From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
From the Lever’s reader supported newsroom this is Lever Time.
I’m Arjun Singh.
Since the founding of the Republic, America has always considered itself unique from the rest of the world. That term, American exceptionalism, has justified wars and invasions and why some think the United States should dominate the global pecking order.
Lately, what seems to make the US exceptional though is that it’s allowed an incendiary right-wing reality television star to upend its political system.
But to say that’s unique to the US is of course a classically exceptional, and incorrect statement.
Right wing nationalism has emerged in countries like Hungary and India. And like Trump, these leaders have taken advantage of popular anger against democratic institutions, and channeled that into an often nativist and belligerent form of governance.
But how did we arrive here? What’s happened in the last decade that’s led to the rise of a new crop of leaders who are vowing to remake their countries and turn their backs on traditional democracy?
In his new book, The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, Vox senior correspondent Zack Beach-em explores that history, and tries to understand how this became a global phenomenon.
Today on Lever Time, I’ll sit down with Zack to discuss the rise of right wing governments from Trump in the US to Modi in India, and how they all share elements with an antidemocratic ideology that was born in the U.S.
Arjun (00:22.852)
So, you know, to get into it, Zach, we're talking at an interesting time, although I feel like the last six years have been speaking at an interesting time. But I'm talking to you at this kind of unique moment where we're having an upending of the U .S. presidential election. But in particular, there's been a lot of, you know, thought and hand wringing in a way over the usage of Joe Biden's and Democrats kind of campaigning that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to
democracy that, you know, preventing him from coming to power is really the stakes of these elections. Ever since the assassination attempt on Trump, there has been some hand -wringing about whether that went too far or not. To kind of cut through that noise, though, as someone who reports on and has been researching, you know, democratic backsliding, when you look at the state of kind of the U .S. in the Trump era, in Trump's presidency, after Trump's presidency,
and what you hear from Trump right now, how do you think about the idea of democratic backsliding and existential threat to democracy? Is that something the US has been in a moment of? Is it new to us right now? What do you sort of make of that?
Zack Beauchamp (01:37.94)
Yeah, so the answer to your question, the simple answer is yes, the United States is in the midst of a fight over its democracy survival. That is, I think, clearly true. But to understand why that's true, we need to go a bit into American history, as I do in the book, right? So the argument that I make is that from the outset, the United States has been defined by two competing political traditions, right? One is democratic.
It's all what you see in civics classes and the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal, et cetera. And the other is, I think, much less well understood, but is a descendant of European feudalism that grew up in the American South as a consequence of slavery. It was an ideology that was designed to legitimize slave holding.
took from it, from really ideology promulgated by the Stuart Kings in England, that people have a natural place in human society. There's a natural order to things. And that ideology has evolved over time, but what it has stayed true to is this idea that there needs to be a social hierarchy and that social hierarchy can be enforced even at the expense of democracy and democratic rights.
And it's not explicit on that point. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the American authoritarian tradition is how well it adopts democratic language for undemocratic means. That's been true for hundreds of years. But what we're seeing right now is, and this waxes and wanes throughout American history, depending on circumstances, and we're seeing a waxing.
We're seeing, we're in the midst of, and really have been since, I'd say, at least since Barack Obama was elected president the first time, an upsurge in the American authoritarian tradition. It has been gaining in adherence, its penetration of mainstream institutions has been increasing. And now, I mean, I don't want to say that if Trump is re -elected, American democracy is over, because I don't necessarily think that's true. But I do think that Trump could do significant damage.
Zack Beauchamp (03:42.462)
if he comes back to the presidency in ways that are predictable and scary.
Arjun (03:48.422)
So you titled your book The Reactionary Spirit and sort of one of things that you write about here is that this is an American phenomenon, you will, uniquely American thing. What is the reactionary spirit and in what ways is this an American, I was going to say problem, I suppose you can call it a problem, but an American concept?
Zack Beauchamp (04:08.971)
Yeah, so it's important to be clear on the elements of it that are and aren't especially American, right? So the reactionary spirit is something that can happen anywhere. And in fact, I argue is at the heart of conflict between democracy, of conflict inside democracies around the world right now. At its essence, it is born out of a dilemma that conservative factions face inside democratic
Arjun (04:14.803)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (04:32.924)
right? Conservative parties, generally speaking, are dedicated to protecting certain elements of the status quo, the political status quo, including the distribution of resources, social status, social status, who's up and who's down, whose art is valued and who isn't, right? Like these, these notions of the way that the country should be and how it looks, that's the concern of a conservative movement, right, or a conservative party. And they have two ways to go about doing it. One is to defend
Arjun (04:53.171)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (05:01.599)
elements of the status quo they think are valuable through democratic means, right, through the system, the political system, and if they lose, then they lose and they try to do their best to accommodate themselves to defeat. Or they believe that upholding these standards, this existing set of social orders, is so valuable, so important, that democracy is secondary and often really is, if democracy is empowering social change, that it needs to be undercut or even toppled
For a variety of reasons, which we can talk about in a second, this is taking root and becoming especially powerful in a number of different countries across the country, a number of different countries across the world. What is distinct and distinctly American right now is the way in which the reactionary spirit is manifesting. You know, I mentioned a second ago that the American reactionaries have always been adroit at masking themselves in democratic language. That is historically abnormal.
Right? So in most places and most times, people say, if I'm against democracy, I'm against democracy. know, fascists weren't like, well, you know, I'm going to pretend to respect the results of elections. No, they said elections were bad. Right? We should get rid of them. And that's not the way that reactionaries operate today. Right. And the United States pioneered the tradition of using democratic language and ideas to hide
Arjun (06:15.24)
Right. Right.
Zack Beauchamp (06:30.207)
an ultimately authoritarian political project. And that's what's gone global today. While the reactionary spirit is inherently universal, its manifestation as a kind of, its democratic veneer is American. And that's what we've exported to the rest of the world.
Arjun (06:46.802)
Yeah, I think that's a fascinating point because, you know, my family is of Indian heritage. My entire family is actually still in India. And when I think about what you were just describing, I think a lot about Narendra Modi and Narendra Modi in India. And this percolates down to the conversations I'll have with family members, people in India, where if you present and you say as a flat statement, well, Modi is an authoritarian or Modi seems like he's doing
dictatorial things. A lot people will very aggressively push back and say Modi has won all of his elections. You Modi talks so much about the mandate that he needs from the people. And, you know, you sort of get into the tinkering language of authoritarianism versus democratic backsliding. But I you've wrote a fascinating article on Vox about Modi. You've been talking about him in India with Modi. How does that reactionary spirit take place? And do you see
connection and the roots of it being in the United States or is this something that's kind of more organic to what is happening in India because of their history of how they became democratic after the colonization by England and try to create these new institutions relatively recently?
Zack Beauchamp (08:02.425)
Yeah, so I think it's, in some ways it's a parallel story. Right, both India and the United States had these really lofty founding ideas. India's constitution when it was created may well have been the most egalitarian constitution anywhere in the world.
Right. It guaranteed equality based on religion, gender, language. There are a variety of protected classes inside the Indian Constitution, which in the late 40s, I mean, very, very few other countries had that level of egalitarianism. And there always was contestation about this, much like in the US. All men are created equal was not a fully accepted idea in the early republic. But India's reckoning.
with its own specifically, you the Hindu nationalist movement that Modi represents that wants to make India not an egalitarian state, but one for the Hindu majority. It kind of got delayed because a Hindu nationalist killed Gandhi.
It's hard to overstate how much this discredited Hindu nationalist politics in the early years of India as an independent country. It really damaged their ability to compete in mainstream politics and consigned them to the fringes. And the Hindu nationalist movement didn't really recover until Indira Gandhi,
Arjun (09:04.646)
Mm -hmm. Absolutely.
Zack Beauchamp (09:21.261)
basically pulled some authoritarian moves of her own. She's from the Congress party, which was Gandhi's party, was Nehru's party, the ruling party since India's founding. And she seized power, declared in what's now called the emergency, functionally declared one person rule for a few years and then ended it. Sort of very surprisingly. wow, yeah. I mean, I've heard really dramatic stories from then, right? was, yeah, it really, I mean, it really opened up Indian politics, right? Cause it showed that
Arjun (09:37.672)
Yeah, my dad was actually a little kid during that time period.
Arjun (09:44.361)
It was, it was a wild time, he said.
Zack Beauchamp (09:50.839)
Congress couldn't be the only ruling party and that created an opportunity, an opening for the far right to begin hammering home themes of Congress is corrupt. What you need, what we really need is a Hindu state that can make India a non -corrupt, pure, insert your, know, political, positive political adjectives there, right? So they needed to figure out a way to pioneer an exclusivist politics.
Arjun (10:09.662)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (10:15.584)
in a country where that had been pretty thoroughly saturated with egalitarian democratic ideas since its founding again not universally accepted, but we're really power a powerful part of Indian identity and part of the way we can go through again the specific history of how. modi is BJP turned into an electoral juggernaut and the the levers that they pulled inside India but what's interesting is that you know.
understanding the legacy of the assassination, right, and what going outside of the democratic system did to their movement back in the day, the BJP and its Hindu nationalist allies have really started to work within the Indian political system and tried to adhere as close as possible to democratic ideals and rules in their language, not in their practice.
Right. But in their language, much like Republicans under Trump, you know, they don't say elections are bad. They say Democrats stole the elections from us. And January 6th was just trying to, you know, restore people's sovereignty. Right. That kind of language. Modi talks a lot about how India is the mother of democracy. Right. And the democratic ideas have a deep root in India. Yeah. And, you know, that's true to an extent. Right. There really is in the Indian tradition. Right. There's three thousand years of religious tolerance, certain proto liberal ideas.
Arjun (11:18.852)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, it's something he's very proud of, in
Zack Beauchamp (11:32.696)
India really does have a long and rich commitment to ideas that we might recognizably now call democratic. But what Modi has done by co -opting that language is he starts to play it towards a Hindu script. He says India is the mother of democracies. He doesn't explicitly say this, but it's that it's not just India, it's Hindu India. And that Muslims are interlopers, invaders. The Muslims are the group that he hates the most, but there are,
Arjun (11:48.115)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (11:58.44)
varying degrees similar kinds of language or applied to Christians or Sikhs or other different Buddhists, the different many different groups inside India. So that's that's the kind of discourse that Modi sells his followers to avoid being the party that killed Gandhi or the fact the movement that killed Gandhi and now instead be the movement that's standing up for the ordinary Indians against the corrupt liberal elite.
Arjun (12:24.096)
One thing that I wonder is why does this manifestation of reactions seem to fall in right -wing politics a lot? You see it in Orban, see it in Modi, you see it in Trump, and...
You know, it's interesting that it does seem to fall under a lot of things under the right -wing political bubble, even though, you know, a handful of those things might not necessarily mean authoritarians. I mean, free market capitalism, pro -business kind of policies. But you do see this coming from the right a lot right now. Is that just unique to this moment? Or why do you think that it's so common on the right? Or am I wrong in that maybe there are liberal and even left -wing governments that have had a reactionary
to them.
Zack Beauchamp (13:08.931)
I think the reactionary spirit specifically is a right -wing phenomenon, right? Like what I'm talking about, I'm talking about the way in which the right becomes authoritarianism. Excuse me. The way in which the right becomes authoritarian. And that's not to say there isn't left -wing authoritarianism. Of course there is, right? Anyone who would try to deny that would be crazy. I think, I mean, you would have had to forget about the Soviet Union or current day Venezuela, but.
The way in which left -wing movements become authoritarian or lured into authoritarianism is different. It's not that they see social change happening and they say, too much change, we have to stop it, we need to break the system. It's kind of the reverse of that. They see not enough change happening and they say, things are still bad. We need to break the system if we want them to get better. We need to seize control if we want them to get better.
era or particular time is one of tremendous social change, right? Not in ways that will, you know, fully satisfy someone who is a real socialist, right? In some ways there's been backwards progress on economic issues, though that's the extent to which of that is debatable. But what really has happened
or at least that's true for some European democracies and North American democracies. What really has happened across the democratic world has been a tremendous amount of specifically social change, right? The status of minorities, the participation of women in politics, the open visibility of LGBT individuals. Like all of this is relatively new to democratic politics and it represents democracy starting to take its founding idea of political equality seriously, right? Like, I mean, I've
Arjun (14:24.477)
Mm
Zack Beauchamp (14:51.528)
referencing the Declaration of Independence a lot, all men are created equal had explicit caveats, right? Men and implicit caveats. Black people, black men weren't allowed in and non -property owning men in a lot of places weren't allowed to vote either at that point in time, let alone, there were, you know, there are issues of access for religious minorities in the early US, etc. And a lot of the second half of the 20th century has seen a tearing down of those barriers across countries, right? And really
Arjun (15:05.661)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (15:21.423)
the democratic world. Just a complete global social revolution. And to me, that is what set the stage for an upsurge in the reactionary spirit. Is the way not just in which that there was social change inside democracies, but countries that weren't democracies became democratic, creating the conditions for even more social change because democracy empowers people who want to change their lot in society to vote in such a way as to change said lot.
And you know, sometimes that challenge was economic. There were people at the top of the financial hierarchy who were really upset about the threats to, let's say, increased tax rates or make it such that people that they owned literal slaves were no longer slaves anymore in the case of the 19th century United States. But what's happening right now is, think, it's a cop car, hold
Arjun (16:11.93)
You're no problem.
Zack Beauchamp (16:19.616)
What's happening right now is really a transformation, a revolution in social attitudes. And that's why we're seeing so much right -wing anti -democratic activity and so little relatively left -wing democratic anti -activity. It's because it's not a time of social stagnation, it's a time of social change.
Arjun (16:38.782)
There's one sort of viewpoint that, I think this applies a lot to America, but in other places, which is that you're seeing kind of the rise of an economic populism and people have pointed to JD Vance's speech, the RNC where he's railing in corporations, even though JD Vance is a venture capitalist who cut his teeth in the middle of Silicon Valley. But we'll talk about that at a different podcast for a different time. one thing that I do hear is that this is a
Zack Beauchamp (16:58.484)
Yeah.
Arjun (17:08.678)
economic story that's really happening and that the right wing movements are happening because of a reaction to globalization, a reaction to sort of the excesses of capitalism and then the almost the intertwining of liberal values and you know massive corporations multinational corporations and I think here in the United States you you did see that and this is social values I should say not you know economic liberal values but
that there was this mass pushback against the elites, the economic interests and that. But you write in the book that the economic story isn't quite the whole story or even the story whatsoever. Elaborate a little bit more on what you were saying about the sort of the economics first account of why this is happening and what that misses and what it maybe does get about the reactionary spirit.
Zack Beauchamp (18:03.828)
I will answer that in a second when the truck stops going by. It's nice to live next to a busy street. Yeah, it's a really important question because I think there are elements of that narrative that aren't wrong, right? Some academic studies have shown some effects on of trade exposure, on voting patterns, a handful of things like that that do matter at the margins. think it's...
Arjun (18:06.568)
Yeah.
Zack Beauchamp (18:28.375)
rising inequality really matters because it concentrates money in the hands of some elites who have a lot to lose by the system being changed and those elites end up becoming the primary funders of reactionary political movements. But you reference the term economics first that I use in the book and I think economics first is an important way of putting it because it posits that the primary driver of reactionary movements today is kind of displaced anger and inequality of right and that's not true.
Right? may matter on the margins, right? There might be a small number, or comparatively small number of people, maybe globally large, of people who have lost their jobs due to deindustrialization and are very, very angry and voting for Donald Trump as a result of that. But typically, that's more of a window dressing for what's actually happening, right? And this has been, and what's actually happening.
Arjun (19:03.724)
Mm
Arjun (19:17.916)
Yeah. Kind of an upending of the social order, usually.
Zack Beauchamp (19:21.331)
Yeah, like, and if trade matters, matters because it's a sign, like factory shuttering is a sign of visible change, along with other changes. You know, people who look different starting to move into a town or a metro area, speaking different languages, a guy who looks different being president of the United States, specifically a black man. And
You know, you can't say in theory which of these explanations, sort of social backlash or economic backlash comes first. You have to look at the data, right? And that's what I did when I've, I really have been doing this for almost a decade now, checking out the data on this. And it almost always points one way, which is that social causes matter more.
Right, you can, there are a variety of different ways to slice this. But one one thing that I find really helpful is that when political scientists do regression analysis, right, they look at multiple different variables and see what their effect is the effect size of something like
race or gender, that is someone's perceptions of race metrics like racial resentment, which is a tool that political scientists used to measure people's racial attitudes without being like, are you racist? Yes or no, which is not an especially useful question, right? So they use the scale and they find that the degree that somebody holds
racially resentful attitudes is way more predictive than any measure of their economic health or well -being. And, you know, it often finds, you know, a study might find some economic effects, but it turns out that when you can control for the effect of education, these often fall out. And now that's political science jargon, but to put it in more concrete language, right, basically, you're, can be wealthy and not have a college degree and be much more likely to vote for Trump than
Zack Beauchamp (21:09.829)
who is either poor and has no college degree or someone who is wealthy and has a college degree. That is to say, it's the level of education. Yeah, yeah, it's the level of education that matters more than income, right? So one way to think about it is grad students who are not rich, right? Often quite poor by national standards.
Arjun (21:18.578)
because it's about like cultural circumstances around you.
Zack Beauchamp (21:35.359)
They're still voting for Democrats, Because they're highly educated. But someone who owns four car dealerships and started working in that field right out of high school, they're going to show up as non -college, but they'll be quite wealthy. And that person is like the archetypal Trump voter. Like, don't think closed factories. Think the boat parades that you've seen in Florida of people going around, right? Right around with flags. That's really what the sort of core demographic of Trumpism is. And I think that often falls out of the story.
Arjun (21:52.581)
Yeah.
Arjun (22:02.354)
Yeah, I mean, that's such a good point because it is so much.
Cultural and I think going back to you know what I was saying earlier is that that was what was started surprising to me is when You saw Republicans who've been very friendly to big business, know for way past you and I have both been alive but there was a backlash when there was a perception that these corporations were starting to espouse liberal values whether that was major league baseball, you know letting players wear pride patches or You know corporate DEI initiatives on Wall Street
people really rebel to and it's you know it did kind of show that the cultural values were more important or more of a driving force for them to react than it was excess of wealth or things like that. I think it's very difficult to disentangle the role of race, ethnicity, identity from a lot of what is happening and what I find interesting from your book is that you know you look at a lot of different countries and I see that particularly in
US, you talk about the Civil War era and the slavery era as a time when the reactionary spirit starts. You see that with Modi in India. We haven't talked yet about Netanyahu in Israel, but the role that that race immigration, I guess if you will, a changing visible national identity, how does that feed into the reactionary spirit and where do you see that kind of cropping up in today's reactionary spirits?
Zack Beauchamp (23:34.673)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's at the core of it in every country around the world that I look at, right? Is there's a sense that the country is no longer for people like them among supporters of reactionary political movements, that something has been lost and that something needs to be regained. And the sense of what that something is, is very often bound up in visible lived experience.
Arjun (23:39.887)
Mm -hmm.
Arjun (23:45.779)
Yeah.
Zack Beauchamp (24:00.286)
of the society becoming one in which things don't work in the way that they used to and put the same people in charge and in position invisible positions in the way that it used to. Right. And so I focus in the book on Barack Obama's election because I think the presidency has a uniquely symbolic power and there's a lot of political science evidence backing up the degree to which like just the identity of the guy in the White House there being a black man there really changed the way people thought about politics.
Arjun (24:22.088)
Yeah, absolutely.
Arjun (24:29.309)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (24:30.189)
So it's like, I think that was an especially important inflection point, but it's not the only one, right? There were lots of structural determinants that went before this one particular event and in different countries, it's different things. But it can even be things like you mentioned that point about, you know, woke capitalism as conservatives often term it now, right? What kinds of families show up in advertising can affect somebody's sense of place?
Right? Who the corporate, the mascots are. Like there was that big boycott movement against Bud Light because they partnered with a trans influencer for like one particular ad. Right? To me that shows the power of symbolic markers of acceptance in mobilizing reactionary backlashes. And I think people, know, people liberals and people on the left are not good at understanding how much that matters.
Arjun (25:05.779)
Mm -hmm.
Arjun (25:24.765)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (25:24.936)
to people on the right and how much that can fuel tremendous senses of unease and anger at the way that things have changed. They often will say, it's irrational. It's voting against their interests. How could anybody care about things like that? It seems so stupid. But for a lot of people, as you suggested, it's not stupid to them. To them, it speaks to their understanding of the nation changing at an elemental level and not knowing what their place is.
Arjun (25:49.916)
Yeah, and a feeling of being left out of that transition, if you will. Whether that's correct or not, you know, that resentment in there.
Zack Beauchamp (25:57.01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's that people like me and values like mine aren't being represented in Washington or in the culture. And that is a really powerful reservoir to draw on. And it makes people feel really alienated from the political system and in ways that often diverge from.
Actual economic circumstance like when really striking study I looked at again, is an American study, but it looked at people who lived in rural areas and tried to identify and analyze what they call rural resentment. Right is the sense that ruralities are locked out of political power and excluded from mainstream society dominated by coastal elites. They found that there were a few different ways in which this was expressed.
But one thing that they tried to track is the degree to which expressions of rural resentment correlated with Trump voting. And they found that in places where people were poorer and more upset about the distribution of resources, they were actually less likely to vote for Trump, people in those areas, than other people in other rural areas. Whereas when people in the areas expressed a cultural variant of rural resentment,
right, when they were concerned about, you know, feeling like this wasn't their society, they were much more likely to vote for Trump. That was positively correlated pretty strongly with Trump. And to me that suggests this is not, it's not an economic phenomenon. really, like culture is a very, very profound and deep motivating capacity for people that we ignored our peril.
Arjun (27:32.988)
Yeah, and I think it's the emotional.
You know, I don't want to say the emotional truth, but it is the emotional core of what a lot of people kind of form their worldviews around. And that leads to how they think about everything else. So taking that idea, looking at a place like Israel, because Israel is interesting to me in that I think on, and again, you know, I can be very wrong. Please correct me on this, but you know, on both of the liberal side and the more conservative side, I mean, Israel is built around sort of a shared identity that this is a Jewish state,
This was really built because of the pogroms, the Holocaust, the centuries of oppression that people have felt. And yet in there, does seem like Netanyahu sort of adheres to this reactionary spirit. But I remember you and David had a fascinating conversation about liberal Zionism. So in what way does Israel kind of fit into this idea that it is a cultural change that
Zack Beauchamp (28:22.173)
Very much so, yeah, very much so.
Arjun (28:34.836)
who is reacting to and kind of leaping on and is that something born out of culture, ethnicity, religion? How does this play out inside of Israel?
Zack Beauchamp (28:45.293)
So Israel has always had a deep tension inside of its national identity, which is that it is a country that promises universal equality in some ways. It doesn't use the word equality, but it certainly aspires to be a liberal state in the way that its founding documents and original laws are structured. But it also is one premise on the idea that it's the nation state of a specific people. So how can it be a liberal democracy, but also
an ethnic democracy for a certain certain group right there's a lot of tension there and different Israeli both and different Israelis both you know scholars and political figures have worked this out in different ways over the course of time and a lot of the.
big picture of Israeli politics is which side of that ledger is winning and how it deals with the side that's losing. Right? Is Israel a more liberal country or is it a less liberal country and a more more hardline Jewish one? So I think the crucial period here, I talked about this a little bit David last time, is the 1990s. Right? Because in the 1990s, you had two concerted efforts.
Arjun (29:39.123)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (29:57.639)
to bring Israel in line with its more liberal identity and develop a new vision for how that related to its Jewish identity. And you can see this in what was called the Constitutional Revolution, a series of court rulings in the mid early 90s that kind of expanded the court's power to review legislation and often did so, not too often, but enough, did so to push the country in a more liberal direction. And part of that,
That idea, as expressed by a man who's a long time and famous Supreme Court justice or Haram Barak, was that Israel being a Jewish state didn't mean being a state that gave
special rights and privileges to Jews per se, other than giving Jews unconditional immigration rights because of the fear of persecution abroad that you mentioned. It's that it was a country that used Jewish national symbols, right? It had used the Hebrew calendar, Hebrew was the national language, it had the holidays were Jewish holidays, it had all of these senses of Jewish identity in a way that made it meaningfully a Jewish state, but not one that said,
Arjun (31:05.573)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (31:11.915)
Jews have access to rights and privileges that other people can't have in all other ways. In fact, he argued that Judaism demanded that equal treatment of all citizens when it comes to civil and political rights. And so that vision of what it means to be a Jewish state, the trappings of Jewishness, a Jewish majority and being a place of refuge for Jews persecuted abroad, was a distinctly liberal spin on Zionism.
And one that was perfectly compatible democracy and it happened at the same time. think very non coincidentally with the most serious effort to make peace with the Palestinians in Israeli history, right? The Oslo Accords and then the subsequent negotiations. Because Israeli society was becoming open to the idea that it didn't that it not just shouldn't for its own reasons be occupying Palestinian land, but that.
It would be an affirmative good, a moral obligation even, to develop peace with the Palestinians, to live side by side and not dominate an Arab population and impose what is essentially an authoritarian system of rule on them in the West Bank. And that was a version of Israel that could have been, I think. The problem is the peace process fell apart, the end consequence
Arjun (32:20.627)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (32:32.179)
whoever you want to blame for it. The reality is a series of increasingly vicious wars. The Gaza being taken over by Hamas and now leading to the current horrific conflict, the worst in the history of Israeli -Palestinian violence, at least modern history, when it can be defined as specifically Israeli -Palestinian rather than Israeli -Arab.
And that the rise of violence and the failure of the peace process has really enabled Israeli reactionaries to say we were right all along. Right. This is a Jewish state and it needs to be a Jewish state because if it's not an exclusively Jewish state you won't be safe here. That's how we safeguard ourselves is by protecting the dominance and the social power of Jews inside Israel and their control sort of.
not quite exclusive, but close to exclusive control over the state. And that has fueled in a variety of specific ways, often linked in very concrete and specific, let me take that, in very concrete legal mechanisms to the occupation itself in the West Bank, a really major backsliding in Israeli democracy, one that's been on display during the current conflict as well.
Arjun (33:48.432)
If we're trying to say move forward from or away from these reactionary right wing.
Ideologues 2024 is a very pivotal year for this to be happening. We have our presidential election here. Modi has just returned to power. You know, there's a chance that this could be the make or break year for Netanyahu as well. But the role of the United States in steering global global policy or global ideology. I want to be very careful and sameness because I don't want to say that the US is the the world
kind of follow the US's lead, but the US has, especially in Israel, economic influence and you know, the US has kind of used its economic influence as a cudgel to try and push through reforms before. Now if the United States goes towards a Trump, you have a Modi in India, you have Orban in Hungary,
Does that create the conditions for a further rise of these reactionary movements? I guess what I'm trying to understand is there's very much a part of me that just wants to lump everything together and be like, there's a pattern. See, everything is happening, everywhere it's all interconnected. But is there a pattern or are these unique to the countries that they're happening in? And it isn't necessarily about what happens in the United States can influence what happens in Israel. It's just that this is a more spontaneous moment.
Zack Beauchamp (35:15.768)
No, no, you're not making it up, right? There is, there are interconnections here and there are interconnections of two kinds, right? The first is direct linkages, right? The United States has leverage in the form of trade agreements that it could be more or less likely to use to protect democracy in places where it's threatened. Use the example of aid to Israel, but there's also another truck, hold
Arjun (35:40.754)
Yeah, no problem.
Zack Beauchamp (35:56.234)
You use the example of aid to Israel, but there's also, you know, trade ties with India. The United States really sets at the top of the international economic hierarchy. And so the way in which it's willing to use its financial cloud and its economic relationship with other countries, not just in the forms of sanctions, but in the forms of whether they ink new trade agreements, you know, where certain
decisions about even something like military basing, military aid, or even something like military aid, right, or assistance or cooperation, all of those can be affected to varying degrees by human rights concerns. And the US is much less likely to do that in a world where Donald Trump is in power, which is not to say that other countries don't matter, right, in concrete ways. God damn it.
What is happening out there?
Arjun (36:52.862)
See you tomorrow.
Zack Beauchamp (37:05.232)
Yeah, there's a huge truck in the alleyway next to me. I don't think it's that bad right now. It's just very, loud. Okay, yeah. But the United States is the most important country in the world financially, so it does matter, right?
Arjun (37:08.744)
Yeah, no problem. I can try and, god, de -noise it in Pro's production too.
Zack Beauchamp (37:19.012)
You know, even a country like Hungary, right? It's not an economic power by any means, but it is inside the European Union and the European Union often and NATO both operate to a degree by unanimity. So the ability for other countries and international bodies to respond to authoritarian actions or backsliding in another country is limited by what happens inside Hungary. So even there, that matters a great deal. But I think the other thing, and here the US is again the most important, but also followed by India, is
Arjun (37:25.523)
Yep.
Zack Beauchamp (37:48.936)
Demonstration effects, right? What country is perceived to be in a position of power and what their political system works or in how their political system works matters a great deal for what people in other countries are willing to countenance and for the kinds of ideas that enter the minds of political entrepreneurs there if the Trump story is a success story
Well, that'll encourage lots of similar politicians like him in other places and it will encourage lots of voters in other places to believe it's possible.
And down the line, right, India, think, will occupy an increasingly important role in that space. It doesn't so much right now, but given its rapid pace of economic growth and its rising status as a global diplomatic power, I think India will soon have a really significant demonstration weight. And so I argue in the book that when it comes to the future of democracy, what happens in India is much more important than what happens even in China, because it's very hard to influence the democratic world from outside. But once you're when you're inside,
Arjun (38:47.998)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (38:50.044)
Your example matters a great deal more.
Arjun (38:52.852)
I've always thought that because I think China has been easy for the US to sort of do a New Cold War style and just say well, they're gonna do something radically different But it's harder when you have someone who's ostensibly an ally someone who ostensibly is speaking in the same rhetoric that that you and
your sort of government's culture has been built around. Before we leave, I'd love to hear your sense of what happened in France because France went through a moment where it seemed as if it could go to a reactionary hard right, Marine Le Pen, I believe her father was also a sort of right wing reactionary. Ultimately, it didn't happen. When you were watching the French elections in that moment, what does that say to you about, you know, the staying power of
Zack Beauchamp (39:30.18)
Very much so.
Arjun (39:41.371)
actionary spirit and was that maybe a bulwark example against it?
Zack Beauchamp (39:45.925)
Yeah, I think the French election is very interesting and worth breaking down in specifics. I'll start with the general point about it, which is the French election showed how when you feel that democracy is under threat, rightly or wrongly, that can be a unifying force for people across the political spectrum to rally in its defense.
Arjun (39:51.945)
Mm
Zack Beauchamp (40:08.614)
And I think that's what happened in France, right? So the French legislative election takes place in two rounds. And in the first round, the far right RN won a plurality and was projected, if things stayed the same in the second round, to have even maybe even an outright majority of seats in the French parliament. They ended up coming in third when that actually happened, which no one expected.
Arjun (40:30.802)
Yeah, this is a total flip it felt like.
Zack Beauchamp (40:32.984)
Yeah, no one expected that. The left -wing parties came in first, and President Emmanuel Macron's party, Renaissance, came in second. They were supposed to come in third by a distant margin. or at least one of them. Sorry, I'll scrap that. So the question is, right, like what happened? And the big answer is it was cooperation between Macron's centrist faction and the left. Not only did the left unite various different left -wing parties,
in one coalition, which is actually quite a feat. Right, it ranged from the center -left Socialist to some pretty far -left factions, including the Communist Party, all running under one ticket.
But you also had an agreement with Macron or some kind of election by election agreements where candidates from one party or the other would drop out. So there wouldn't be three way races with the far right, but rather than in basically every district, the far right would be in a one -on -one fight with either a party of the center or a candidate of the center or a candidate of the left.
And that meant that there wasn't the kind of vote inefficiencies and vote splitting of people who oppose the far left and the people who oppose the far right and the majority of French voters who really don't like them were given a chance to vote for something else. And that's what happened, right? They cooperated. They figured out how to work the electoral system to put together an anti far right majority.
Arjun (41:55.379)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (41:55.468)
And that's a model that other countries should be looking at when they're concerned about their own reactionary upsurges is what about my political system is like the rules that the French used that could allow me to coordinate with people that I disagree with fundamentally on lots of issues. Like let's be clear, Macron and the left had huge policy disagreements, right? But really, really big ones. Yeah, and liberal values.
Arjun (42:16.486)
Absolutely, yeah. But their shared thing
was democracy it felt like and you know and I'd be curious if in your research and all of this is different from the time period when fascism and dictatorships were rising the pre -World War II and the World War II era it feels that even the people who might be enticed by some of what the right -wing reactionaries are saying fundamentally people want to live in a democracy that the underlying value is in the democracies they want to elect their leaders they want to have a say
and it might be more of, I'm not going to break down every single person as to why they're voting for someone on the right, but that seems to feel like a little bit of hope and you I want to end on the example of Canada that you write about. Tell me a little bit about Canada and what happened there and how they sort of moved on from their reactionary moment.
Zack Beauchamp (43:13.304)
Yeah, I mean, it's not so much a reactionary moment as it is a country that had a lot of difficulties in defining itself. Right, Canada didn't really know what it was about for a lot of its history until recently. Canadians may or may not like me saying that, but that is, it is the reality of the situation until, yeah.
Arjun (43:31.924)
Well, you had a pretty rough fights between the French Canadians and the English speaking Canadians. The Kipa Kwa wasn't there was this secessionist movement where Montreal is to try and leave,
Zack Beauchamp (43:43.12)
yeah, there was a tremendous amount of violence during that time. Martial law declared in Quebec, there's parts of it. And that led Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin's father, to formulate an official policy which eventually turned into the cornerstone of modern Canadian national identity, which is multiculturalism.
Arjun (43:47.058)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (44:06.318)
Right. The idea that Canada isn't just a country for one group of people, but or for one set identity, but rather a variety of different ones operating inside harmony with no one particular identity dominating the other ones and putting them in subordinate positions. The way that this is often explained in Canadian schools is comparing it to the American melting pot model where immigration to different populations emerge into a unified whole that shares a certain identity that's taken on
Arjun (44:34.802)
Right.
Zack Beauchamp (44:36.232)
components of multiple different groups. The Canadians think of themselves as being a salad bowl, right? They're all still separate ingredients, even if they're in the same bowl together, coexisting in a harmonious whole, but not being melted together, right? And that, a salad bowl. Well, people may disagree with this. This is like the textbook, like Canadians learned this in school, right? Kind of depiction of their country. And it's been an enormously successful
Arjun (44:42.527)
Yeah.
Arjun (44:49.992)
That's what I call Los Angeles, but a lot of people tend to disagree with me.
Zack Beauchamp (45:05.802)
and giving Canadians something to unite around, something that really defines what Canada gives to the world. And it's a vision of equality and multiculturalism and social justice. So one Canadian, a conservative Canadian professor derisively calls Canada the world's first woke country. So he obviously doesn't like that, right? But
Arjun (45:23.55)
Zack Beauchamp (45:27.488)
I think that a more positive spin on it is Canada is the country, one of the countries that takes democracy's promise most seriously anywhere in the world that really does take notions of political equality seriously and meets people where they are in treating them as equals, not trying to force them to act in a particular way or be a particular kind of person. And that's made Canada almost uniquely resistant to modern far right.
anti -democratic politics, right? The current Conservative Party in Canada, the leader is by Canadian standards far right, I think that's fair to say, but he's also nothing like Trump or the AFD in Germany, or let alone someone like Orban or Netanyahu.
Arjun (46:11.358)
Does Canada have like a nativist, I wouldn't say an uprising, but do they have these nativist tremors that you've seen in the United States or in Hungary? Yeah.
Zack Beauchamp (46:19.639)
Yeah, but it's...
It's not even close in terms of power or potency, right? That definitely exists. And I don't want to pretend it doesn't, that Canada is a perfect country with no conflict over immigration. But it remains the case that immigration is, on a values level, especially popular. Arguments against immigration that have gotten traction only very recently, and I don't know how durable this is, has to do with housing prices. Housing in Canada is often quite expensive. And so they argue that we can't take in as many people as we've been taking in unless we can get the housing market under control.
that's, you know, a different kind of anti -immigration argument than the one that works nearly anywhere else. And it's not one based on the idea that these people are a threat to our national identity or that things are changing too quickly. That's all of those arguments don't work, right? They're not effective. Even the right -wing populists in Canada don't want to cut immigration for that reason. They attest to the ways in which
Arjun (47:07.346)
Right.
Zack Beauchamp (47:14.123)
diversity and multiculturalism are essential to Canadian identity. And that to me is a striking success. And it also manifests in limited challenges to the democratic system itself. Like there's just not any evidence that even the current conservative leader, Pierre Polyevra, would steamroll democratic freedoms. There's like maybe one or two examples of bad policy ideas that he has relating to democracy, like cutting funding for the CBC, it's central broadcaster. But A, I don't know if he'd be able to do that. And B, I
That's bad.
But it's certainly not the same as firing the entirety of the civil service and replacing them with crony bureaucrats as Trump is proposing to do in the next term. Or going as far as Viktor Orban and gutting not only the civil service, but the judiciary, the election committee, seizing control of the private sector media, all the things that modern authoritarians do to destroy democracy from the inside. There's not any evidence that that would or is likely to happen in Canada anytime soon. And it speaks to the way in which changing
one's values on diversity and multiculturalism, provide a sort of vaccination against what I would call specifically reactionary politics, not just right wing, but anti -democratic, extreme right politics.
Arjun (48:21.865)
Mm -hmm.
Arjun (48:28.734)
So I got an easy.
Last question for you. How do we just do that here? No, I kid about that. is it a top down thing? Because what you said is my parent's story of immigrating to the United States is that the US is an idea, the democracy is an idea, and that it is a multicultural promise of democracy, of freedom, of enterprise. It's not rooted in a religious or racial identity. But how does a country
Zack Beauchamp (48:31.252)
Sure. Well, no,
Arjun (49:00.138)
like that.
Zack Beauchamp (49:01.238)
Well, so I don't think anyone should just try to be Canada, right? The circumstances that led to Canada's adoption of official multiculturalism are complex and probably not replicable anywhere else. So that's not my suggestion. What I do think Canada should teach us is that appealing to core elements of American, to core elements of a national identity.
Arjun (49:05.735)
Yeah.
Zack Beauchamp (49:24.225)
can be immensely valuable and potent when those elements of identity caught against the appeal of authoritarian movements. And so in Canada, that's been
Arjun (49:33.832)
Mm -hmm.
Zack Beauchamp (49:35.785)
It's been bolstered by the ability to draw on a variety of different traditions, but the multiculturalism aspect being at the top of the list. In a country like the United States where that's more contested, right, you just saw JD Vance in his Republican convention speech say something like, America is not an idea, it's a place, right, and really building a of a blood and soil vision of American nationality. Almost literally, right, he talked about, you know,
about going to his grave and generations lie in graves, right? It really is about the blood of the people who've been here. United States, that's not, as you suggested, it's not historically been how the United States conceives of itself, at least in the majority. So when you want to make arguments that draw on the deep well of national consensus, that point of consensus is democracy in the US. Not multiculturalism, but democracy, the idea of a self -determining polity. And so if you can show
that what reactionary, and I think this is true by the way in a lot of other peer countries as well, not as deeply as it is in the United States, but in a lot of other democracies, there's generally a view that democracy is good. And that gives you a similar tool to official multiculturalism, not quite as potent, but still valuable in attacking these movements, because what you can do is show the contrast, the gulf.
between what they say about supporting democracy and what their actual policies are, the concrete specific things that threaten the system. And in showing that golf, you can do significant, significant damage to these movements' political standing. Actually, the last question, okay. Yeah.
Arjun (50:57.459)
Mm -hmm.
Arjun (51:08.488)
I know I said that was my last question, but this is actually my last question to hear from you. what you were saying is it's making me think about, there is a lot of importance on people on the ground kind of creating these connections with each other. And you write a little bit about this in your book. So like, for example, I live in Washington, DC. I'm on the same block as this nice little bar called the Wonderland
And it's a neighborhood water room, but it's a place where people connect. And it's in a weird way, it's a shared commonality that we're all friendly with each other because we kind of, you we know we exist in the same community. We exist in the context of all that came before us. But for people who are listening right now, you know, who might be saying, how do I help?
Zack Beauchamp (51:31.552)
I go there all the time.
Arjun (51:57.864)
get us to that direction. How can I as a listener, how can I as someone just trying to live my life, help move my community and thus the country towards that embrace of multiculturalism? What would you say?
Zack Beauchamp (52:10.344)
Yeah, I think that one important, sorry, hold on, someone's coming into the house and I need to be quiet on the podcast for a second. So I think.
Arjun (52:17.832)
Yeah, no problem.
Zack Beauchamp (52:25.15)
I think one really valuable thing to do is to think about micro level actions that one can take in your own life that can strengthen not
you know, democratic resilience, but build a sense of community and social trust because distrust in society is often deeply linked to anti -democratic politics. And I think one good way to do that, I suggest in the book, is get involved in pro -democracy organizing or just local organizing on particular issues that you think are of relevance to democracy, the challenge reactionary views of the world. Another thing, and this may sound saccharine or simple, but I really think it's not and it's underappreciated, is talk
Arjun (53:08.51)
Yeah, absolutely.
Zack Beauchamp (53:09.642)
talk to people that you know about politics, right? And people who disagree with you, right? There's a lot of research showing that it's possible to persuade people, right? But it takes a lot of work. You know, have to have like deep conversations with people for hours and that's really hard to scale. But one advantage about talking to people who are in your life, one advantage about talking to people who are in your life is that they already know you.
Arjun (53:12.628)
Oh, 100%. 100%. Yes.
Zack Beauchamp (53:39.414)
and they already trust you. And knowing and trusting you means that they'll listen to what you're saying. They're more receptive, more willing to change their minds. So don't just go talk to them and say, I think that you're wrong and Donald Trump is bad or Benjamin Netanyahu is gonna destroy Israeli society. That kind of argument is not gonna be a big.
Arjun (53:47.955)
Mm -hmm.
Arjun (53:55.972)
Right. Start yelling at each other and yeah.
Zack Beauchamp (54:05.384)
winner, right, what is is trying to understand their perspective, showing to somebody that you that you listen to them and that you care about them and you see their value as a person and a fellow citizen, and then explain why you're coming from a different place and how rooted in shared values like democracy you come to a different conclusion about politics than they do. And that's not easy, right, it might not always be fun and it's not like
It's not gonna feel like you've swung an election on your own when you've done it the way you feel when you get caught up in volunteering for a campaign, even though you haven't swung the election. But arguably, like lots of people doing this kind of deep engagement at once, the political scientists like to call it deep canvassing, really can alter the foundations of the way a society relates to itself. And so if you're just listening to this podcast and you're looking for what can I do to help protect democracy from the reactionary spirit, that's what you can do.
Arjun (55:00.852)
Well, Zach, thank you so much for this conversation. The book is the reactionary spirit. Thanks for joining LeverTime.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Lever Time. This episode was produced by me Arjun Singh with help from Chris Walker, and editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell.
We’ll be back next week with another episode of Lever Time.