Gotta say that Doug's interview with Corey Robin was really great. I've already ordered the book, and I hope everyone takes some time out to listen to the interview. Joanna
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Yes it was a great interview and covered a lot of points. It's important to understand your enemy. I was struck by conclusions or directions of thought that Robin covered in the reaction to the French Revolution in the Anglo-American tradition. These themes were later picked by students of LS as reactions to the 1960s events and the crystalization of these reactions in Reagan.
I approach a lot of these same themes in a different way through LS, by reading him and studying his time and associate German intellectuals and their reaction to Weimar. But those ideas, place and time are too distant for American readers. They just have to have too much explained and described, and don't want to bother.
The basic themes are the idea that everyman has to be a little king ruling over somebody lower on the power spectrum. Then there is the discourse of victimhood and loss. In LS's case it was real enough as antisemtism, and the conjoining loss of a traditional Jewish life or the strong patriarchy followed by the anti-assimilationist argument of restoration.
In the American context the discourse of loss was the loss of position, wealth, and power with the loss of the slave owning class where every white man was an aristocrat if he could own one slave. Then the discourse on return or recovery, the ship is sinking, but we can bail it out.
In the modern discourse, it's the return to power and domination by the US empire, the re-establishment of the dominance of white supremacy, coded as a white identity movement and an attack on immigrant minorities as well as an attack on traditional minority blacks and suppression of their political, cultural and social contributions to the American history, etc.
Not to bring up an old argument, but the importance of what is now a very real multi-cultural and multi-lingual society, isn't found its liberal centered equalitarianism, but in the threat it poses to the dominant and decreasing white majority. This perceived declining majority can protest victimhood at the foreign invaders so its a great tool for rightwing populism.
My only criticism of Robin is he uses a more fluid treatment and doesn't follow it back the way the more thorough going Strauss did. Part of that comes from political science as a field that pretty much excludes the European history of ideas or philosophical arguments. This isn't a complete exclusion but it is mostly limited to selected readings from the French Revolution and the Anglo branch of the Enlightenment. What gets dropped out is the co-evolution of a continental counter-enlightenment project where Robin's `romanticism' of the right gets a much more articulate play. I look forward to his study of Hayek and the role of capitalism in reactionary circles.
US audiences have zero interest in studying Vico, Hobbes, de Maistre, Gobineau, et al. Maybe John C. Calhoun is enough. I certainly loathed reading a couple of his famous essays in high school or college wherever it was.
Anyway I spent much of yesterday afternoon mulling it over and then re-listened to it this morning. Great. But I would go further and say important...
CG