Corey Robin talks to AWOT
As part of a new feature for our blog, AWOT has begun a series of interviews with public intellectuals, professors, activists and journalists. This week, we caught up with Corey Robin, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Fear: History of a Political Idea, as well as of numerous articles in the London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Review, American Political Science Review, Social Research, Theory and Event, and Raritan. Robin is also the author of a recent essay comparing the neoconservatives to other counter-revolutionaries in American history, which he has generously shared with us.
AWOT: We’d like to start with your best known book, Fear: History of A Political Idea. In that book you suggested that mainstream American liberalism has relied on a politics of fear for a long time, at least as far back as the end of World War II. I wonder if you could say what you mean by a politics of fear – do you mean McCarthyism type fearmongering, or something else?
ROBIN: Well, I should say that if Fear is my best known book it’s because it’s my only book. But more important, I think modern politics as a whole, at least since Hobbes, has relied upon a politics of fear in order to deal with a recurring problem of modern politics: namely, the periodic recognition that we live in a world of irreconcilable moral and political ideals, where we lack fundamental agreement upon the positive goods that should guide us in our collective lives. At such moments, when we recognize this problem or become particularly weighed down by it, there’s a tendency on the part of political theorists and leaders to turn to fear as a foundation, a negative foundation, for politics. People begin to argue that we don’t know what the good is – or at least can’t agree upon the good – but we do know what the bad is and that fear is the worst bad or the worst evil. So if we can ground our politics in opposing the object that represents that fear – usually some kind of foreign enemy – we can move forward.
Now, as I’ve said, this is a problem for modern politics as a whole. But it’s an especially potent problem for liberalism, which often – though not always – exhibits a certain agnosticism about the good. So liberals are prone to turn to a politics of fear as the grounding of their politics – everyone from Montesquieu to Arthur Schlesinger to Michael Ignatieff has suffered from this tendency.
That’s the first meaning of “the politics of fear,” and it has little to do with McCarthyism. That said, this kind of politics of fear has few resources to fight against something like McCarthyism, which is why you find many liberals during the early years of the Cold War trying to oppose McCarthy the man but flailing against McCarthy the ism. Hubert Humphrey helped sponsor one of the most draconian pieces of legislation of the McCarthy era – the Communist Control Act – which Michael Harrington called “an abject capitulation by liberalism to illiberalism.” It was Harry Truman who did the most – not willingly or happily – to purge communists and leftists from the US government, in the form of his Executive Order 9835. That was in 1947 – a full three years before anyone had ever heard of Joseph McCarthy – and it created a terribly repressive atmosphere that the Republicans and conservatives then used to go after liberals. I could cite many other cases of liberals sponsoring or succumbing to fear-mongering and red-baiting, which ended up only hurting themselves and their cause. Ironically, it is these liberals that Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, now seeks to rehabilitate in his most recent book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, which claims to provide an intellectual and political road map for liberals to make a comeback in contemporary America.
When liberals turn to fear as the foundation of their politics, they are unable to counter fear-mongering of the sort that Bush and his people have been peddling. And that is why we find ourselves in the situation we’re in – where we have a president and party desperately trying to scare people and an opposition party that is utterly incapable of doing anything to counter it. If anything, that party and its leadership seem hell bent on outdoing the president, as you correctly pointed out on your blog in your discussions of the Dubai port security scandal.
AWOT: You also link the increasing use of a politics of fear in the post-Cold War era to the decline of political ideologies. What’s the connection? A lot of people think it’s the opposite – security is a more important issue when political ideologies are rampant, because the worst violence is committed in the name of utopia.
ROBIN: I think I answered the first part of this question in my previous answer. Whenever there is an exhaustion of political ideas, intellectuals and leaders turn to fear as a foundation. That’s why immediately after the Cold War, when liberalism was declared dead and conservatism had lost its animating causes (the Soviet Union and the welfare state), there was a revival of the politics of fear – most visibly in the work of Harvard liberal theorist Judith Shklar.
As for the second part of your question: many people do think that violence is committed by utopians and ideologues and that security is the necessary antidote to that ideological, utopian violence. But that’s just plainly wrong. There’s an awful lot of violence that is committed or defended by people who think of themselves as the opposite of utopians or ideologues (think Robert McNamara or Herman Kahn), and security is often their calling card. Even the ideologues of violence like Hitler or Stalin often defend their worst atrocities by invoking security. And that’s because security is one of the hardest claims to argue against, particularly when it is invoked by one’s own government. US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was also the main prosecutor for the Allies at Nuremberg, had it right when he wrote in 1950, “Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name.”
AWOT: You’ve been writing more recently about the neoconservatives and the tradition of counter-revolution in the United States (see this paper). Why do you see the neoconservatives as counter-revolutionaries?
ROBIN: There’s an old argument, going back to Condorcet and de Maistre, about what a counterrevolution is: Condorcet said it was a revolution in reverse, de Maistre said it was the opposite or antithesis of a revolution. One man saw counterrevolutionaries as similar to revolutionaries, only that counterrevolutionaries wanted to use politics to spin the world backward in time; the other saw counterrevolutionaries as fundamentally different from revolutionaries, employing different means, seeking different ends, etc. I think they’re both right. Counterrevolutionaries are fundamentally different from revolutionaries in that they are profoundly hostile to both freedom and equality – which are the animating ideals of modern revolutions – but they’re like revolutionaries in that they mobilize (or try to mobilize) a mass base, are hostile to tradition, have contempt for the old elites, believe in the future, and articulate a worldview that is dynamic rather than static, and that celebrates violence as a purgative force and acts of untrammeled will.
If you take these as the defining elements of counterrevolutionary thought and politics, I think the neocons are counterrevolutionaries. People get confused by the neocons because they don’t seem like traditional conservatives – or at least what we think of as conservatives. And that’s because they’re not. While they are absolutely antagonistic to equality and freedom (except for the most limited kinds of market freedoms), not to mention democracy (except as a slogan for the American Empire), they are forward-looking, dynamic, contemptuous of what they think of as the old elites (in both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party), and have something like a mass base in the form of the Christian Right. They are populists of a sort, though that doesn’t mean they believe in popular power. Far from it. They believe in mass spectacle – in the people basking in the glow of George Bush’s empire – which is not the same as democracy.
What’s more, like all counterrevolutionaries, they developed their ideas and tactics by watching the revolution – in this case the revolutions of race and gender from the 1960s and of the welfare state and the Great Society. They learned how to borrow and to co-opt the ideas of their opponents (something de Maistre wrote about at length, vis-à-vis the Jacobins, in his Considerations on France) and to use mass politics and mass ideologies against liberals and progressives. They’ve trumpeted the ideals of empire and imperialism, which is a classic form of counterrevolution (Marx has some very interesting comments on this phenomenon in his Eighteenth Brumaire; he said Louis Napoleon, after 1848, had developed “an imperialism of the peasant class” in France, which is not a bad description of George Bush’s empire). That doesn’t make the neocons utopian or conservative; it makes them counterrevolutionaries.
AWOT: We have argued on our blog that the neocons are mistakenly seen as radical utopians or dangerous idealists, but that they are better seen as anti-utopian. What do you think of that idea? How does it fit with their conservatism?
ROBIN: I agree and disagree with you. They’re certainly not utopian, except in the most academic sense, but neither are they anti-utopian. They are, however, radical and dangerous. I don’t think I have to elaborate how they are dangerous on this blog, but their radicalism consists of a basic hostility to established institutions like the Constitution and to Congress, to academia, which for all the talk of its radicalism is an extremely conservative institution, and to the media. These institutions used to be the targets of leftists and radicals, and the neocons are as hostile to these institutions (for different reasons of course) as the New Left once was.
You ask how this all might fit with their conservatism. If by conservatism you mean a traditionalist, quiet, pragmatic, get-along philosophy – supposedly typified by Burke, Eisenhower, Oakeshott, Bill Buckley, and other allegedly genial types – it doesn’t. But that sense of conservatism, I’ve come to believe, doesn’t really exist and has never really existed outside the minds of a few intellectuals of a more or less pastoral bent. Conservatism, we often forget, was born in reaction to revolution and liberalism. Its genesis is entirely counterrevolutionary. Karl Mannheim wrote a brilliant essay decades ago where he made this point. Conservatism and counterrevolution are one and the same: they’ve always been activist, rabid, often violent philosophies and movements, which are deeply hostile to the basic values of liberalism and the Left, and are willing to use any means necessary to counter those movements. So George Bush and his acolytes are not outliers within the conservative movement. They are its fulfillment, conservatives on steroids perhaps, but conservatives nonetheless. The only reason they seem like outliers is that they are conservative counterrevolutionaries who’ve won.
AWOT: We have also argued that, insofar as the neoconservatives are driven by an anti-utopian or anti-totalitarian ideology, they are actually in sync with a lot of contemporary thinking. Do you think it is right to characterize them as political outliers or extremists? Is it correct to call them idealists?
ROBIN: As I’ve said, they’re not outliers or extremists within the conservative or counterrevolutionary tradition. And part of their philosophy – empire or the aggressive use of American military power, often dressed up as democracy-building – is very much in keeping with that of some liberals and leftists. You probably know the names, but they include Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, George Packer (though he wavers back and forth), Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman (depending on which side of the bed he woke up on), Samantha Power, David Aaronovitch (in Britain), Bernard Henri-Levy (in France), and others. Perry Anderson wrote an excellent essay a few years back on how many of the arguments used by Bush for the invasion in Iraq were used by liberals to defend the interventions in the Balkans. In my book, I show some of the deeper parallels in these ways of thinking between conservatives and liberals since the end of the Cold War.
Having said that, I do think there is a full-throttle celebration of American might and violence among the neocons – violence celebrated for its own sake, or as a purifying agent of moral regeneration – that you don’t find among many of the liberal imperialists. The latter see violence as the way station to a wonderful new world; the neocons see it as a way of life.
Remember: Bill Clinton came into office imagining a world governed by an entirely benign capitalist market; he and his advisors believed, at least according to their public statements, that organizing an international economy of free trade and free markets was the fundamental imperative of US foreign policy. They began to move away from that philosophy toward the second term. But Bush and his people have shown remarkably little interest in that aspect of US foreign policy. Their thing is violence.
AWOT: Do you think the influence and significance of the neoconservatives is exaggerated? If so, why do you think that is? At our teach-in, which you participated in, we suggested that obsessing about the neoconservatives was its own kind of fearmongering, cooking up an all-powerful bogeyman about to destroy the country. What do you think of that idea?
ROBIN: I have mixed feelings about this discussion. I don’t think of the neocons as a cabal or a bogey-man. They’re full-square within the American political spectrum and have been for some time. Bush is not that different from Reagan; the only difference is that the former presides over a hyper-power, while the latter had the Soviet Union and genuine popular insurgencies in Central America – and a somewhat less helpless Democratic opposition – to contend with. The problem with the discussion about the neocons is that many presume if we could just get the neocons out of the picture, we could solve all of our problems. It’s a completely apolitical analysis, which doesn’t focus on the underlying structural issues that make something like the neocons possible.
Having said that, I don’t think it’s fear-mongering to suggest that the neocons are a real political force, with real political power, and that they help drive events. And, most important, that they do need to be defeated. There’s some evidence that their influence is already on the wane – you guys on the blog have done an excellent job demonstrating that – but as you’ve also suggested, that doesn’t end the problems we currently find ourselves in.
AWOT: Another issue that came up at the teach-in was the perennial question of the exhaustion of left-wing politics. The dominant message, even amongst most of the left, in the last election was ‘anybody but Bush.’ Yet one prominent theme of your writing is that the left’s problem isn’t so much strategic as ideological: it suffers from an exhaustion of political ideals and principles. There’s a way in which even traditional categories like ‘left’ and ‘right’ are hard to map on to contemporary politics. If the problem is a poverty of progressive ideas, do you think that there can be too much concern with attacking the ‘right’, and with political tactics? Does the urgency with which Bush is attacked crowd out a discussion of first principles?
ROBIN: Absolutely. I’m not sure if the problem is that the Left has no ideas or that it is too afraid to articulate clearly the ideas that it does have. At some level, it doesn’t matter: the Left is not a potent ideological force, and so long as that remains the case, it can’t offer a credible opposition or program for power – no matter how many net activists it has or online bloggers or whatever. You see this problem repeatedly in all the Left diagnoses that are being peddled about. The recent book by the guy who runs Daily Kos is a case in point – very little discussion of ideology at all. The Right long ago realized that ideas matter, but the Left hasn’t gotten the message or, as I’ve said, is too afraid to do anything about that.
I think the elephant in the room here is capitalism: the Left really doesn’t know where it stands on capitalism, what it has to offer to counter it, and so long as capitalism and the free market is the only game in town – in terms of offering a way of organizing public and private power – the Right will dominate.
AWOT: One thing you mentioned at the teach-in, and which you discuss in your recent paper, is that the neoconservatives celebrate a culture of risk-taking. By exalting the rare, heroic act, and connecting it to some notion that violence can be a force of cultural regeneration, you suggested that they are reading from a counter-revolutionary, even fascist, script. Do you think that risk-taking is inherently conservative or dangerous? Isn’t there an inverse danger with risk-aversion, not just that it leads to political apathy, but that more broadly, it is a cultural attitude hostile to liberty? Is there a progressive position on risk-taking and uncertainty?
ROBIN: No, yes, and yes. Risk-taking is not inherently conservative but celebrating risk-taking for its own sake – or for the cultural regeneration it brings – is a classically counterrevolutionary and fascist idea. The counterrevolutionary or fascist sees a prostrate, weak, vapid society and believes that heroism and risk are the only ways to jump start that society into something more vital, profound, and elevated. Having said that, there’s never been any progress – liberal or leftist – that did not depend upon some kind of risk-taking. Not because taking risks is good in itself – I’m a fairly risk-averse person myself and wouldn’t wish risk upon anyone – but because the odds of any liberal or left actions actually working are never great and are often quite small. Eve Weinbaum, who’s a professor at U. Mass Amherst (in their labor studies program) has a great book called To Move a Mountain – about workers organizing against plant closings in Tennessee. The basic thesis of her book is that social movements, particularly progressive movements, are always built on decades of failure. Failure is part of the story of successful movements – in fact, it’s the main story. But in America, most people are positively allergic to failure. It terrifies them. Not for nothing did William James call success “the bitch goddess” because the drive for success, the fear of risk and of failure, is precisely what inhibits the kind of progressive change we’re talking about. Anyone who is averse to risk and wants to see progressive change is whistling in the wind.
AWOT: We’d like to start with your best known book, Fear: History of A Political Idea. In that book you suggested that mainstream American liberalism has relied on a politics of fear for a long time, at least as far back as the end of World War II. I wonder if you could say what you mean by a politics of fear – do you mean McCarthyism type fearmongering, or something else?
ROBIN: Well, I should say that if Fear is my best known book it’s because it’s my only book. But more important, I think modern politics as a whole, at least since Hobbes, has relied upon a politics of fear in order to deal with a recurring problem of modern politics: namely, the periodic recognition that we live in a world of irreconcilable moral and political ideals, where we lack fundamental agreement upon the positive goods that should guide us in our collective lives. At such moments, when we recognize this problem or become particularly weighed down by it, there’s a tendency on the part of political theorists and leaders to turn to fear as a foundation, a negative foundation, for politics. People begin to argue that we don’t know what the good is – or at least can’t agree upon the good – but we do know what the bad is and that fear is the worst bad or the worst evil. So if we can ground our politics in opposing the object that represents that fear – usually some kind of foreign enemy – we can move forward.
Now, as I’ve said, this is a problem for modern politics as a whole. But it’s an especially potent problem for liberalism, which often – though not always – exhibits a certain agnosticism about the good. So liberals are prone to turn to a politics of fear as the grounding of their politics – everyone from Montesquieu to Arthur Schlesinger to Michael Ignatieff has suffered from this tendency.
That’s the first meaning of “the politics of fear,” and it has little to do with McCarthyism. That said, this kind of politics of fear has few resources to fight against something like McCarthyism, which is why you find many liberals during the early years of the Cold War trying to oppose McCarthy the man but flailing against McCarthy the ism. Hubert Humphrey helped sponsor one of the most draconian pieces of legislation of the McCarthy era – the Communist Control Act – which Michael Harrington called “an abject capitulation by liberalism to illiberalism.” It was Harry Truman who did the most – not willingly or happily – to purge communists and leftists from the US government, in the form of his Executive Order 9835. That was in 1947 – a full three years before anyone had ever heard of Joseph McCarthy – and it created a terribly repressive atmosphere that the Republicans and conservatives then used to go after liberals. I could cite many other cases of liberals sponsoring or succumbing to fear-mongering and red-baiting, which ended up only hurting themselves and their cause. Ironically, it is these liberals that Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, now seeks to rehabilitate in his most recent book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, which claims to provide an intellectual and political road map for liberals to make a comeback in contemporary America.
When liberals turn to fear as the foundation of their politics, they are unable to counter fear-mongering of the sort that Bush and his people have been peddling. And that is why we find ourselves in the situation we’re in – where we have a president and party desperately trying to scare people and an opposition party that is utterly incapable of doing anything to counter it. If anything, that party and its leadership seem hell bent on outdoing the president, as you correctly pointed out on your blog in your discussions of the Dubai port security scandal.
AWOT: You also link the increasing use of a politics of fear in the post-Cold War era to the decline of political ideologies. What’s the connection? A lot of people think it’s the opposite – security is a more important issue when political ideologies are rampant, because the worst violence is committed in the name of utopia.
ROBIN: I think I answered the first part of this question in my previous answer. Whenever there is an exhaustion of political ideas, intellectuals and leaders turn to fear as a foundation. That’s why immediately after the Cold War, when liberalism was declared dead and conservatism had lost its animating causes (the Soviet Union and the welfare state), there was a revival of the politics of fear – most visibly in the work of Harvard liberal theorist Judith Shklar.
As for the second part of your question: many people do think that violence is committed by utopians and ideologues and that security is the necessary antidote to that ideological, utopian violence. But that’s just plainly wrong. There’s an awful lot of violence that is committed or defended by people who think of themselves as the opposite of utopians or ideologues (think Robert McNamara or Herman Kahn), and security is often their calling card. Even the ideologues of violence like Hitler or Stalin often defend their worst atrocities by invoking security. And that’s because security is one of the hardest claims to argue against, particularly when it is invoked by one’s own government. US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was also the main prosecutor for the Allies at Nuremberg, had it right when he wrote in 1950, “Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name.”
AWOT: You’ve been writing more recently about the neoconservatives and the tradition of counter-revolution in the United States (see this paper). Why do you see the neoconservatives as counter-revolutionaries?
ROBIN: There’s an old argument, going back to Condorcet and de Maistre, about what a counterrevolution is: Condorcet said it was a revolution in reverse, de Maistre said it was the opposite or antithesis of a revolution. One man saw counterrevolutionaries as similar to revolutionaries, only that counterrevolutionaries wanted to use politics to spin the world backward in time; the other saw counterrevolutionaries as fundamentally different from revolutionaries, employing different means, seeking different ends, etc. I think they’re both right. Counterrevolutionaries are fundamentally different from revolutionaries in that they are profoundly hostile to both freedom and equality – which are the animating ideals of modern revolutions – but they’re like revolutionaries in that they mobilize (or try to mobilize) a mass base, are hostile to tradition, have contempt for the old elites, believe in the future, and articulate a worldview that is dynamic rather than static, and that celebrates violence as a purgative force and acts of untrammeled will.
If you take these as the defining elements of counterrevolutionary thought and politics, I think the neocons are counterrevolutionaries. People get confused by the neocons because they don’t seem like traditional conservatives – or at least what we think of as conservatives. And that’s because they’re not. While they are absolutely antagonistic to equality and freedom (except for the most limited kinds of market freedoms), not to mention democracy (except as a slogan for the American Empire), they are forward-looking, dynamic, contemptuous of what they think of as the old elites (in both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party), and have something like a mass base in the form of the Christian Right. They are populists of a sort, though that doesn’t mean they believe in popular power. Far from it. They believe in mass spectacle – in the people basking in the glow of George Bush’s empire – which is not the same as democracy.
What’s more, like all counterrevolutionaries, they developed their ideas and tactics by watching the revolution – in this case the revolutions of race and gender from the 1960s and of the welfare state and the Great Society. They learned how to borrow and to co-opt the ideas of their opponents (something de Maistre wrote about at length, vis-à-vis the Jacobins, in his Considerations on France) and to use mass politics and mass ideologies against liberals and progressives. They’ve trumpeted the ideals of empire and imperialism, which is a classic form of counterrevolution (Marx has some very interesting comments on this phenomenon in his Eighteenth Brumaire; he said Louis Napoleon, after 1848, had developed “an imperialism of the peasant class” in France, which is not a bad description of George Bush’s empire). That doesn’t make the neocons utopian or conservative; it makes them counterrevolutionaries.
AWOT: We have argued on our blog that the neocons are mistakenly seen as radical utopians or dangerous idealists, but that they are better seen as anti-utopian. What do you think of that idea? How does it fit with their conservatism?
ROBIN: I agree and disagree with you. They’re certainly not utopian, except in the most academic sense, but neither are they anti-utopian. They are, however, radical and dangerous. I don’t think I have to elaborate how they are dangerous on this blog, but their radicalism consists of a basic hostility to established institutions like the Constitution and to Congress, to academia, which for all the talk of its radicalism is an extremely conservative institution, and to the media. These institutions used to be the targets of leftists and radicals, and the neocons are as hostile to these institutions (for different reasons of course) as the New Left once was.
You ask how this all might fit with their conservatism. If by conservatism you mean a traditionalist, quiet, pragmatic, get-along philosophy – supposedly typified by Burke, Eisenhower, Oakeshott, Bill Buckley, and other allegedly genial types – it doesn’t. But that sense of conservatism, I’ve come to believe, doesn’t really exist and has never really existed outside the minds of a few intellectuals of a more or less pastoral bent. Conservatism, we often forget, was born in reaction to revolution and liberalism. Its genesis is entirely counterrevolutionary. Karl Mannheim wrote a brilliant essay decades ago where he made this point. Conservatism and counterrevolution are one and the same: they’ve always been activist, rabid, often violent philosophies and movements, which are deeply hostile to the basic values of liberalism and the Left, and are willing to use any means necessary to counter those movements. So George Bush and his acolytes are not outliers within the conservative movement. They are its fulfillment, conservatives on steroids perhaps, but conservatives nonetheless. The only reason they seem like outliers is that they are conservative counterrevolutionaries who’ve won.
AWOT: We have also argued that, insofar as the neoconservatives are driven by an anti-utopian or anti-totalitarian ideology, they are actually in sync with a lot of contemporary thinking. Do you think it is right to characterize them as political outliers or extremists? Is it correct to call them idealists?
ROBIN: As I’ve said, they’re not outliers or extremists within the conservative or counterrevolutionary tradition. And part of their philosophy – empire or the aggressive use of American military power, often dressed up as democracy-building – is very much in keeping with that of some liberals and leftists. You probably know the names, but they include Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, George Packer (though he wavers back and forth), Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman (depending on which side of the bed he woke up on), Samantha Power, David Aaronovitch (in Britain), Bernard Henri-Levy (in France), and others. Perry Anderson wrote an excellent essay a few years back on how many of the arguments used by Bush for the invasion in Iraq were used by liberals to defend the interventions in the Balkans. In my book, I show some of the deeper parallels in these ways of thinking between conservatives and liberals since the end of the Cold War.
Having said that, I do think there is a full-throttle celebration of American might and violence among the neocons – violence celebrated for its own sake, or as a purifying agent of moral regeneration – that you don’t find among many of the liberal imperialists. The latter see violence as the way station to a wonderful new world; the neocons see it as a way of life.
Remember: Bill Clinton came into office imagining a world governed by an entirely benign capitalist market; he and his advisors believed, at least according to their public statements, that organizing an international economy of free trade and free markets was the fundamental imperative of US foreign policy. They began to move away from that philosophy toward the second term. But Bush and his people have shown remarkably little interest in that aspect of US foreign policy. Their thing is violence.
AWOT: Do you think the influence and significance of the neoconservatives is exaggerated? If so, why do you think that is? At our teach-in, which you participated in, we suggested that obsessing about the neoconservatives was its own kind of fearmongering, cooking up an all-powerful bogeyman about to destroy the country. What do you think of that idea?
ROBIN: I have mixed feelings about this discussion. I don’t think of the neocons as a cabal or a bogey-man. They’re full-square within the American political spectrum and have been for some time. Bush is not that different from Reagan; the only difference is that the former presides over a hyper-power, while the latter had the Soviet Union and genuine popular insurgencies in Central America – and a somewhat less helpless Democratic opposition – to contend with. The problem with the discussion about the neocons is that many presume if we could just get the neocons out of the picture, we could solve all of our problems. It’s a completely apolitical analysis, which doesn’t focus on the underlying structural issues that make something like the neocons possible.
Having said that, I don’t think it’s fear-mongering to suggest that the neocons are a real political force, with real political power, and that they help drive events. And, most important, that they do need to be defeated. There’s some evidence that their influence is already on the wane – you guys on the blog have done an excellent job demonstrating that – but as you’ve also suggested, that doesn’t end the problems we currently find ourselves in.
AWOT: Another issue that came up at the teach-in was the perennial question of the exhaustion of left-wing politics. The dominant message, even amongst most of the left, in the last election was ‘anybody but Bush.’ Yet one prominent theme of your writing is that the left’s problem isn’t so much strategic as ideological: it suffers from an exhaustion of political ideals and principles. There’s a way in which even traditional categories like ‘left’ and ‘right’ are hard to map on to contemporary politics. If the problem is a poverty of progressive ideas, do you think that there can be too much concern with attacking the ‘right’, and with political tactics? Does the urgency with which Bush is attacked crowd out a discussion of first principles?
ROBIN: Absolutely. I’m not sure if the problem is that the Left has no ideas or that it is too afraid to articulate clearly the ideas that it does have. At some level, it doesn’t matter: the Left is not a potent ideological force, and so long as that remains the case, it can’t offer a credible opposition or program for power – no matter how many net activists it has or online bloggers or whatever. You see this problem repeatedly in all the Left diagnoses that are being peddled about. The recent book by the guy who runs Daily Kos is a case in point – very little discussion of ideology at all. The Right long ago realized that ideas matter, but the Left hasn’t gotten the message or, as I’ve said, is too afraid to do anything about that.
I think the elephant in the room here is capitalism: the Left really doesn’t know where it stands on capitalism, what it has to offer to counter it, and so long as capitalism and the free market is the only game in town – in terms of offering a way of organizing public and private power – the Right will dominate.
AWOT: One thing you mentioned at the teach-in, and which you discuss in your recent paper, is that the neoconservatives celebrate a culture of risk-taking. By exalting the rare, heroic act, and connecting it to some notion that violence can be a force of cultural regeneration, you suggested that they are reading from a counter-revolutionary, even fascist, script. Do you think that risk-taking is inherently conservative or dangerous? Isn’t there an inverse danger with risk-aversion, not just that it leads to political apathy, but that more broadly, it is a cultural attitude hostile to liberty? Is there a progressive position on risk-taking and uncertainty?
ROBIN: No, yes, and yes. Risk-taking is not inherently conservative but celebrating risk-taking for its own sake – or for the cultural regeneration it brings – is a classically counterrevolutionary and fascist idea. The counterrevolutionary or fascist sees a prostrate, weak, vapid society and believes that heroism and risk are the only ways to jump start that society into something more vital, profound, and elevated. Having said that, there’s never been any progress – liberal or leftist – that did not depend upon some kind of risk-taking. Not because taking risks is good in itself – I’m a fairly risk-averse person myself and wouldn’t wish risk upon anyone – but because the odds of any liberal or left actions actually working are never great and are often quite small. Eve Weinbaum, who’s a professor at U. Mass Amherst (in their labor studies program) has a great book called To Move a Mountain – about workers organizing against plant closings in Tennessee. The basic thesis of her book is that social movements, particularly progressive movements, are always built on decades of failure. Failure is part of the story of successful movements – in fact, it’s the main story. But in America, most people are positively allergic to failure. It terrifies them. Not for nothing did William James call success “the bitch goddess” because the drive for success, the fear of risk and of failure, is precisely what inhibits the kind of progressive change we’re talking about. Anyone who is averse to risk and wants to see progressive change is whistling in the wind.