It's the Brian Letter Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, Zach Beecham,

senior correspondent at Vox, where he largely covers right-wing populism and challenges to democracy

in the United States and abroad. He has a new book now called The Reactionary Spirit,

how America's most insidious political tradition swept the world. Zach, we've always appreciated

your reporting when you've been on. So congratulations on the book. And welcome back to WNYC. Thank you, Brian. I really, really appreciate that. So right to the subtitle of the book,

how America's most insidious political tradition swept the world. So is part of your premise that

the reactionary spirit is an American export? Yes and no. So I define the reactionary

spirit as the impulse to when faced with a social movement or changes in society through

democratic means that threaten the stability of the government, sorry, that threaten the stability of certain social hierarchies,

that people who support those hierarchies make a choice to choose,

well, the hierarchies over democracy and work to undermine democracy

to protect keeping things the way that they are.

Those hierarchies may be of wealth, race, class, gender, religion, caste.

There are lots of different ways they can be structured.

And this, I argue, is a perennial feature, a conflict that's in every democracy, right?

Because every society has its hierarchies and it has people who are attached to them

and people who are willing to go to extreme to defend them.

What I argue in the book is an American export, or at least an American invention that has

since gone global, is the way in which the reactionary spirit operates today, that it creates

a very particular kind of anti-democratic politics, one that masks itself as democratic and uses

democratic-seeming language to result to support and even enact in actual politics, this age-old

reactionary spirit.

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