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The Reactionary Spirit
How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World
Description
With keen insight, Vox journalist Zack Beauchamp traces how a reactionary antidemocratic ethos born and bred in America has come to infect democracies around the world.
There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American politics that has endured since our nation’s birth. In The Reactionary Spirit, Zack Beauchamp explains what he calls the reactionary spirit: as strides towards true democracy are made, there is always a faction that reacts by seeking to undermine them and thereby resist change.
Brilliantly combining political history and reportage, Beauchamp reveals how the United States was the birthplace of this strange and harrowing authoritarian style, and why we’re now seeing its evolution in diverse nations including Hungary, Israel, and India.
The Reactionary Spirit paints a vivid, alarming picture that illuminates not only what’s happening to democracy globally, but also what we must do to protect it—while we still can.
There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American politics that has endured since our nation’s birth. In The Reactionary Spirit, Zack Beauchamp explains what he calls the reactionary spirit: as strides towards true democracy are made, there is always a faction that reacts by seeking to undermine them and thereby resist change.
Brilliantly combining political history and reportage, Beauchamp reveals how the United States was the birthplace of this strange and harrowing authoritarian style, and why we’re now seeing its evolution in diverse nations including Hungary, Israel, and India.
The Reactionary Spirit paints a vivid, alarming picture that illuminates not only what’s happening to democracy globally, but also what we must do to protect it—while we still can.
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Praise
“Zack Beauchamp draws on deep reporting, historical understanding, and personal conviction to reveal much about the crisis facing democracies today. The Reactionary Spirit takes the reader on a riveting tour beneath the surface of the authoritarian wave that has spread to so many parts of the world, while answering important questions about its source within the United States. An essential addition to understanding the true nature of the times we are in.”
—Ben Rhodes, author of After the Fall
“Beauchamp’s always insightful exploration of the overlap between ideology and politics shines here as he unpacks how American democracy contains within it an impulse for self-destruction. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the different stages of democracy’s life-threatening illness in Hungary, Israel, India, and the United States, along with a prescription for nursing democracy back to health.”
—Heather Cox Richardson , author of Democracy Awakening
“Beauchamp’s trenchant analysis of the reactionary spirit—a political mindset that sees democracy as a threat to be abolished—is a timely and vital contribution to our understanding of the myriad antidemocratic movements threatening our freedoms today.”
—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen
“The Reactionary Spirit is an insightful and absorbing read that traces the distinction between traditional conservatism and the antidemocratic ideology that threatens democracies across the world. Beauchamp wields both history and social science to illustrate the origins of this neoreactionary sentiment and how it camouflages itself using the democratic rhetoric of the liberal societies it aims to annihilate.”
—Adam Serwer, staff writer, Atlantic
“A conscientious peeling away of the false democratic facade of contemporary authoritarianism.”
—Kirkus