Subtitled “How American’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World”
(PublicAffairs, July 2024, 262pp including 16pp of acknowledgements, selected bibliography, and index.)
Here’s another recent book, which I bought mainly because I’ve seen the author’s name quite a number of times in recent years attached to articles I found astute enough to quote here. And, it addresses a key question that I have ideas about but no firm conclusion: what does the apparent retreat in America and other nations from democracy and toward authoritarianism mean? Does it indicate that democracy may have been a nice experiment over recent centuries and is now giving way to the impulses of base human nature — conservative, in Lakoff’s terms, authoritarian, in common parlance when discussing Trump, or reactionary, in the book’s terms?
Gist
Like numerous recent books on social and political matters, this one consists of some general discussion and initial theses, then several case studies, and ending with conclusions and thoughts about the future. So as I did with that Prothero book, I skimmed or even skipped some of the case studies, looking mostly for general conclusions and in particular if the author had any *explanation* for this apparently slide toward a reactionary past. In a nub, no he doesn’t, just as Lakoff never wondered *why* his two modes of political thinking exist, or came to exist. To Beauchamp, the reactionary spirit just is.
The introduction opens with a striking anecdote about the author attending the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in 2013, during which he heard a speaker named Scott Terry explicitly call out white supremacist goals. Segregation as a policy to return to. In an interview, Terry said this directly to the author: Whites should control the political system, and if blacks don’t like it, they can go back to Africa. (This wasn’t quite an admonition to return to slavery, but pretty close; I’ve noted before how some conservatives (whom we’d call MAGA now) have always called for the return of slavery, and elimination of women’s suffrage, and so on, saying so very unapologetically.) Ironically, Terry claimed to be a direct descendant of Jefferson Davis — as was the author! Who was a descendant of Southerners on one side, Holocaust survivors on the other. How is it that two such distant cousins had such different views of the world?
Ch1, What Is the Reactionary Spirit? Author considers democracy as an upending of traditional hierarchies, both economically and socially. The reactionary spirit is anti-democratic, seeking to restore such hierarchies. (This distinction maps easily to Lakoff’s conservative vs progressive, my own occasional terms about tribal morality and cosmopolitan morality, Joshua Greene‘s tribal mentality vs. his modified utilitarianism of “deep pragmatism,” and Tim Urban‘s Primitive Mind and Higher Mind. Which is to say, they all reflect a base morality and an evolving morality, one that has enabled the expansion of humanity around globe, and thus the spread of that morality. While the base morality — Alex Rosenberg‘s “core morality,” and the mind as evolved in the ancestral environment explored by Steven Pinker. But Beauchamp doesn’t go there.)
The Constitution captured those anti-hierarchical principles — that no person is inherently better than any other — that the reactionaries now reject. Their principle is that some are fit and ought to rule others. (This is Heather Cox Richardson’s definition of fascism; I’ll get to her book soon.) Author mentions many examples, and explores the US, Hungary, Israel, and India in subsequent chapters of the book. Yet the trend isn’t universal, e.g. Canada and Japan. Key point: modern reactionary forces don’t attempt to overthrow democracy; they maintain it as a fiction, e.g. with Trump’s claim that the election was rigged.
This trend began in the 1990s as the world became increasingly egalitarian. (Remember that Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history”.) Why? Competition between democratic and authoritarian states? Economic inequality? Populism? None of these fully explains it.
Democracy is a system in which rulers are selected through free elections and leave office when they lose. Where elections are not free, as in Hungary, they are not democracies. The US system is deeply flawed, but still a democracy. Democracy grew out of the work of liberals, but it’s not the same as liberalism. Reactionaries cite liberal rights to defend their tyrannical majority!
Ch2, All-American Authoritarianism. Author meets Milo Yiannopoulos. Discusses De Tocquerville. How slavery was defended on the basis of biological race, and thus a racial hierarchy. Even Thomas Jefferson cited such reasons. And so on through the history of America since then. We’re now in an age of “competitive authoritarianism.”
Ch3, The Americanization of the World, is about how far right parties arose in Germany and other nations (p95). Fukuyama realized his “end of history” might not last; there will always be some people who are dissatisfied. (As I’ve noted, here in #10 about the “ultimate dynamic of human history.”)
Then follow three chapters about Hungary, Jerusalem, and then India, America, and China.
Ch7 is about How Reactionaries Lose. Canada is an example where this spirit has not threatened democracy, because its self-identify involved multiculturalism. (And they never imported slaves, perhaps.) Examples where reactionaries have been defeated include Brazil in 2022, Czech Republic, Poland, result in techniques for doing it correctly. (On p207.3 he finally alludes to “human psychology” !) He discusses John Rawls, whose 1971 A Theory of Justice laid out a proposal for democratic stability, in which citizens disagree on moral and religious issues yet find some kind of ‘overlapping consensus,’ e.g. equality and freedom, even if their reasons differ. The NYT’s 1619 Project tried to reflect Rawls’ vision.
Some of those techniques are in “evidence-based democracy,” about how to change peoples’ minds, with examples of gay marriage and “deep canvassing.” [[ Which sounds a lot like street epistemology as directed toward religion. ]]
Finally the author discusses Nietzsche, who attacked both Christianity and democracy. As debasing what is great and beautiful in the human spirit. That the doctrine of equality is poisonous. In democracy, you typically compromise rather than vanquish your enemy, with the suggestion that maybe stable democracies are too boring to last. To N, politics is about ennobling extraordinary characters. With Trump as an example of how he gives his followers a sense of belonging. N admired czarist Russia. Others after N predicted the glories of authoritarian regimes, and were embarrassed by actual events. The author concludes:
…despite all the evidence of the reactionary spirit’s resurgence, I’m still guardedly optimistic about democracy’s future.
Prediction of its imminent doom, of its obsolescence in the face of authoritarian challenge, have repeatedly proven wrong for the last two hundred years. Offering such predictions today risks confusing what is happening with what will happen. The passionate fires of reaction could, and quite possibly will, dwindle to embers Democracy taps into something more permanent, more essential even than the distinction between friend and enemy: each person’s desire to have a good life. Democracy’s supporters are legion; if they wake up to the reactionary threat in sufficient numbers, they will be unstoppable.
But this awakening is by no means inevitable. Democracy as we understand it, founded on the idea of essential human equality, has existed for but a blink of the eye in historical terms. Past reactionaries have failed to overthrow it not due to some iron law of history, but because they faced determined opposition from democracy’s champions. Today’s reactionaries, by presenting themselves as democrats, are doing their best to avoid inciting a similar level of resistance.
The contest for democracy’s future is thus different in some respects from the one previous generations faced, but at its heart the struggle is still the same. It is a conflict over whether democracy’s champions are as committed to equality as its rivals are to hierarchy. Previous generations of democrats showed that they were up to the challenge. The great question facing all of us today is whether we are.
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It occurs to me — and the author may well have said as much — that America’s current authoritarian crisis is driven by a single man as much as any global discomfort with democracy and modernism. When he goes away, it will take someone as powerful, in the perverse way he is (I don’t want to say charismatic), to keep the MAGA movement going. And that may, I predict will, not happen. And when he’s gone, I predict, many Republicans will shake their heads, look around, and ask themselves, what have we done?
