Democracy’s Demons
REVIEW ESSAY
The Reactionary Spirit:
How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World
by Zack Beauchamp
PublicAffairs, 2024, 272 pages
Hayek’s Bastards:
Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
by Quinn Slobodian
Zone Books, 2025, 272 pages
Following her defeat in the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton published a book titled What Happened. While that tome is not considered a classic work of political analysis, its implied titular question animates a good deal of writing about politics these days, including two books released over the past year: Zack Beauchamp’s The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World and Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right.
Both books were written prior to Donald Trump’s reelection last year, but both are products of the Trump era in a larger sense. They are attempts to grapple with the significance of the political energies of which his initial victory was both cause and effect. And each is in different ways trying to articulate a conceptual vocabulary to describe the associated movements for which terms like “conservative” and “right-wing” seem inexact or insufficient.
Neither insists on that bugbear “fascism,” which has been profitably leveraged by other public intellectuals, and such restraint merits praise. Nonetheless, neither is entirely successful in their attempts, for the same political changes they seek to understand have a way of resisting the categories imposed on them.
Democracy and Reaction
Zack Beauchamp is a longstanding senior correspondent at Vox, and this book, his first, reproduces some of that publication’s accessibility but also its often cursory treatment of complex topics. His basic thesis is that the “reactionary spirit” is an impulse to protect or reestablish hierarchies of wealth and status within democratic societies, and this ultimately leads such societies to become antidemocratic altogether. It thus represents a specific kind of threat to democracy that is not reducible to right-wing authoritarianism as such.
This is not just a theoretical claim: Beauchamp argues that ours is an especially fraught time for democracy, which until recently appeared triumphant. He purports to demonstrate the global momentum of the reactionary spirit by focusing on four cases: the United States, Hungary, Israel, and India (though he also ends up discussing political trends on the broader European scene at some length). There is a surface plausibility to his choice of case studies that becomes increasingly tenuous within the discussions themselves, particularly as he seeks to prove that reactionary tendencies around the world today are not local products but come stamped with the label “Made in America.”
Beauchamp begins with a survey of what he terms the reactionary tradition (though this frequently blurs into authoritarianism, with which it overlaps) in the United States, from John C. Calhoun’s defense of slavery to Republican opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency. From there, he zooms out to reveal the hegemonic American influence on broader reactionary developments around the world, especially in the once-secure liberal strongholds of the European Union, where anti-immigration parties like Rassemblement National (RN) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have made unexpected electoral gains over the years.
Beauchamp then proceeds to examine those countries where he views democracy to be under most acute strain: Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu, and India under Narendra Modi. Of these, he claims Hungary is the only one in which the reactionary spirit has effectively triumphed over democracy. There is some obvious selection bias at work throughout, and it’s difficult to gauge the global health of democracy by focusing on these troubled cases. But even if one concedes that these are in fact countries of concern, Beauchamp is frequently compelled to abandon his specific thesis about the reactionary spirit and retreat to more generic claims of authoritarianism and state capture.
The rise of Hungary’s Fidesz party, for example, may be seen as a “reaction” to the European Union’s lax border policies, or George Soros’s influential transnational network of NGOs, or just the broader tendencies of progressive liberalism in the twentieth-first century. But it is still a far cry from the political goals of the southern plantocracy, of which Beauchamp makes so much in defining the spirit of reaction. He also likely overstates the significance of this middling Central European power for the fate of world politics—not unlike an inverse Rod Dreher.
Israel, meanwhile, is a complex case, and its highly idiosyncratic parliamentary system has contributed heavily to Netanyahu’s unprecedented prime ministerial reign. Yet here, too, the discussion dissolves into a broader consideration of the state of Israeli democracy. In the course of this, he conflates several related but distinct tensions in Israeli politics: the management of the Palestinian conflict (both before and after October 7), disputes between the prime minister and the security apparatus, the growing political power of religious Zionism, and the question of the judiciary. Any or all of this would warrant its own book, really, and this condensed treatment requires him to speed through complicated issues. For example, Netanyahu makes for an easy villain, but Beauchamp oversimplifies the problem of Israeli judicial reform by treating the Supreme Court as representing democratic interests against Netanyahu’s authoritarianism—not least because judicial review is not typically understood as a democratic process.
Even with India, whose recent political history might seem like a particularly clear instance of antidemocratic reaction, Beauchamp has relatively little to say about the preservation of hierarchical privileges. After all, the most obvious expression of social hierarchies on the subcontinent is, of course, the caste system. But neither Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party nor the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the paramilitary organization with which it is closely associated, has sought to uphold that system (Modi himself does not hail from one of the higher castes). Indeed, the divisions of varna and jati are obstacles to their political goals. Modi’s agenda may be illiberal, but it looks less like the preservation of hierarchy than an attempt to reestablish Indian nationalism on the basis of Hindutva.
In fact, most of the political dynamics Beauchamp observes seem to have more to do with nationalism than anything else. He frames these disputes as conflicts between democratic and reactionary forces. But this is begging the question. In a sense of course, one can view citizenship itself as a matter of inequality, a form of privilege that citizens enjoy over noncitizens. But democracy itself requires this boundary if it is to function at all (there’s a reason it’s sometimes called the democratic boundary problem).
Thus, one can see, as Beauchamp does, the rise of right-wing parties in Europe in reactionary terms (i.e., a reaction to the excessively broad or rapid extension of residency privileges to foreigners). But they have a prima facie claim to democratic representation as well, insofar as they represent the preferences of a majority of their citizens on this issue (as it increasingly appears that they do). In any case, such disputes look more like a matter of competing democratic claims rather than simply one of democratic versus antidemocratic ones—and appeals to democracy as such do not offer a clear way of adjudicating them.
Though Beauchamp is a journalist by vocation, and he periodically makes use of direct encounters for illustrative purposes, he primarily relies on contemporary social science to advance his book’s major claims throughout. And here he displays a common vice of his tribe: excessive deference to academic expertise. Malcolm Gladwell raised this to an art form.
I don’t mean to say that Beauchamp necessarily lacks the resources to evaluate the sturdiness of, for instance, Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way’s theory of competitive authoritarianism. But there is an ad hoc quality to this way of deploying sources. He neither builds his argument on them in a consistent way nor tries to demonstrate to a neutral reader that these sources warrant their trust. Beauchamp’s uncritical acceptance in such cases suggests that his own book is primarily intended for those who have also already accepted its main premises at the outset.
This problem intensifies as Beauchamp shifts from social science to political philosophy, in which various competing claims jostle for space: Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, John Rawls’s political liberalism. It’s a heady stew, but his specific theory of reactionism begins to get lost amid attempts to vindicate democracy and stare down authoritarianism.
All of this comes to a head in his conclusion, where Beauchamp really lays down his cards:
This is partly why democracy (and liberalism) works so well. Democracy doesn’t demand that people make politics the centerpiece of their life; it asks only that they make themselves heard if and when doing so matters to them. True meaning is found elsewhere, with democracy as an enabler—a guarantee that people will be respected, protected from being crushed, and given an equal chance to advocate for their interests. What people really want is private freedom and public voice. Liberal democracy provides both.
This is a very Rawlsian defense of democracy: democracy works insofar as reasonable citizens can advance their interests while refraining from imposing what Rawls calls “comprehensive doctrines” on others. I’m not sure, however, that this is an adequate description of the most developed liberal democracies over the past two decades. One might even argue that their governments have put forth fairly comprehensive doctrines on contested matters involving immigration, race and ethnicity, sex and gender, epidemiology, and more.
By framing the reactionary spirit as an attempt to push parochial or outdated ideas concerning the best way of life onto otherwise neutral liberal societies, Beauchamp allows his role of advocate to overtake that of analyst. Moreover, this modest definition conflicts with his contention at the outset of the book: that democracies by their nature are dynamic regimes that actively level established hierarchies and expand the domain of egalitarian practices, thus triggering right-wing reactions.
He contrasts this moderate vision of democratic order with that held by one of democracy’s greatest critics: Friedrich Nietzsche. But this too indicates some of the larger problems with Beauchamp’s thesis—and not just because one would ideally need more than four pages to dispense with Nietzsche’s critique. For while Nietzsche was undeniably critical of liberal democracy, to call him a reactionary in this specific sense is to miss much of what he was up to.
While Nietzsche is explicit about the ways in which certain past political societies were preferable to his contemporary one, he does not suggest that a “return” is either possible or desirable, and his anti-egalitarian philosophy hardly supports existing social hierarchies. For that matter, there is very little to suggest a line of influence from Nietzsche to contemporary populist leaders like Trump or Modi. Certainly, it would not have surprised Nietzsche, or any major critic of democracy of whom I am aware, that mass democracy would produce demagogic leaders. Indeed, this tendency is a recurring theme in such critiques. That Beauchamp disregards or is simply unaware of this indicates that he has fallen prey to a common belief that all bad things must perforce go together.
It’s true that Nietzsche and many others found something contemptible in the low materialism of modern liberal democracy, not to mention the absence of nobility in the citizens it produces. But I don’t see very much of this spirit in the electorates supporting MAGA or the AfD, except perhaps among its online fringes. Regardless of whether one finds their complaints persuasive, they do not stem from contempt for the private aims fostered by liberalism but rather at what they perceive as the obstacles it puts up to pursuing such aims themselves. Declining job opportunities, the arrival of uninvited (by them) immigrants at home, intrusive courts and bureaucracies imposing basically foreign norms on them, and so on.
The point is that, whether one finds these grievances credible or not, they represent an essentially democratic impulse: to level the field that they see as tilted against them by hostile elites. Beauchamp seems uncertain what to do with populism, which may be compatible with nostalgia for a remembered past but not with the reinstatement of old hierarchies. He is surely free to dislike these trends in political life today, and he recognizes how democratic rhetoric can conceal effectively antidemocratic goals. But it is not clear, and he too often asserts rather than argues, that they follow the logic of his own thesis.
The effect is to flatten otherwise diverse political phenomena across the world into a single overarching narrative of reaction. Beauchamp surveys the world and consistently finds its political tensions to be mere echoes of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Of course, seeing the world as America writ-large is a very American tradition—perhaps even more so than the reactionary spirit.
Capitalism and Reaction
Unlike Beauchamp, Quinn Slobodian is an academic and his book is on the whole a more concise and systematic treatment. His title is of course a double entendre: after all he could’ve titled it Hayek’s Children. “Bastards” implies illegitimacy of descent as well as something about the character of the heirs, and this pejorative tone pervades his narrative. The story he tells is an interesting one, and many of its highly colorful characters will probably be unknown to his readership. But in telling it, he is obliged to overstate their importance in the grand scheme of things, and to treat their specific motivations as more generally applicable than is likely the case.
Slobodian’s argument is that a seemingly unrelated coterie of “neoconfederates, ethnonationalists, and goldbugs” all emerged out of the same neoliberal milieu with significant consequences for right-wing politics today. At the Cold War’s end, it became apparent that, despite the demise of communism, we would continue to face calls for greater equality under new guises. In response, various neoliberals and libertarians—intellectual heirs of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and others—turned to nature “in matters of race, intelligence, territory, and money as a way to erect a bulwark against the encroaching demands of progressives.” As with Beauchamp’s reactionaries, their goal was to roll back social progress and reinstate older hierarchies. In this, they were compelled to turn against their intellectual progenitors, like Hayek, who emphasized social factors over natural ones, hence the book’s title.
Slobodian links these otherwise disparate strands by calling them (in what sounds a bit like one of Chairman Mao’s coinages) the “three hards”: hard borders, hardwired differences, and hard currency. Slobodian calls this amalgam the “new fusionism,” after the old fusionism of free markets joined with social conservatism plus anti-communism. While the old fusionism was held together by shared fears of the Soviet threat, the new fusionism is driven primarily by neoliberal anxieties about the future of capitalism after the Cold War’s end.
The term “neoliberal” and its cognates may warrant some explanation. Slobodian himself does not provide a definition, possibly because it is already a frequent term of analysis (and opprobrium) in his corner of academia. Nonetheless, this is unfortunate because it does not really have a single usage even within the pages of this book, which benefits from this ambiguity. Thus, “neoliberalism” can sometime refer to an ideological pro-market strain among latter-day Hayekians, as found in such organizations as the Mount Pelerin Society, or it can also refer more broadly to the prevailing global order that emerged out of the economic crises of the 1970s, and it sometimes simply functions as a stand-in for capitalism as such.
The understanding that most pervades the volume is something like an ideological devotion to capitalism at the expense of any commitment to democracy (or other value). Nonetheless, this “strong” definition sometimes blurs with more general pro-capitalist positions so as to make some of the ideas under discussion here appear more widespread than they might actually be, opening the way for a certain degree of “motte-and-baileyism” throughout the book. He is on relatively defensible ground in telling a story of how certain neoliberal figures came to adopt surprising or counterintuitive positions on topics like immigration or hard commodities. His thesis becomes less secure, however, the more he tries to tie this story to larger political developments or pro-market sentiments.
This divide becomes apparent early on as Slobodian takes up the hot-button topic of the biological basis for differences in intelligence and aptitude between individuals, sexes, and—most controversially—racial or other population groups. Slobodian does not delve into the conclusions or methods of this research, for this is not his aim: “The Bell Curve is usually engaged on the terrain of science; I engage it on the terrain of capitalism.” By this, he means to trace the funding for figures like Charles Murray or Richard Lynn, as well as that of associated studies, but also to show that this funding represented a steady interest on the part of free marketeers to use the findings to justify the elimination of welfarism.
This may be true in some broad sense (donors generally give money to projects they find ideologically congenial), but the specifics get muddled. By the end of these chapters, it is never revealed just how the publication of these findings really serves the interest of capital, particularly given how much notoriety attaches to these questions. At a minimum, one might reflect on the fact that all of the major capitalist institutions, from banks to large corporations to media organs to universities, have quite publicly taken positions concerning diversity and equality that are diametrically opposed to those findings.
Occam’s razor would suggest that capital, or those most concerned with its accumulation, are simply indifferent (if not outright hostile) to inegalitarian ideas. Titans of industry and finance may in fact be inegalitarian in a de facto sense, but that hardly requires elaborate public justifications. Those who have publicized these ideas did so for largely independent reasons, whatever economic beliefs they may hold. Hence the reason why they are largely marginal figures. At the end of the day, Jamie Dimon matters a lot more for the functioning of global markets than, say, Richard Lynn.
Slobodian concludes his chapter on “race realists” with the claim, “As should be clear by now, behind the abstract talk of liberties and freedoms in much of twenty-first century neoliberal and libertarian discourse lies a much grubbier story of hunting and gathering, primordial beginnings, and adamantine differences.” This is a somewhat less than clear assertion. And, importantly, claims like this seem to invert his ostensible thesis, which is that misplaced or excessive concerns about economic liberty have led to increasingly outré ideas. But he ends up arguing that these outré beliefs were the real story to begin with, with neoliberal economic ideas serving as a cover. Yet if this is true, then it also confuses the book’s purpose. Moreover, it is still uncertain whether he wants to make this claim for neoliberal thinkers generally, or just the rather fringe individuals. The fact that quite a number of those mentioned are unlikely to be household names suggests the latter.
His chapter on borders and immigration faces a similar problem. He describes at some length the ideological trajectory of Peter Brimelow, a former editor at Forbes who went on to found the anti-immigration website vdare. In the process, he attempts to show how such a figure could transition from a commitment to capitalism to one of nativism on the basis that both are in some sense expressible in economic terms: “The alleged open borders advocate and the restrictionist firebrand both measured people by the yardstick of economics,” writes Slobodian. But the fact that “capitalism” can account for positions favoring both open and restrictive borders indicates the way that Slobodian’s thesis is overdetermined. And in any case, “economistic” ways of thinking (which are often more metaphorical than literal) are so ubiquitous these days that they do not require any particular ideological commitment.
Quoting Steve Bannon, Slobodian writes, “The goal of the populists, he said, was not to maximize shareholder value but ‘maximize citizenship value.’ This sounded less like a rejection of neoliberalism than a deepening of the economic logic into the heart of collective identity.” Well, perhaps. But Slobodian is acting as though he is a stranger to figurative language. Bannon is using the image of shareholder value as a metaphor for citizenship, but his point is that we should prioritize national or civic interests over commercial ones. In any case, this is another indication of the procrustean nature of Slobodian’s thesis.
That procrustean approach is nowhere more apparent than in his insistence on linking anti-immigrant or nativist sentiment with free market capitalism. For there is no particular reason to associate border control with inequality as such. This was, in fact, Bernie Sanders’s response to Ezra Klein on this point, describing open-borders ideology as Koch thinking: maintaining strong wages relies on minimizing labor competition.
Slobodian attempts to square this circle by insisting that immigration restrictionism actually serves neoliberal interests: “People must remain fixed so that capital and goods can remain free.” But this is Slobodian’s gloss, and the causal link he asserts is not demonstrated. A more direct reading would simply be that these polemicists wish to control migratory flows across their borders without losing the material benefits of global markets—a fairly common preference these days. In other words, “people should remain fixed but capital and goods should remain free.”
There is a plausibly organic (if not deterministic) connection across concerns involving notions of race, ethnicity, immigration, human capital, and IQ, and as a result the three chapters that take these as their respective focus flow reasonably well from one to the next. But Slobodian, who has previously written and edited books on neoliberalism and globalization, is too inclined to graft this book’s themes onto his existing areas of interest.
The gold question, meanwhile, cuts in a different direction than the other themes of the book and has the feel of being shoe-horned in. All of the others are in some way bound up with the success of one’s political economy. For example, concerns about immigration and human capital are premised on the belief that unconstrained immigration will damage the quality of life in one’s country. But gold is a hedge against that failure. True, goldbugs have historically hoped to return their countries’ currencies to a gold standard, but barring that unlikely scenario, hoarding gold on an individual or institutional basis is a means of protection against the fluctuations (or outright decline) of fiat currencies. As he admits by the end of the relevant chapter, “Traveling with goldbugs on the Far Right, we are far from simple ‘blood and soil’ nationalism.” Indeed, we are.
And yet the subject of gold raises some of the same questions that bedevil the rest of Slobodian’s book. How important is the long-standing paleoconservative obsession with gold for the continuation of neoliberal capitalism? All of these are, from the standpoint of the actual operation of global capital markets, fringe figures. Peter Boehringer and Jörg Guido Hulsmann are, after all, figures of near total obscurity to most readers, whereas Warren Buffet, who is among the most famous investors on the planet, has referred to gold as a nonproductive asset.
Thus, any reasonable observer is again left wondering: how much significance does one accord to these figures or to their association with libertarianism? Indeed, it has long been one of the ironies of contemporary politics that, while capitalism itself has largely triumphed, many of its most ardent exponents, from Ayn Rand to Murray Rothbard, have tended to be quite marginal rather than mainstream figures, whose importance is nonetheless magnified by those who are ideologically hostile to capitalism anyway. (Probably the most popular Mises-booster these days is the relatively mainstream Tyler Cowen, who does not write on group differences, is generally pro-immigration, and has referred to gold as “just another cyclical asset.”)
Slobodian’s vagueness about how his story bears on more general political developments results in an essentially conspiratorial mode of thinking. After all, the accretion of otherwise disconnected details is only persuasive if one is already inclined to see them as a meaningful part of a larger narrative.
Thus, former Czech president Vaclav Klaus’s growing concerns about immigration might be attributed to a burgeoning neoliberal/Alt-Right agenda, but it might also have to do with the actual migration crisis that Europe faces, particularly since 2015. Donald Trump bragging on Twitter about his “high IQ” might be further evidence of just how far this obsession with general intelligence goes on the political right, or it might just be another instance of Trump being Trump. Similarly, the excitement surrounding population genomics these days has less to do with Hayek or any economist but with geneticist David Reich, whose laboratory lies just across the river from where Slobodian teaches. The appeal of Javier Milei’s radical ideas probably cannot be understood without reference to the prior decades of stagnant growth both leading up to and away from the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina. And so on.
All of this is to say that even radical or reactionary ideas tend to have a dialectical relationship with mainstream culture and are usually more influenced by contemporary developments than by the minutes of Mount Pelerin Society meetings from half a century ago. As with Beauchamp’s book, there is a persistent attempt to corral unruly ideological currents under a single master category and to overstate their real-world impact. And as with that work, Slobodian’s classification scheme is likely to prove most persuasive to those already persuaded.
The Burden of Ideas
Though Beauchamp and Slobodian have different vocations and different politics (Slobodian being rather to Beauchamp’s left), both are concerned with right-wing revanchism, and they share a methodological approach. Both ascribe excessive causal significance to the role of ideas. Slobodian is more closely doing genealogy—tracing the complex descent of ideas that emerged under specific circumstances—while Beauchamp is trying to disclose the foundational concepts that underlie our present political disputes.
Slobodian’s method puts him on somewhat firmer ground, since his principals have explicitly acknowledged their intellectual debt to thinkers like Hayek and Mises. It is not always as clear in Beauchamp’s account why contemporary movements are necessarily replicating the philosophical tendencies of John Calhoun or Carl Schmitt. But both writers end up presenting an oddly segregated history, such that these ideas unfold according to their own interior logic, unaffected by larger political and social developments.
Ironically, this approach is traditionally a conservative one, sometimes called the “poison pill” theory, which can be summed up quite simply: things weren’t so bad before the wrong ideas entered general circulation. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, in which the main villain proves to be William of Ockham, is a paradigmatic example, but others abound. This approach has historically been more alien to the Left, which, following Marx, has tended to emphasize material factors over ideational ones. Ideology may be called out, but mainly insofar as it functions as a cover for those material interests that are really driving events.
Beauchamp and Slobodian are alike too wedded to their conceptual schemes to accord sufficient attention to the status of the liberal establishments opposed by the movements they chronicle. Both books thus overemphasize the internal logics of the right-wing intellectual tendencies they examine at the expense of more urgent political and cultural factors. This primacy of text over context does not sufficiently account for the gains progressivism has made across so many institutions in contemporary life or the changes it has wrought.
Had they paid more attention to this context, they might also have recognized the ways that the political disputes that concern them are as much driven by claims for greater equality as claims against it. While both books are concerned with equality and with what they view as threats to it, they have a tendency to treat difficult questions about the nature of equality as not only settled but settled in favor of their own political commitments. But the question of equality is often at the heart of political conflict, especially in democracies. This is why, for example, Aristotle maintains in The Politics that both oligarchs and democrats associate justice with equality: they just disagree on what it is and where the lines should be drawn.
One can sympathize with the difficulties Beauchamp and Slobodian face in theorizing various forms of opposition to the prevailing liberal establishment that do not readily answer to established ideological categories. What both books suggest, albeit unintentionally, is that we are still much too involved in the everyday polemical battles underlying this era’s realignment to settle on any broadly acceptable schemes of political classification. If the events of the past few months are any indication, this task is unlikely to grow much easier anytime soon.