The global reach of America’s “reactionary spirit”

In this in-depth review of Zack Beauchamp’s The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World (PublicAffairs, 2024), Nick Warmuth explores how a distinctly American reactionary tradition now threatens democracies worldwide. From Trump to Orbán, Netanyahu to Modi, Beauchamp shows how elected leaders hollow out liberal democracy under the guise of saving it. Warmuth argues that realising how this “reactionary spirit” has been coopted is crucial to understanding how to overcome their ultimate intentions.

What do the United States, Hungary, Israel, and India all have in common? It’s probably not what you think. According to Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent at the progressive news outlet VOX and author of the recently released book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, these four democratic nations are all currently governed by right-wing authoritarian strongmen (each of whom were legitimately elected to office) intent on destroying the very principles of liberal democracy as a means to stay in power, despite explicitly presenting themselves as bulwarks against tyranny. Indeed, democracies the world over are under serious threat not seen in generations. According to V-Dem, a leading academic database recording democracy, the world has fewer democracies than autocracies for the first time in over 20 years (88 to 91, respectively). Twenty-seven of the 45 nations that are currently turning towards authoritarianism were democracies at the start of their respective backslidings. Of these, only nine can still be considered legitimate democracies.¹ But how and from where exactly does this phenomenon arise? Beauchamp claims to have the answer and, apparently, to employ a currently trending cliché, “the call is coming from inside the house.”

Structurally, the book can be broken into three primary sections. Chapters one and two lay the relevant historical foundation; the former introduces the author’s novel concept of the “reactionary spirit”—from which the book gets its title—while the latter considers its origins. Chapters three through six present the four national case-studies referenced above. And chapter seven, along with the conclusion, addresses the inherent vulnerabilities of the reactionary spirit and how to combat its ascendance. Methodologically, despite not explicitly presenting itself as such, Beachamp’s study incorporates a sophisticated and convincing comparative approach. Again, these four countries do not immediately suggest their apparent commonality as presented here, but the collective actions taken by their respective leaders—Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi—over the past decade or so (not to mention the conspicuous personal relationships between them) demonstrate a credible and consequential pattern that needs to be addressed. 

Provided that the reader is approaching this book with a familiarity with “reactionary” politics, any initial suspicions of repackaged mimicry are quickly abandoned. I am speaking specifically of Corey Robin’s 2011 book on the Reactionary Mind,² of which the general subject matter is nearly identical. But that is where the overlap ends. In fact, Beauchamp avoids the very traps that ensnared Robin, by not pinning the blame squarely on conservativism. Rather, the reactionary spirit refers to a particular mindset or political disposition that is characterized by a deep-seated opposition to modern liberal democracy (i.e., the rule of law, separation of powers, protections of human rights) and the distressed longing for a perceived lost order. Contrary to Robin, this does not concern specific policies or ideologies per se but reflects a broader emotional orientation. Key components of the reactionary spirit include a preference for authority and order, opposition to progressive change, and a romanticized perception of national power and hierarchy. In practice, it is the impulse to choose hegemony over democracy—if need be, to the point of toppling it—in order to protect the established hierarchies of wealth and status (p. 12). While reading this, I was reminded of yet another popular phrase. While reporting from the field on the consequential Tet Offensive in 1968, Associated Press journalist Peter Arnett quoted an unnamed US Major who candidly remarked, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,”³ referring to the Army’s decision to bomb the village of Bến Tre, regardless of civilian casualties, in order to rid the area of Viet Cong. The phrase not only captured the accuracy of the state of the Vietnam War like never before, but it immediately took on a life of its own, becoming one of the most iconic phrases in American political discourse.⁴ The idea of actively destroying something for the express purpose of preserving it is, indeed, a contradiction that no matter how one justifies it, that circle simply cannot be squared. And yet, as Beauchamp demonstrates, this very concept best illustrates the current destruction of democracies around the world. It starts, however, in the apparent bastion of modern democracy: the United States of America. 

There are two fundamental reasons why the United States is commonly considered to have claim over the origin of modern democracy. Since its official ratification in 1789, it is the oldest continuous constitutional democracy in the world. In addition, it is the very principles of American liberal democracy that—since the end of the Second World War—have swept the globe, reaching a near wholesale level after the fall of the Soviet Union. Following the utter failure of fascism and soviet communism as political structures, democracy (despite its shortcomings) proved to be the only way forward. And it often came sandwiched between a Coca Cola and Hershey’s bar. The number of democratic nations rose from 8% to 52% between 1945 and 2005 (p. 22). As an American myself, I can attest to Beauchamp’s claims that the United States identifies as the living embodiment of democracy. From our perceived exceptionalist viewpoint, America and democracy are, therefore, one and the same… which is all the more problematic when one reminds us of our original sin: chattel slavery. But it is in the nation’s violent struggle to abandon such undemocratic practices that Beauchamp argues the reactionary spirit first presented itself. It then went dormant for a hundred years as Jim Crow policies appeased the dominant white majority, only to reappear during the 1960s civil rights movement. And then, according to Beauchamp, it returned once more in the form of the Tea Party movement, following the 2008 election of Barack Obama. It is within these very struggles for progress against social inequality, that liberalism and authoritarianism make up the Janus-faced composition of American democracy… the same American democracy that has since been exported throughout the world. This brings us to contemporary Hungary, Israel and India. I will touch briefly on Israel and India before giving dedicated attention to the chapter on Hungary. 

Considered within the context of the reactionary spirit, Beauchamp notes the striking similarities between Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu and India under Narendra Modi. Both nations established modern liberal democracies in the immediate wake of the Second World War yet have implicitly upheld foundational divisions between the dominant ethnocultural group (Jewish and Hindu) and their respective Muslim minorities (p. 173). The ultra-Orthodox—and as of late, far-right—groups in Israel have consistently pushed for unequal rights based on religious ethnicity. Outright racism notwithstanding, this also includes such relatively banal disparate privileges as exemption from mandatory military service. But it was Netanyahu himself who welcomed voices of the reactionary spirit into the mainstream political discourse for the cynical purposes of not only remaining in power, but quite likely to stay out of prison. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi often proclaims India to be the “Mother of Democracy,” despite being a long-time follower of Hindutva, a radical Hindu-nationalist ideology (p. 167). In fact, a primary tenet of the movement includes the wholesale rejection of India’s constitutional commitments to secularism. Not unlike Netanyahu, Modi went about normalizing such far-right ideals, stoking aggression among the majority and gaining enough political support to overturn liberal policies that protected India’s minority groups. This is indeed troubling, but not necessarily why Beauchamp is deeply concerned for India. With a population approaching 1.5 billion, it is the world’s most populous country, making it also the world’s largest democracy. If the United States and India both devolve into all-out authoritarian states, it could spell an “extinction-level threat to democracy” around the world (p. 184). While neither Israel nor India have yet breached the threshold of pure authoritarianism, they are both playing a dangerous game by actively promoting the reactionary spirit, especially considering that it can be neither domesticated nor is it satisfied with half-measures (p. 162-3).  

Hungary, according to Beauchamp, is the only case study of the four to “fully cross the authoritarian threshold” (p. 29). Since the 2015 refugee crisis, which brought swaths of non-white/non-Christian people into Europe, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has become the de-facto leader of anti-immigration policy and “anti-woke” rhetoric both in the European Union and outside of it. Hungary has been so successful in its anti-liberal messaging, in fact, that the American right-wing continuously praises the nation of less than 10 million people as a model to emulate. As Beauchamp makes plain, “Ironically, Hungary is now exporting America’s own traditional authoritarian style back to the United States” (p. 106). The origin story of Viktor Orbán, the politician, dates back to the tumultuous fall of Soviet Communism. Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian strongman, however, began in 2010 when his Fidesz party used its newly and democratically acquired supermajority vote in parliament to literally rewrite the constitution. In the fifteen years that followed, Beauchamp traces the Orbán regime’s tightening grip over the election process (through extreme gerrymandering and voting regulations), the judiciary (through forced retirements and establishment of loyal government intermediaries), and the media landscape (through buying out or starving independent news agencies). By 2017, roughly 90% of all domestic media was controlled by the government or its allied affiliates (p. 112). All the while, the government has simultaneously worked to financially enrich Orbán’s inner circle. With no realistic possibility of defeat at the polls (as of 2025, Fidesz has maintained its parliamentary supermajority for four straight terms) Orbán soon began actively attacking liberalism, in the name of democracy… “destroying the town to save it.” In 2014, he gave his now infamous “illiberal state” speech, where he mused over a complete reconfiguration of the relationship between the state and the people. Four years later, he declared victory. In 2018, having just been sworn in as prime minister for the third consecutive time, Orbán proclaimed, “Liberal democracy is no longer able to protect people’s dignity, provide freedom, guarantee physical security or maintain Christian culture… Our response… has been to replace the shipwreck of liberal democracy” (p. 115).

According to Beauchamp, Hungary’s reactionary spirit was not an organic revolt among the majority; there was no groundswell of public fear and violent anger over the thought of being displaced by foreigners. Indeed, it became all of those things, but it was originally manufactured from the top down. Case-in-point: the anti-Soros campaign and the ultimate removal of both the Open Society Foundation and Central European University from the country—an undertaking that the author characterizes as a “Trojan horse” to further extend the party’s control over Hungarian society (p. 121). And this kind of deliberate deception—an apparent existential crisis of national sovereignty, expressed within the parameters of democratic freedom yet wholly anti-liberal—as a flagrant ploy to maintain and even increase power is what Hungary has contributed to the toolbox of the would-be authoritarian. These very tools have been exported back to the United States and employed in nearly identical fashion under Donald Trump.

2024 proved to be a disappointingly consequential year for global democracy. While the outcomes were unknown before this book was published, both Donald Trump and Narendra Modi have since secured their election victories (albeit the latter was forced to build a coalition government). The optimistic concluding chapters on “how reactionaries lose” therefore read quite bleak while the obligatory encouragement to get involved comes across as uninspired. Maybe that’s just a reflection of the unfolding developments in the last several months. But that does not make this book obsolete—quite the opposite, in fact. Realizing that the reactionary spirit has been coopted to support and strengthen a transnational network of (would-be) authoritarians is crucial to understanding how to overcome their ultimate intentions. 

The underlying paradox that runs through all four case-study nations is that each leader audaciously professes to be defending democracy, and that liberalism is the true enemy. But what is democracy without individual rights, the rule of law, popular sovereignty, and free market capitalism? These are all concepts of liberal thinkers. The authoritarian sleight-of-hand therefore focuses on the exercise of elections (being the primary attribute of a democratic state) while quietly exorcising away everything else. And this is where Beauchamp’s study really reveals its sincere value. It acknowledges that without liberalism, democracy is largely just the apparatus; America—the modern world’s archetypal democracy—failed to meet its own progressive principles from its inception. And despite its incremental movement toward true equality, it still struggles to provide on the promises made in the constitution. As much of the world began embracing plurality and self-determination, following the collapse of imperialism and totalitarianism, democracy was there to fill the void. But it carried a malignant stow-away in the reactionary spirit. Liberalism, it turns out is the antidote to authoritarianism and without it, there is no true democracy.