Thoughtful conservatism can tame reactionaries

David Brooks

History is often a volley between revolutionaries (who take control in some periods) and reactionaries (who drive events in others). Today, as the Columbia political theorist Mark Lilla points out in his compelling new book, “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction,” reactionaries are in the saddle.

Reactionaries, whether angry white Trumpians, European nationalists, radical Islamists or leftwing anti-globalists, are loud, self-confident and on the march.

Reactionaries share a similar mentality: There was once a golden age, when people knew their place and lived in harmony. But then that golden age was betrayed by the elites.

Soon, they believe, a false and decadent consciousness descended upon the land. “Only those who have preserved memories of the old ways see what is happening,” Lilla notes. Only the reactionaries have the wisdom to return things to the way they used to be, to “Make America Great Again.”

“Reactionaries are not conservatives,” Lilla continues. “They are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings.”

Reactionaries have a militant, apocalyptic mind-set, a crisis mentality. They will take extreme, violent action to turn back the clock.

It’s understandable that we would be living in a reactionary moment. The periods after financial crises are always bumpy politically. Whether it was the 1890s, the 1930s or today, such periods often thrust up ugly, backward-looking ideologies.

Eras after mass immigration tend to be bumpy, too. There tends to be a repulse against the sudden influx of new people. Moreover, for many groups, especially the less-educated working class, life genuinely is worse than it was in the mid-’60s.

The more serious problem is today’s pervasive and self-reinforcing pessimism, which feeds the reactionary impulse.

The best weapon against the reactionary is not bubbly, blind opti- mism. It is, frankly, temperamental conservatism. It is the belief that, thanks to the general spread of market freedom and cultural pluralism, our society is becoming stumblingly but gradually richer, more just and more creative. But economic and technological dynamism needs to be balanced by cultural cohesion.

It’s stupid and impossible to turn back the clock. History is a repository of wise cultures. Ming dynasty China, medieval Germany, Victorian England each contained wisdom and had its own strengths and weaknesses.

The conservative looks fondly to the past not as a paradise to return to but as a treasure trove of experience to borrow from. The conservative seeks to revive, restore and reconstruct — to use the gifts of the dead to make the present a little sweeter and deeper. Many of history’s most inspiring leaps forward (the Renaissance) came from a blending of past cultural and spiritual wisdom with present technological advance.

The global pluralistic marketplace is a permanently revolutionary force. If you don’t balance it with the communal, humanistic and spiritual countercultures from the past then the people, naked, will try to reject it altogether. They’ll succumb to the angry extremism of reaction and discard progress whole cloth.

That impulse is on the march just now.