"The Reactionary Spirit:" Interview with Zack Beauchamp of Vox

Yesterday I interviewed Zack Beauchamp about his recent book, The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, in an intimate event organized by Edmund Zagorin at Hotel Biron in San Francisco.

The audio recording of our interview can be heard above. The recording is unedited and somewhat messy. Most interview recordings get edited to remove all the “ums” and minor accidents of speech, but I did not edit this one :) you’re hearing pretty much what our audience at the event heard!

Note: I have made the entire recording free to listen for now, although the text of the post below is partially paywalled. I might change this in the future. But today, on publication day, the recording is free to listen, while the text transcript is half free to read.

One of my goals was to have a philosophical and anthropological discussion, without going far into the nitty-gritty. So, while I occasionally got the sense that Zack and I were talking past each other, or that we could have discussed some nuances more, I wanted to get through all the questions and give us a chance for audience interaction, so I didn’t linger on those moments. (For example, we probably could have been more detailed and nuanced around “defund the police,” or perhaps we could have explored more of the factual debates between Red and Blue, what’s false and what’s true.) I can imagine that some people will listen to this and find that frustrating, so I just wanted to give you all a heads up before you dive in.

Below is a lightly edited transcript.

Thank you so much to Zack for chatting, and to Edmund for recruiting both of us and making this happen!

LYDIA LAURENSON: This is Lydia Laurenson. I'm here at the Hotel Biron in San Francisco with Zack Beauchamp.

ZACK BEAUCHAMP: It's pronounced “Beecham,” actually.

LYDIA: What?

ZACK: Yeah, I gotcha. It's pronounced “Beecham.”

LYDIA: Wait, no.

ZACK: I'm serious, yeah. It's an old English name, though the French had it first, obviously. But the English, through their weird mangling of the French language, changed it to “Beecham.”

LYDIA: Oh my God. I'm already — okay, so, prior to this, I was warned —

Edmund Zagorin, who organized this event, warned me that Zack is, like, a world champion debater. World champion! And I was like, how hard can it be? We're going to have, like, a civilized conversation. But already, already, I have made a mistake in the pronunciation of the name.

I'm so sorry.

ZACK: Yes, the entire conversation, I'm just going to try to trap you. That's what's going on here.

EDMUND ZAGORIN (from the audience): It’s pronounced Edmund Zagorin.

ZACK: I wasn’t going to say it…

LYDIA: Noooo! Oh no! I'm so sorry. Okay, is the venue, at least, Hotel Byron, that's how I pronounce the venue, right? Like Byron?

EDMUND: Biron (French accent).

LYDIA: Well, it's a very attractive venue. It has delicious wine. Anyway. We are going to start.

We are here to talk about Zack's new book, The Reactionary Spirit. I will admit that, because I have a toddler, I have not read the entire thing. I've read parts of it and some interviews that I was able to sneak in in the middle of the night when awake, having been awoken by my toddler, who I love very dearly. (Although, to be fair to my toddler, often I have recently lain awake for hours in the middle of the night through no fault of his.¹) Anyway, Zack, perhaps you can tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us if you had, like, an emotional moment that led you to write this.

A lot of people have moments, like triggers or specific points, where they feel as though their their morality is affected or crossed — something specific happens that makes them really care about this topic, on one side or the other. So I'm curious if you had something like that.

ZACK: I've been a journalist since 2011 — which still feels recent to me — but I'm now realizing is almost a decade and a half ago. So it's been a while, and I spent most of that time, probably about the past 10 years, writing about comparative democratic decline as my chief subject, though I read about a lot of other things. Obviously, that was galvanized in large part by the summer and the events of 2015-2016, right, which is to say the twin shocks of Donald Trump and Brexit, right? And that, I think, reconfigured a lot of people's feelings and vision about what's possible, right? What our world could look like, and where democracy could go in the future. I don't know if there's a precise moment where I was like, I want to turn what I'm thinking about into a book. I don't know if there's a moment that crystallized it, but there was, I think, to me, always a sense that the way that we are talking about democratic decline is missing the right vocabulary. There was a lack of not just, literally, the words, but a conceptual vocabulary, to be able to describe the process that was happening.

People had this sense that if there is a large scale macro society event happening, happening across the world — not just in the US — it had to be something related to a change in physical, material reality, right? The idea that it’s — I don't know — globalization or neoliberalism, or that people are angry about factory closures or something like that, like, that the world was being reduced to changes in the economic structure, and that struck me as wrong. It struck me as misreading, profoundly, the contours of modern politics and the way in which people engage with political life. It struck me, honestly, as an outdated, 20th and even maybe 19th Century way of thinking about politics. So to understand what was happening in the world right now, I needed to think about how we develop a vocabulary for talking about structural ideological change.

This is really the main focus of the book: That people's ideas, values, and norms have shifted in a way that has triggered fundamental political confrontation and destabilized political systems around the world. The need to develop a new conceptual language is what drove me to write the book.

LYDIA: There's a word that people often use on the Internet that I think originated in the rationalist community, but it's more broad than that. The word is steelman. Typically, what this word is taken to mean is someone being able to give the best representation of their opponent's argument. And so I guess one thing I'm really interested in — especially now that I know that you are a champion debater — is whether you can give a steelman of this phenomenon that you describe as the reactionary spirit? I don't know if that question is too confronting, but I'm genuinely curious.

ZACK: I love this question, actually, because it sometimes it feels difficult to talk about what I'm describing using language other than pejorative language. Because the reactionary spirit, as I define it in the book, is this sense that people believe that democracy has come into conflict with their basic social values, right? Specifically conservative social values. It’s the sense that there are people who believe there are elements of the current social and economic order that are just and good, and the Democratic political change is unsettling those elements of the social order. And so when I speak to a mostly left-leaning audience, that comes across as immediately saying these people are racists. They're bigoted. And I do think that's part of it, or it's one way to talk about it, but that's not how they experience it.

I went to great lengths in the book to try to figure out, or think through, how I represent it in their language, using more neutral terms than I might use, or than someone else on the left might use. The way that I think it feels to a lot of people who have taken up this — what I think of as an anti-democratic position — is that they believe that their way of life is in jeopardy. That what the political left wants is to change a society that they love into something that is fundamentally unrecognizable from what it used to be. And that, not only is that the case, but they are doing so through political means that they see as underhanded, right, or potentially even — in their own language — undemocratic, right?

One of the major themes of the book is that anti-democratic politics today does not describe itself as such, right? It says: We are the true democrats, and these liberals who are calling us anti-democratic are actually the ones trying to impose their values on a fundamentally conservative society, a society that is opposed to the kinds of changes that liberals want. I think that many people believe that.

LYDIA: Can you give an example?

ZACK: Sure. I think the “Stop the Steal” movement in 2020 is a really profound example. In that regard, I think there are many people who believe the 2020 election was stolen. I think anyone who's in politics knows that that's a lie, but I'm talking about somebody who maybe voted for Trump, and would say in a poll, as a majority of Republican voters would, that the election was stolen. I think most of them really believe that.

LYDIA: Can you give an example that isn't so widely discredited?

ZACK: Sure. So another example would be voters who support European far-right parties, some of which are anti democratic, some of whom are not. But let's take one that is clearly an anti-democratic faction, which is AFD in Germany. That party began life as a Euro-skeptic party, and has evolved over time to be an anti-immigration party. Their position is, in part, that the EU, through its rules and regulations, is forcing on Europeans — ordinary Europeans — a degree and a pace of migration and social change that is unacceptable and incompatible with the survival of traditional European society.

Now to me, this strikes me as profoundly dangerous, right? I think it’s a normatively awful way of thinking about the world. But when they say “this is being imposed on us by the European Union,” they're not entirely wrong, right? The EU does create a political structure in which national majorities have much less ability to control policy in their country than they would have otherwise. And so, to say that there are elements of the EU that are anti-democratic, or at least, that compromise the ability of majorities in one country to govern their own systems, including, as it regards immigration — I think that's just clearly true, and so the question is whether that's good or bad, or whether the EU democratic deficit should be reformed. This is something that's been a subject of legitimate debate for quite some time. I think it's on the European Union for creating a vacancy, an ability, for radical anti-democratic factions like AFD, to claim the mantle of democracy for themselves. It's not the only reason why that happens, but it is a real thing, right? And shouldn't be discounted as mere propaganda.

LYDIA: So, for me — well, I assume you are unfamiliar with my work, which is much less famous than yours, but I have spent a very large amount of time in the “neoreactionary” world, or NRx movement. And for me, one thing that I would pull out of what you just said is that a widespread strand in how NRx talks about itself is this idea that “we don't actually live in a democracy right now.” That is very, very widely believed. Or perhaps another way to describe this NRx perspective would be that “inasmuch as we live in a democracy, maybe it's a really dysfunctional one.” And I think there are so many examples of society actually being dysfunctional right now, that it's getting easier and easier for that point to be made.

A lot of people around here refer to these groups as Blue Tribe and Red Tribe, and I often do as well, primarily because it reinforces a sense of cultural boundaries, this idea of them being very different communities, which is definitely my experience. With these words, it feels more community-based and emotional, like, who is supporting you emotionally or in your lifestyle.

Anyway, if you go to something like the immigration argument, then one way that I would steelman the NRx version of the anti-immigration argument, would be to articulate it along the lines of: “If too many people come to a country who don't share the original values of that country, they will move that country in the direction of those values, and ironically, eventually, that might potentially be anti-democratic.” Accordingly, one argument that I see a lot in NRx-land or in the so-called “dissident right” on Twitter — there will often be examples of women being abused in other cultures. The question is implicitly posed: Do we think this is okay, and do we want to welcome this cultural behavior into our country, assuming it's cultural behavior?

So, that’s one way that I can myself steelman it: It’s this idea that, if we don't actually live in a functional democracy right now, then you can imagine someone responding to that by being like, well, then the correct response is a coup or a rebellion or a military takeover. I think the current regime complicates this argument, obviously, but that's an argument that I've heard a lot. I wonder if you have any further comments on that?

ZACK: Yeah. It's a potent argument if the premise were true, and the important thing is, you just don't grant the premise. It's false. It is the case that, whatever the flaws of the democratic model in the United States or in Europe or in Canada or any other advanced democracy — Japan, South Korea, Australia, whatever — those countries are democracies. And by “democracy,” I want to be specific about what I mean. I mean a country in which elections are held under free and fair conditions, in which multiple different factions can compete and win power, and that when you lose an election, power alternates fairly between the majorities, and I think maybe more fundamentally, that power can alternate. That is to say: The majority, the incumbent party, can lose an election. That's the really basic test that political scientists use for assessing whether a country is a democracy.

It's minimal. It's a basic condition. It's not good enough, but it is a useful bright line between probably-a-democracy and not-a-democracy. And all of these countries that people complain about as being non-democratic — they all have power alternation. They all have robust alternative media ecosystems. They all have civil society that allows people to go around making those arguments.

Like, I've been to non-democratic countries. I've seen what life is like there. Most of the time, you don't notice that much of a difference, in the sense that you can eat at restaurants, you can go to raves, you can do whatever it is that you like to do. The problem is that, the second you try to enter politics and enter political life, you encounter a series of roadblocks. In a country like China, you go to jail if you violate certain rules. In a country like Hungary, the tax agency comes and they harass you endlessly until it's financially no longer feasible for you to participate in political activity. That doesn't happen in the same systematic way in countries like the United States, right? And so to call the U.S. non-democratic because there are instances of power being wielded without explicit democratic authorization — which is, by the way, inevitable in any political system — to say that that's not democratic at all is to engage in conceptual trickery to justify their own anti-democratic politics, right?

So the vital thing to do with that argument is to say the premise is not only false, but kind of ridiculous, right? It's just so obviously untrue, based on any reasonably neutral marker of how we assess and understand democracy, that we can't go forward with the argument unless the other person will acknowledge honestly that they are saying that they don't like liberal democracy in the way it's construed, and they want an alternative political system. I would say to that person: If that's your view, great, let's debate that. I'll have that argument, and I'm very confident that I'll win. But if you're lying about it, then the conversation is not happening under fair and reasonable — and maybe more fundamentally, respectful — terms, right? If you are saying that, you're dissembling, and you're not an interlocutor. You're just some guy who wants to try to make a polemical point.

LYDIA: So a lot of what I've studied has been polarization, especially in the media. I'm sure you've also familiarized yourself with this topic. There's some stuff about it in your book. Specifically, I thought one of the concepts that was really interesting is “transformative repolarization.” Would you be willing to summarize that real quick?

ZACK: Sure. This is a notion that I got from some political scientists, one of them Jennifer McCoy, at Georgia State, who does really interesting work in this area. The idea is that in a society where there are there are significant amounts of polarization, which is to say division of people into competing camps that see themselves as rivals rather than political competitors — this is what she calls pernicious polarization. When we say polarization, that this bad thing we call “polarization” is happening, I think we're talking about pernicious polarization, not just political disagreement or people clearly sorting themselves into two parties. Those two things are different things. Her solution to pernicious polarization is to figure out ways to tap into people's identities and their ways of seeing the world and experiencing it, such that political coalitions can be repolarized along different lines that highlight different issue areas.

Polarization is fundamentally a product of social cleavages, of people in particular groups disagreeing with each other profoundly, and mapping that onto their political engagement. That's why it can be quite dangerous, right? Because people then get in these us-or-them camps where those disagreements turn into huge fights about the existential state of the country. But what Jennifer and her co-authors propose is finding ways to tap into elements of people's identity that aren't being well-represented by the current division of political parties and political factions, and then using that to try and create new contours of political conflict that no longer threaten democratic politics.

So the idea that I have for it in my book is, basically calling bullshit on the people who say that they are standing for democracy, when, in fact, their politics are truly and definitively anti-democratic. Because I think that an essential way anti-democratic parties mainstream themselves is by wrapping themselves in the banner, in the language of democracy. The way to transformatively repolarize a system is to be able to say, no, they're not.

Democracy is a thing that most people in a democratic society care about. So you can say that the idea of there being equal political cooperation and there being free and fair elections is under attack, right, and really demonstrate that in a persuasive way. It's doable. It has happened in certain cases. I go through a few of them in my book, and I give examples of that strategy failing too.

Repolarization is not just about the way that politicians talk. It's about rebuilding social coalitions, organizations, the entire discursive vocabulary that we use to discuss political issues. That's a whole-of-society thing. And it takes a lot of work. It takes political entrepreneurship. I don't have a roadmap for how to do it, but I certainly think talking more about democracy and highlighting shared commitments to a free political system is an important start.

LYDIA: This reminds me of a finding from polarization that I think is really interesting, which is being able to predict someone's ideological positions from their other positions. That ability goes up in a highly polarized society.

I will give a concrete example, because this can be a little bit of a tricky concept. In a society that's less polarized, you won't necessarily be able to predict what someone thinks about X based on what they think about Y. But in ours, which is extremely polarized, you can. So it's like, if you know someone's position on abortion, you probably know their position on climate change, right? This is actually a signifier of polarization. Scholars use that to talk about how polarized a culture is. That was part of why I thought this concept of transformative repolarization was really interesting.

The word transformation also comes up in the peacebuilding field quite a bit — just this idea that in order to manage a conflict once it gets past a certain type of polarization, or a certain line in the sand, there is nothing to be done but “transformation.” There's something out there that you can feel, a sense that things can be different, but it's almost a mystical process, like, society will have to change so deeply that it becomes a different thing.

That's something that I've thought about a lot, especially in the last few years, and especially with all my like interactions with NRx. I was very consistently in this position of people reading me as being on one side or the other, or as trying to promote one side or the other. That was happening to me basically all the time for years when, more fundamentally, my interest was much more like trying to refactor the whole thing from the ground up. Like, what are we actually talking about? What are we actually doing here? What really matters? I don't know if I was very successful, but at least I feel like I have some vocabulary for those things.

One way I sometimes talk about this is: For me, a lot of my core issues fit under something along the lines of, God, family and country. I'm really interested in spirituality; I really care about the family, and women and children; and I really care about my country, the United States. All of those interests are, like, Red Tribe interests in this weird coding that we have now. But that seems very strange somehow. It's not quite right, especially if I look at stuff like women's rights, then I think that breaks down for me a little bit. So I'm really interested in this notion, and I kind of think it's where the conversation has to go. But it's a little bit hard to figure out how to go there.

ZACK: I want to pick up on that last part of what you said, which is country, right? Because you describe that as being Red-coded, and I think historically, that's true, right? Nationalism is in the United States, at least in the 21st Century, is like, a right-wing phenomenon. But I wonder how long that will work. I wonder, because there really is a deep kind of patriotism on the American left. Right?