and for a couple of reasons.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: The first is that conservatism is a defense of hierarchy and privilege.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And there are multiple forms of social hierarchy and privilege.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Race is one, class is another, gender is another, gender and the family are absolutely foundational to the conservative imagination.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, what I say in the book is that what conservatives, when they talk about hierarchy and order, it's very much in these private regimes of power.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: I call it the family, the factory in the field, to try to kind of get at all of this.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, Burke, long before Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI are the targets of the French Revolution, but the revolution has begun, he says, who's going to be threatened here?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be every master with their servant, every officer with their soldier.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately he's going to see prophetically, long before anybody else does, the revolution in Haiti.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's these private regimes of power, and they take multiple forms.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: However, and I think this is the second part of this that's really important for us to understand, is that conservatism is always formed in reaction against movements of equality.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not simply a defense of these regimes, it's a defense of these regimes of power and hierarchy when they're under threat from a real political and social movement, not from tweets on Twitter, but actual movements that are going to really start dispossessing people of their power, whether that power takes the form of wealth, whether it takes the form of white skin privilege, whether it takes the form of patriarchal authority in the family.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's when these movements happen that conservatives really get going.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's that reactive instrumental part, which is what you're assured of asking about, is race instrumentalizing on behalf of class.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: What I would say is that conservative arguments are always instrumental, all of them are.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when conservatism is at its most powerful, ironically, is when these movements of the left are trying to dispossess these established hierarchies, and suddenly there is a counter-movement from the right that rises up and says, we have the mechanism to stop these people on the other side.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the more comprehensive our side can be in its defense of hierarchy, that is, the more intersectional we can be.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm being deliberately provocative, but in many ways, the right is an intersectional kind of politics in a crude way, obviously.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: But they want to appeal to men, they want to appeal to white people, they want to appeal to wealthy people, and to combine that into a counter-social movement.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the summary of this long oration here is that conservatism is a defense of multiple orders of hierarchy, right?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's not one or the other, and it always has been, oftentimes private regimes of power, but that it is always instrumentalizing and coming up with new defenses of that hierarchy and something we haven't talked about, oftentimes borrowing from the very movements that they are opposing.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And just to give a quick example, the right now talks about cancel culture and being threatened with silencing, using all the language that the kind of social justice movement of the left has used over the last 20 years.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing new or surprising about this.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is from the original playbook of the right, which has always been, as I say, extraordinarily instrumentalizing in its approach.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: It is a victim-based argument for power, which is just extraordinary.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm a political theorist.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Plato doesn't say that the basis of the philosopher king's right to rule is that he's a victim.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle doesn't say that the magnanimous man has been hurt.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's the opposite.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: And yet you have these arguments over and over and over again, going back to Burke and Joseph Demest.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: We are the meek ones who have been beaten down, and it is time for us to reclaim what we once had.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that is exactly the Trump approach.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Pure victimhood.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody cheating me.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's fascinating.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when I uh think about the American history of my lifetime, I was born in 1954.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, grew up in an FDR household where Franklin Roosevelt was the greatest president.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I still think he is the greatest president as an adult uh after all these decades.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: I do look back at him and what he brought uh in the Great Depression as the greatest thing.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then watching what I think it's right to say was basically one swing of the pendulum during my lifetime from the New Deal era, which I would date from 1933 to essentially the arrival of Richard Nixon, but especially with Ronald Reagan really making the revolution, to this moment still not getting out of it.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: And trying to understand that conservative era.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the puzzle has been always for me what we're talking about, which is many forces came to play during uh these critical years of the 60s, 70s, and the and the rise of the conservative movement, but it was the civil rights era, the women's rights era, and so forth.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: But it was also the incredible class war by the rich on the poor that started at the same time.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: So somehow class, race, gender all became implicated in the same way.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the genius of the Reagan uh movement, which has now been, in my view, 40 years uh in power more or less, and is still holding on even in these days as uh we watch whether Biden can make any kind of breakthrough or not, is that somehow an incredibly grotesquely unequal distribution of income, and some of the richest people uh in the United States are able to harness a mass movement?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, are they instrumentalizing these other fears uh successfully and brilliantly, or uh is it deeper than that?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: And uh why do poorer whites or working class whites uh sign up for this exactly in our time?
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Why is Joe Manchin uh senator of probably the poorest state in the country taking every dimension of poverty to bear of West Virginia?
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Why is his mission in life as a Democrat and a senator of the poorest state to hold back progressive economic change?
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: This and how does he get away with that?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: And why is his state one of the largest majorities for Trump voters?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's a lot, but let me turn it back to you.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, I appreciate it.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think the first thing I would say, because I think a lot of us on the left, you know, have this question about race and class and gender, and there's a part of the left, I think it's fairly small at this point that wants to try to find a class politics without dealing with race.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, you see a lot of these debates on popularism and David Shore and so forth that are going on.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what I would say is it's sort of unavoidable.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: And go back to the New Deal.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: The New Deal was a massive project of political redistribution of wealth and class power.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And people don't talk about this that much, but African Americans in the North between 1932 and 1936 dramatically swinged from going from the party of Lincoln, they voted for Hoover in 1932, overwhelmingly to the party of the Democrats, and they never turned back for the most part.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the question is why?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that is because African Americans saw a real opportunity for themselves in labor unions, in the kinds of redistributive programs that, however limited they were and oftentimes exclusive of African Americans, nevertheless, you know, they saw a possibility there.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: There was also a tremendous amount of civil rights agitation within the New Deal coalition going back into the 30s in the North.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Eric Schickler, who's a political scientist at Berkeley, has a wonderful book on this called Racial Realignment, showing that the civil rights movement and the New Deal coalition doesn't just begin in the 50s or the 60s, it goes back to the 30s.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And women, DC, is a place, and the New Deal is a place where many feminists flock to.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see it in the Hollywood films, you know, the rise of the new woman who's independent and not so tied to her husband or marriage, but with a career.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Social movements have a way of spilling out like that.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's just no way that you could have the kind of universalism of the New Deal rhetoric and not have it set off explosions in the sphere of the family, in the sphere of race and all the rest of it.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's inescapable.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: It just cannot be done.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's what that happens in the French Revolution.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: It sets off all of these things.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: And Burke, of course, saw that happening.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there's no way of putting that genie back in the bottle.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's always going to be there.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that is going to both be the great capaciousness of a revolutionary movement of the left, but also its great vulnerability because you can't reform gender relations in the family without upsetting a lot of husbands, some of whom might be part of your New Deal coalition.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, uh Corey, just to say so brilliant in the book and so eye opening is this the private spheres of power as being relevant here because you know, as a Economist, I think about classes or the median income and those below and those above.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: And what you're reminding us is that issues of class or gender or any opening of the economy or any basic equalizing measure in the economy affects at the household level or at the community level or in the block or in the factory, or as you say, family factory field on the farm, social relations.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so if someone has what I wouldn't even recognize as a power relation vis-a-vis someone else, because I'd put both of them on one side of the class divide, this could be deeply threatening at the micro level and perceived in a way that's completely different from some grand equalization of income.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's a brilliant, crucial insight.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's really the micropolitics of power.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we credit feminism with inventing, you know, the personal as the political.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: In some ways, it was the right that first understood that because they have this old regime mentality that all social order is essentially a form of real personal dominion and rule of one person over another.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in the grand abstractions, not just of economists, but of the left, that oftentimes is lost sight of.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it is both the great promise of the left to break those very tangible personal bonds.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: That is what liberation and emancipation is all about.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And if you ask any woman in the women's movement, any worker in the workers' movement, any African American in the freedom struggle, they will tell you at the heart.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Elizabeth Cady Stanton says this very clearly in the 1850s.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Why are these guys so obsessed about women's suffrage?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: What are they so afraid of?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: A light bulb goes off and she says, it's at the home.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they're terrified of.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: And in during the battle over Reconstruction, you see the same thing among civil rights activists in the 1870s.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: They say, you know, these white people be okay if there's like a representative off in Washington.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: They just want to make sure I'm, you know, tipping my hat when I'm walking down the street.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: So they're very personal.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a great opportunity for the right.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the flip side of that, what I wanted to say, because you were talking about Nixon and Reagan and Trump as the fulfillment of this kind of politics.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm always struck by, and this, you know, something that I think many on the left really disagree with me about, but I'm I hold to it very strongly, is that from if you look historically, what I see with Trump and the GOP today is actually that populism has become weaker and weaker and is not providing the same kind of political elixir that it once provided.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see this just in the presidential returns.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Compare the landslide that Richard Nixon had in 1972 to Reagan's.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Nixon, it was like 63%.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: Reagan is about 58% in 1984, George W.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: Bush gets 51, 52%.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: And Trump, of course, both times is a minority president and second time loses.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think what's more important to understand, the right today, right now, is less, frankly, the kind of nasty racial appeals, as vicious and as awful as they are.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: But from an analytic perspective, what I think matters far more to the right today are things like the Electoral College, the Senate, the filibuster voting, the filibuster and the Supreme Court.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: These are all profoundly anti-democratic.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: They're deliberately counter-majoritarian institutions.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's their whole purpose.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: So far from populism being the kind of secret of today's right, the right to me looks more and more kind of like Britain circa 1820, before the Great Reform Act of 1832.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: That is, the Tories ruled Britain from, I don't know, the 1790s.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was hardly anybody who wasn't a Tory who controlled parliament.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what the secret of the Tories was was what we call rotten boroughs, right?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: These gerrymandered districts where voting was very difficult.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a kind of losing battle that they had because the modern world has unleashed democracy as the kind of lingua franca.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: And when you see conservatives today increasingly using these institutional counter-majoritarian mechanisms, I don't think that's a sign of their strength.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a sign of their weakness.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean they can't hold on to power for a long time.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that at all.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: But what I'm struck by is that where once these kind of the rabid racial language, the coded language, but nevertheless rabid of a Richard Nixon and of a Ronald Reagan was able to kind of propel these vast majorities, those have gotten progressively smaller.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great point.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it is really the frightening thing.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, Trump never, I don't think, in a day in his administration, had a net positive approval rating, like you're saying, never won a majority vote and so forth.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's frightening, of course, to watch all the machinations of trying to keep minority power or power of definitely a minority of the population.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it's perhaps more unnerving that if one felt that our institutions will hold, don't worry about it, it's a lot of noise and heat, we'd feel better about it.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: But they seem pretty nasty, this group, uh shockingly nasty.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I dwell on this, though, is really for the left.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm slightly younger than you, but I really came of age during the Reagan era.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I grew up during the 70s and the 80s.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, you know, I think the left and liberals and Democrats have always had this kind of angsty feeling about themselves that somehow we don't represent the majority of the country.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that what the majority is, is racist and sexist and vicious and nasty.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: Hobbes is, you know, nasty, brutish, and tall.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and the fact is that there was a reality that corresponded to that because the right was winning majorities.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think what's really important for the left to be clear on is however vicious and nasty these people are and racist they are, it is not a majority-winning program.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I say this because the left's attitudes towards racial equality and economic equality are often moralistic, but haunted by the sense that it's politically unrealistic, right?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're morally right, but politically we can't do it.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm trying to say here is that that division no longer holds because there is a majority that rejects this kind of politics.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: For years, the left would hide behind the Supreme Court and the kind of majoritarian dilemma, and you know, it was the court that was going to advance civil rights.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Those days are gone.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: It does have that feeling.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: How could we really make this case?
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much pushback and so on.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: But what has struck me on the economic side, because I'm basically focused on the social democratic issues, raise some taxes from the rich and help poor people to get the education that everybody should have, be able to eat properly, decent shelter, and so forth.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm shocked in our wealthy society that we alone of the high-income countries, we don't have the basics.
• 29:27
  unknown: Right.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: But absolutely uh consistent with what you're saying, public opinion runs consistently, 60, 40, 70, 30 in favor of these issues.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it, you know, indeed, uh on the issue that we're facing in the United States right now, rather painfully and poignantly, taxing corporations and the rich, it's something like two to one in favor of raising the taxes.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: But then when it comes into the Congress, it's by a vote one way or another.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just awful to watch this, but it's not public opinion.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: And Corey, I face the same thing in all the work I do on climate change legislation, where I'm asked constantly, especially in Europe, how can you convince the American people about these issues?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I say it's not the American people.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: They want climate safety.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: And they've been saying it roughly 70, 30 for decades, but the political system is really broken.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: Can I ask you just about that?
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think we have a very corrupt, inherently corrupt political system, though it's legalized corruption in its way, it's pay for playing politics relentlessly in$14 billion spent on the last election cycle.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: How does that part of the political game and the ideological populistic part fit together in your thinking?
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: How do you join the ideas part, the battle for public uh opinion and the uh mechanics uh together in the US context?
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: When I started writing about the right, it was in the early years, the first part of the George W.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Bush administration, so almost 20 years ago.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the issues I was focused on then was the way warfare was being used by conservatives and the attractions of violence.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then I started focusing more on populist issues that we've also been talking about.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: In recent years, I've really been struck by the extent to which those things, again, don't explain the persistence and the potency of the right anymore.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: It is really these institutional mechanisms.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's these things that are sewn into the Constitution.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what program policy does that lead us to?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not a political strategist, I don't have the answer to that.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I think to the extent that people on the left can increasingly focus on the fact that there is a majority, there is a popular majority for these positions, and that appeals of race, however nasty they become and are increasingly becoming, are also decreasingly popular.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: With a demographic change in the United States that is so much wonderful diversity, in my opinion, for all of that also pushing not only the change of values, which is certainly happening, but also just the change of who we are in the United States, making it happen in a very wonderful way.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: It is really the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, to me, this is the triptych of power today.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in some ways, the fact that the Democratic Party's more ambitious program is being stalled by one or two, however enraging and frightening that can be, particularly when you consider the stakes of climate change and things like that, in a way that's kind of progress from where we have been before.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that everything was thought to be possible through a reconciliation package, there's none of this, we got to get it to 60 votes with at least the big ambitious thing.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think shows signs to me of movement.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think the biggest problem today is that we're sort of in this interregnum period.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: I really feel this quite strongly where the right's traditional appeals are weaker, and the left has not figured out the final mechanism to produce the sort of realignment that I think is possible right now.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: By realignment, I mean those great realigning elections of 32, 1980, 1860.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know where that leaves us, but that's the way I see it today.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, another side of this is that when they do have power democratically, and I'm thinking of the first two years of the Trump administration when they controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: What was fascinating to me was how little of their program they were actually able to get through.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is was extraordinary.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is the trifecta of power that they had.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: And with the exception of the tax cuts, the budgets that they put through, it is true that they're determined to hold on to power.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: That is absolutely correct.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: What the purpose of that power is and what they want to do with it, I think is an open question.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I this is something where I think people on the left really disagree with me, because you see the kind of awful cruelty of things like at the border, immigration policies, and so forth.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: But it struck me that it was kind of amazing that they weren't able to get any immigration bill through Congress at all when they had total control.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: It does sometimes seem that the one consistent accomplishment is tax cuts, tax cuts for the rich.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, because uh Reagan delivered that, George W.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: Bush delivered that, and Cheney famously said when he was told it couldn't be afforded.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: He said, we won the election, that's what it was for.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: And Trump did accomplish that.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, these have been grotesquely unfair and unaffordable and have ramped up the public debt to historic highs because we don't pay for the government that we absolutely need.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: But the point you're making is also completely right.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: The right has never been able to cut the size of government because the public wants it.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: So in the end, they don't go through with that, even with dismantling the bogeyman of Obamacare.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: They couldn't find a way to do anything.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's something important for the left to also keep in mind is that when you create institutions, you know, in political theory, those are the founding moments, is when you create institutions.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: And why do you do that?
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because it locks in things and changes long after the revolutionary reformist fervor is gone.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes it very hard to dismantle them.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Social Security, you know, this the dream for you know of the right since creation was to get rid of it.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Were they able to chip away?
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's no question about it.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: But they can't get rid of it.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so to me, that's why, with whatever power the Democrats have, locking in institutional changes that are hard to undo.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: Even the Obamacare thing is fascinating.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's one thing, you know, for George W.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Bush to try to take on privatizing Social Security 60 years after it's been in existence, right?
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: Obamacare had hardly been in existence at all, right?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: And its benefits were only just beginning to trickle down when the Republicans took over.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they weren't able to do it.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't able to get rid of it.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: They've done piecemeal, this, that, and the other, but that's what they've had to settle for.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's an opening there.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think the institutional gridlock is very hard to overcome.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I think we're in a different kind of a ball game.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope that the left realizes that.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: And part of the point of this book is to say that the things that seem most grotesque and awful about Trump are A, long-standing, and B, what's most significant about Trump and the GOP today is not the viciousness of those things, but their steadily weakening appeal to a mass majority electorate.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's wonderfully reassuring to hear this and actually very, very cogent.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of presentism in journalism and in the electorate, and frankly, in academics too.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of years ago, I did a piece for Harper's about how whoever the right is, the current right person, it always feels like this is the worst we've ever been.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I traced this in Philip Roth, actually, of all people.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when Nixon was happening, he said, this is the worst thing that could have ever happened to us.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Then Reagan came along, and Nixon wasn't so bad.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's right, you know, and and there's always this revisionism of the past.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I'm exactly that.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because, and I didn't even realize until now, I've been exactly on that line.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: He's the worst ever.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: I used to think so-and-so was the worst, but he's the worst.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm completely in this presentist mode.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: We all to some degree are, but I do think that's part of having the historical perspective on this stuff, is a lot of this stuff is not new.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that helps us see what is new and what is changing for better or for worse.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: One of my favorite paragraphs of your wonderful book, which I want to conclude on because it just conveys how rich your writing is and how wonderful it is to be traversing history.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: You say that you use the word conservative, reactionary, and counter-revolutionary interchangeably.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: You write, I see philosophers, statesmen, slaveholders, scribblers, Catholics, fascists, evangelicals, businessmen, racists, and hacks at the same table.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: Hobbes is next to Hayek, Burke across from Donald Trump, Nietzsche, in between A.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Rand and Antonine Scalia with Adams, Calhoun, Oakshot, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernest Junger, Carl Schmidt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafley, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Pubiyama, and George W.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: Bush, interspersed throughout.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Corey Robin, that is why your book is so much fun, Corey, and not just fun.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's an amazing read and an amazing way that you help us to understand history and our present and our presentism by taking the long perspective.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to thank you for a great book.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to thank you for, I'll say cheering me up tremendously, because you you remind us that we're facing with the conservative wave and with Donald Trump, we are not facing a majority of the American people.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: We're not in a heartless country.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: We are not facing absurdity of the majority of our fellow citizens.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: We're facing a political movement that has used these tools, this instrumentalization or these fears and appeals to hierarchy and power for a long time.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's waning.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think that should be our takeaway message from our conversation today.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: Corey Robin, thank you so much for being together for this conversation.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: We've been discussing the reactionary mind, conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: Please, everyone, read this remarkable book.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Corey, thank you so much.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: And to everybody listening, thank you for joining us today.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: Bye-bye.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, bye-bye.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: Next time, I'll be speaking with Dr.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: Keisha Blaine, award-winning historian and New York Times best-selling author, to discuss her newest book, Until I Am Free.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America, a blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history, Until I Am Free is a manifesto for all who are committed to social justice.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: The book challenges us to listen to Fannie Lou Hamer, a working poor and disabled black woman, a leading activist, and a great intellectual of the civil rights movement.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: To listen to Hamer as we continue to grapple with contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: Together we will discuss Hamer's insights on how we might continue this fight to help America to live up to its core ideals of equality and justice for all.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: And how 40 years on, Hamer's words continue to speak truth to power.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: I would love to hear your thoughts as we continue to develop the series.