We opened the year with a talk by the acclaimed American political scientist and commentator, Corey Robin (City University of New York). In front of an audience of more than 120 people, Corey explored the roots of conservatism and suggested ways we might understand its current shape, especially under the influence of Donald Trump. The talk – and Jamie Allinson’s short comment – were recorded as a podcast, which can be accessed via the Audiomack link below, through iTunes, or through any other podcast app (just search for ‘CSMCH Edinburgh’). For those who prefer an executive summary, Rory Scothorne was there in person and sends this report, based on his meticulous notes.
Donald Trump and his supporters are often portrayed in the media as a quasi-revolutionary force in US politics, breaking with conservatism and rejuvenating the Republican Party after the Obama years. Many liberals and those further left are frightened of a new era of intensified right-wing hegemony, fuelled by a turn towards ‘national populism’ across the globe.
Corey Robin argued, however, that Trump is in fact part of a Conservative tradition in crisis. The most important sign of this crisis, Robin suggested, is the budget. This can be obscured by a popular focus on Trump’s public statements, many of which don’t match what’s going on in policy terms: on higher education and primary school aid, immigration, planned parenthood and renewables, Trump’s spending plans have not only been blocked by Congress – in many cases spending has gone in the opposite direction. Trump’s dependence on the spectacular deployment of executive orders is a sign of weakness being marketed as strength: compared to other highly ideological conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Trump’s record leaves little for the latter to boast about.
So why is it all going wrong for the right? Understanding this, suggested Robin, requires us to situate Trump within the broad conservative tradition. The thread running through this tradition, and holding it together, is a consistent desire to react against and suppress the assertion of power and agency by subordinate groups. Conservatism entails a fetishisation of ‘rule’ and a desire for competent, even heroic, domination; this carries the populist corollary of a disdain for the inadequacies and compromises of the existing elite. One means of elite rejuvenation is through a self-consciously unpredictable but assertive violence: ‘the spectre of lawless grandeur,’ as Robin put it.
Yet it is not simply through violence that conservatism secures itself. Fundamentally shaped by the left, it also borrows copiously from it. The reassertion of elite legitimacy can be framed in terms of novelty and innovation, a sort of ‘progress.’ Most importantly, conservatives popularise hierarchy by offering subaltern groups some sort of real benefit from it: they do this by giving the masses a ‘taste of power,’ recomposing old hierarchies so that the dominated are also able to dominate, in their own modest ways. Thus popular support for conservatism is not merely ‘false consciousness’ but a product of shifting lines of inclusion and exclusion which confer real material benefits and status upon certain subordinate groups.
If this is the shape of the Conservative mould, it is not hard to see how Trump might fit, perhaps even better than most. Far from breaking with Conservatism, then, Robin’s thesis implies that Trump simply follows several of its elements to their logical conclusions, and often openly admits to them. This loss of nuance may represent a sort of end-point, a hollowing-out of the the tradition after years of success.
Robin argued, somewhat counterintuitively, that the crisis of conservatism is the product of having been so effective: there is little left to react against, too little insubordination against which reactionary desire might be sustained and mobilised. The labour movement has accepted its marginalisation after decades of setbacks; movements for black liberation have not been able to stop rising school and residential segregation, and a growing racial wealth gap; and the feminist movement, while more successful, has still seen been forced onto the defensive against challenges to fundamental rights in several states.
This does not mean, however, that Trump and the wider conservative tradition cannot make further gains: further sweeping tax cuts have been made, and through executive orders and the courts Conservatives continue to exercise considerable authority. But the right can no longer define the political horizon as it once could. Robin, who identifies within the American democratic socialist tradition, suggested that the responsibility to break with the past few decades of Conservative hegemony lies with the left.
In his comment, Jamie Allinson suggested that Trump’s novelty may lie in his role within a political system transformed by global crisis: Trump’s successes and constraints must be seen in terms of a dialogue between a Conservative intellectual tradition and the wider systemic context in which it operates. One of his most thought-provoking queries concerned Robin’s thesis about the ‘buying off’ of the oppressed, proposing that there may be other, more organic forms of popular conservatism which stress the virtues of knowing one’s place, or a more simple acceptance of the way things are and desire for stability.
The question and answer session developed some of Jamie’s lines of questioning. One audience member asked how religion features in all of this, and Robin admitted that this is one of the weaker points in his analysis. Scholars engaging with his thesis might find in religion a productive way of complicating the ways in which conservatism can be ‘popular’, a reaction not to the assertion of subaltern agency, but the more systemic disruptions of modernity (Marx’s ‘heart of a heartless world’). Robin’s argument is in some ways an inversion of that of Karl Polanyi, who sees much of the progressive politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of a diverse, cross-class and politically ambiguous ‘counter-movement’ against the attempt by market ‘utopians’ to ‘disembed’ the economy from society.
One way Conservatives have demonised the left in recent years has been to associate them with new waves of systemic disruption, particularly globalisation – Theresa May’s infamous remark about ‘Citizens of Nowhere’ comes to mind, as well as conspiracy theories about ‘Globalists’. Today’s radical figureheads – Corbyn, Sanders, Melenchon and others – are nevertheless learning to harness ‘conservative’ impulses to more progressive goals. But Robin shows us that conservatism is endlessly adaptive, motivated by a reactionary desire that runs deeper than formal principle: new Conservatisms – which, he suggested, will surely emerge – may still be able to turn these attempts at radical triangulation to their own advantage.
Rory Scothorne is a PhD student in History. His research interests lie broadly in the history of social movements, the development and contestation of the public sphere in the twentieth century, and the political thought of the radical left. His thesis focuses on the relationship between the radical left and Scottish nationalism from 1968 to 1992. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.