4/23/2016

The Reactionary Mind - The New York Times

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SundayReview

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Reactionary Mind

Ross Douthat

APRIL 23, 2016

OVER the last year, Americas professional intelligentsia has been placed
under the microscope in several interesting ways.
First, a group of prominent social psychologists released a paper
quantifying and criticizing their fields overwhelming left-wing tilt. Then
Jonathan Haidt, one of the papers co-authors, highlighted research showing
that the entire American academy has become more left-wing since the 1990s.
Then finally a new book by two conservative political scientists, Passing on
the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, offered a
portrait of how right-wing academics make their way in a left-wing milieu.
(The answer: very carefully, and more carefully than in the past.)
Meanwhile, over the same period, there has been a spate of media
attention for the online movement known as neoreaction, which in its
highbrow form offers a monarchist critique of egalitarianism and mass
democracy, and in its popular form is mostly racist pro-Trump Twitter
accounts and anti-P.C. provocateurs.
I suspect these two phenomena are connected the official
intelligentsias permanent and increasing leftward tilt, and the appeal of
explicitly reactionary ideas to a strange crew of online autodidacts.

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The Reactionary Mind - The New York Times

For its opportunistic fans, neoreaction just offers a pretentious

justification for white male chauvinism and Trump worship. But the void that
it aspires to fill is real: In American intellectual life there isnt a far-right
answer to tenured radicalism, or a genuinely reactionary style.
Our intelligentsia obviously does have a conservative wing, mostly
clustered in think tanks rather than on campuses. But little of this
conservatism really deserves the name reaction. What liberals attack as
reactionary on the American right is usually just a nostalgia for the proudly
modern United States of the Eisenhower or Reagan eras the effective
equivalent of liberal nostalgia for the golden age of labor unions. A truly
reactionary vision has to reject more than just the Great Society or Roe v.
Wade; it has to cut deeper, to the very roots of the modern liberal order.
Such deep critiques of our society abound in academia; theyre just almost
all on the left. A few true reactionaries haunt the political philosophy
departments at Catholic universities and publish in paleoconservative
journals. But mostly the academy has Marxists but not Falangists, Jacobins
but not Jacobites, sexual and economic and ecological utopians but hardly
ever a throne-and-altar Joseph de Maistre acolyte. And almost no academic
who writes on, say, Thomas Carlyle or T. S. Eliot or Rudyard Kipling would
admit to any sympathy for their politics.
Which is, in a sense, entirely understandable: Those politics were
frequently racist and anti-Semitic, the reactionary style gave aid and comfort
not only to fascism but to Hitler, and in the American context the closest thing
to a reactionary order was the slave-owning aristocracy of the South. From the
perspective of the mainstream left, much reactionary thought should be taboo;
from the perspective of the sensible center, the absence of far-right equivalents
of Michel Foucault or Slavoj Zizek probably seems like no great loss.
But while reactionary thought is prone to real wickedness, it also contains
real insights. (As, for the record, does Slavoj Zizek I think.) Reactionary

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The Reactionary Mind - The New York Times

assumptions about human nature the intractability of tribe and culture, the
fragility of order, the evils that come in with capital-P Progress, the inevitable
return of hierarchy, the ease of intellectual and aesthetic decline, the poverty
of modern substitutes for family and patria and religion are not always
vindicated. But sometimes? Yes, sometimes. Often? Maybe even often.
Both liberalism and conservatism can incorporate some of these insights.
But both have an optimism that blinds them to inconvenient truths. The
liberal sees that conservatives were foolish to imagine Iraq remade as a
democracy; the conservative sees that liberals were foolish to imagine Europe
remade as a post-national utopia with its borders open to the Muslim world.
But only the reactionary sees both.
Is there a way to make room for the reactionary mind in our intellectual
life, though, without making room for racialist obsessions and fantasies of
enlightened despotism? So far the evidence from neoreaction is not exactly
encouraging.
Yet its strange viral appeal is also evidence that ideas cant be
permanently repressed when something in them still seems true.
Maybe one answer is to avoid systemization, to welcome a reactionary
style thats artistic, aphoristic and religious, while rejecting the idea of a
reactionary blueprint for our politics. From Eliot and Waugh and Kipling to
Michel Houellebecq, theres a reactionary canon waiting to be celebrated as
such, rather than just read through a lens of grudging aesthetic respect but
ideological disapproval.
A phrase from the right-wing Colombian philosopher Nicols Gmez
Dvila could serve as such a movements mission statement. His goal, he
wrote, was not a comprehensive political schema but a reactionary
patchwork. Which might be the best way for reaction to become something
genuinely new: to offer itself, not as ideological rival to liberalism and
conservatism, but as a vision as strange and motley as reality itself.

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The Reactionary Mind - The New York Times

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