Book Review: The Reactionary Mind

In National Justice, we have a publication that can be used to combat the falsehoods and smears of Liberal academics. Among the backlog I hope to address is the work of the Jew Corey Robin, professor of political science at Brooklyn College. Born into the American elite, Professor Robin told Tablet Magazine that he was raised in Chappaqua, graduated from Princeton University, and received his Ph.D. from Yale University. Following in the footsteps of Theodore Adorno, Robin is best known for his attempt to pathologize Conservatism as a product of fear in his book: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

I felt compelled to read The Reactionary Mind, not for its purported insights into the mind of right-wingers, but for its insights into the mind of Robin. It is not often that I find myself reading through the texts Jewish academics use to train the next generation of Jewish and Liberal commissars. Also insightful was the change in the book’s content and reception between its initial release in 2011 and its post-Trump re-release in 2018.

There exists no better summation of Robin’s worldview than the opening paragraph of the first edition, reproduced below:

“Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors in the state, church, workplace, and other hierarchical institutions. They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, rights, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them, violently and nonviolently, legally and illegally, overtly and covertly. That march and demarche of democracy is the story of modern politics or at least one of its stories.”

What Robin describes is the struggle for political power inherent in a modern nation state. Such a struggle is familiar to every political dissident from Vladimir Lenin, to Adolf Hitler, to Richard Spencer. Robin, however, is unwilling or unable to acknowledge that the opponents of Jewish Power face a similar upward climb. “Men and women in subordinate positions” who “marched against their superiors” is an apt description of those at Charlottesville who faced universal condemnation in the Jewish press and now face imprisonment for that protest.

According to Robin, it is only the “Right” that seeks power. The Left merely seeks to wield it on behalf of those oppressed classes: the migrant, the homosexual, and the woman who wishes to vacuum out her baby’s brains. This is the moral justification of Jewish Power. Robin can ignore the three Jewish justices of the Supreme Court if he can pathologize Justice Scalia (the subject of an entire chapter). Robin’s book runs cover for Israeli gun running to Guatemalan death squads and Kenneth Feinberg’s decision to compensate 9-11 victims’ families based on the decedent’s income by ascribing both actions to the Right and not Jewish racial interests or Jewish patterns of behavior. Robin waxes on at length over the horrors of the 1954 coup in Guatemala but papers over the root cause. When Guatemalan socialists nationalized his banana plantations, the Jewish owner of United Fruit, Schmuel Zmurri, tasked Freud’s double-nephew Edward Bernays with launching the propaganda campaign that tied a democratically elected leader’s land reform to the specter of international communism.

But should we accept Robin’s definition of Conservativism as a defense of privilege in a hierarchy, who is a better Conservative than the Jew? Jews certainly are a privileged group. They are 2% of the American population but 35% of American billionaires. Jews made up 26 out of the top 50 donors in the 2018 election, and Jews provide 50% of all DNC contributions and 25% of all RNC contributions. By redirecting his students’ anger at Jewish Neo-Cons towards Conservative Gentiles, Robin outs himself as a Reactionary defending Jewish Power.

Jews certainly defend their collective position of privilege. Any critic of Jewish Power will be fired from their private employer and, in many European countries, jailed. Jews edit the Washington Post, Time Magazine, and National Geographic. They own the New York Times and U.S. News and World Report. ABC, NBC News, CBS, CNN, Comcast, Disney, Warner Brothers, Columbia Pictures, and Universal Pictures all have Jewish chief executives. The Jewish Newhouse family exercises ownership over the Conde-Nast magazine empire, the Discovery Network, and Reddit.

These plutocrats and magnates certainly collude to protect their racial power. It is the ceaseless flow of Jewish contributions that keeps both the Democrat and Republican parties blind to the Israeli brutalization and colonization of the Palestinians. Media Jewry conspires to cover up the sexual indiscretions of powerful Jews including Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer. Among the Hollywood old-guard, Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are still considered saints despite one raping a 13-year-old and the other marrying his stepdaughter. When a former ABC staffer leaked video of an ABC anchor complaining that executives killed her story on Jeffrey Epstein, all it took was ABC executives calling up their (likely Jewish) counterparts at CBS to get the staffer fired from her current job.

However, I generally agree with Robin’s chapter on Neo-Conservative foreign policy. If Robin simply mentioned the Jewish ethnicity of the malicious war-hawks he writes about, the chapter would be only slightly less anti-Semitic than Mein Kampf. For your convenience I have underlined the names of men of Jewish descent. Robin writes:

Breaking again with the usual stereotype of conservatives as nonideological pragmatists, figures like Wolfowitz, Libby, Kaplan, Perle, Frank Gaffney, Kenneth Adelman, and the father-and-son teams of Kagan and Kristol called for a more ideologically coherent projection of U.S. power, where the “benign hegemony” of American might would spread “the zone of democracy” rather than just extend the free market. They wanted a foreign policy that was, in words that Robert Kagan would later use to praise Senator Joseph Lieberman, “idealistic but not naïve, ready and willing to use force and committed to a strong military, but also committed to using American power to spread democracy and do some good in the world.”

The chapter’s concluding paragraph reads like a nightmare portended by The International Jew. Here the Right, despite suffering defeat after defeat on social issues, exercised a free hand to reshape the entire Middle East with blood and fire. According to Robin, the Jews of the Bush administration, earlier described as barely able to conceal their glee at the fall of the Twin Towers, now pulled the strings directing the American Golem across the world:

On the other hand, we have a new class of political elites who have little contact with the business community, whose primary experiences outside of government have been in academia, journalism, think tanks, or some other part of the culture industry. Men like Wolfowitz and Brooks, the Kagans and the Kristols, traffic in ideas and see the world as a landscape of intellectual projection. Unconstrained by even the most interested of interests, they see themselves as free to advance their cause, in the Middle East and elsewhere. Like their corporate counterparts, the neocons view the world as their stage; unlike their corporate counterparts, they are preparing for an altogether more theatrical, otherworldly drama. Their endgame, if they have one, is an apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil, civilization and barbarism—categories of pagan conflict diametrically opposed to the world-without-borders vision of America’s free-trading, globalizing elite.

Besides failing to mention the vicious racial Zionism that motivates these Neo-Cons, Robin is incorrect in asserting that Neo-Conservativism is incompatible with corporate globalism. No candidate better represented the synthesis of the two than Hillary Clinton, the ostensible leftist who shattered the opponents of global finance capitalism with the American military in Libya and Syria. The Neo-Cons act to knock down Nationalist regimes that stand in the way of the expansion of the American economic zone while finance capitalists profit from the wreckage.

Robin makes another intentional misdirection by attempting to connect libertarianism and National Socialism. The Reactionary Mind attempts to conflate the radical individualism of the Jew, Ann Rand (Rosenbaum), with the call for collective sacrifice in Goebbels’s Total War speech. The common tie is “preservation versus elimination,” a distinction utterly meaningless because every ideological system from National Socialism to our current Godless Randian Capitalism seeks to preserve and replicate itself.

Robin then attempts to conflate several statements on the inherent inequality of individuals by both Hitler and Rand/Rosenbaum. Robin observes, “To find Rand in such company should come as no surprise, for she and the Nazis share a patrimony in the vulgar Nietzschean-ism that has stalked the radical right, whether in its libertarian or fascist variants, since the early part of the twentieth century.” A ridiculous comparison. Who is the Radian hero? Jeff Bezos, who scams and schemes in search of new ways to exploit his warehouse workers. Who is the National Socialist hero? Ernst Junger and Hans Ehlers, extraordinary men, prepared to give their lives for their nation and race. Furthermore, Rand saw libertarianism as a poison to foist on non-Jews given her consistent support of the racial Socialism of Israel.

The idea that certain individuals do not possess a unique degree of bravery or intellect is a ridiculous assertion that stands in opposition to the lived experience of every single human being. Far more interesting is the question of what duties these unique individuals owe to others in society. For Rand/Rosenbaum these heroic individuals owed no other duty to their fellow men other than to seize and exercise the power they deserve. But Adolf Hitler, a war hero imprisoned by the nation he fought for, saw the role of that individual as boundless sacrifice for his race. Hitler demanded from each according to his abilities—not toward some material end—but towards the collective survival of the German race.

In 2018, Robin wrote a second edition of The Reactionary Mind, updated to explain Trump’s victory. Whereas the 2011 first edition was widely panned, even in liberal rags like the New York Times and the New Republic, Robin’s second edition received more widespread praise. The explanation is that the mainstream press had little interest in tearing apart the impotent ideology of Mitt Romney and John Boehner. But with the ascendance of Trump and his revolutionary energy, the press and academia rushed to chain Trumpism to the ideological garbage pail of Ann Rand, the Austrian School, and Barry Goldwater. Robin distinguishes the editions by writing:

In the original conclusion to The Reactionary Mind, however, I argued that conservatism—​ at least in its most recent incarnation as a reaction against international communism and social democracy, the New Deal and the liberation movements of the 1960s—​ was dying. Not because it was no longer popular, not because it had grown radical or extreme, but because it no longer had a compelling rationale. Rooted in its opposition to the Soviet Union, the labor movement, the welfare state, feminism, and civil rights, conservatism had achieved most of its basic goals as set by the benchmarks of the New Deal, the 1960s, and the Cold War. Its serial triumphs over communism, workers, African Americans, and to some degree women had divested the movement of its counterrevolutionary appeal, at least for a majority of the electorate. Its victory, in other words, would prove the source of its defeat.

What an idiotic paragraph. First, Conservatives were utterly crushed on the issues of feminism and civil rights. Second, it was Hillary Clinton and the DNC that struck the hardest blow against workers and social democracy when they cheated Bernie Sanders and his 72% non-Hispanic White 2016 voting base out of the nomination. Clinton was the candidate of finance capital in 2016 and she was crushed by Trump’s populist appeals to White workers.

No political movement disappears because it has won too much. Conservatives did not win so much that they grew tired of winning. The history of post-Nixon America is one in which the Right will work diligently to fight for Capital on issues of outsourcing, taxes, and free trade while throwing the fight for the social issues of immigration, abortion, and homosexual marriage. The Left mirrors this strategy. The Democrats watch impotently or even support Republican moves on tax cuts, de-regulation, and free trade. But when it comes time to promote mass immigration, transgenderism, and abortion, Democrats, transform into Red Guards—imposing the ideology of the academic cathedral on the American Kulaks below.

This waltz between the Democrat and Republican parties only benefits those Capitalists who profit from the free movement of goods and people, and those individuals who hold a stake in the destruction of White political power. Robin’s claim of perpetual Conservative victory is necessary to explain the Left’s abject failure to secure better working conditions. The obvious answer is that Democratic political leaders are just as averse to socialism.

Robin is a great fan of the narrative that White workers consistently “vote against their economic interests.” Republicans do indeed seek to convince poor and middle-class Whites to vote against their economic interests. However, Leftist Jews like Robin seek to convince those same Whites to vote against their racial interests. Why should a White worker, who may desire a nationalized healthcare system, vote for a Democratic party that embraces his racial replacement and seeks to entrench the institutional discrimination his children will face in college admissions and employment? The natural solution, of course, is to pursue a third position, embracing socialist economics while governing explicitly to secure the existence and welfare of America’s White majority.

Robin is certainly aware of the aesthetic similarities between Trumpism and Adolf Hitler. There is also a begrudging respect that Jews seem willing to grant Hitler. Robin confirms that Trump copied the National Socialists in his 2016 campaign. Robin writes:

“Once upon a time, fascism—​ like the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s—​ possessed the freshness and vigor of youth. Fascism “was the major political innovation of the twentieth century,” explains Paxton. Liberals and leftists found their arguments moldering in the graves of centuries past; fascism was novel. The aging Hindenburg evoked a war—​ and a zeppelin—​ that failed. Hitler brazenly traveled the country by plane. “In an era when air travel was considered dangerous,” writes Claudia Koonz, “Hitler literally descended from the clouds to address audiences of between 120,000 and 300,000 at major cities.” That inventiveness and creativity, that youthful spirit of daring and originality, are what gave fascism its élan and esprit de corps.  It’s telling that Trump has repeated—​ more than once—​ the stunt of landing from the skies.”

Robin correctly observes the crucial difference between Trump and Hitler’s rise to power:

“Hitler fought his way to power as the culmination of a decade-​ long ascendancy of the right battling back a triumphant left. Trump, by contrast, assumes the leadership of the conservative movement, the Republican Party, and the American government at a difficult moment for the right.”

Trump failed because he tied his populism to the pre-existing GOP establishment. Reading Robin’s comparison of Trump to Adolf Hitler makes clear that Jews will often grant a grudging respect to National Socialists while looking down on Conservatives with unreserved contempt. Robin’s analysis of Trump confirms that the Alt-Right must completely and utterly divorce itself from Conservativism lest it be co-opted and pacified like the Tea Party and Trumpism. Conservatives do not need to fear Alt-Right infiltrators, the Alt-Right should fear Conservative infiltrators!

Robin seeks to push his students to the Left by associating the Right with Jewish ghouls like William Kristol and Ann Rand. I pursue a third position, rejecting the anti-White hatred of the Left and the Right’s subservience to Capitalism. One such state pursued that third position, subordinating domestic capitalists to the will of the state and expelling internationalist Jews like Robin. Robin is desperate that Whites never examine that National Socialist system too closely.

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