Must-Read: John Holbo: Corey Robin’s Reactionary Mind in the New Yorker: "What Matt Feeney actually says...
...From Robin’s argument, we could predict that a conservative party would be unlikely to nominate the idealized conservative as its standard-bearer, but that it would absolutely yoke itself to a... Donald Trump.
That’s better than the headline.... Trump fits the Robin model to a T, but it goes too far to say the model predicts him.... You could have made money in the prediction markets, betting according to Robin’s model, because you would have snapped up Trump back when he was selling for fractions of pennies. Clearly he was an undervalued property, by Robin’s theoretical lights. But recognizing a long shot as not so long as people think is not the same as it being a lock....
It’s not that he predicted Trump and, therefore, his hypothesis is confirmed. Rather, nearly everyone else predicted Not-Trump and, therefore, their hypotheses are disconfirmed by Trump....
Now the question is: have philosophers and theorists and advertisers of the alleged virtues of the conservative mind, from Burke to Kirk, Buckley and beyond, really been advancing variations on an empirical hypothesis? The obvious objection is that conservative political philosophy is a normative claim, or cluster of them. It says how people ought to be, not how they are. So it isn’t refuted if people don’t follow its precepts in real political practice.... That just shows Trump isn’t a conservative, not that conservatism was always already Trumpism. If ‘conservatives’ substantially go Trump, it goes to show that they weren’t conservative. There were fewer ‘real’ conservatives, after all....
But if conservatism is a normative position unmoored from real US politics, to the point where it has no bearing whatsoever on election results, and election results do not reflect on it, then it seems self-defeating for a different reason: namely, it’s just some abstract philosopher’s game... a paper plan for some utopia. That’s nuts. Because the paper plan is to be smug about how other people--the liberals--are always making paper plans for utopia....
‘Liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have many uses.... Foci for theorizing about ideals. We want to know what is the best that liberalism could be; the best that conservatism could be.... Socio-electoral shorthand. If you want to understand what is going on in politics, ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ are terms for tagging groups and movements.... Deploying these terms is supposed to make politics less, rather than more, baffling.
Using one word to do both jobs... depends on the real groups and movements being approximately ideal.... A theory of ideal conservatism [needs] to do reliable double-duty as a rough map of actually existing conservatism. Robin’s model has the distinction of not having conspicuously fallen to pieces, due to this potential gap. That’s a fairly rare distinction, I should think.
