In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla reviews Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. Like some other notable reviews, Lilla’s claims that Robin got the subject right but the argument wrong. Robin should have written a different book — the book that the reviewer, in this case Lilla, would have written. In the dismissive tone of a schoolteacher making an example of a bad student essay (“Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind is a useful book to have — not as an example to follow, but one to avoid”) Lilla absolves the reader, and himself, of the need to read Robin’s book with the necessary care.

And it shows: of the good points that Lilla does go on to make, Robin mostly agrees and makes them in his book. Having decided that Robin is an “über-lumper” — because The Reactionary Mind draws out what is common among otherwise very different conservatives — Lilla helpfully reminds the rest of the class that “if there’s anything we’ve learned over the past century, it is that la destra è mobile. The right used to be isolationist, then became internationalist, and to judge by recent Republican debates may be tiptoeing back to isolationism again.”

Devastating! Except that Robin makes the same point: “Some conservatives criticize the free market, others defend it; some oppose the state, others embrace it; some believe in God, others are atheists. Some are localists, others nationalists, and still others internationalists. Some, like Burke, are all three at the same time. But these are historical improvisations — tactical and substantive — on a theme. Only by juxtaposing these voices — across time and space — can we make out the theme amid the improvisation.”