Cory Robin on The Reactionary Mind (2012)

Tuesday, October 1, at 2 PM on KPFK, I present excerpts from one of the most requested, most popular, and perhaps, alas, most enduring and relevant of the hundreds of shows I have hosted over more than fifteen years of Bibliocracy Radio. Corey Robin’s landmark The Reactionary Mind: Conservativism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin is a primer, a take-apart, an essential guide to understanding, critiquing, and fighting the Right. It’s a fun, smart, engaging history, revisionist history; a collection of case studies and analyses. Alas, it never gets old, not with half of U.S. voters unable to apprehend even the basics of the tired old appeals to fantasy, masochism, and ideological mischief presented by the GOP and worse. Perhaps, like me, you’ll find in this show and this book some of the necessary wisdom and perspective required to arm yourself for intellectual self-defense and feel brave about calling out the easy, often sophomoric “ideas” that have otherwise been promoted or advertised or repeated by both “conservatives” and mainstream journalism. This is a good one, folks! And just right for the first day of the KPFK October Fund Drive, with the election a month away.

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