The Reactionary Spirit Astride a Horse
Scattershot thoughts on Zack Beauchamp’s new book, the Trump/Vance ticket, and creative destruction
In one of Hegel’s more famous passages (i.e. one of the two that anyone has read), he describes Napoleon as “an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
Earlier this week, Ross Douthat of the New York Times used that passage to describe Donald Trump after Saturday’s failed assassination attempt. Trump, Douthat claims, is “a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics.”
But Hegel believed Napoleon embodied the World Soul and despite Douthat’s barely sublimated infatuation, Trump remains a far smaller man than that. Right-wing populism may be in vogue internationally, but it is hardly unchecked, or the spirit of the times (see Lula in Brazil, the NFP in France, even Labour in the UK).
The former president merely embodies the reactionary spirit — coincidentally the title of a recent volume by Vox correspondent Zack Beauchamp.
For his book, Beauchamp adopts a Tocquevillian view of democracy as a leveling influence that threatens existing hierarchies. While the stodgy French aristocrat griped that “men will never found an equality that is enough for them,” Beauchamp champions a more Whiggish perspective inspired by the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.
He writes: “Democratic institutions both create legal avenues for members of oppressed groups to act against their own oppression, and encourage the spread of political ideas that fuel such challenges.”
The titular “reactionary spirit” is thus rightly understood as the backlash to this leveling, this expansion of the rights of citizenship. And, an always fraught topic, to the expansion of citizenship itself. (Ziblatt’s Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy is pleasingly cited to help make these points.)
From chapter 2: “The architects of Jim Crow abandoned the formal feudal order but attempted to reinstate it through more subtle legal means; the post-Obama reactionaries reject Jim Crow but use authoritarian means to defend its legacy of a society sharply stratified along racial lines.”
Despite the lack of direct attacks on democracy as a mode of politics, Beauchamp argues, the reactionary spirit is still anti-democratic. When reactionaries praise democracy today, their behavior is comparable to portrayals of the quasi-feudal Confederacy as “a defense of freedom and self-government” — adaptation by camouflage.
Beauchamp outlines that as democracy became engrained in political culture, the dream of reactionaries shifted from authoritarianism plain and simple to competitive authoritarianism. They adapted the Schmittian view of democracy as built atop a friend-enemy distinction, rather than a vision of universal equal rights. But they retained the same enemies (democratizing forces) and the same backers (beneficiaries of traditional hierarchies threatened by the popular will).
Beauchamp is also harshly critical of arguments that economic inequality causes support of right-wing reaction, at least at any significant level. The voter base, he writes, is inspired and realigned by cultural flash points like Merkel’s acceptance of refugees, not economic inequality. However, “rising inequality concentrates wealth in the hands of a few people with a vested interest in supporting the status quo distribution of wealth and power.”
For recent evidence of reaction’s elite roots, look to billionaires like Elon Musk pouring countless dollars into pro-Trump PACs, with Musk alone pledging $45 million a month (over 7,000 times more than the average American family’s monthly earnings).
Perhaps unfortunately neglected by Beauchamp, though, is the theory of open access vs. limited access orders put forth in North, Wallis, and Weingast’s Violence and Social Orders. His democratic vs. reactionary framing works, but it’s a bit uncomfortable as is shown by the need to explain away modern reactionaries’ lip service to democracy. And his description of why economic elites support reactionary movements is maybe a tad underdeveloped.
As many have pointed out, Trump’s organic base has long been America’s petite bourgeoisie, the nation’s rent seekers and gentry.
In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter described creative destruction, the process by which the churn of capitalism constantly remakes the economy while leaving workers (and, to a lesser extent, the small capitalists) in the dust. In Marx’s words, “all that is solid melts into air.”
Or, as North, Wallis, and Weingast wrote: “Individuals and organizations pursue rents as vigorously in an open access society as they do in a natural state, but impersonal economic and political competition result in the rapid erosion of rents.” Hence the MAGA rentier’s felt need to return to a closed access order.
Beyond just reflecting an anti-democratic/reactionary spirit, the Trump/Vance ticket is generally pro-limited access. It wants to use tariffs to close off American markets from foreign competition, it wants a personalist presidency presiding over civil service appointments, and it wants unfair and unfree elections.
When Peter Thiel, Vance’s backer par excellence, writes in the Wall Street Journal that “competition is for losers,” listen to him. When all the Silicon Valley billionaires start supporting Trump after spending decades trying to corner markets and manufacture monopolies, pay attention.
The MAGA vision of what America should be is a vision of a system of political and economic rents. Restrictions on how employers patrol their fiefdoms (DEI, anti-discrimination laws, etc.) are to be dismantled, threats to existing businesses neutralized.
The Democratic policy prescription for creative destruction recently has been either “retraining” or, since 2020, pro-union/pro-worker industrial policy (see the CHIPS Act and the IRA). Creative destruction is an inevitability (or actually good in the case of climate change), Democrats have argued, but we have an obligation to take care of everyone who is left behind.
Traditional Republican orthodoxy, a la Romney, was to step back and let the market work (and get rich while you watch). Hopefully workers can sort everything out, but a bigger pie lifts everyone’s boats, or whatever the saying is.
The Trump/Vance ticket has put forward a third option: End creative destruction.
Senator Vance suggests ending subsidies for EVs and instead subsidizing cars with traditional internal combustion engines. Faced with the rise of renewable energy posing a threat to fossil fuels, Trump promises to make it easier to “drill, baby, drill.”
Tucker Carlson, one of Trumpism’s most successful popularizers, says that if he were president, he would tell the DOT “we’re not letting driverless trucks on the road, period.” (An impulse potentially responsible in part for Teamsters prez. Sean O’Brien speaking at the RNC.)
When it comes to immigration, Trump and Vance speak with a single voice. If you’re already a citizen, maybe that’s alright. But No More. Demographic change is clear evidence of a nefarious political plot, a novel threat to the American way of life.
For the last ten years, there has been no shortage of people saying that Trump is not a true conservative (remember the Never Trump issue of National Review?). But it’s hard to say Trump has been doing anything since he went down that escalator in 2015 besides “stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop.”
Stop immigration, Stop the green transition, Stop the extension of social and economic rights. Freeze the nation in amber and keep everyone already up on a pedestal up there.
That is the spirit that Trump embodies. That is the energy he will bring to a second term.
Anyways, here are some articles I’ve been reading this week:
Bhaskar Sunkara interviewing Bernie Sanders for The Nation
Branko Marcetic on Trump’s near-death and the RNC for Jacobin
John S. Ahlquist, Jake Grumbach, and Thomas Kochan analyzing the state of union support for the Economic Policy Institute
And Kim Kelly on Sean O’Brien vs. Shawn Fain for Hell World