By Ross Douthat
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Over the last year, America’s professional intelligentsia
has been placed under the microscope in several interesting ways.
First, a group of prominent social psychologists released
a paper quantifying and criticizing their field’s overwhelming left-wing
tilt. Then Jonathan Haidt, one of the paper’s co-authors, highlighted research
showing that the entire American academy has become more left-wing since the
1990s. Then finally a new book by two conservative political scientists, “Passing on the Right: Conservative
Professors in the Progressive University,” offered a portrait of how
right-wing academics make their way in a left-wing milieu. (The answer: very
carefully, and more carefully than in the past.)
Meanwhile, over the same period, there has been a spate
of media attention for the online movement known as “neoreaction,” which in its
highbrow form offers a monarchist critique of egalitarianism and mass
democracy, and in its popular form is mostly racist pro-Trump Twitter accounts
and anti-P.C. provocateurs.
I suspect these two phenomena are connected — the
official intelligentsia’s permanent and increasing leftward tilt, and the
appeal of explicitly reactionary ideas to a strange crew of online autodidacts.
For its opportunistic fans, neoreaction just offers a
pretentious justification for white male chauvinism and Trump worship. But the
void that it aspires to fill is real: In American intellectual life there isn’t
a far-right answer to tenured radicalism, or a genuinely reactionary style.
Our intelligentsia obviously does have a conservative
wing, mostly clustered in think tanks rather than on campuses. But little of
this conservatism really deserves the name reaction.
What liberals attack as “reactionary” on the American right is usually just a
nostalgia for the proudly modern United States of the Eisenhower or Reagan eras
— the effective equivalent of liberal nostalgia for the golden age of labor
unions. A truly reactionary vision has to reject more than just the Great
Society or Roe v. Wade; it has to cut deeper, to the very roots of the modern
liberal order.
Such deep critiques of our society abound in academia;
they’re just almost all on the left. A few true reactionaries haunt the
political philosophy departments at Catholic universities and publish in
paleoconservative journals. But mostly the academy has Marxists but not
Falangists, Jacobins but not Jacobites, sexual and economic and ecological
utopians but hardly ever a throne-and-altar Joseph de Maistre acolyte. And
almost no academic who writes on, say, Thomas Carlyle or T. S. Eliot or Rudyard
Kipling would admit to any sympathy for their politics.
Which is, in a sense, entirely understandable: Those
politics were frequently racist and anti-Semitic, the reactionary style gave
aid and comfort not only to fascism but to Hitler, and in the American context
the closest thing to a reactionary order was the slave-owning aristocracy of
the South. From the perspective of the mainstream left, much reactionary
thought should be taboo; from the
perspective of the sensible center, the absence of far-right equivalents of
Michel Foucault or Slavoj Zizek probably seems like no great loss.
But while reactionary thought is prone to real
wickedness, it also contains real insights. (As, for the record, does Slavoj
Zizek — I think.) Reactionary assumptions about human nature — the
intractability of tribe and culture, the fragility of order, the evils that
come in with capital-P Progress, the inevitable return of hierarchy, the ease
of intellectual and aesthetic decline, the poverty of modern substitutes for
family and patria and religion — are
not always vindicated. But sometimes? Yes, sometimes. Often? Maybe even often.
Both liberalism and conservatism can incorporate some of
these insights. But both have an optimism that blinds them to inconvenient
truths. The liberal sees that conservatives were foolish to imagine Iraq remade
as a democracy; the conservative sees that liberals were foolish to imagine
Europe remade as a post-national utopia with its borders open to the Muslim
world. But only the reactionary sees both.
Is there a way to make room for the reactionary mind in
our intellectual life, though, without making room for racialist obsessions and
fantasies of enlightened despotism? So far the evidence from neoreaction is not
exactly encouraging.
Yet its strange viral appeal is also evidence that ideas
can’t be permanently repressed when something in them still seems true.
Maybe one answer is to avoid systemization, to welcome a
reactionary style that’s artistic, aphoristic and religious, while rejecting
the idea of a reactionary blueprint for our politics. From Eliot and Waugh and
Kipling to Michel Houellebecq, there’s a reactionary canon waiting to be
celebrated as such, rather than just read through a lens of grudging aesthetic
respect but ideological disapproval.
A phrase from the right-wing Colombian philosopher
Nicolás Gómez Dávila could serve as such a movement’s mission statement. His
goal, he wrote, was not a comprehensive political schema but a “reactionary
patchwork.” Which might be the best way for reaction to become something
genuinely new: to offer itself, not as ideological rival to liberalism and
conservatism, but as a vision as strange and motley as reality itself.
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