The Reactionary Mind

The Reactionary Mind
Author: Corey Robin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190692006

Now updated to include Trump's election and the rise of global populism, Corey Robin's 'The Reactionary Mind' traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution.

The Reactionary Spirit

The Reactionary Spirit
Author: Zack Beauchamp
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2024-07-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1541704436

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 rhetoric cleverly belies authoritarian ends—a development that is increasingly prevalent today, both at home and abroad. 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. These countries in turn provide blueprints for the reactionary spirit domestically, as with Florida governor Ron DeSantis taking pages from Hungarian president Viktor Orbán’s anti-LGBT legislative playbook. 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.

The Reactionary Mind

The Reactionary Mind
Author: Michael Warren Davis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1684511461

America Needs Reactionaries! Never have the American people been lonelier, unhappier, or more in need of a swift reactionary kick in the pants. There is a better way to live—a way tested by history, a way that fulfills the deepest needs of the human spirit, and a way that promotes the pursuit of true happiness. That way is the reactionary way. In this irrepressibly provocative book, Michael Warren Davis shows you how to unleash your inner reactionary and enjoy life as God intended it. In The Reactionary Mind, you’ll learn: Why medieval serfs were probably happier than you are Why we should look back fondly on the Inquisition Why all “news” is fake news How “conservatives” become “adagio progressives” You also get bonus lists of Reactionary Drinks, Reactionary Books—even Reactionary Dogs. If you want to be happy, you need to be a reactionary, and this book is your guide. It belongs on the bookshelf of everyone in America. (And, incidentally, a reactionary would build his own darn bookshelf, not buy one from IKEA!)

The Shipwrecked Mind

The Shipwrecked Mind
Author: Mark Lilla
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2016-09-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1590179021

We don’t understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today’s political dramas are unintelligible to us. The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked in the rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe. And like the revolutionary his political engagements are motivated by highly developed ideas. Lilla begins with three twentieth-century philosophers—Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss—who attributed the problems of modern society to a break in the history of ideas and promoted a return to earlier modes of thought. He then examines the enduring power of grand historical narratives of betrayal to shape political outlooks since the French Revolution, and shows how these narratives are employed in the writings of Europe’s right-wing cultural pessimists and Maoist neocommunists, American theoconservatives fantasizing about the harmony of medieval Catholic society and radical Islamists seeking to restore a vanished Muslim caliphate. The revolutionary spirit that inspired political movements across the world for two centuries may have died out. But the spirit of reaction that rose to meet it has survived and is proving just as formidable a historical force. We live in an age when the tragicomic nostalgia of Don Quixote for a lost golden age has been transformed into a potent and sometimes deadly weapon. Mark Lilla helps us to understand why.

Spirit Car

Spirit Car
Author: Diane Wilson
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2008-10-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0873516990

A child of a typical 1950s suburb unearths her mother's hidden heritage, launching a rich and magical exploration of her own identity and her family's powerful Native American past.

Change They Can't Believe In

Change They Can't Believe In
Author: Christopher S. Parker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2014-10-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400852315

How the political beliefs of Tea Party supporters are connected to far-right social movements Are Tea Party supporters merely a group of conservative citizens concerned about government spending? Or are they racists who refuse to accept Barack Obama as their president because he's not white? Change They Can’t Believe In offers an alternative argument—that the Tea Party is driven by the reemergence of a reactionary movement in American politics that is fueled by a fear that America has changed for the worse. Providing a range of original evidence and rich portraits of party sympathizers as well as activists, Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto show that the perception that America is in danger directly informs how Tea Party supporters think and act. In a new afterword, Parker and Barreto reflect on the Tea Party’s recent initiatives, including the 2013 government shutdown, and evaluate their prospects for the 2016 election.

The Spirit of Terrorism

The Spirit of Terrorism
Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2013-01-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1781680205

Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of slaughter—not merely the reality of death, but in a sacrifice that challenges the whole system. Where previously the old revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle between real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated and vulnerable West. This new edition is up-dated with the essays “Hypotheses on Terrorism” and “Violence of the Global.”

Reactionary Liberty

Reactionary Liberty
Author: Robert Taylor
Publisher:
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2016-12-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9781537539072

In Reactionary Liberty: The Libertarian Counter-Revolution, Robert Taylor argues that without a reactionary element to its philosophy, libertarianism can never be a serious movement because it will always fall victim to O'Sullivan's Law: any movement or institution that is not explicitly right-wing will eventually turn left-wing. While libertarians may believe that they are "above" or "beyond" Left and Right, the Leftist infiltration of libertarianism (combined with the evolutionary psychology of r/K selection theory) proves that libertarians cannot be neutral. While offering private alternatives that can help to circumvent Leviathan-including the use of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, withdrawing consent, and the power of new technologies to create freer markets-Taylor poses questions that libertarians must answer if we are ever going to achieve a free society. Is democracy the highest form of political order, or does it only enable socialism to grow without limit? Will open borders and mass immigration expand, or hinder, liberty? What if cultural Marxism represents an equal or even greater threat to a libertarian society than the state? The Italian traditionalist Julius Evola embraced the reactionary spirit, calling it "the true test of courage." With this book, Taylor blends this courage with a radical libertarianism to forge a coherent and forceful philosophy of liberty.

Whiteshift

Whiteshift
Author: Eric Kaufmann
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 814
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1468316982

“This ambitious and provocative work . . . delves into white anxiety about the demographic decline of white populations in Western nations” (Publishers Weekly). “Whiteshift” is defined as the turbulent journey from a world of racially homogeneous white majorities to one of racially hybrid majorities. In this dada-driven study, political scientist Eric Kaufmann explores how these demographic changes across Western societies are transforming their politics. The early stages of this transformation have led to a populist disruption, tearing a path through the usual politics of left and right. If we want to avoid more radical political divisions, Kaufmann argues, we have to enable white conservatives as well as cosmopolitans to view whiteshift as a positive development. Kaufmann examines the evidence to explore ethnic change in North American and Western Europe. Tracing four ways of dealing with this transformation—fight, repress, flight, and join—he makes a persuasive call to move beyond empty talk about national identity. Deeply thought provoking, enriched with illustrative stories, and drawing on detailed and extraordinary survey, demographic, and electoral data, Whiteshift will redefine the way we discuss race in the twenty-first century.

On the Spirit of Rights

On the Spirit of Rights
Author: Dan Edelstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2021-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 022679430X

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.