How Reactionaries React

By Dan Hagen

Let’s say I propose a solution to some problem, and you tell me:

A ) that trying to solve the problem will make it worse;

B ) that the proposed solution will accomplish nothing whatsoever and/or;

C ) that the solution will harm some other, greater value.

Congratulations, sir. You’re a reactionary.

In the 1980s, observing the rise of the new American right, the late philosopher Albert Hirschman identified a rigidity in their thinking characterized by these three standard jerks of the conservative knee. He branded them, in order, “perversity,” “futility” and “jeopardy.”

“Hirschman shows that these objections are stupefying, mechanical, hyperbolic and often wrong,” wrote Cass Sunstein in the May 23, 2013, New York Review of Books.

“The current debate over gun control is a case study in ‘the rhetoric of reaction,’” Sunstein said. “Those who object to legal restrictions urge that far from decreasing the risk of violence, such restrictions will actually increase it. For Hirschman, this objection would be an example of ‘perversity.’ Opponents also contend that if we want to save lives, gun control will have absolutely no effect — the argument from futility. We can find precisely the same rhetorical gambits in countless other debates, including those over Obamacare, increases in the minimum wage, affirmative action and same-sex marriage.”

In the 1980s, Sunstein noted, “Hirschman was struck by the routine, stylized, even mechanical character of much of conservative thinking.”

Hirschman died late in 2012, but had he lived longer, he might have added a fourth standard response to his reactionary trio: “fantasy,” the claim that the problem itself, however glaring and obvious, does not in fact exist.

For example, right wingers routinely deny the existence of the American health care crisis with an angry, dismissive claim that access to an emergency room and — presuming one survives that experience long enough to receive the subsequent staggering medical bills — access to the bankruptcy courts is more than enough “health care” for ordinary Americans. It’s more than Daniel Boone had, you whiny weaklings.

Meanwhile, the congressional Republicans who make these claims receive free outpatient care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and National Naval Medical Center, and a generous variety of other comfortably subsidized health care services.

See? No problem at all.

Sources: The article An Original Thinker of Our Time by Cass R. Sunstein, based on the book Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman