Wednesday, March 21 - The Reactionary Mind

Wednesday night at 8 on KPFK 90.7 FM:  COREY ROBIN.  My guest this week is a political theorist, journalist, professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center and, best of all, a student, as it were, of the Right.  Corey Robin has tried to make sense of the so-called conservative movement in a way that few others have dared.  His persuasive and ferociously entertaining take-apart of the Right comes at a moment in which it reveals so much of itself but which nobody else seems brave enough to notice. In a series of essays from his new collection, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Corey Robin elaborates on a point which almost never seems to be articulated, challenging the --- generous, or perhaps lazy --- assessment of conservatism most consistently presented:  as a multi-faceted and thoughtfully complex intellectual tradition.  This leaves most people either shrugging or encouraged, always, to accept the equivalency of ideas and missing the more obvious, if somehow difficult point.  Instead, Corey Robin argues the point.  He surveys what has been the Right’s shared motivation and behavior:  a reaction to liberation and social and economic justice movements.  It is, he says, a counterrevolutionary movement which struggles always to find a new way to say and do the same thing, over and over again:  No to liberation, progress, freedom.  Corey Robin is author of a previous collection:  Fear:  The History of a Political Idea.  Thanks for listening live on the radio, online or whenever you like as a free download: http://archive.kpfk.org/mp3/kpfk_120321_200050bibliocracy.MP3