So, Shane, do you think that’s because there is a “conservative/reactionary mind” in quest of a “taste of lordly power”?
—ravi
Please don’t tell me to read the book. That’s a cop out. I am not asking about Robin’s ultimate opinions. I am asking about yours in response to something that just happens to be something Robin wrote in the NYRB, but has been brought up before as a question: how does one explain “reactionary mass political engagement by the ‘lower orders’”? I don’t have a good explanation. But I do have a suspicion that it cannot just be all explained by pointing to white supremacy and such. Better I think an EP style argument that human “minds” are adapted to pressures dating millenia where loyalty, group cohesion, etc, matter more significantly than it does today; or that human “minds” are naturally conservative, preferring a well-known status quo/equilibrium, even if disadvantageous to new complexities.