The Reactionary Spirit - How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World

With keen and original 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. The defining ideals of democracy and liberty for everyone have always existed uneasily alongside realities of slavery, widespread disenfranchisement, and other grave impediments to true democracy. How has this paradox survived for so long in the face of America''s foundational claim of liberty and justice for all?

In The Reactionary Spirit, Zack Beauchamp explains that this tension is in fact an example of a phenomenon intrinsic to the project of democracy, 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. The adoption of democratic r