Albert O. Hirschman, _The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy_

A BRILLIANT BOOK--short, plainly written, original, illuminating. I had never heard of Hirschman until I read an article about him by Cass Sunstein in NYRB a few years ago--I picked this up about that time, but only got around to reading it now in my trying-to-understand-the-Trump-phenomenon reading campaign.

Hirschman looks at what I'm going to call three families of arguments that have served conservative intellectuals from the beginnings of consciously conservative thought (Burke, de Maistre) up to the present.

"Perversity" arguments claim that the proposed progressive solution to a problem will exacerbate the problem. Poverty programs will lead to deeper poverty, attempts to counter racism will generate worse racism, etc.

"Futility" arguments claim that the proposed progressive measure will fail because of some basic, unchangeable foundation within human nature, e.g., universal public education is folly because a large number of people are just plain ineducable and always will be.

"Jeopardy" arguments claim that the proposed progressive measure will undermine some kind of progress that has already been achieved. The classic version of this we recall from Alexis de Tocqueville: social equality can only be gained at the expense of individual liberty.

Hirschmann (persuasively) argues that these arguments get recycled repeatedly in the late 18th century arguments against the abolition of aristocratic privilege, then in the 19th century arguments against widening suffrage, then in the 20th century arguments against the welfare state.

Really glad I finally read this book, but I'm not sure how much help it will be in understanding Trump. Most of Hirschman's examples are European, and perhaps American conservatism just does not map onto this template readily--just as American Christianity often seems to be its own thing, distinct from European Christianity. Or perhaps Trump is not exactly a "conservative" at all, just your garden variety xenophobic populist opportunist.

Or perhaps Corey Robin is right--just recently looked at his piece in the Fall 2017 n+1 in which he says that classic conservative thought gets its edge from its dialectical engagement with the best ideas of the left (this parallels Hirschman's thesis nicely) and the American left of the present is so foamy and incoherent that the right does not have to generate any ideas at all--it can just enjoy its hegemony and not even worry about who its figureheads are: "Having achieved so many conservative goals--a labor movement in terminal decline, curtailed abortion rights, the deregulation of multiple industries, economic inequality reminiscent of the Gilded Age, and racial resegregation--the right can now afford the luxury of irresponsibility."