“To live a modern life anywhere in the world today, subject to perpetual social and technological transformations, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.
“Every major social transformation leaves behind a fresh Eden that can serve as the object of somebody’s nostalgia. And the reactionaries of our time have discovered that nostalgia can be a powerful political motivator, perhaps even more powerful than hope. Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable.”
~ Mark Lilla, Our Reactionary Age
What if we are all more reactionary than we’d like to admit? Related to that, what if we are all more splintered and dissociated as well?
We have this sense of knowing who we are, as though we are singular stable identities. And we defend those identities with ideology or rather with ideological rhetoric, a wall of language with metaphors as the sentries. It is easy to rationalize and narratize, to make coherent the divided self that plagues the modern mind. It makes me wonder that maybe none of us is as we seem. We look at people with serious personality issues and we might call them dissociated or something similar. But what if we are all disconnected on some basic level. If that is our default state, then it isn’t really dissociation for there is no other supposedly normal state to be dissociated from, no unified whole that only later becomes fractured.
I’ve observed those who can say something to another person, walk into the next room, and say the complete opposite to someone else. It’s an amazing thing to see for how naturally it comes. There is no sign of intentional deception or self-awareness. Of course, this is not so easy to observe in oneself. If one were doing the exact same thing, how would one know? Yet we are constantly splitting ourselves off in this manner, just to get by in this complex society. Who we are with family is different than when with friends. And who we are at church is different than when at work. Egoic consciousness (from a Buddhist, Humean, and Jaynesian view) is always a limited construct, not as grand and encompassing as it presents itself.
We are all raised in a society full of lies, half-truths, and just-so stories. When we are young and innocent, we might occasionally challenge authority figures in their dishonesty and deceptions, their self-serving explanations and commands. But the response of authority challenged is almost always negative, if not punishment then gaslighting. This creates each new generation of schizoid adults. Not every kid gets this kind of mind game to the same degree, but I suspect this is what happens to all of us in various ways. It’s the way our society is built.
The trickster quality of the reactionary demonstrates this. And it makes us feel better to accuse those others of being reactionaries. But maybe the reactionary frames everything, existing at the periphery of our vision at the dark, blurred edges of liberal idealism. We live in a society of instability and uncertainty, of stress, anxiety, and fear — the fertile black loam of the reactionary mind. That would explain why it seems so much easier for liberals and left-wingers to become reactionaries than the other way around.
In my gut-level hatred of this reactionary madness, I feel most judgmental of those who turn reactionary, especially those who should know better such as a well-read left-winger mindlessly repeating racist beliefs or a well-educated liberal obliviously being converted while following their curiosity into the “Dark Enlightenment”. It’s sad and frustrating. I can sympathize for the lost souls on the right who were simply born into a world of reaction. They don’t know better. But when those most aware of the dangers of the reactionary mind are lured into its temptations, it further chips away at what little hope I have remaining for humanity. It makes me worry for my own mind as well, as I sense how overpowering reaction can be when one is immersed in it.
Our intellectual defenses are weak. That is what makes the reactionary mind flourish under these unnatural conditions of capitalist modernity. It must be what it was like in the late Bronze Age when the first authoritarian leaders arose in the growing empires. There wasn’t yet the rhetorical capacity among the population to protect against it, as would later develop in the Axial Age. Millennia later, in this ever increasingly reactionary age, authoritarianism grows worse as its rhetorical skill manages to stay one step ahead. We are inoculated only to the reactionary mind as it expressed in the past, ever expecting it to repeat the same way with the Nazi brownshirts goosestepping in the streets.
Corrupt power is what it is. Filled not only with authoritarians but social dominators, psychopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellians. Those people, for all the problems they cause, are a miniscule proportion of the population. They could not rule, could not cause damage if there weren’t those who could be manipulated, riled up, and led to commit horrors upon others… and then the intellectuals and media hacks who come along to rationalize and normalize it all. This is why I fear the reactionary mind, the sway it holds even over those not explicitly reactionary. This is why we desperately need to come to greater self-understanding. Even simpleminded fools like Donald Trump are able to seize power and play us like fools, only because the reactionary mind has seized the entire political establishment and body politic with the grip of a heart attack. The kindly pseudo-liberal reactionaries of the Democratic Party are no better — if anything, far more dangerous for their masked face.
Still, maybe there is a hint of hope. When looking at some other societies, one doesn’t see this kind of full reactionary dominance. I’m particularly thinking of more isolated tribes maintaining their traditional cultures and lifestyles. The example I often turn to is that of the Piraha. Daniel Everett noted how they lacked any evidence of stress, anxiety, depression, and fear of death. And along with this, there was no expression of authoritarianism and social dominance. I’ve pointed out elsewhere that traditional communitarian societies, if they were to survive, could not tolerate psychopathy as we do in such careless fashion. We modern Westerners are far too tolerant of this threat, as if we believe we are above it all. That is a dangerously naive attitude.
Related to this, in understanding human nature, the diversity of identity indicates there is much more we don’t understand. Many hunter-gatherers don’t have rigid ego boundaries, don’t have permanent unitary selves, don’t have a sense of individualistic isolation from others and from the world around them. They aren’t divided, splintered, fractured, or dissociated. An open and loose embrace of a complex psyche is their natural way of being and maybe it is the default position for all humanity. Our carefully constructed egoic structures are rather flimsy, not a great foundation upon which to build a civilization. No wonder we are in a constant state of fear and anxiety, ever worried about the whole thing collapsing down around us. We are without the calm confidence found among many indigenous people who know their place in the world, know they belong without needing the authoritarian control of a clenched fist nor the rhetorical sleight-of-hand of a demagogue to keep everyone in line.
The reactionary mind may be the norm for our society. But it is not normal.
* * *
Let me leave some brief commentary on Mark Lilla and Corey Robin, the two main scholars on the reactionary mind. They are correct to place nostalgia as the taproot of this phenomenon. Lilla is also right to link it back to early thinkers like Plato who reacted, as I see it, to both Athenian democracy and the ancient poetic tradition. But he is wrong to separate the reactionary and the conservative, a mistake Robin avoids.
But I’d argue that Lilla and Robin are further missing out on how the reactionary is linked to the liberal, two sides of the same paradigm. All of these co-arise. The reactionary isn’t only a counter-revolutionary that is only found after the revolution for the leaders who co-opt revolutions typically are reactionaries, from the likes of George Washington to Maximilien Robespierre.
Some conservatives seek to distinguish themselves by identifying as ‘classical liberals’, in the hope of separating their identity from both progressives and reactionaries, but they fail in this endeavor. For one, many of the classical liberals were revolutionaries, as some were reactionaries, since liberalism as a paradigm has been a mix right from the beginning, even in terms of looking to its precursors in the Axial Age.
To demonstrate this confusion of ideological rhetoric, Mark Lilla himself in reacting to the failings of the liberalism he hopes to defend ends up turning to reactionary nostalgia. So, when even a scholar seeking to defuse the reactionary bomb falls prey to it, you know that it is potent stuff not to be handled lightly, even for those who think they know what they’re doing.
* * *
In conclusion, here is my alternative view as an independent. There is something I’ve never seen anyone acknowledge. This is my own insight.
Some see it all beginning with the French Revolution and Edmund Burke’s response. But it’s a bit complex, since Burke himself was a progressive reformer for his era and belonged to the ‘liberal’ party. His reactionary stance came late in life and yet this never led him to abandon his former left-leaning positions. He was a liberal and a conservative and a reactionary, but he was no revolutionary though he initially supported the American Revolution, only because he hoped for progressive reform. The standard story is that reaction was the counter-revolution following revolution. That doesn’t quite make sense of the facts, though. To clarify this, look to the French Revolution. The Jacobins, I’d argue, were reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries.
They were reacting to the old authoritarian regime of French monarchy but not to eliminate rigid hierarchy for they used the same tactics of oppressive violence to defend their preferred hierarchy, precisely as Corey Robin describes the reactionary agenda. It was a power grab and unsurprisingly it led to an even greater anti-democratic authoritarianism. And they were counterrevolutionaries fighting against what the American Revolution had unleashed. The radical and revolutionary social democrat Thomas Paine, we must remember, sat on the right side of the French National Assembly opposite of the Jacobins. The French Revolution didn’t begin with the Jacobins for they only managed to co-opt it long after it had started. They were counter-revolutionaries within the revolution.
I’ve come to a more complex view. I tend toward the theory of Robin. But I don’t entirely agree with him either. My present assessment is that conservatism is the reactionary and the reactionary is simply the other side of liberalism. It’s all of one cloth. They co-arose together (and continue to do so), going back to the precursors in the Axial Age. This puts the liberal in a less comfortably righteous position. There is no liberalism without the anxiety and hence nostalgia that leads to reaction, and conservatism has nowhere else to stand except right in the middle of the chaos.
This comes to a breaking point now that ‘liberalism’ has become the all-encompassing paradigm that rules as unquestionable ideological realism. Reactionary conservatism can offer no alternative but destruction. And liberalism can offer no response but defense of the status quo. So, liberalism becomes increasingly reactionary as well, until there is nothing left other than reaction in all directions, reactionaries reacting to reactionaries.
That is the final apocalypse of the ideological worldview we take for granted. But apocalypse, in its original meaning, referred to a revealing. Just as revolution once meant a cyclical turning that brings us back. Reaction, as such, is the return of the repressed. This is far from nostalgia, even as we have no choice than to carry the past forward as society is transformed. The reactionary age we find ourselves in is more radical than the revolutions that began it. And what, in our projections, is reflected back to us flatters neither the right nor the left.
It’s an ideological stalemate for it never was about competing political visions. All rhetoric has become empty or rather, to some extent, maybe it always was. It never meant what we thought it did. We find ourselves without any bearings or anchor. So we thrash about on a dark sea with a storm brewing. No sight beyond the next wave looming over us, casting its cold shadow, and ready to come crashing down.
* * *
The Reactionary Mind in a Reactionary Age
Reactionary Revolutionaries, Faceless Men, and God in the Gutter
The Ex-Cons
by Corey Robin
Lilla v. Robin
by Henry
Wrong Reaction
by Alex Gourevitch
Why reactionary nostalgia is stronger than liberal hope
by Carlos Lozada
The Shipwrecked Book: Mark Lilla’ Nostalgic Prison
by Robert L. Kehoe III
The Revolutionary Nostalgia That Gave Rise to Trump – and ISIS
by Shlomo Avineri
Is a Conservative Crack-Up on the Horizon?
by Samuel Goldman
Marmalade 
We happened again across Samuel Goldman’s article, the last one linked in the above post. We don’t recall why we included the link to it here. I suppose it had to do with the author’s view of a self-defeating schism within conservatism. Reading it this time, we still agreed with much of it but also had some more critical responses to it. We sense a failure to fundamentally understand conservatism as reactionary because of a lack of familiarity with social science research and theory. He starts with a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald, taken from the essay “The Crack-Up”: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
The theory is that such a state is unsustainable. But this misses a couple of points. The ability to maintain cognitive complexity, in consciously holding multiple ideas and viewpoints simultaneously, is a defining trait of liberal-mindedness. The conservative-minded, as reactionaries, have a similar capacity, if only able to maintain it unconsciously; and hence the reason the reactionary mind attempts to misdirect and obscure. In both cases, this ability will be undermined with greater stress, which is presently where we find ourselves. Stress undermines liberal-mindedness in general, even the distorted co-optation of liberal-mindedness that reactionaries can redirect toward illiberal ends.
The author says that, “I now think the opposition between liberalism and reaction is only contingent. When reaction is defined as the attempt to recover a lost golden age rather than commitment to a specific historical order, it becomes compatible with liberalism.” It only seems contingent. That is because reactionaries can co-opt the rhetoric and tactics of any other ideology. But that co-optation doesn’t demonstrate any actual affinity. There is no such thing as a reactionary liberal, any more than can there be a liberal-minded and socially liberal authoritarian, in that they can’t simultaneously co-exist.
A liberal, though, could become reactionary and, for as long as that lasts, that individual is effectively no longer a liberal. And if reaction lasts long enough, the once liberal would then be a reactionary. The same could apply to a reactionary, under healthier and unstressful conditions, becoming liberal. But that kind of dynamic is separate from the issue of co-optation. Reactionary is defined by anti-egalitarianism, which Corey Robin describes as denying the agency of the subjugated class. Whereas liberalism, and leftism more broadly, is defined by egalitarianism.
The confusing part is that the co-optation of liberal posturing and persona occurred quite early in modernity, if not fully achieved until the post-war period. That is relevant since most American’s conception of political factions, identities, and labels is framed by the past half century or so of American history, with anything beyond that mostly being historical ignorance and amnesia. Even the typical well-educated American, for example, has little sense of who were the original Populists and Progressives, much less what they advocated. This is why reactionary co-optation is so effective, as part of reactionary historical revisionism. After a while, even many on the left forget the real history.
Yet as conventional intellectuals go, Goldman has a somewhat decent grasp of Anglo-American history, at least parts of it: “The classical liberalism I have tried to describe is characteristically skeptical of executive power, particularly as an instrument for renovating constitutions whether written or unwritten. The reactionary tendency, by contrast, sees a strong executive as the only viable weapon against managerialism.” We’d agree with that assessment and broaden it further. Liberalism was most strongly expressed early on as Anti-Federalism, which included a working class populism of democratic and progressive reforms. It involved not only wariness toward executive power but also judicial power, military power, theocratic power, aristocratic power, corporate power, and plutocratic power.
This was all motivated by a strong appeal to democracy, specifically direct and majoritarian but also with inclinations toward social democracy and the welfare state. Simply put, liberalism meant seeking a society organized by something other than power hierarchies, that is to say egalitarianism. That is why liberalism is everything that the reactionary is not, and vice versa. But this is easier said than discerned, since the reactionary by its nature is shaped by what it’s reacting to. Still, even when a chameleon takes on the color of bark and leaves, it doesn’t change it’s essential lizard nature into that of a plant. Simply observe it closely, and you’ll realize what it actually is, even when it hides amidst foliage.
To give the author further credit, he is correct about the two-facedness of the right-wing or at least an influential segment of it. It is nostalgic about the Anglo-American past which has been dominated by liberalism but also inherently opposed to liberalism right from the start. But he is wrong to separate the reactionary from the conservative: “He describes reaction as the yearning to overturn a present condition of decadence and recover an idealized past. The pursuit of social transformation distinguishes reaction from the conservative inclination to cherish and preserve what actually exists.” That misses the point that what conservatives falsely portray as ‘conserving’ is a reactionary fantasy.
Let’s give an example of confusion: “Liberalism and reaction can overlap in a specific kind of decline narrative — one according to which private conduct used to be protected, government was properly limited, reason ruled.” It’s not really, essentially, or primarily overlap. Besides reactionaries co-opting all things liberal, rhetoric most of all, liberals themselves during times of actual or perceived decline will fall under stress, anxiety, and fear. That is to say there is an overlap not between reactionaries and liberals but between reactionaries posing as liberals and liberals turned into reactionaries, but in both cases conservative-minded and authoritarian. Listen to a liberal parent who has fear elicited about their young children and you’ll often hear responses that are tinged with right-wing rhetoric.
Goldman further on states, “It might be objected that even if American conservative thought involves a reactionary pattern of historical reasoning, it does not seek classically reactionary ends. Few American conservatives admired early modern absolutism or ancient paganism (although more expressed affection for the antebellum South). But they have dabbled in the endorsement of non-liberal means to liberal ends.” Reaction is less a coherent ideology than a psychological disposition. Referring to classical reaction entirely misses the point, as reaction is always morphing. Also, to the degree that a conservative seeks liberal ends, they are not conservatives. That really throws people off. Most symbolic conservatives (i.e., self-identified) not only seek liberal ends but support liberal means, as shown in decades of polling. Yet the author, at other times, seems to co-identify conservatism and reaction, while oddly linking reaction to liberalism:
“In the American context, that usually means adopting populist strategies that cater to the prejudices of the public. Conservative intellectuals have been willing to accept support where they could find it, without inquiring too deeply into its sources. In particular, the role of conspiracy theories and racism in generating support for putatively liberal candidates and policies tends to be downplayed or ignored. Conservatives have also been less than vigilant about limited government when sympathetic figures are in office. Concerns about executive power, for example, have a way of disappearing when Republicans occupy the White House.
“The divergences are not simply lapses from principle. Reaction is, in a paradoxical way, more hopeful than liberalism. Instead of placing its faith in the long-term salutary effects of countless private actions, it depends on the acquisition and assertion of power. Like Gramsci’s Marxism, reaction could be characterized as pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.
“Despite the tension between them, liberalism and reaction are not mutually exclusive. They coexist not only as factions within the conservative movement, but even in the thought of individual conservatives — maybe most of them. That is where the political theorist Corey Robin goes wrong in his perceptive if polemical book The Reactionary Mind. Robin depicts conservatism as inherently reactionary and only situationally liberal. Rather than the inner truth of conservatism, however, reaction is part of a dynamic tension that helps explain its vitality.”
The strange argument seems to be that conservatism, not liberalism, is the foundation and frame of American culture. No accurate historical survey, though, would support such a conclusion. Reactionary conservatives, in that there is no way of cleaving this into two, use liberal rhetoric because liberalism won the ideological war. Even reactionary conservatives have become less reactionary and less conservative over time, that is to say increasingly progressive and liberal. A reactionary conservative today, in fact, is further to the left than many liberals, progressives, and leftists of a century ago. Reactionaries are now ever more reacting to an ever greater liberalism, which makes their reaction stand out more starkly by contrast, in spite of the actual reaction being more muted over time. Reaction isn’t getting worse but as the population becomes less reactionary we all become more sensitive to it.