The Reactionary Spirit

How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World

By: Zack Beauchamp

Narrated by: Justin Price

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.

Timely

This should be required reading elementary and high school throughout the nation. Very eye-opening as well as disturbing at times I very much enjoyed this book.

Useful tool for understanding today’s world

This book should be added to the pantheon of books on why we keep losing and how to fix our division.

Well told tale about extremism on the right.

The oral presentation was well articulated. It would have been helpful had the story been edited down by about a third.

So Timely!

This book breaks down the entire authoritarian playbook that is being rolled out across Western Democracies. There may be no book more timely and important in the wake of the 2024 US election.