A Fundamentally Anti-Democratic Tradition: Zack Beauchamp's "The Reactionary Spirit"

As equality is its core principle, the cultural revolution teaches that the real heroes of history are not the conquerors, soldiers, and statesmen who build the Western nations and creates great empires, but those who advanced the higher cause—the equality of peoples. Thus, the end of segregation in the South and of apartheid in South Africa are triumphs greater than the defeat of communism, and Mandela and Gandhi are the true moral heroes of the Twentieth century. Thus Martin Luther King stands tallest in the American pantheon, and any state that refuses to set aside a holiday to celebrate his birth is to be boycotted. As for George Washington, if his name is removed from schools, so be it. Was he not an owner of slaves? Did he not participate in America’s most egregious violation of human equality? As equality is a first principle, one person, one-vote democracy is the highest form of government and the only truly legitimate form.

-Pat Buchanan, The Death of the West

That some are more deserving, and so deserving of more, has long been a sacrosanct principle of the reactionary. That the “deserving” so often turns out to be the reactionary himself has never surprised anyone but reactionaries themselves, whose delicate vanities are rarely more wounded than when you point out that there is nothing profound—and a lot that’s vulgar—about desperately searching for a “superior moral justification” for their selfishness and ego. 

Zack Beauchamp’s The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World is a lucid and very well written guide to the reactionary tradition, doubling as a manual on how to confront it. Beauchamp is a well-regarded journalist for Vox who has been commenting on both reactionary movements and intellectuals for years. He’s part of a growing cadre of liberals and progressives who take a deep interest in the intellectual and ideological roots of the modern right, ranging from academics like Larry Alan Busk and David Austin Walsh to podcasts like Know Your Enemy. The attention is very much needed given the pivotal moment we are in.

In many parts of the world reactionary forces look like they’ve experienced a setback. France and the United Kingdom both held recent elections that broke left (albeit, not as firmly as one might wish). Hungary’s Victor Orban and India’s Narendra Modi both experienced their first serious electoral setbacks despite efforts to rig the system in their favor. But in the United States things are far more ambiguous. Every poll shows a very tight election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump—at least in the electoral college.  If liberals and progressives are to win we need a better understanding of what we’re up against.

Conservatism and the reactionary spirit 

Beauchamp opens his book with a discussion of the titular “reactionary” spirit. He makes clear that it is not to be confused with the moderate forms of conservatism which have played a constructive role in modern liberal democracies. Beauchamp notes how the “democratic right” sees “virtue in tradition and danger in change.” Democratic conservatives regard their “core” purpose as being “opposing misguided attempts at social change and enacting reforms that strengthen what’s valuable about the existing political order.” Their aim, as the pithy statement goes, is to change what they must to conserve what they can in the face of reformist calls. Beauchamp even gently chastises some left-commentators on the right like Corey Robin for eliding this distinction and failing to recognize the value of such efforts at conservation. 

It's important for Beauchamp not to overstate the case for moderate conservatism. Through the 19^th century Burke and many other “moderate” conservatives were often doggedly opposed to what we’d now consider commonsense democratic norms like universal suffrage. In his classic Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity the English conservative James Fitzjames Stephens stressed the “disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage” which was “that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad.”

In the United States William F. Buckley, now lionized by the Never Trumpers, penned columns defending Jim Crow on the basis that whites were the “advanced race” before backtracking. Recognizing these tendencies to vacillate between resisting the tide of egalitarian modernity and accommodating them is necessary when trying to understand why some moderate conservatives like Jonah Goldberg or George Will eventually come out of the closet as right-wing liberals while others tactically or enthusiastically jump into Trump’s lap.

Nonetheless, intelligent liberals and progressives have good reasons to develop what we might call the Burkean virtues of prudence and political empiricism, recognizing that the key test for a nice-sounding theoretical idea is its impact in the real world. Also important is to stress that there is nothing inimical between supporting liberalism and progressivism and supporting and even defending the retention of cultural traditions. Even (perhaps especially) socialists like G. A. Cohen were willing to call themselves “conservatives” about conserving what was of value in our traditions, the environment etc. 

If anything the liberal insistence on upholding multicultural policies reflects a commitment to allowing individuals and communities the rights to maintain their traditional practices where their members wish. Liberals and progressives are opposed to traditions which are imposed by the state and other powerful institutions, in no small part because that means competing traditions and forms of life come under threat. Above all else I’ve often thought that conservatives are at their best when they accuse the left of, to paraphrase Burke, hating vices too much and loving people too little. The tendency to project a boundless love of humanity, but only as it might be if transformatively improved, while expressing self-righteous disdain and a lack of forgiveness for ordinary flaws is a serious weakness. Some internal critics on the left have recognized this as well. 

This kind of moderate Burkean conservatism is very different from the reactionary spirit Beauchamp challenged. As he defines it the reactionary spirit:

…Is a specific kind of antidemocratic politics that emerges in a country that has democratic institutions, like elections and parliaments, in reaction to the operation of those institutions. The reactionary spirit sees democracy as so threatening to the existing social order that it must be weakened or even abolished entirely. The result is a politics that uses political power in all its forms, ranging from legislation to coups to revolutions, to undermine democracy or overthrow it outright.

Beauchamp argues there are two ways to distinguish the reactionary spirit from conservative and “even extreme-right” politics. The first is that the reactionary spirit arises (surprise surprise) in reaction to the democratic changes, either through legislative institutions or constitutional reforms. Secondly, the reactionary spirit produces an anti-democratic form of extreme right politics. This is distinct from even extreme right parties which might have radical and xenophobic goals, but accept that they must play by the rules of the democratic game to implement them. 

The march of the reactionary spirit 

Much of the book is taken up with discussing four case studies of the reactionary spirit on the march. These are the United States, Hungary, Israel, and India. Beauchamp could have also pointed to Poland under PiS—which was also undergoing democratic backsliding which may have been partially halted by the election of Donald Tusk’s centrist coalition—and Brazil under Bolsonaro. In each circumstance a reasonably stable or emerging democracy found its norms challenged from within by “extreme” right parties that denounced liberal elitism while endorsing nativism and the return to old, or in rarer cases the creation of new, forms of social hierarchization. Many have been tempted to call this a new form of fascism, but Beauchamp would disagree. As Roger Griffin points out in The Nature of Fascism, fascism had a populist demotic quality in calling for a palingenetic renewal of the “ultranation” that would require an extraordinary unity of will from the entire people embodied in the masculine leader. But both the Italian Fascists and German Nazis made little if any secret of their disdain for democracy. 

By contrast Beauchamp points out these new extreme right parties will initially blanket themselves in the language of democracy, claiming to embody the will of the real people better than soft liberal cosmopolitans. Yet, once in power these extreme right parties will typically impose tighter constraints on democratic participation and public criticism—especially upon groups they regard as enemies. This may very well be carried out by a dull and creeping “autocratic legalism” which gerrymanders electoral districts, overregulates or defunds opposing media and parties, stacks the judiciary and bureaucracy with supportive cronies, and rigs election laws to favor the ruling party. The end result is a form of “competitive authoritarianism” that the current Hungarian state serves as such a pominent example of, and a model to many. Elections are still held between competing parties, there is some freedom to criticize the government, and in principle the replacement of hegemonic party rule is possible. But, as I explain here in more detail,  the loaded rules of the game are designed to make that outcome very unlikely. In Hungary the ruling party failed to win a majority of the vote in 2014 and 2018, but won two thirds of the seats in Parliament regardless, in no small part a result of its blizzard of constitutional and technocratic changes. 

American reaction

One of the more dispiriting chapters concerns the United States. Prior to 2016 the operative assumption was that someone like Trump could never come anywhere close to power, and if they did there’d be no serious path to rolling back democratic norms. Much of this turned on the exceptionalist mythology that the United States was simply different from others in having never had a serious aristocracy committed to reactionary politics, let alone one that could pose a genuine threat to American democracy. Beauchamp rightly reminds us that this simply is untrue. For much of the country’s history an extraordinarily powerful, often racial, plutocracy wielded outsized influence. Given the minoritarian features of the American constitution, this was often by design. This left the country torn between “two contradictory ideologies: a liberal-democratic gospel of universal human equality, and a feudal-authoritarian vision premised on the idea of fundamental human inequality.”

As time went on, and the conflict between these strains became clearer, slavery’s defenders did away with Jefferson’s contortions and boldly asserted the “fundamental inequality” of humankind. This of course was true on many different levels; there’s a reason the kind of people who endlessly harp about “human biodiversity” and racial inequality also don’t much like feminism or redistributive programs. Contra liberal thinking that imagines it is progressive who lionize difference, the right has always insisted on the importance of difference in so far as we are talking about varied differences of what Nietzche called “ordering of rank.”

The right’s vision of difference is pyramidal—each different rung of the hierarchy occupying its place—while the left’s is mosaic-like—each equal thread contributing to the whole. Nor was this commitment to “fundamental inequality” the purview of lazing aristocrats and thoughtless bigots. It found preeminent intellectual defenders of bigotry and racism like John C. Calhoun, the seventh Vice President of the United States and in his day a constitutional theorist of repute. Calhoun argued that the majoritarian and democratic features of the American system might pose a threat to the slaveholding minorities of the Southern states, and drew on Madisonian rhetoric to argue this had to be inhibited. The basis for this was his unrepenting view that the American caste system and its fundamental inequities was basically just, and if a majority of citizens came to disagree the privileges of the plantocracy should still prevail. As he put it in A Disquisition on Government:

There is another error, not less great and dangerous, usually associated with the one which has just been considered. I refer to the opinion, that liberty and equality are so intimately united, that liberty cannot be perfect without perfect equality.  That they are united to a certain extent—and that equality of citizens, in the eyes of the law, is essential to liberty in a popular government, is conceded. But to go further, and make equality of condition essential to liberty, would be to destroy both liberty and progress. The reason is, that inequality of condition, while it is a necessary consequence of liberty, is, at the same time, indispensable to progress. In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to bear in mind, that the main spring to progress is, the desire of individuals to better their condition; and that the strongest impulse which can be given to it is, to leave individuals free to exert themselves in the manner they may deem best for that purpose, as far at least as it can be done consistently with the ends for which government is ordained—and to secure to all the fruits of their exertions. Now, as individuals differ greatly from each other, in intelligence, sagacity, energy, perseverance, skill, habit of industry and economy, physical power, position and opportunity—the necessary effect of leaving all free to exert themselves to better their condition, must be a corresponding inequality between those who may possess these qualities and advantages in a high degree, and those who may be deficient in them.

What’s remarkable about passages such as these is how quintessentially American much of the rhetoric and argumentation is. Calhoun juxtaposes liberty and equality, and finds that expansive liberty for some cannot coexist with social equality. Drawing on deep reservoirs of American commitments to meritocracy and Jeffersonian “natural aristocracy” Calhoun stresses how individuals differ in their ability to work and strive to better themselves, and that the alleged natural inequities which emerge should be respected. Interestingly even the language of difference and variation, so often condemned by the American reactionary right in some modes, is appealed to.

But not in order to defend the view of society as a mosaic where different but equal individuals pursue various experiments in living which enrich the whole. Instead to justify the view of society as the aforementioned pyramid predicated on what Charles Taylor in Modern Social Imaginaries calls “hierarchical complementarity”—each rung of the ladder, from wealthy masters down to slaves, has their place. But by no means will they possess the same rights, including to political power. Political power is to be reserved to those judged worthy of it, and even then there will be protections granted to insulate privilege from the moralistic pressures of reformers and dangerous “numerical” democratic majorities.

It is an exaggeration to follow Pat Buchanan in assuming that the largest untapped pool of political support lay to the right of Ronald Reagan. In many ways a majority of Americans have become more liberal on issues like abortion, LGTBQ inclusion, etc. Indeed American reactionaries often anxiously gestured to just this possibility; vacillating in a contradictory but always self-reinforcing way between insisting that ordinary folk didn’t like what was happening and expressing deep anxieties that the country was slipping away from them and into the hands of the black mermaid purveyors. But Beauchamp’s book helps show why there was a base hungry for the MAGA movement, and how the history of American reaction explains how a well worn path lay open to someone like Donald Trump and his followers. 

Looking ahead

What then can be done? Beauchamp’s book is refreshingly optimistic about the future. He points out how extreme right movements lost major elections in America (2020) and Brazil (2022) despite their leader’s desperate attempts to claw onto power by any means necessary. The core lesson Beauchamp draws from this is that citizens are responsive to the calls to defend democracy if and when they think it is seriously under threat and another, liberal movement is willing to protect it. To Beauchamp’s mind the Achilles heel of the modern reactionary movement is its reliance on claiming to democratically embody the will of the people while actively doing a great deal to prevent the people from expressing that will.

As he puts it “the modern reactionary project has a basic problem: it needs to undermine democracy without appearing to do so….Authoritarian factions inside democracy employ some combination of three broad strategies to thread this needle. They enact technical and complex antidemocratic policies that ordinary citizens don’t notice or understand. They polarize the population along ethnoreligious lines so several that citizens overlook antidemocratic actions. And they claim that they are ‘merely’ attacking liberalism rather than democracy to justify curtailing basic democratic freedoms.” These tactics can be effective when done subtly, but the fact that they have to be done subtly demonstrates how reactionaries are keenly aware that the public as a whole would not likely approve of their anti-democratic machinations. 

I would put this in a slightly different way than Beauchamp that might further fortify his optimism of the will. Historically the reactionary right has expressed an unreserved loathing for democracy; nothing more than a “soft variant of communism” as Hermann Hoppe once put it. This loathing has persisted to the present day. Reactionary libertarians like Peter Thiel, neo monarchists like Curtis Yarvin, and aging trolls like Bronze Age Pervert join hands in their disdain for the herdlike bugmen who imagine they should have a say about the world is run when that in fact that job belongs to rarefied Dark Elves like Thiel, Yarvin, and BAP. 

And yet more public facing reactionaries have rarely dared to outwardly express this revulsion since they are aware that it would kill their movement’s electoral chances—or at least get them labelled “weird.” This demonstrates that the legitimacy of democratic governance, and the liberal norms that complement it, remains largely hegemonic in the broader culture. Rather than attack it directly, as their own grandiose attraction to great big men who do great big things on behalf of very small ideals would suggest, reactionaries are reduced to nebbish technocratic incrementalism on the one hand or—in electoral defeat—impotent grabs at power by goading on the very mobs they disdain to attack opponents they can’t defeat in a fair fight.

None of this is to suggest that the victory of liberal democracy is inexorable or fated, much as one would like to believe the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. But the air of gloom that has surrounded liberals since 2016 is unwarranted, unhelpful and self-reinforcing. Beauchamp closes his book with a call to arms: this is a “conflict over whether democracy’s champions are as committed to equality as its rivals are to hierarchy. Previous generations of democrats proved they were up to the challenge. The great question facing all of us today is whether we are.” The answer to his question is indeed “we are”—but only if we remember that. 

Featured image is Portrait of Thomas Carlyle