Mark Lilla insists that the "real news on the American right is the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism":
People who know what kind of new world they want to create through revolution are trouble enough; those who only know what they want to destroy are a curse.
When I read the new reactionaries or hear them speak I’m reminded of Leo Naphta, the consumptive furloughed Jesuit in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, who prowls the corridors of a Swiss sanatorium, raging against the modern Enlightenment and looking for disciples. What infuriates Naphta is that history cannot be reversed, so he dreams of revenge against it. He speaks of a coming apocalypse, a period of cruelty and cleansing, after which man’s original ignorance will return and new forms of authority will be established. Mann did not model Naphta on Edmund Burke or Chateaubriand or Bismarck or any other figure on the traditional European right. He modeled him on George Lukács, the Hungarian Communist philosopher and onetime commissar who loathed liberals and conservatives alike. A man for our time.
The review of Corey Robin's essays is the best I've read. I found Robin's collection to be interesting in unearthing shards of reactionary rhetoric and impulses in conservatism's brief history. But the premise – that all conservatism means and can mean is suppression of the downtrodden and that all coservatives are the same underneath – is so crude it beggars belief:
[Robin] posits a class, isolates a characteristic of one of its members, and then ascribes that characteristic to every member of the class. Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre and George W. Bush are both on the right in Robin’s scheme; following his logic, since Maistre spoke flawless French, Bush must too. Which would be some national secret. Yet that’s exactly how Robin proceeds, until he has corralled everyone he doesn’t like into a pen and labeled them all conservatives and reactionaries and right-wingers, terms he fails to distinguish.
This is not an exaggeration.
The Dish 