QOTD: Corey Robin (and Paul Krugman)
by digby
I missed this post by The Shrill One or I would have linked to it in my earlier post about Joe Scarborough’s William F. Buckley worship. Krugman discusses this nice piece by Mike Konzcal about the holes in the libertarian critique and makes the important point that conservatives aren’t really libertarians. (Not that I’m defending libertarians, mind you …) He points out the obvious fact that social conservatism is anything but libertarian, while the history of conservatism is well — the history of white supremacy. And anyone who thinks those foundational conservative organizing concepts are dead really needs to think again, particularly when you see how necessary they are to the cause:
All of this makes no sense if you think of liberalism versus conservatism as a simple argument about the size and role of the state. But it makes perfect sense if you follow Corey Robin, who sees it as being all about the protection of traditional hierarchy:
For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.
That’s basically it. All the mumbo jumbo about states’ rights and individual freedom and the rest is a conservative tactic, not a principle. It’s about holding on to power. In America that manifests itself as a tool for the wealthy and a cause for certain members of the white majority who are unable to accept a world in which they are not inherently privileged. That’s a suckers game for the working class, but the racialists and patriarchs, along with the women who love them (talk about fools) think their relative status translates to power when it really doesn’t.
Real libertarians do truly believe all that stuff about the power of the state and freedom’nliberty but they are few in number. Conservatives care about hierarchy and power which, when you think about it, should really make them the libertarians’ greater enemy. It always astonishes me that it doesn’t.
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