The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey Robin

Author:Corey Robin [Robin, Corey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Political Science, History & Theory, Political Ideologies, Conservatism & Liberalism
ISBN: 9780199793747
Google: C9pVqNulOtMC
Amazon: B005H5O20C
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-09-28T23:00:00+00:00

8

Remembrance of Empires Past

Busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.

—Henry IV, Part 2

In 2000, I spent the better part of a late summer interviewing William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol. I was writing an article for Lingua Franca (see chapter 5) on the defections to the left of right-wing intellectuals and wanted to hear what the movement’s founding fathers thought of their wayward sons. Over the course of our conversations, however, it became clear that Buckley and Kristol were less interested in these ex-conservatives than they were in the sorry state of the conservative movement and the uncertain fate of the United States as a global empire. The end of Communism and the triumph of the free market, they told me, were mixed blessings. While they were conservative victories, these developments had nevertheless rendered the United States ill-equipped for the post-Cold War era. Americans now possessed the most powerful empire in history. At the same time, they were possessed by one of the most antipolitical ideologies in history: the free market. According to its idealists, or at least one camp of its idealists, the free market is a harmonious order, promising an international civil society of voluntary exchange, requiring little more from the state than the occasional enforcement of laws and contracts. For Buckley and Kristol, this was too bloodless a notion upon which to found a national order, much less a global empire. It did not provide the passion and élan, the gravitas and authority, that the exercise of American power truly required, at home and abroad. It encouraged triviality and small-minded politics, self-interest over the national interest—not the most promising base from which to launch an empire. What’s more, the right-wingers in charge of the Republican Party didn’t seem to realize this.

This chapter originally appeared as “Remembrance of Empires Past: 9/11 and the End of the Cold War,” in Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism, ed. Ellen Schrecker (New York: New Press, 2004), 274–297.

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