alternarrative

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Corey Robin’s lengthy article in last week’s Nation, where he reviews three books on conservatism, including the one by famous “Mr. Conservative,” Barry Goldwater. The main thrust of Robin’s piece is to articulate the essential double bind of conservatism: a sense of entitlement as well as exclusion. This characterization is apt. I’m sure I’m not the only one to be so confounded by the remarkable comfort with which some conservatives claim victimhood, even as they fully enjoy the comforts of privilege. Here’s some characteristic eloquence from Robin that made me giddy with recognition:

Reformers and radicals must convince the subordinated and disenfranchised that they have rights and power. Conservatives are different. They are aggrieved and entitled–aggrieved because entitled–and already convinced of the righteousness of their cause and the inevitability of its triumph. They can play victim and victor with a conviction and dexterity the subaltern can only imagine, making them formidable claimants on our allegiance and affection. Whether we are rich or poor or somewhere in between, the conservative is, as Hugo Young said of Maggie Thatcher, one of us.

But how do they convince us that we are one of them? By making privilege democratic and democracy aristocratic.

I guess victimhood is sexy. Robin also writes about the “puzzle” that is the neocons (“How did a group of bookish, mostly Jewish, ex-leftists from New York City come to help govern a nation that is Christian, anti-intellectual and hates New York City?”). But here’s some more insightful verbiage from the conclusion to Robin’s essay:

Ever since it emerged from the shadows of the French Revolution, conservatism has been a movement of insiders pretending to be outsiders. Who better to make the case that the insider is really an outsider than the outsider who has become an insider? Staffing the offices of reaction, parvenus and upstarts can argue, like no one else, for a modernized mass feudalism. Their very presence at the centers of power signals that privilege has indeed become democratic.

The full article is available online.