The laughing lefty

What a shame the Christmas literary recommends season is over: otherwise I would have loved to draw this to your attention as quite the funniest book of the year. In The Reactionary Mind political author Corey Robin pretends to analyse the psychopathology which drives conservatives to think and act the way they do. I say “pretends” because obviously the whole thing is a sustained exercise in hilarious, spot-on pastiche of just how shrill, absurd and ludicrous the liberal-left can be when it tries too hard to be clever.

Robin’s comedy spoof thesis goes like this: conservatives are power-crazed bullies who just love to oppress; they are a self-perpetuating elite who’ll stop at nothing to put subordinate groups down be they women, ethnic minorities, or the workers; and this is why they so love war and violence — because they exist in a perpetual state of counter-revolution, desperately trying to regain ground which enlightened progressives have stolen from them, constantly striving to crush their opponents.