watching up w/chris hayes and seeing corey robin, author of the reactionary mind: conservativism from edmund burke to sarah palin. see the problem with robin's frame, also pointed out by mark lilla in the nyrb this month, is that the definition of conservatism as the defense of privilege and hence reactionary in the face of movements for emancipation, obviously begs all the normative questions. then the only remaining mystery is that conservatism can sell itself as a popular philosophy at all, and the fiendish manipulations by which it does that become an object of study, along with the false consciousness of the reagan democrats or whatever.
rather we should see the left/right spectrum as a contest between different cultural coalitions, led by elites in a contest for power. what? are columbia or harvard profs the representatives of the downtrodden in a democratic movement of emancipation? the idea that the left is emancipatory and the right oppressive is just a reproduction of the rhetoric of the left circa 1848; it doesn't look like what's there. where in reality is the non-hierarchical left? not in american liberalism, e.g., or in marxist communism. what robin's thesis gets half-right, however, is that the left and right take shape in response to one another. but as lilla said we could really use a taxonomy of the right. because the fact that robin's thesis takes the left/right split as fundamental and coherent in itself disqualifies it as social science. add that he accepts the account of the taxonomy itself of one of the positions, and you have something that by definition is a mere polemic, not a 'study' of the 'conservative mind.'
just take a hyper-primitive idea of progress and reaction: changing things vs keeping things the same; moving into the future as against stopping time, as though that were among the choices. well, the average working-class person might have various stakes either way. no one can just endorse change or no change, and for example various government programs for the amelioration of this or that might effect you one way or another. working people too can get entwined in the coils of the state or rightly regard it with extreme suspicion. the managerial expertise of professors might not be so obviously attractive after all even on a sober analysis of one's own interests.
at any rate, you can't start with interests as only economic interests, and these are bound up at every node with religious interests, moral interests, psychological predilections, individual autonomies, regional interests, racial interests, aesthetic interests, social affiliations, and so on. that there would be the precise failure of the left: reduction to the economic, while regarding everything else as mere ideology or superstructure. rather, you had better listen to people's account of their own interests, and the role of religion in the inner city or in deeply rural zones of america makes answering that a religious question. appeal to managerial expertise or cold-war style militarism or constitutional fundamentalism is an aesthetic as well as an economic issue, etc. we need to be pluralists about real values and hence real interests.
i would start by dividing the poltical spectrum along the lines of domination and resistance to domination. of course, what resistance is at a given moment also depends on the shape of the dominant ideology, which might be right or left.
