Corey Robin

I mean, I'm, I'm surprised that no one, uh, uh, has written a book that basically examines fear and how much fear seems to rule public life.

There is a book, uh, to put in a plug, uh, there was a, there's a great scholar named Corey Robin, R-O-B-I-N, uh, who has examined fear as a political phenomenon.

I drew on it for the book I did called The Soul of America about-

Yes

I mean,

both, both Robin and Moin have sort of since, say the spring of 2025.

Yeah, so maybe change their tune a little bit on this.

But this was specifically about, I'm going to call them maybe some of their disciples, some of their former students who are more...

Because I've gone from pure, I don't really care what we call it, to like, I'm not insisting on labels anymore.

But the labels are clearly doing some work.

I'll take the high church version, Corey Robin.

I think Corey Robin is denying this is not fascism.

His argument is that the pro-slavery case was a national conservative ideology with heavy New England clerical input, not a regional peculiarity of the South, which, if true, means you cannot use the North as a clean alternative lineage, which, by the way, Northern historians really enjoy doing.

Corey Robin, uh, generalizes the whole thing, that conservatism as such is reaction to emancipatory movements from below, and that the American case is just the clearest instance of it, okay? Now, here's four responses in order of importance from my perspective.

The first and best is that there is a Northern conservative tradition that owes nothing to slavery.

Adams, Fisher, Ames, uh, Hamilton, the Federalists in general, uh, John Jay and Hamilton, Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, um, Orestes Brownson, the Whig constitutionalists.

Like, no one else exists to him

himCorey Robin wrote that book, The Reactionary Mind, several years ago, and his thesis was that the, the reason that Republicans can kind of, um, be wildly unpopular but continue to win elections and, like, kind of more or less stay within a range of power and all this stuff, or at least control the levers of government, is because of their ability to sort of be mali- malleable and kinda s- read the trends better than Democrats can.

Democrats tend to be behind the trends.

Republicans tend to be able to see what's coming down the pipe and adjust accordingly.