The conservative sublime

Corey Robin takes the occasion of 60th anniversary of Adorno's Authoritarian Personality to argue that violence is not an aberration from "true" conservatism, but essential to it, going back to Burke on the sublime vs. the beautiful and tying it in to his political thought:

Far from being saddened, burdened, or vexed by violence, conservatives have been enlivened by it. Not necessarily in a personal sense, though it's true that many a conservative has expressed an unanticipated enthusiasm for violence. "I enjoy wars," said Harold Macmillan, wounded three times in World War I. "Any adventure's better than sitting in an office." The conservative's commitment to violence is more than psychological, however: It's philosophical. Violence, the conservative maintains, is one of the experiences in life that makes us most feel alive, and violence, particularly warfare, is an activity that makes life, well, lively. Such arguments can be made nimbly, as in the case of Santayana, who wrote, "Only the dead have seen the end of war," or laboriously, as in the case of Heinrich von Treitschke:

To the historian who lives in the world of will it is immediately clear that the demand for a perpetual peace is thoroughly reactionary; he sees that with war all movement, all growth, must be struck out of history. It has always been the tired, unintelligent, and enervated periods that have played with the dream of perpetual peace.

* * * Rule may sometimes be sublime--our power is not always so assured or secure--but violence is more sublime. Most sublime of all is when the two are fused, when violence is performed for the sake of creating, defending, or recovering a regime of domination. But history does not always present such opportunities. The conservative must settle for the lesser good of war, pure and simple. Thus, when Carl Schmitt declares that the fundamental distinction in politics to which all "actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy," he merely formalizes an axiom that had been stirring the conservative mind for more than a century.

In this age of terror, it's easy enough to identify this strain of thought in parts of the conservative movement. Even the sunniest of neoconservative spirits can't get enough of the dark arts of war. "We have traded the anxieties of affluence for the real fears of war," a fizzy David Brooks wrote after 9/11. Channeling not only Burke--a patrimony he would be only too happy to claim--but also Schmitt and a great many other fascist and proto-fascist writers, Brooks welcomed "the fear that is so prevalent in the country" as a "cleanser, washing away a lot of the self-indulgence of the past decade." Being attacked, it seems, and attacking back, is like that bracing slap of after-shave in the morning.

Read the whole thing. Robin has "a collection of his essays on conservatism" coming out in 2011; it will be worth keeping an eye out for.