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The Reactionary Spirit

How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World

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By Zack Beauchamp

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On Sale
Jul 16, 2024
Page Count
272 pages
Publisher
PublicAffairs
ISBN-13
9781541704411

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.

Genre:

  • “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

Formats and Prices

Price

$30.00

Price

$39.00 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Hardcover $30.00 $39.00 CAD
  2. ebook $18.99 $24.99 CAD
  3. Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $24.99

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Zack Beauchamp

About the Author

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, right-wing populism, and the world of ideas. He has received funding awards from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to report on democratic decline in Israel and Hungary in the field, and was the longtime host of Worldly, Vox’s weekly podcast on foreign policy and international affairs. He has appeared on a wide range of television and radio networks, including MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, BBC, CBC, ABC (Australia), and Al Jazeera.
 
Before coming to Vox, he edited TP Ideas, a section of ThinkProgress devoted to the ideas shaping our political world. He has an MSc from the London School of Economics in International Relations and grew up in Washington, DC, where he currently lives with his wife, two children, and (rescue) dogs.

Learn more about this author