In 1955, the political theorist Louis Hartz published his classic The Liberal Tradition in America, which set out an influential framework for thinking about American history. Hartz sought to explain the reasons for the weakness of the American left compared to its counterparts in European societies. Rejecting interpretations that focused on the material well-being and innate conservatism of American workers (too much “roast beef and apple pie,” as sociologist Werner Sombart had put it in 1906), Hartz made the counterintuitive claim that America lacked socialism because it had never been a feudal society. The absence of a gentry, a legally defined aristocratic class, meant that there was no need for a bourgeoisie to assume a revolutionary politics as in France. Lacking a “genuine revolutionary tradition,” the United States “lacks also a tradition of reaction: lacking Robespierre it lacks Maistre.” All there was in American politics was a “fixed, dogmatic liberalism” that Hartz (writing in the shadow of McCarthyism) feared could harbor a frightening conformity and “tyrannical compulsion.”

Although critics have taken issue with Hartz’s book ever since it first appeared, the idea of America as defined by its liberal democratic aspirations has proven difficult to shake. But as the extreme right has gained momentum in American politics, the question of what the American political tradition really is has come under more scrutiny. Recent works such as Steven Hahn’s Illiberal America and Jacob Heilbrunn’s America Last have observed the recurrent surges of hostility to liberal individualism and the perennial appeal of dictatorial political models to right-wing activists throughout American history.

Journalist Zack Beauchamp’s The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, a work of popular political theory grounded in reportage on the United States, Hungary, Israel, and India, goes even further. The claims of human equality that have long been seen as core to the American ideal are less important, he writes, than the opposition to egalitarian politics and ideas that has also percolated through American history. Indeed, in Beauchamp’s telling, the United States has too often provided a case study for the rest of the world in how to fight democratic politics and a toolkit for political reactionaries around the globe.

Beauchamp argues that the very shift of political power to people who have not previously possessed it will necessarily involve the “upending of social hierarchies,” and it will thus be met by an upsurge of the “reactionary spirit.” He defines this not in terms of conservative policies, but instead as an opposition to democracy and democratic government itself. Those whose social positions are threatened will choose “hierarchy over democracy,” as they try to “constrain or even topple democracy to protect hierarchies of wealth and status.”

Central to Beauchamp’s argument is the idea that the “eternal and enduring” reactionary spirit is something more than the traditional defenses of existing authority. It represents the way that these defenses adapt to the radical challenge of democracy—an antidemocratic politics that is compelled to adopt the rhetoric of democracy, framing itself as protecting the genuine people from the fraud and manipulation of sinister outsiders. For this reason, the United States can at once be the exemplar of democratic politics and a model of counterrevolutionary politics. Yet while Beauchamp puts forward a powerful depiction of this political style, the transhistorical nature of his argument makes it difficult to fully grapple with the reasons for the power of reaction in American history—let alone to imagine how to escape the paradox he outlines.

Beauchamp suggests that the German political philosopher (and eventual Nazi) Carl Schmitt is the central theorist of this antidemocratic politics. In the 1920s and ’30s, Schmitt argued that liberals (such as those of Weimar Germany) might delude themselves that political life was defined by the equal rights of citizens, the rule of law, the toleration of cultural differences, and the existence of political institutions that could ensure fair processes of representation. All this, Schmitt believed, was window dressing for what really mattered—namely, the struggle between opposed groups (“friends” and “enemies”) for power. A single leader could come to speak for the will of the people unified against the alien threat. Paradoxically, an autocrat—or a Fuhrer—could embody the democratic will of the community far more purely than the corrupt, messy give-and-take of a parliamentary regime. In Beauchamp’s view, Schmitt’s thought points to the way that those deeply hostile to egalitarianism and democracy might borrow the language of popular rule to defend the centralization of power.

For Beauchamp, the key to the reactionary spirit in American politics is racism. Although he refers to the history of slavery to suggest the depth of the reactionary tradition in the United States, Beauchamp sees the rise of the Jim Crow South as a turning point in the development of a “competitive authoritarianism” (in the phrase of political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way) in America. Here, we see the preservation of the general framework of democratic institutions—regular elections, a state constitution, nominal equality before the law—along with the systematic disenfranchisement of Black Southerners (and many poor whites) in the name of protecting democracy from subversion. In the 1960s, the “Second Reconstruction” of the civil rights movement destroyed Southern segregation and made it impossible to openly embrace white supremacy in politics. But it fueled the reactionary spirit, especially after the election of Barack Obama: “A Black man in the Oval Office is undeniable evidence that things had changed in America, that certain elements of the old order no longer held.” The rise of MAGA and of Trump, Beauchamp suggests, represents a “primal scream” against a more diverse and inclusive future.

The American pattern—democratic upsurge followed by reaction—can be seen around the globe. As decolonization ended empire and as countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East adopted liberal democratic constitutions, citizens no longer could be persuaded by an open appeal to fascism. Instead, the European far right (especially Viktor Orbán in Hungary), the Likud party under Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, and India under the leadership of Narendra Modi have all adopted an anti-egalitarian politics in the name of preserving authentic democracy. In some cases, their inspiration can be traced back to the United States: Orbán’s 2013 campaign against George Soros as the enemy of “Christian democracy” and Hungarian tradition was apparently inspired by American political consultants Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum, recommended to Orbán by Netanyahu. During Orbán’s rise (and before Finkelstein’s death in 2017), they helped Orbán develop a line of argument that blamed foreign media, “hired activists,” and outside troublemakers such as Soros himself for the influx of migrants to Hungary. The result was Orbán’s rejection of liberal democracy as “no longer able to protect people’s dignity, provide freedom, guarantee physical security, or maintain Christian culture.” In order to preserve democracy, the “Hungarian people” had to replace “the shipwreck of liberal democracy.”

Israel can be seen as another example of the reactionary spirit on the move. The right wing in Israel, Beauchamp argues, insists that pluralism is a betrayal, dissent the handiwork of alien outsiders, egalitarianism a ploy that distracts from the authentic democratic community. Here, the core of reaction is the occupation of the West Bank and Israeli control over Gaza. (Most of The Reactionary Spirit was plainly written before October 7, 2023, but the war and the attendant infringements on the right to protest and dissent within Israel have only given more weight to Beauchamp’s arguments.) As Ayelet Shaked, Netanyahu’s then-justice minister, said in a 2018 speech, maintaining the “character of the State of Israel as a Jewish state” was the highest priority, even when it came at the “expense of equality.” Here, too, there is an American connection: Beauchamp reminds readers that Meir Kahane, the reactionary rabbi who said he would never allow “the Jewish state to be sacrificed on the altar of democracy,” was born in the United States (in Brooklyn), and his politics was forged in opposition to the civil rights movement.

For India, Beauchamp traces the Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi to the 1930s and the writings of the anti-imperial activist M.S. Golwalkar, who extolled Germany’s expulsion of Jews as a model for Hindus in India to adopt vis-à-vis Muslims: “We are an old nation; let us deal, as old nations ought to and do deal, with the foreign races, who have chosen to live in our country.” Once again, supposed outsiders (India’s Muslim population) became the unifying threat that could bring together the true people, and purifying the country of those races and cultures with “differences that go to the root” became the core political project. A member of Golwalkar’s movement ultimately assassinated Gandhi following the partition of India and Pakistan. Modi’s rise, Beauchamp shows, has been supported by the United States, which sees India as an Asian ally against the threat of China—giving the reactionary spirit a toehold in the Global South similar to that which Hungary provides for Europe.

The Reactionary Spirit builds a persuasive case for a politics of reaction taking shape around the world, its leaders learning from and taking inspiration from each other as they solidify their grips on power. Many accounts of the growing power of the right around the world have focused on the leaders—“strongmen” who seek to attain control over their country’s political processes. Others have treated this as a “populist” revival. Beauchamp rightly rejects both these approaches, seeing the emphasis on the leaders as lone actors as misplaced and arguing that there are many left populists (such as Bernie Sanders) who do not have antidemocratic stances and whose populism emerges out of egalitarianism. Instead, he steps back to present the reactionary spirit as a timeless flip side of democratic politics. As democracy generates challenges to conventional forms of authority—as feminism, gay rights, transgender politics, and international immigration all have done in recent years—tradition-minded people will respond with anxiety and fear, and they will form an electoral base for a politics rooted in undermining democracy in order to turn back change.

What is striking about this approach is its existential quality, the way that it grounds the emergence of reactionary politics entirely in terms of the emotions of displacement and cultural anxiety. Politics itself is almost absent, as are material interests: Beauchamp says little about the organizing strategies of right-wing political activists or the ideas they have used to recruit and mobilize their followers. The reactionary spirit is treated as something that emerges organically, not as a “structure of feeling” (to quote the critic Raymond Williams) that is cultivated by people who might have something to gain from channeling diffuse grievances into a particular political shape. More consideration of the many different studies of the American right—from the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, to the appeal of the “old Christian right” (as historian Leo Ribuffo put it) in the 1930s, to the emergence of contemporary conservatism in the postwar period—all might have helped Beauchamp shed light on how reactionary politics do not simply or inevitably arise, but are shaped historically and through political organization.

Beauchamp’s transhistorical approach to the politics of reaction also leads him to avoid saying much about the material context in which the contemporary right has emerged, both in the United States and around the world. He does note that the polarization of income and wealth has helped to create a group of superrich people who have sometimes funded far-right politics, suggesting a symbiosis between extreme inequality and the reactionary spirit (for example, Sheldon Adelson’s bankrolling of Israel Hayom, a free daily newspaper that has staunchly backed Netanyahu, or his widow Miriam Adelson’s ardent and generous support of Donald Trump). But he does not really develop this insight systematically to look at the way that the extremely wealthy might have a real and distinctive interest in promoting politics that limit democratic participation. And when it comes to popular support for reaction, Beauchamp is insistent that economic anger is not primary in driving support for Trump or other reactionary leaders. The emotional dynamic that turns people against democratic government is, in Beauchamp’s telling, really about the inevitable discomfort with cultural and demographic change, which he views as self-explanatory, not something that needs to be understood historically. Nor does he see ideas about race emerging from the tumult and antagonism of capitalism or of free-market policies.

The result is that the norms of liberal capitalism are seen as the opposite of the reactionary tradition, even as a bulwark against it, with little sense of the ways they might be entwined. In the closing pages of The Reactionary Spirit, Beauchamp expresses his own guarded optimism that democracy will survive the latest challenges that it faces. Quoting Friedrich Nietzsche’s denunciation of “the contemptible sort of wellbeing dreamt of by grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats,” he concludes that this everyday “wellbeing” is in truth what people want most to preserve. Politics, for most people, is a means to an end, not a source of meaning in itself. The agonistic politics that Schmitt proposes will ultimately, Beauchamp hopes, simply demand too much emotional energy and time and drama. Trump’s rallies and tweets might feel good in the moment, but in the cold light of day they will lose their appeal. In the end, the vitriolic high pitch of the reactionary spirit is at odds with the quotidian wishes that really guide people’s lives: a secure job, a place in a community, a stable family. “The politics of passion,” Beauchamp writes, “is often fleeting.”

But this seems overly optimistic. For one thing, as Beauchamp argues, Orbán’s Hungary provides an example of an antidemocratic state that has been able to consolidate power quietly and unobtrusively, through legal manipulation, bureaucratic control, and quiet repression rather than through mass rallies and public anger. More deeply, though, truly reactionary regimes that are able to consolidate power tend to suck everything else into their orbit. Through threats of violence, expulsion, exclusion, and public humiliation, the reactionary leader creates a context of fear and insecurity in which it comes to seem that one’s own self-interest and security—the job, the home, the family—can be advanced and preserved only through complicity with power. As Primo Levi wrote in his devastating account of the Nazi concentration camps, “[A]t the foot of every absolute throne, men…crowd in order to grab their small portion of power.” The desires for a good career, personal advancement, luxury consumption, and family prestige can themselves propel people to protect the monstrous. To quote Levi again, “Willingly or not we come to terms with power”—and as we do, the quiet joys that Beauchamp hopes will protect people may in fact propel our undoing.