Irritable Mental Gestures, Reconsidered

In his 1950 defense of American liberalism, Lionel Trilling famously said that conservatives expressed themselves in “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” In his recently published The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservative” Isn’t Enough, Michael Warren Davis seems to celebrate this charge. His book is, at its heart, a series of irritable mental gestures aimed at contemporary liberal and mainstream conservatism nostrums. One will find individual critiques but no sweeping ideological program or synthesis of data. The book appears at a time when reactionaries are experiencing something of a boomlet. From Catholic integralism to Bronze Age Pervert, some on the American Right seem fed up with defending American republicanism and existing political institutions. What is odd is that Davis’s particular reactionary position is one that has had much less of a share in this boomlet—the old Chestertonian distributist living on his farm, smoking his pipe, and working only to live a modest, cultured life.