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 and Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards. Both books are attempts to grapple with the significance of the political energies of which Trump’s 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. 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…

Read More