It's the Brian Larrow 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 Incidious 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 write to the subtitle of the 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

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