From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lerer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Thursday, July 18th.

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 certain social hierarchies,

that people who support those 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 extremes to defend them. What I argue

...