By Lily Geismer @ Los Angeles Review of Books, Jan. 19

WHAT SHOULD WE MAKE of conservatism in the Trump era? Last spring, Rick Perlstein, a historian of the American right, published a mea culpa in The New York Times Magazine explaining how the election of Donald Trump had led him to reconsider the settled narrative of modern American conservatism. Perlstein bemoaned the fact that 20th-century political historians mostly restricted their attention to establishment figures like William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan. Instead, he exhorted his colleagues to look fringeward, to “conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage,” in order to understand the foundations of Trumpism.

Though much of its contents were written and published prior to this call to arms, the updated edition of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind can be read as a powerful rejoinder to Perlstein’s argument. Robin posits that the roots of Trumpism are not on the right’s fringe but rather among its standard-bearers, going back as far as Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, and winding through respected figures like Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich Hayek, and Antonin Scalia [....]