America’s reactionary moment is here

It’s been two weeks since the presidential election and there has been no shortage of autopsies. If anything surprised me about the outcome, it’s not that Donald Trump won, but how he did it. The president-elect won all seven swing states and the popular vote, and seemed to gain ground with basically every demographic except college-educated women. That is a political reckoning for the Democratic Party.

All we can definitively say at this point is that there are many reasons for this electoral defeat 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 happened.

What is fairly clear is that the roughly 76 million people who voted for Trump were saying “no” to something — or, to be more precise, they were saying “no” to lots of things. And I am genuinely interested in understanding what — apart from the Biden administration — so many people were rejecting, and what lessons we might be able to draw from that.

So in the aftermath of the election, I invited Vox’s own Zack Beauchamp on The Gray Area to talk about what we know and what it could mean for our political future. Beauchamp 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. He’s also the author of a recent book called The Reactionary Spirit.

We discuss the competing accounts of this election, the differences between conservative and reactionary parties, as well as some of the broader trends in democratic societies across the world. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

Now that we’ve all had a little time to process it, what do you make of the election results?

Zack Beauchamp

I would say we should separate out two different things. One is our analysis of what’s happening, and the other is how we feel about what happened. Analytically, I think it’s 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.

You mentioned that Trump gained ground with basically every group, right? Well, that only happens, this kind of uniform swing, when there’s some big structural factor at play. The candidates that make sense to explain a shift from 2020 to 2024 are inflation, right? That’s new and has been politically potent everywhere, and historically, in the US it matters. And anti-incumbent sentiment, which is a worldwide fact and true in democracies around the world. But Harris’s biggest losses were in blue states, and that suggests that something is going on beyond messaging. Something else is happening.

Sean Illing

Let’s set aside the election for a minute, though we’re going to keep coming back to it. When someone asks you what is American conservatism in 2024, what is your answer?

Zack Beauchamp

It’s 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. The distinction 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. 

Reactionary parties are different from conservatism. They both share an orientation towards believing that certain ways in which society is arranged — certain setups, institutions, even hierarchies — are good and necessary. 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.

My view is, at the core of the Trump movement, which I want to distinguish from every Trump supporter because they’re not the same, but the people who have given Donald Trump an iron grip on the Republican Party, that base 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.

Sean Illing

What Trumpism 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?

Zack Beauchamp

When we talk about what Trumpism is, we need to specify what we’re talking about. And I don’t think [that means] looking at a general election and saying that every person who voted for Trump is necessarily 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, 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, but this is just a fact about people who don’t pay attention to politics very much.

If you look at Trump’s core supporters though, the story of racial and social grievance, anger about immigration, a 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 and 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 were 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 the bulk of Republicans rejected the 2020 election when previously they had believed elections were legitimate. It’s why so many people were 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 46 or 47 percent of the electorate that’s not going to change their mind no matter what on both sides. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. 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 they voted for Trump once. So collapsing that distinction leads to analytic mistakes. 

Sean Illing

I continue to have a hard time parsing out all the forces that are combining to scramble our politics. 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. And I’m just going to keep saying that I think millions of people have never experienced real political disorder, so they take liberal democracy for granted and frankly don’t take politics very seriously. They’re entertained by Trump. They think he’s funny, and maybe he’ll make eggs a little cheaper and also drive annoying coastal elites insane and that’s kind of it for plenty of people.

Zack Beauchamp

Yeah, I think that’s true for a lot of people. Especially that point about taking liberal democracy for granted. When you live in a political order for a long period of time, you start to take it as a baseline. This is the way that things are. 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 when you 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. 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, just doesn’t even register because it seems too remote to feel real.

Sean Illing

I don’t think Trump is really 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 and he’s so well-equipped to be this kind of vehicle. 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?

Zack Beauchamp

No, but I think that that’s a mistake. 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.” And he openly admires leaders in other countries who have either always been authoritarians, like Xi Jinping in China, or who have torn down their own democracies like Putin [in Russia] or Viktor Orbán in Hungary. He thinks that they’re strong and that it’s great that they get to do stuff like that.

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.” 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. 

Sean Illing

Do you think our institutions will continue to hold? 

Zack Beauchamp

Yeah. I mean, I don’t think there’s any reason to expect that elections will be formally abolished by 2028 in the way that some wild-eyed commentators in social media have suggested. I think there is a moderate chance that the fairness of our elections will be severely undermined by then. 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. 

Put differently, I don’t think this election itself is the end of American democracy. 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 and there is a range of probabilities, ranging from truly catastrophic to merely somewhat bad.

Sean Illing

What makes this to you a more significant test than the first Trump administration?

Zack Beauchamp

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. 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, 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 and scope of the planning that has gone into this and the willingness to take a hammer to different institutions and the specificity of the plans for doing so is not normal. To name just one example from Project 2025, they want to prosecute the former Pennsylvania secretary of state who presided over the 2020 elections using the [Ku Klux] Klan Act, which was passed to fight the first Klan. It’s basically alleging that by trying to help people fix improperly filed mail-in ballots in 2020, this Pennsylvania secretary of state 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 threatening to lynch them. 

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 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 Civil Rights Division role, so the Election Crimes Unit and the Criminal Division, fire those people who 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 Aileen 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, and this is just one specific example, 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 law as 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.

Sean Illing

As hard as it is to believe, there’s a shelf life to Trump’s political career and there are people who think our situation will be drastically better the day he leaves. I’m not so sure about that. Are you?

Zack Beauchamp

Well, I agree with you in brief, but to build on what you’re saying, let’s say Trump dies in office. Then you get President JD Vance, who shares some very similar ideological commitments to the people who want to tear down American democracy. 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 saying what we need to do is go back to 2012. Because even if all you care about is narrowly 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.

Sean Illing

But can they do that effectively? Can anyone else do what Trump has done? 

Zack Beauchamp

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 this saying in Indian politics that Narendra Modi is the man who has a 56-inch chest. 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 have supported his party in the past. And I think Trump is much the same way. And that appeal, first of all, is not fixed. Modi, while he won reelection this year, his party took a major hit. They lost their parliamentary majority, and of course Trump lost in 2020.

But second is, what happens when he’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 rules 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 normal democratic procedure.

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 even now, he’s unpopular. 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.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.