America’s reactionary moment

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Learn more at www.nesonusa.com slash 2025 dashkicks. Available feature boasts as a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. It's been almost two weeks since the presidential election. The outcome was not what I wanted, but I cannot say that it was unexpected.

If anything surprised me, it was how definitive the Trump victory was. And if anyone says that there's a simple and obvious explanation, I would suggest not listening to them anymore. There isn't a reason for this. There are many reasons. And we just don't know enough right now to parse it out in a satisfying way.

But that doesn't mean that we have no idea what just happened. We know plenty. The road to this result has been paved for several years and regardless of who you voted for or what your politics are. I think we all have a duty to read the political room as best we can. I'm Sean Elling and this is The Great Area.

Today's guest is Zach Beecham. Zach is a friend and a colleague here at Vox who recently published a book called The Reactionary Spirit. The book is a deep dive into the historical roots of reactionary politics, both here and around the world. But more than that, it's a book about democracy and the contradictions and the conflicts at the heart of it.

What we can say pretty confidently is that the roughly 75 million people who just voted for Trump were saying no to something. They were saying no to lots of things to be more accurate. And I am genuinely interested in understanding what so many people were rejecting and why and what lessons we might be able to draw from that. This is Zach's beat. In addition to his book, he writes a newsletter for Vox called On the Right.

which is all about the evolving nature of conservatism and the various ideas and movements driving it. So in the aftermath of this election, I invited Zach on the show to talk about what happened and what it could mean for our political future. Zach Beacham, welcome to the show. Hey, Sean, it's really, really great to be here with you. It's good to see you too, buddy. So there's a lot I want to talk about, but I think

Right out of the gate, let's just address the orange elephant in the room. Yeah. Trump didn't just win the election. It was a fairly resounding win, not a historical blowout, but he gained ground with basically every single demo. This isn't POD Save America, so we're not here to do an autopsy. But now that we've had a few days to let everything

sink in. How are you feeling? What do you make of what happened? Well, next time I'm on Podsave America, I hope that they say this isn't the gray area at the beginning, and then we go on to do something very differently. Like, I would say we should separate out two different things, right? Like, one is our analysis of what's happening, and the other is how we feel about what happened, both sort of emotionally and normatively. Like, how do we judge a reaction like this?

Analytically, I think we're still pretty early to have any really strong conclusions, but I will say that most of what people are saying as a result of that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you notice, there's a one-to-one correlation between someone's very detailed account of what happened in the election and their own priors about how politics works. Fancy that.

right and or actually it's this other thing that nothing to do with my ideology which by the way is my own inclination just from looking at the data you mentioned that trump gained ground with basically every group right like well that only happens this kind of uniform swing when there's something some big structural factor and play right and the things though the candidates that make sense to explain a shift from 2020 to 2024 are

inflation, right? That's new, and it's been politically potent everywhere, and historically in the US it matters. And anti-incumbent sentiment, which is a worldwide fact. It's true in democracies around the world. Her biggest losses were in blue states.

And that suggests that something is going on that wasn't just like Harris's message is bad. She didn't say exactly the things that I thought you should say when you're going to win, right? Something else is happening. I mean, there clearly wasn't a reason. There are many reasons and we're going to be parsing this out for a while, I'm sure. Years? Years. People are still fighting about 2016. So years. Yeah, no shit. From your point of view, what were the most

important material stakes of this election. And I realize there's a lot of uncertainty here, but it's not a complete black box. And I'm asking because I think this question is mostly lost in all the horse race coverage and all the arguments about exit polling and what went wrong for Dems. Yeah, look, what matters is that Donald Trump is coming into his second term agenda with a very clear vision of what his movement is for.

and what he wants to wield power to get. And that was not true in the first term. The first term, those of us that remember and were journalists during it, especially, was chaotic. A lot of things happened for reasons that were hard to tell. The policy process was not streamlined. The people in charge had fundamentally different ways of thinking about politics. This time around, though, I expect chaos, Trump is not a very good manager, just if people had good executive.

At the same time, I really do think that he will come in an attempt to implement at least three things that are really important to him and that have huge, huge stakes for people's lives. The first one is mass deportation. I think there's no doubt that's going to happen.

how mass it is exactly, we don't know, but it could be in the millions of the number of people who are deported, which would be a massive disruption to all sorts of different things, from businesses that depend on these people to work, from most importantly to the people themselves and the communities that they're a part of, of them being suddenly thrown out of the country, some of whom maybe have never even left the United States.

And just to say that there is no non horrendous way to execute that. It will be very ugly. Correct. We're talking ice agents going door to door, looking for people in certain areas. We're talking potentially camps where undocumented migrants are capped.

for holding until they can be processed and deported. All of that's a realistic possibility. This is all stuff the Trump team has said themselves. It's not just people projecting onto them. Economic disruptions are real. The pain of individuals that what it's going to do to American society, that's all I think going to happen. The only question is how big the scale is.

And I think a similar thing, like that is tariffs. We're going to get fairly significant economic disruptions. If you're talking, people don't like inflation. Just waiting until every foreign made good is 10% more expensive, or whatever. If Trump targets China, escalating trade wars in the first term, and they continue through Biden's term, by the way, contributed non-trivially to rising prices and economic slowdown, I would expect that. And then the third thing

which is kind of hard to process as a material stake in the way that you put it. But it's like really important is Trump's plan to remake the federal government in his image and purge critics from the ranks of the civil service. This is profoundly dangerous, I would say, because what it means is not just

asserting political control over the state, though there's that, right? There is a significant element of democratic threat there. And all the downstream consequences are potentially quite dangerous, depending on which department you look at. You know, I recently wrote a very long thing about Trump's plan for one division of the Justice Department, the Civil Rights Division, and how much that could be used as a tool of weakening certain foundations of American politics. And that's just like one sub branch of one branch.

But it's also not just democracy, it's also every function of the federal government that depends on non-partisan, experienced civil servants could potentially be affected by this. And the consequences are almost unpredictably large. One example is that it's not outside the realm of Trump's power to encourage localities, if he does empower RFK Jr. in the way he suggested, to eliminate vaccine mandates in schools.

And if that happens, we're talking about an unprecedented experiment in a developed country reversing vaccines that had kept the rate of preventable diseases down at a marginal level, the reduction of herd immunity across the United States. So it's not just a red area problem if red states are the only one following federal guidance. It's like, potentially we're talking national returns of diseases thought defeated. And again, I want to emphasize that these are just two examples I pulled.

They're almost at random from the list of examples because I've been thinking about them for a variety of reasons recently. If Trump does the things that he says he's going to do, the revisions to the American state and the functioning of the American government model will be fundamental. But that's what is so well to me. How much of the faith in Donald Trump really depends on him not doing the things he says he's absolutely going to do.

Yeah. What a gamble. I mean, I think that a lot of people can't believe it. They just hear stuff like that and they can't. And some people just don't think about it. They go to vote because they're angry that groceries are somewhat more expensive and they have seen some scary images of the border on TV. And I don't mean to make light of people for doing this. This is what democracy is. Not everybody spends all day thinking about politics, but not supposed to and they shouldn't.

It's not like they're morally blameworthy for casting a vote based on limited information. Again, that is what democracy is. It's just that the sheer radicalism of Trump's policies are difficult to understand.

unless you're really well versed in how the US federal government works. That's not most people. One thing I write about extensively in my book is how anti-democratic politics functions by masking itself in both democratic language but also in

being boring and being normal, seeming like just sort of like everyday stuff inside the political system. And that's, I really think that a lot of how Trump got away with promising to do significant damage to American democracies because it didn't register to most people as operating in that way. Well, let's get into that.

You've covered the American right for a long time. You just wrote an excellent book about this. You have a great Vox newsletter called on the right, which is very much about this. And so that's where I want to move this conversation. And let's just set aside the election for a minute, though. We're probably going to keep coming back to it. We just can't help it. But when someone asks you, what is American conservatism in 2024? What is your answer?

not conservatism, what we call the conservative movement today is not what the conservative movement historically has been in the United States. It's a species of reactionary politics. And the distinction, I think, rests in the party's fundamental attitude towards democracy and democratic institutions. The Old Republican Party, for all of its faults,

played by the political rules. It had faith in the idea that elections determine the winner and that when elections happen, you accept the verdict of the people and you adjust based on that, regardless of whether or not you like the policy preferences. Again, we can already start to see the scenes in this narrative, the emergencies of certain Trumpisms, because you'd be like, well, what about the 2000 election? To which I would say exactly. That's evidence that there was always a component of this more

radical version of the right, but even that was much more system-oriented and system-accepting than what the Republican Party has become, which in the language that I use in my book is a reactionary party. And reactionary parties are different from conservatism and that they both share an orientation,

towards believing that certain ways in which society is arranged, certain setups, institutions, even hierarchies, are good and necessary, right? That there's value in the way that things are. What differs between the two of them is that conservative parties don't see potential social change as an indictment of democracy. That is to say, even if a democracy or an election produces an outcome,

that they don't like, that threatens to transform wholesale certain elements of the social order, a conservative would not throw out the political order as a consequence of that. Reactionaries are willing to do that. And my view is that the core of the Trump movement, which I want to distinguish from every Trump supporter, they're not the same. But the people who have given Donald Trump an iron grip on the Republican Party,

That sort of hardcore support are animated primarily by reactionary politics, by a sense that things have gone too far in a socially liberal and culturally liberal, and even in some cases economically liberal direction. And they want things to go back to partially a past that never existed, but also a past that did exist, where there was a little bit more order and structure in terms of who was in charge and what the rules were.

I should say, I think we both respect the conservative instinct. I genuinely think that, and we've talked about this before. The challenge of political life is navigating the tension between order and progress, which is very difficult, and you put it well in the book. The small D, democratic right, sees virtue in tradition and danger in change.

there's wisdom in that orientation, correct? I absolutely think that. Part of what's made me so nervous about the 2024 election results is that Trump has a much more anti-system orientation on foreign policy than he did in the past, and that the international order as defined post-World War II really

orients around the United States playing this core stabilizing role and being willing to involve itself in all sorts of things that most Americans don't see or even care about, but that do play a role in global financial and political stability. And a lot of what Trump wants to do is tear down the things that make that work. And gee, I feel very conservative saying this, but like,

If you take a hammer to that system and you change it because you think it's not delivering in certain ways, which it isn't, by the way, it's not perfect. It's doing a lot of things that I think are very good. But if you take a hammer to that system, you don't know what the consequences are going to be. And I think they're likely to be quite dangerous. That's just something that

That impulse, that sense that whatever the critiques are, and there are many, when I say things like this, people often say, how can you support an international order that is yielding the inhumanity in a Gaza, which I take it, that's a very classic progressive critique of conservatism, X feature of the status quo is bad.

is unacceptable, even morally, how dare you support the status quo as a whole, to which the conservative replies reasonably. Well, that's really bad, and we should try to do something about it, but that doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? That doesn't mean that you should say, okay, the whole thing is irredeemable, let's throw it out, or let's transform everything. That's how I feel about the international system, and what makes me very worried about Trumpism is that part of its reactionary politics is saying the international order is a symptom of the leftism that we dislike so much.

Well, there's a political scientist we both know at Harvard, Daniel Ziblatt, and you discuss his work in your book pretty early on. He made the case, I think, successfully, that the countries in Europe that transitioned successfully into democracy were the countries that had the strongest conservative parties, which sounds a little counterintuitive at first.

This is an important point. What was his explanation for that? Because it does sort of speak to the inherent utility of having a sane, healthy, conservative party. Yeah, so historically speaking, the base of conservative parties has been the social and economic elite.

which makes sense, right? Like who benefits the most from the status quo? Well, it's the wealthy and the powerful and the influential, right? And so they need some way to organize their interests and defend them, whether or not you agree with whatever their policies are for defending those things. And my read of Ziblatt's book is that he sees conservative parties

as a means of structuring those interests and channeling them into pro-system politics. That is to say, if these sort of rich people, powerful people in society, believe that they can get what they want through the electoral system. They don't feel as much of a threat when democracy delivers

results that are contrary to their own views that maybe level the playing field a little bit for people lower down on the social economic hierarchy. And so they're willing to tolerate losing elections periodically as long as they think that they'll have a chance to win again in the future and that they feel like the policy results aren't fundamentally, you know, let's say, I don't know, lead them to the guillotine. But when they don't have a party like that,

It's something that can advocate for them in elections, a strong party, and I use the guillotine example deliberately, right? If you read a history of the French Revolution, it's just a story of like leftward and leftward and leftward.

movement until there's not any party that could properly even resemble anything described as being on the right. It's just a division between more and less radical people on the left that in countries like that where the right felt that the very nature of the political system, the democratic system had become an existential threat to their often their physical survival, let alone their economic status. Well, they're willing to support extreme measures

like the restoration of the bourbon monarchy in order to safeguard themselves. So that's what a conservative party does, right? It advocates and stabilizes the social order by serving to bring the most powerful people in that order into the system itself.

And the problem is when you lack a conservative party or what was once a conservative party is no longer acting as such, your political system gets a little off-kilter. And to repeat, we currently lack an actually conservative party in America. Yeah. Great. I was trusting your listeners to get the inference there. Yeah.

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the reactionary spirit you're talking about it is a form of anti-democratic politics and we see it in democratic societies when there's a perceived threat to the social order to traditional hierarchies and that becomes the justification for using all forms of power to

undermine democracy from within. First of all, how is this different from fascism? Is it that reactionary politics claims to be a defense of true democracy, whereas fascism is just an outright rejection of the whole democratic project?

The way I would see it is that oftentimes fascism is a species of reactionary politics, but there are plenty of variants of reactionary movements that are not fascist in orientation. They have some kind of different ideological tenor to them.

anti-democratic parties historically, let's say, I mean, we were just talking about 19th century Europe, right? That was before fascism existed. Monarchism, like anti-revolutionary monarchism, was certainly a variant of reactionary politics in the sense that there had been a change to the social order that led people to turn against democracy itself, but it wasn't fascist in the sense that it didn't have all of the specific hallmarks of mid-century European authoritarianism.

And we can go down the list and there are different examples, but I think what it means to be a

example of the reactionary spirit is to be an extreme right party that for whatever reason believes that change has gone too far and that overthrowing democracy in one way or another is the solution. Now, the point you made earlier about playing within the contours of the democratic game is really important, but I think it speaks to sort of different facet of the reactionary spirit and its mutability, right? Is that

reactionary politics doesn't go away after fascism. The extreme right is delegitimized, like poorly, in a lot of places, not everywhere, but certainly in the Atlantic West. And what happens is not that people all of a sudden are fine with social progress, challenges to the economic hierarchy,

and are unwilling to do anything about it, or even that they've just reconciled themselves fully to losing democratic elections. There are always people who reject those things, but they recognize that the public has mostly gotten on board with democracy and still is, by the way, as much as anti-elite sentiment as there is right now. People still generally want to have elections and want to be able to choose who leads them. They're pulling on that's pretty clear.

So they adapt their rhetoric. And I think this is an important difference between modern reactionary politics and a fascist reactionary politics, right, is that fascists and monarchists do, whether it would outright say, we're against democracy. Democracy is bad. We need to replace it. Now,

Authoritarians tend to have a more subtle message, at least when they're operating inside a country that's already a democracy. They're trying to contest elections with an electorate that believes in democracy as the governing logic of the system. So what they do is say, we are the true Democrats. It's the other people.

These opponents who are trying to, through the radical leftism, radical Marxism, you've heard all of these terms, are trying to overthrow our system of government. Not us. They stole the election.

We didn't lose it. And it isn't that we see elections as illegitimate. It's that Joe Biden has nefarious thugs somehow managed to secretly break the 2020 election behind our backs. And that difference playing within the ideological contours of democratic discourse allows them to succeed in the environment where being called a fascist is still a slur.

Right. Trump didn't say, I'm a fascist. Yeah. When he was called that, he was like, look at how they're trying to call you a fascist. And aren't you angry about that? It's all taking place in a very different ideological environment than previous bouts of authoritarianism. So we can make the case that Trumpism is a reactionary movement. But what is Trumpism really reacting against? What it seems to be increasingly is

a rejection of the ruling elites, a rejection of the professional managerial class, which is more about class and culture than race and the preservation of traditional hierarchies. So how do you make sense of that? Yeah, I think there's a little bit of analytic slippage going on in that account, and I think we need to be really careful when we talk about it. That's the classiest way someone just called me wrong.

A little analytical slippage there, sir. There's a little bit of slippage here. I'm speaking for the critics. This is how I run away from everything. Yeah, I didn't want to tell you. Many people are saying that. That's actually true. They're wrong and I think an important sense, but right in another one. But let's start with wrong, right? When we talk about what Trumpism is, we need to specify what we're talking about.

And I don't think looking at a general election and saying that person voted for Trump is necessarily to say that person is a Trumpist. If somebody was considering voting for Harris or maybe voted for Democrats down ballot, it might not make sense to think of their behavior through a purely ideological lens. Because they may not even have firm ideological beliefs. Many swing voters don't. If you look at the way they talk about politics, it's sort of jumbled. Again, I'm not saying that they are bad for

having jumbled views, just that's a fact about people who don't pay attention to politics very much. Even people who do have jumbled views. That's true. Fair enough. If you look at Trump's core supporters, though, the story of

racial and social grievance, anger about immigration, a kind of sense of alienation from the United States after Obama really personalized the changing social order. All of that is remarkably consistent among the people who will turn out to vote for Trump in a Republican primary.

It's been true over and over again, the evidence is overwhelmingly strong. This is their core motivation in Trump politics, in being engaged in this movement. And nothing about this election result changes that. What that part of the story does is help us understand why Trump has gained control over one of our two major political parties. Why it is that he crushed traditional Republicans who are unwilling to give those voters

what they wanted in such clear terms. And those voters had become a majority of the Republican Party, internally. And more than that, it's why, you know, vast, vast, vast bulk of Republicans rejected the 2020 election when previously they had believed elections were legitimate.

It's why so many people are willing to swallow the idea that Obama wasn't born in the United States. So that's one category of explanation. But then we're talking about shifts in coalitions between different elections. And here the analysis becomes a lot trickier because we're not talking about what makes up the core of an ideological movement.

Because all of those voters are baked into voting for Trump no matter what. I mean, you have what? 46%, 47% of the electorate that's not going to change their mind no matter what on both sides. But maybe a bit of exaggeration, but not much. And so you end up having these voters in the middle. And what causes someone to change their votes between elections?

is not the same thing as what engages really highly motivated, highly ideological voters who make up a political movement. They're swing voters, right? They're not Trumpists in the clear sense, just because you voted for Trump once. So collapsing that distinction leads to analytic mistakes. I think trying to be careful about what we're saying and the kinds of claims that we're making and analyzing election results is really important. Yeah. I just continue to have a hard time parsing out

all the forces that are combining to scramble our politics. I mean, there's so much alienation. It's a very lonely society. Our democracy doesn't feel very participatory for lots of people, so there's not enough investment in it. I think social media, media fragmentation, more generally, the collapse of consensus reality, it's all been very destabilizing.

I'm just going to keep saying that I think millions of people have never experienced real political disorder. I think they take liberal democracy for granted and frankly, don't take politics very seriously. It is a reality TV show and they're entertained by Trump and they think he's funny and he'll make eggs a little cheaper and also drive coastal elites insane.

that that's kind of it. Yeah, I mean, I think that's really that's true for a lot of people, right? Like a lot of people, a lot of people, especially that point about taking liberal democracy for granted is so important. I think it's that when you live in a political order for a long period of time, you just came to take it as like a baseline. This is the way that things are, right? And it's not that you can't even envision fundamental change. It's that you don't

even have the vocabulary necessary or the sense of perspective necessary to believe that you should be envisioning radical change. It just doesn't enter into your daily life. If you look at interviews with swing voters and the way that they talk about politics,

or talk to them yourselves. The sense that you get is not that these people are like, I want to burn American democracy to the ground. It's that they've got a choice between two candidates, like they do every election, and they pick the one who represents whatever their grievances are at this moment in time or whatever their anger or frustration or even hopes and dreams are at this moment in time. And lots of different things go into, for a voter that changes their mind election to election, what speaks to that

And the stuff about who Trump really is and what he really stands for, the system threatening part of it, it just doesn't even register because it seems too remote to feel real.

Not just remote, it also feels, I think we've talked about this a little bit, it feels a little too silly and absurd often, right? I mean, figuring out how to situate Trump in this story has always been weird for me. I think he's too nihilistic to be the leader of anything other than a personality cult. But the question, I guess, for you is a

Has he become more like a vehicle that serious ideological reactionaries are using to advance their serious political project? I mean, I'm going to say yes and no.

Yes, in the sense that Trump does not have the mind for detailed policy work. It's just not what he cares about. It's not. That's terrible.

want to try to understand how something like schedule F is going to work. He's not going to be in the details going through staff directories. He doesn't really know how the federal government relates to local prosecutors and what the authority is to punish the people who went after him. But he wants to do it. And he wants someone to figure out how to do it. And that's like the stuff that he's immediately concerned with. And there's the stuff that's relatively far afield.

Do you think Trump really has a sense of what the Department of Labor does or cares? Absolutely. No, no. No, he's no sense, right? And we'll just do whatever people around him, or the last person he talked to suggested that he does, or the last person that he liked that he talked to. So in that sense, yeah, a lot of what happens in Trump administrations now that we have to use the plural is going to be determined by the political world around him.

And I also don't think he has a sincere commitment to anti-democracy either. He would never write a book where he leaves out a coherent political ideology that he sincerely believes. He puts forward whatever makes sense on that at a time. But Zach, this is my problem with him. He's not committed to anything. I have always felt that his political genius consists in making himself into an avatar onto which people can project whatever they need to project.

He's just so well equipped to be this kind of vehicle that I'm talking about because again, I genuinely do not think he cares about anything other than himself. I mean, if the man had to choose between preserving liberal democracy for another century or building a beautiful new golf course in Saudi Arabia, is there any doubt he'd build the fucking golf course? That's his level of commitment to

democracy. No, but I think that that's a mistake, right? Because it's not that he doesn't have a commitment to democracy in the sense that he's not attached to it. He doesn't like it. He doesn't like the idea that he can't do whatever he wants when he gets power.

He gets very angry when people say, you can't do that, or that's illegal. He openly admires leaders in other countries who have either always been authoritarian, like Xi Jinping in China, or who have torn down their own democracies, like Putin or Viktor Orban in Hungary. He thinks that they're strong.

and that it's great that they get to do stuff like that. And again, this is not an ideological commitment to authoritarianism either. It's not like Trump has a sincere belief that authoritarian systems work better or deliver better in some kind of meaningful sense. It's a gut level. I like that. I want to be like that. It's when he said in those comments that were recently reported, I want generals like Hitler's generals. It's not like he was saying, I want generals who will follow my orders to exterminate the Jews.

He's saying, I want people who listen to me and do the things that I say, whatever those things are, however crazy they might seem. And in that sense, he has a gut level authoritarianism. And it's reactionary in the sense that he very clearly hates a lot of the social change that has happened. So he does really classically fit the pattern I describe in the book.

But it's not because he, unlike someone like say Orban, or Narendra Modi in India, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, like all of them have complex ideological beliefs. Orban's are mostly for show, by the way. He mostly cares about power, but he's a very sophisticated ideological operator. And Netanyahu and Modi are for real ideologues. They really do believe a lot of what they're saying.

I think that's more what I was speaking to. It's clear that Trump wants power. It's just not clear to me what he really wants to do with it. It's not clear to me what it will be in service of. Yeah, I mean, there are two things, right? Like two things that I think he does care about, right? He does believe that we need to get the immigrants out of our country. He really does believe that. It's been true for decades and his statements consist. That's one thing he's been consistent on. And the second, he believes that free trade is bad for America.

It's like a really fixed belief for him. It's unchangeable. No amount of evidence could cause him to change his mind on this topic. The only question is how far he's willing to go in pursuing an anti-trade agenda. And those two things reflect

A deeper worldview, I think, a sense of the world as a fundamental, easy-rope someplace, where it can't be the case that migrants coming to the US is good for native-born citizens. Someone has to win and someone has to lose. It can't be the case that both countries involved in a trading arrangement benefit.

someone has to get the better of the deal that's being made between the two sides. And you see this in his approach to foreign policy too. It can't be the case that the Atlantic alliance is something that stabilizes the world for everybody. It's that the Europeans are taking America for a ride.

Americans are letting them slide on their own defense obligations and footing the bill. So it's bad for us because we're the militarily stronger component of the alliance and on down the list. And so that sort of constellation of instincts, the zero-sumness of it all filters down into perspectives on different policy issues. But it's not in the same way as somebody who has a doctrine, a set of propositions that they believe about the world that have been applied in different cases.

It's just he has sort of feelings about stuff and the feelings about stuff Translates into some relatively stable policy views and some areas where he doesn't really think that much or care that much about it And when he doesn't care he is willing to be protean in the way that you described To like just change his mind on abortion whenever he feels like it and whatever the audience is and say a wildly different contradictory stuff Depending on what feels like in his interest at that moment in time

Yeah, I think it's clear he certainly has instincts and I think those instincts can be properly called authoritarian. Yeah. I'm curious what you make it JD Vance. I mean, I know he's shape shifted quite a bit here in the last few years, but he seems to me to be

seriously ideological in a way that maybe Trump isn't. I mean, is he the future of the political right? What does he represent? What does he want? I think he is sincerely ideological. I think this in part because I've met him and I've interviewed him ever briefly, but also because I've talked to people who know him pretty well, like just through random chance. We have a good friend in common, his former law school roommate, who's now state center in Georgia named Josh McClure. And I talked to Josh a lot about this.

He's like, well, JD is really motivated by anger. He's just a very angry person. In Josh's accounting, that anger has shifted from being an anger in part at the circumstances under which he was raised.

which you can see on display in hillbilly elegy in the way that he talks condescendingly in a lot of times about other poor whites in about how he's the one who made it out and they have cultural problems that prevent them from doing so it's a sort of classic conservative text in those ways but now his resentments he's always had these but they've come to the fore are primarily directed at other elites

He's angry about the way that the elite establishment in the Ivy League and the business world and the political world treats people who believe the sorts of things that he believes. He's come to align himself with Trumpism and builds a broader doctrine around that anger that's very, very hostile to the current political arrangement, the current political order in a fundamental sense. He literally called himself at one event an anti-regime

leader, like if that's the nature of his politics. He believes the fact that he refers to the United States as a regime to begin with is I think telling in the way that he thinks about things.

You know, people differ on how serious he is about his Trumpest ideological turn I happen to for the reasons I just described. I think it's serious, but ultimately what someone actually believes matters less than what they do with that belief. And most of the time politicians are what they say, not what they feel in their hearts.

right they it's it's the the commitments they make in public that bind them to a certain policy direction and cause them to act in a particular way in the alliances they cultivate the networks they need to survive as politicians and whether or not vance believes that the radical stuff that he said he's he's kind of bound to it

He pals around with people like Curtis Yarvin, who's a monarchist, and Vance has cited him as explicitly as an influence on how he thinks about executive branch staffing in a second Trump administration. He is thinking about how to remake the federal government through the lens of the work of a guy who wants to topple democracy, which is a wild thing to say about the Vice President-elect, but is absolutely true by his own words.

I don't know if Vance has the charisma to pull off what Trump does. Like you said earlier, Trump is funny. He's really funny, right? I don't know. Have you seen J.D. ordering donuts in a diner? It's losing charisma. Yeah.

Like most people are going to come across as stilted interactions like that. Like Lord knows that's not. Yeah, but with some people, you can see the ones in zero is a little more fair enough. But I think, I think honestly, like Sean, if you had JD Vance on your show, he would come across as like a pretty natural guy. And it probably would be a pretty fun conversation. Right. This is the kind of I've talked to before.

Yeah, yeah, right? I talked to him before. It was years ago, right after his book, and he really struck me as a very different person than... Yeah, but fair enough. Then he is now, and so I don't know how that interaction would go.

But if he was on this right now and you or me or both of us characterized him as a reactionary, would he own that label or would he describe his political project differently? That's an interesting question. I know he wouldn't characterize it in the way that I characterize it. He wouldn't say, yeah, I'm dedicated to tearing democracy down because that's part of my accounting. That's part of what makes reactionary politics work today is you have to explicitly say, I'm for democracy.

And then claim the mantle of democratic elections in order to tear down the scaffolding that makes fair elections possible in the future. But I think that if you asked Vance, do you reject your previous characterization of yourself as an anti-regime candidate?

or anti-regime politician. He would say, of course not. That's what I believe. I believe the regime is a coterie of liberals and unaccountable positions in culture and the quote unquote deep state in academia that exercise undo influence.

and do so against the wills and the beliefs of the majority of the American people, and I'm speaking for them, and my political project is to destroy the powers of these unaccountable elites and bring things back to the people. I think that's what he would say. I don't think that's what he actually is doing.

And I don't know the extent to which he believes that he's really the guy who is putting things back in charge of normal people, or whether he just says that for show. But that comes awful close without the anti-democratic part to how I would define reactionary. It just, you know, the tiny little bitty question of whether or not you believe elections should be fair.

whatever one thinks of Trump's appeal and why so many people voted for him. I mean, I think we've discussed lots of people voted for him for lots of different reasons. The fact is

He is not committed to liberal democracy. He is not committed to the rule of law. And that creates a lot of uncertainty about what might happen. One of the things you do in the book is challenge American exceptionalism. I mean, this idea that we're immune to certain kinds of political chaos because we're America. Do you think our institutions will

continue to hold. I think they will. I don't think this is the end of the Republic, but I'll confess that I'm not super duper confident about that. Yeah. I mean, I think that there is no reason to expect that elections will be formally abolished by 2028 in the way that some like wild-eyed commentators in social media have suggested. I think there is a moderate chance that their fairness is severely undermined.

by then, a not unreasonable one. And I think there is a very high chance that some of the core institutions of American democracy will be damaged in ways that have significant long-term consequences. But differently, I don't think this election itself is the end of American democracy, like it spells the formal abolition of it. I do think it is the beginning of the greatest test American democracy has seen since the Civil War.

of its resilience. And the outcome of that test is not determined with a huge range of probabilities ranging from truly catastrophic to merely somewhat bad. And just to the point is not lost, what makes this to you a more significant test than the first Trump administration?

I mean, it's the degree to which they have clear and cogent plans about what they want to do and the anti-democratic nature of those plans. Coming into office last time, Trump didn't have a vendetta against large chunks of the government. He didn't believe an election had been stolen from him, and that needed to be rectified. And he really believed that. It's like a slight- You think so? To his personal self. At the very least, he thinks it is a public blemish that needs to be shown to be false to many people, because if many people believe that he won, then that's good enough. It doesn't matter if he actually did.

What matters, I guess, maybe to put it differently, is Donald Trump's honor. And the honor of Donald Trump must be avenged at all costs. And the insult of 2020 must be erased from the history books. That's the kind of thing that he cares about.

The degree in scope of the planning that is going into this and the willingness to take a hammer to different institutions to the US government and the specificity of the plans for doing so to name just like one example from project twenty twenty five. They want to prosecute the former.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State, who presided over the 2020 elections, using the Klan Act, which has passed to fight the first Klan. And it's basically alleging that by trying to help people fix improperly filed mail-in ballots in 2020, that this Pennsylvania Secretary of State candidate was

rigging the election, trying to undermine everyone else's fair exercise of their votes in a way akin to the Klan intimidating black voters in the 1860s by, you know, threatening to lynch them. This is like a crazy charge on substantive legal grounds, right? When I speak to legal experts about this, they're like, no credible prosecutor I know would bring such a charge.

It's a real abuse of power and anti-democratic in many ways because it's like trying to wield federal power to prevent local authorities from administering elections properly and helping people vote.

So in order to try to even begin an investigation on this front, let alone actually prosecute, what you need to do is fire the people who would do that kind of job, which would typically be in the Justice Department's civil rights division or also the election crimes unit in the criminal division, fire those people who'd work on these cases, bring in attorneys who are willing to do what you say, even though it's ludicrous on the basis of a traditional read of the law, and then

Initiate an investigation, try to get charges spun up, and then get them to a judge, like Eileen Cannon, who's presiding over Trump's documents case, and has clearly shown herself to not really care about what's going on, but rather just to interpret the law in whatever way is most favorable to Trump.

All of that stuff. This is just one specific example. But it illustrates the ways in which doing what Trump and his allies have outlined as part of their revenge campaign requires attacking very fundamental components of American democracy. The building blocks, like the rule of law,

like a nonpartisan civil service that treats all citizens equally, like a judiciary that's designed with interpreting the laws best as it can rather than delivering policy outlines. You need all of those things in order to act on already offered promises in what is widely understood to be the planning document for the Trump administration, like the main one.

So that is a threat, a concerted authoritarian campaign, unlike anything the United States has seen in its history, really, at the federal level. I'm trying to think, and there's just no good parallel. There have been more serious challenges to American democracy before, but they mostly took place in the case of either foreign attacks.

like the War of 1812, and internal violent challenges, the Civil War, in many ways Jim Crow was a state-level challenge to American democracy, but you haven't had at any point a federal government that has made one of its central missions be crushing the various constituent parts that make a democracy work. That's a new one for the United States.

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It feels so wild to say this, but is it clear by now that Trump is unquestionably the most consequential political figure of the 21st century so far? It depends on how you calculate these things. First of all, we don't know how successful he'll be at doing those things.

All of the scenarios that I just spun out in that last answer depend on not only Trump and his team's willingness to root out people inside the government and replace them with ideologically motivated people, but all of them being competent enough to deal with the existing roadblocks that make politically motivated prosecutions difficult.

I don't know if they have the bureaucratic or legal competence to do this kind of thing. When you said earlier that you think the system might hold, I think that's a big reason why, is tearing down a democracy is really hard. One thing that I learned from studying Victor Orban in Hungary and writing about him in the book and just doing a lot of reporting on him in the past several years is that he's super smart.

He's a lawyer by training, his inner circle, all lawyers, they all have intimate knowledge about the Hungarian political system works, and have been very, very good at finding its weak points and sticking knives in them.

That is a particular kind of talent and skill that I know Trump personally doesn't possess, and I don't know how many of his people are going to possess enough speech to be able to succeed in what is unquestionably a much more difficult political environment to authoritarianize. The Hungarian system was a lot simpler. There were no checks and balances given that he had a two-thirds majority that could amend the Constitution at will. That's not how things work here.

And so that's going to be hard. And that will determine a lot of the answer to your question is Trump, the most significant figure of the 21st century. My view is Trump's significance will depend very heavily on how successful he is in his second term at doing what he wants to do. But I do think you can also make a case that the ideological impact of Trump on American politics has already been massive and will inaugurate shifts that may well become permanent.

I don't think there's any doubt. And I guess to bring this around to the question of where we're going and what's next. Personally, my political commitments haven't changed.

believe in democracy. I'm with John Dewey. I have faith in ordinary people if they're empowered to meaningfully participate. In political life, the way our politics have drifted in the last decade has left me pretty alienated, for reasons I don't really want to get into it the moment we don't have time.

But I'm not a both sides are equivalently bad type. I voted for Harris because Trump doesn't give a shit about the Constitution and failed the most pacing test you can take as a politician in a liberal democracy, not accepting a peaceful transfer of power. In the world, the Democratic Party wants to build remains much closer to the world I want to live in. So this wasn't a hard choice for me. Still, though, I do wonder.

where we're heading and what our politics might look like on the other side of all of this. Trump is old, very old. So there is a shelf life to his political career. And there are people who think our situation will be drastically better the day he leaves. And while I think we'll be better off when he's gone,

I'm not so sure the political dysfunction that he's uncorked will fade away nearly as quickly as people think. What do you think? Well, I agree with you in brief, but sort of build on what you're saying. First, let's say Trump dies in office.

I mean, then you get President J.D. Vance, who shares very, very similar ideological commitments to the people who want to tear down American democracy and is, I think, probably one of them in a lot of ways. So there's that.

There's the fact that Trumpist politics have paid off in two presidential elections for Republicans. And I just can't imagine being a Republican strategist right now and being what we need to do is go back to 2012, right? Because even if all you care about narrowly is winning elections,

then you're going to try to be Trump rather than the pre-Trump GOP. There will be a lot of people trying to take up the mantle of Trump's successor in the Republican Party, and that means doing a lot of the same things that he did.

But can they do them in the way he did them? He is one of one in so many ways. I'm very skeptical. I'm very skeptical of that. If you look comparatively at authoritarian parties that work inside democracies, many of them are led by singular charismatic figures. Not all, but many of the successful ones.

There's the saying in Indian politics that Narendra Modi is the man who has a 56-inch chest, right? And it's not literally true, but it's one of many things that isn't about him that his supporters say. When you talk to them, this sort of mythologizing and grandiose comments stem from Modi's outsized personality.

And his ability to connect as a figure with supporters of his party and with a lot of ordinary Indians who might not support his party in the past. And I think Trump is much the same way. And that appeal, first of all, it's not invariant, like Modi, while he won reelection this year, his party took a major hit. They lost their parliamentary majority and he's now in power. The coalition and Trump, of course, lost in 2020. But second is like what happens when it's gone?

We know that this is a huge problem for authoritarian parties in authoritarian countries. They're often nasty fights over what happens after the big man dies.

That seems equally true in authoritarian factions inside democracies, because part of what makes them authoritarian is that they put one guy in charge. And it's not clear who's next unless you have something like a monarchy where the roles of succession are clear, but even then, who doesn't know about nasty fights inside monarchies over who is the true heir to the throne. It's just a fact of life when you're not having things settled.

through a sort of normal democratic procedure when some politics come so oriented around one person to an outsized degree. So I just don't know what's going to happen after Trump is gone. I can guess. And I think a lot will depend on how his administration manages

American public opinion. Not only did Trump end his presidency historically unpopular, but he even now he's unpopular. Like he just won an election and as a figure, he is an unpopular candidate. There's a lot of people who really don't like him and many of the swing voters could be turned off by things that happened during his presidency, especially if it's as disruptive as it seems like it might be to ordinary people's lives.

Yeah, and maybe this goes back to the legacy question a little bit or the question of his ultimate impact. I mean, I don't know either. I just know he broke a lot of things that cannot be fixed very easily. You know what I mean? You talk about the legacy of Nietzsche on the reactionary, right? Yes. Towards the end of the book, which obviously triggered me a little bit. Of course. Yeah. It was written for you. So I should have written that. This is the Sean section of the book. I felt very seen.

But Nietzsche definitely was not a fan of democracy. But man, any anti-democratic movement with Trump as its face is so far from what Nietzsche would have championed, the anti-intellectualism, the petty narcissism, the worshiping of money for its own sake. I mean, he is the pleasure-seeking decadent. Nietzsche thought democratic cultures would inevitably produce. But the one Nietzschean thing about him, which is what we've been talking about here, is that

He is dynamite. He has a way of blowing everything up. And that's something Nietzsche would have appreciated. But what worries me is that there's just doesn't seem to be much else there. I don't there's no real ideas, no new values, no vision of the future. It's just all the worst excesses and pathologies of our culture taken to their logical endpoint. And I don't know where that leaves us except staring at the abyss, I guess, to stick with it.

Yeah, except now, not only is the abyss staring back, it's almost in reverse, right? We're staring up at the abyss and the abyss is staring down from its commanding heights of the federal government. It's kind of sort of twist the metaphor past the point of breaking.

I mean, the one thing that I will say that's sort of hopeful to counter the depressing sentiment that you just outlined is that I really believe, and even after this election, I really believe this, that most people in the United States and in other democracies still want to live in a democracy. Again, again, they say it, the polls show it, that the alternatives don't poll very well.

force people to act within its confines. And when they stray too far, there tends to be a popular backlash, right? If I think the 2024 election is just another in a long list of trans ideological, like it's not just like one side is being punished, right? But trans ideological backlashes against a status quo that people don't like for certain reasons. But there's a limit to how much people hate the status quo.

There are things that you can do to break it. And if there's anything, anything that's been clear about American politics in the last few years, it's that when you do things, when you try something ambitious, people punish you for it. What happened after Obamacare? Obama suffered an extraordinary wipeout. The Democrats did more precisely in the 2010 midterm elections. And there's good evidence that Democratic candidates who voted for Obamacare

suffered more because voters didn't like that change was happening. Now Obamacare is incredibly popular to the point where Republicans are debating whether or not they should try to ever repeal it again at all. They talk about it and Mike Johnson said something that sounded like he wanted to repeal Obamacare and then he walked it back immediately because what you're doing is threatening to take people's health care away or threatening to disrupt the status quo.

in a radical way. And that status quo bias is very real, and it exists at the same time as anti-incumbent sentiment, which is a weird thing to think about. People are both unhappy with the way that things are, and then really unhappy when you try to change some of the things that are the way things are. I wouldn't call it especially coherent, but it is a kind of conservative safeguard on democracy that if Trump pushes too hard too fast to try to break some stuff, there will be a real reckoning with the American public.

I hope so. And the optimistic case you make at the end of the book is pretty persuasive to me, even though my instincts are want to push me in the opposite direction. I mean, I do. To be bleak. It's a good point that we are still all sort of playing this fundamental language game of democracy. We're still even the GOP, which as a party, I think it's just objectively less committed to liberal democracy than the Democrats. They still feel compelled to cloak their appeals in the language of democracy. And that does say something about how

secure we are in the ideological confines of liberal democracy. I will say the thing I struggle with.

In that last chapter is the argument about how effective it can be telling voters that they need to defend democracy. I don't know how much it matters in the way we think it matters. And like I said earlier, I think Americans in particular are incredibly privileged. And many people knowingly are not take stability for granted. And democracy is just an abstraction. And having never lived in a non-democracy, people are just not as worried as they should be about losing one.

I have been thinking about this question a lot, right? Since those exit polls that you referred to and the outcome of the election are definitely not ones that vindicate my arguments that you should be like making the political case about democracy in the way that I think the 2022 election results strongly vindicated that as an argument, right? Or at least was very consistent with that. What I think is that

not every election is going to be about the things you want it to be about. It just isn't the case that even if you objectively are correct that democracy is on the line, that that's going to be the issue that registers with voters in this particular election. That's in part because

Second, it's a little bit harder to say democracy is on the ballot when you're the party in power. Not impossible. Again, 2022 was easier, but there wasn't the countervailing pressure of someone like Donald Trump who's capable of ginning up a lot of support, which leads me to three, which is that one of the most effective tactics for any authoritarian party to pull right now is to claim the mantle of true democracy.

and to blame the other party for not being really democratic and not succeeding. And regardless of the strength of that case, it can be really resonate with people. And so the push and pull of a lot of arguments now in a society where democracy is in trouble is who can do a better job making the case that their side is to blame or that

getting their voters more riled up about this particular issue. And in this election, for a constellation of reasons, I think primarily oriented around anti-income and sentiment, Republicans had an easier time with their version of the argument, even though clearly they're the party that's more threatening to democracy.

Things will be different in future elections, especially if Trump acts in the way that I think he will. Like I said in the book, that this tactic succeeds primarily when you can point to a contrast between their pro-democratic rhetoric, the claims to be standing for democracy, and actual behavior that is itself anti-democratic.

And that's easier when somebody's in power and actually doing said anti-democratic things. Trump's, he's out of power, and a lot of people don't remember what things were like in 2019. Next time around 2026, 2028, as long as we still have relatively fair and functional elections, which I think we probably will, the fact that I have to caveat with probably is disturbing, but I think we're likely to. Voters will be seeing what Trump has to offer, and I just,

have a hard time believing that Democrats won't be better able to make this case next time around, given the objective changes to reality. I think they will, and I think there'll be a thermostatic reaction in the other direction. It has been very instructive for me. I live in Southern Mississippi at the moment, which is obviously a Trump stronghold. I can't tell you how many people I know who, if you ask them, just straight up,

What's more concerning to you, a gallon of milk being 72 cents higher than it was five years ago or president of the United States refusing a peaceful transfer of power? The answer is the milk, dude. And that may be because they don't really believe anything will truly destroy the American system. But even in that case, it speaks to my point about the background assumption that our democracy will just keep humming.

a long forever, no matter what we do or who we elect. And that is a problem, I think, a very big problem. I agree. The way I've been thinking about this since the election is that people lack a tragic imagination, the ability to think what happens if something changes in a way that you lose so much that you're taken for granted. And people just can't, they can't conceptualize of something that fundamental being broken.

because it's so outside the realm of their own experience. It sounds like catastrophizing to talk about it, and then it happens, and then you quickly adjust and live in the new reality, but it's forever changed. I do think it would be better if horrible shit didn't have to happen in order for us to course correct. And I will say, look, I do, I think you make a good case in the book that

We still have every reason to believe that liberal democracy will hold. Frankly, believing that to be true is probably essential to making it happen. That alone is all the justification we need, really. There's my optimism. There's your optimism. I appreciate that, Sean.

Zach Beecham. This is a long time coming, man. I'm really glad we finally got you on the show. Please go check out Zach's terrific book, The Reactionary Spirit. And you should also go check out his terrific newsletter called On the Right. We'll drop a link in the show notes. Zach Beecham. Thanks, buddy. Thank you. This has been great.

Alright, I hope you found that episode useful. I'll just say I went into this conversation thinking there are no simple answers to what just happened and I feel even more strongly about that now. But...

There's a tendency on the left to dismiss what just happened as some kind of rupture of democracy. But Trump won the popular vote in a free and fair election. So whatever we think about how he might govern.

That's democracy. And that's worth remembering. Anyway, as always, we do want to know what you think. So drop us a line at thegrayareaatbox.com. And then please rate, review, and subscribe to the show if you haven't already.

This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Travis Larchuck, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact checked by Enoch Dusso, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the gray area drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.com slash members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.