In France , a reconstructed neofascist, Marine Le Pen, has just won a place in the final round of the presidential election.
In the Netherlands , the anti-immigrant right became the second-most-popular vote-getter — a new high-water mark for illiberalism in that once famously liberal country. Japan is led by a government attempting to rehabilitate its imperial, nationalist past. Poland is now run by an illiberal Catholic government that is dismembering key liberal institutions.
Turkey has morphed from a resolutely secular state to one run by an Islamic strongman, whose powers were just ominously increased by a referendum. Israel has shifted from secular socialism to a raw ethno-nationalism. We are living in an era of populism and demagoguery. But what we are also seeing, it seems to me, is the manifest return of a distinctive political and intellectual tendency with deep roots: reactionism.
Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt.
If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic. If conservatives value elites, reactionaries seethe with contempt for them. If conservatives believe in institutions, reactionaries want to blow them up. If conservatives tend to resist too radical a change, reactionaries want a revolution. It is a reactionary party that is now at the peak of its political power.
The reactionary impulse is, of course, not new in human history. Whenever human life has changed sharply and suddenly over the eons, reactionism has surfaced. It appeared in early modernity with the ferocity of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in response to the emergence of Protestantism. Its archetypal moment came in the wake of the French Revolution, as monarchists and Catholics surveyed the damage and tried to resurrect the past.
Sometimes it swings back with unusual speed and power. You can almost feel the g-force today. But their current reaction is proportional to the bewildering pace of change in the world today. They are responding, at some deep, visceral level, to the sense that they are no longer in control of their own lives. They see the relentless tides of globalization, free trade, multiculturalism, and mass immigration eroding their sense of national identity.
They believe that the profound shifts in the global economy reward highly educated, multicultural enclaves and punish more racially and culturally homogeneous working-class populations. And they rebel against the entrenched power of elites who, in their view, reflexively sustain all of the above.
I know why many want to dismiss all of this as mere hate, as some of it certainly is. I also recognize that engaging with the ideas of this movement is a tricky exercise in our current political climate. I find myself repelled by many of their themes — and yet, at the same time, drawn in by their unmistakable relevance.
He grew up in West Virginia, with a schoolteacher mom and a dad who owned a grocery store. They were, he told me, culturally conservative and politically mixed.
He is now a professor at Claremont McKenna, where he focuses on the roots of a specifically American conservatism, exemplified by his reading of the Founding Fathers. He smiled a little defensively. It was an act of desperation, he explained. In classic reactionary fashion, he believes that we are living through a crisis of American democracy. The Claremont consensus to put a name on this strain of thought holds that beneath the veneer of constitutional democracy, we are actually governed by a soft despotism of permanent experts, bureaucrats, pundits, and academics who ignore the majority of the American people.
This elite has encouraged a divisive social transformation of the country, has led us into disastrous wars, and has created a deepening economic crisis for the middle class. His response was to go back to the distant past — to the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Maimonides, among others — to see where the West went wrong, and how we could avoid the horrific crimes of the 20th century in the future.
One answer was America, where Strauss eventually found his home at the University of Chicago. Some of his disciples — in particular, the late professor Harry Jaffa — saw the American Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of the self-evident truth of the equality of human beings, as a civilizational high point in human self-understanding and political achievement.
They believed it revived the ancient Greek and Roman conception of natural law. Yes, they saw the paradox of a testament to human freedom having been built on its opposite — slavery — but once the post—Civil War constitutional amendments were ratified, they believed that the American constitutional order was effectively set forever, and that the limited government that existed in the lateth and earlyth centuries required no fundamental change.
Jaffa made an exception for the Civil Rights Act of , which he believed was the only way to enforce the post—Civil War amendments against southern resistance. The expanded government of the last century, begun in earnest by Woodrow Wilson, was, therefore, an unconstitutional and anti-democratic power grab by educated elites. The party of McKinley and Coolidge had, after all, been one that favored tariffs.
I recently met him for dinner near the White House. Once a conventional Republican, an aide to George W. Bush, and an advocate of the Iraq War, Anton decisively broke ranks in and came out as a proud reactionary. You may die anyway. It is a high instance of Straussian thought. Jaffa was not just a political philosopher.
At the Republican National Convention in , Jaffa witnessed bitter platform debates between Goldwaterites and moderate Republicans. The moderates, having lost the brutal nomination fight, were now trying to keep the Party closer to the center. He died last year. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
But Jaffa stood by them and the speech until the end of his life. This is not far-fetched. The statesman, facing a dire threat, has two choices: To embrace extremism is to acknowledge the magnitude of the danger in absolute terms.
To embrace moderation implies weak commitment and potential compromise with the enemy. Strauss had carefully distinguished reason from revelation.
Wilson is an irresistible target because he was both theorist and President, which makes the lines of cause and effect especially legible.
It also allows intellectuals to believe that their ideas—or other, wrong ideas—really do have consequences. But the historical record is muddier. It seems reasonable to say that neoconservative ideas influenced decision-making in the Bush White House, especially after September 11, , when the President and policymakers were looking for answers.
This gets thrown in the mix with men's rights activism , dot-com era cybertopianism even as far as " transhumanism " , and standard-issue Internet libertarianism. Other movements that might be considered reactionary are Dominionism , which seeks to impose a Christian theocracy on the United States , and often seeks to sell itself as a return to the way things used to and ought to be. Fascist movements are often labelled "reactionary", with some justification: Italian Fascism sought alliances with the Roman church, and attempted to portray itself as seeking to revive the imperial glory of ancient Rome.
It's important to note here the difference between conservative and reactionary positions. If someone opposes gay marriage in a state where it isn't legal yet they would still qualify as a social conservative since they are "upholding" the existing order, even if it is with poor reasoning.
On the other hand a reactionary seeks to repeal marriage rights in a state where it's already legal, effectively rolling back rights that were created. However it's been argued that most hardcore social conservatives are only marginally different reactionaries since they usually still desire to return to an older time but simply believe the best way to do this is to oppose liberal reforms in the moment.
The laughable spectacle of Mussolini trying to fill Caesar's sandals underlines the large amount of pseudohistory and shared fantasy present in the typical reactionary's vision of an idealized past. Movements like Dominionism and Fascism are in fact quite ordinary sorts of social radicalism , and the past they seek to restore turns out to have never existed anywhere. The Nazi version attempted to portray itself as restoring some kind of Volkisch Aryan utopia that turned to frank pseudoscience in an attempt to conjure itself an imaginary glorious past.
The basic problem with most forms of reactionary belief is that, with distance, past evils fade from view, leaving only the glorious landmarks that were built alongside them. Time unfortunately appears to be unidirectional, and the past simply cannot be restored in the present. Nominations and campaigning for the RationalWiki Moderator Election is underway and will end on November Reactionary conservative candidates did alarmingly well in recent elections for the European Parliament.
So Rove—I will give him this much—knows the workings of the fearful, reactionary mind. It was one of the conservative sheets, comic-less, reactionary Republican to the core.
This was effected, and Louis Philippe was balked of his desire to interfere in Portugal to promote a reactionary policy. Her husband expressed himself forcibly on a public occasion against some reactionary measures of the government.
Into this surcharged atmosphere came Metternich with his exaggerated statements about the great reactionary party in France.
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