Thank you, PublicAffairs, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I just finished The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept The World, by Zack Beauchamp.

In addition to looking at the anti-democratic authoritarian movement in the United States, the author also looks at Hungary, Israel and India. I’m not convinced that Israel qualifies as a case of a country backsliding away from democracy, since it has been an apartheid state ever since its creation and thus its classification as a real democracy is in serious question (of course, the same needs to be said about the US for the vast majority of its history).

The strongest parts of the book were the chapters on Hungary and Israel. There was some good information in the book, but there have been other books that have done better jobs covering these topics.

So, I give this book a B. Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a B equates to 3 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

I originally finished reading this on July 15, 2024.

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Logan Kedzie's review
Mar 12, 2024 · edit

liked it

Spoilers: it's slavery.

The Reactionary Mind looks at the authoritarian turn taking place in otherwise well-established democracies worldwide, and looks for answers, why it is happening and what can be done to stop it. It stakes an impressively focused claim, namely that reactionary politics arise out of cultural fears, such as xenophobia and racism, and specifically the insecurity of any democratic project when such (small l) illiberal ideas are government-sanctioned. Outside of looking at America, it surveys Hungary, Israel, and India, three states generally considered democratic success stories considering their recent vintage, and the details on how each have now moved or are moving away from that. It ends on a hopeful while not optimistic note, looking at nations like Brazil and Canada that seem to have resist some of these impulses, and discussing objectively-studied steps for people to take with an emphasis on the real peril.

The Hungary section is the best. It is the example of a state with the most total transformation, and also the one where there is the most examples of the author's premise around the interrelation between ideas in the U.S. and ideas in the state itself.

I appreciated the author's fact-based approach. One of the specific refrains here is that it is not the economy, (stupid), and he is able to identify the research done in the U.S. and elsewhere that connects the reactionary sentiments to fears about cultural issues, rather than monetary ones. I feel doubt, but it is more questions I would raise about specifics in the research as opposed to the author's claims. And I appreciate anyone willing to make claims with empirical evidence that can be subject to such questioning, as opposed to the usual truthiness of political commentary. And the book has a conversational style to its citation method, which I do not like, but manages to pass my citation test in that whenever I went 'really?' he was at least describing where the information came from.

The India and Israel sections were weaker. The Israel story is being written headline by headline but I think it interesting the author's claim the Hamas attacks seem to have inoculated against the authoritarian grasp going on rather than advancing it, at least at the time of writing. I feel like the India chapter amounted to the author shouting 'why isn't anyone worried about what's happening to India?' which is pretty much what I imagine I sound like at brunch sometimes, so no foul.

There are two things that put this in the pass column for me. The first is the lack of historical or philosophical inquiry. Yes, there are rational reasons to treat the U.S. as creation of democracy in that it is in the modern political sense, but the Founders themselves were not so blinkered and with intent made choices based on history (or their particular understanding of history). I, too, enjoy ragging on tyranny-apologist John C. Calhoun; while generally in favor of removing Confederate [yes, I know don't @ me] names from public things, I fully support keeping Calhoun Place in the Loop. It is an alleyway, which feels appropriate, or like the Alexander Hamilton Stephens Grease Pit. But the inevitable discussion feels ethnocentric in itself to discuss reactionary theory and only reference Carl Schmitt and not Pseudo-Xenophon, or to address European colonialism and its racist projects in three paragraphs focused more on the perception of nascent Americans. The book comes off as if the U.S. invented racism. And American Exceptionalism, so we are absolutely #1 in racism. But the thesis here is more a subject to investigate rather than an an object with which to investigate.

The second glaring omission is religion. Religious belief is core to each of the case studies. I assume that the author would focus on their autocratic qualities and treat the religious dimension as part of the culture-based fear. But this is the particular 'hack' that the author is concerned about, the specific workaround for anti-democratic views in a democratic way, spelled out explicitly by Orban, who positions a Christian democracy as the evolution or patch to liberal democracy. It is as explicit in Israel and India, at least a detailed in this book in their respective movement-forming philosophers.

It is possible to shrug it off as hypocrisy, but particularly as regards immigration in the U.S. and Europe, and, again, pretty blatantly in Israel and India, as the notion of race and religion having sufficient overlap as to be the same for the purposes of a reactionary mindset (or at least to require more research to answer the question). And on plenty of other topics, religion or religious practice becomes the explanation. And I do not know what is scarier, that the author did not consider this, or that he did, but understood it to be a sort of third rail, effectively ceding the argument that religiosity, or a non-zero number of types of religiosity, is alien to free and fair governance. But I do think that it giving reactionary thought a broad "culture" is potentially as distracting as looking at the economics. I feel like if there is one thing that the last decade politically has taught us, it is that it is worth taking people at their word. Again, though, I write this as a sort of topic that I find missing, not one that I have an answer on. I think that perhaps my own version of the nature of the problem avoids it, but that is more a blog than a review topic.

Anyway, while I generally liked the actionable and serious tone of the conclusion, I will say that the notes on the idea of focusing philanthropy on specialist activists sounds like the windup for a sales pitch. But I also think that the conclusion is why I feel slightly more favorable towards the book in a sense that I share the author's concerns in a broad sense and so think that reasonable discussion of those concerns is a good thing. It has a fundamentally conservative ending, harking back to an earlier point about strong rightward factions being good for democratic governance, in that the key is something like civic pride and footnoted patriotism. That's close enough for me.

My thanks to the author, Zack Beauchamp, for writing the book and to the publisher, PublicAffairs, for making the ARC available to me.