A reactionary anti-democratic ethos born and bred in America has come to infect democracies around the world. This is the central thesis of a timely new book by the journalist Zack Beauchamp, The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.
Through a mix of political history and reportage, The Reactionary Spirit reveals how the United States serves the birthplace of a new authoritarian style, and why we’re now seeing its evolution in a diverse set of countries ranging from Hungary to Israel to India.
Beauchamp elaborated on the thesis of his new book on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy, co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at the online magazine Vox, has spent years covering challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, the rise of right-wing populism, and the world of political ideas. He is also the author of On the Right, a newsletter about the American conservative movement.
Beauchamp spoke with host Milan Vaishnav about the rise of competitive authoritarianism, inequality and democracy, and the current era of “autocracy without autocrats”. They also discussed emerging transnational linkages between rightwing populists in different settings.
“2020 was when it started to become not just clear that something was going on with democracy around the world, but I would say undeniable — and still misdiagnosed,” said Beauchamp. “The vocabulary that we had to talk about this phenomenon seemed all wrong in a number of different and important respects. And there were consistent mistakes being made by people who are really thoughtful and smart…because the phenomenon [of backsliding] was different in subtle but important ways from previous forms of anti-democratic politics.”
The author said that the book was born as an attempt to try and develop a more robust set of concepts to address the shortcomings of conventional modes of thinking about democracy and autocracy.
The book’s central thesis is that as strides towards true democracy are made, there is always a faction that reacts by seeking to undermine them, and thereby resist change. The current moment is an example of this “reactionary spirit”.
Although the book focuses on right-wing authoritarianism, Beauchamp clarified that there is nothing intrinsically authoritarian about the right any more than there is anything intrinsically authoritarian about the left.
“Both sides of the classic French Revolution dispute have produced authoritarian movements. They manifest in different ways and in different times and under different conditions,” the author said. “Sometimes, there are some conditions that are really fruitful for both of them. Inter-war Germany, for example, is a case where, at one point, the two most popular parties were the Stalinist front and the Nazis…because conditions were not good for any centrist faction at that point.”
Beauchamp discussed how now the stars have aligned in such a way that rightwing authoritarianism is ascendant around the world. He added that it is the dominant strain of movement from inside democracies that is challenging the stability and the survival of developed democracies.
“Not to say leftwing authoritarianism is impossible; anyone who has followed anything surrounding Venezuela or in other Latin American countries knows there are real left-wing authoritarian movements,” he cautioned. “But we are living in a moment when the right-wing strain has become more ascendant because we have gone through at least a half-century of left-wing victories.”
