The most hostile administration to the press in American history was former President Barack Obama’s administration.
Obama also tried to force nuns to provide contraception and decreed that “transgender” students should be able to use the bathroom “that corresponds with their identity.”
These are things that are missing from Zack Beauchamp’s new book, The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.
Beauchamp is a writer for the leftist website Vox. In The Reactionary Spirit, he spends a lot of time arguing that former President Donald Trump and the new political populism represent authoritarianism — despite the fact that most political and cultural repression today is coming from the Left. Leftists such as Beauchamp keep preaching that Republicans are authoritarians, then in the next breath demand that you submit to the Left’s policies, no matter how irrational, immoral, unconstitutional, or bizarre.
Here is the sleight of hand that Beauchamp uses. He takes old cases of people resisting moral and necessary social change and declares that such attitudes are still a driving force on the Right. Are you against a boy claiming to be transgender sharing a locker with your daughter? You’re no different from the goons who beat up civil rights marchers. You’re an authoritarian.
Someone once observed that “for liberals, it will forever be Selma, Alabama, in 1965.” This is where Beauchamp lives. He never considers that in the last 50 years, liberalism itself has changed, going from being focused on equality, common sense, and due process to becoming hysterical, punitive, and irrational — not to mention authoritarian.
Beauchamp delves deeply into the ghastly racial history of the United States, arguing that authoritarians are people who fight against the kind of social change that is an “essential” part of democracy. He then transfers the iniquity of defending slavery to conservatives who opposed Obama. “A black man in the Oval Office is undeniable evidence that things had changed in America,” he wrote, “that certain elements of the old order no longer held. Obama’s victory, paired with mass immigration and declining native-white birth rates, led many older white voters to feel as though they were losing their country.”
Ruled out of bounds by Beauchamp is the idea that many of us on the Right dislike Obama not for racial reasons but due to the president’s tendency toward, well, authoritarianism.
The most damning takedown of Obama’s authoritarianism I’ve ever read came not from Breitbart News or Sean Hannity but from Len Downie, the legendary former editor of the Washington Post. In October 2013, Downie and the Committee to Protect Journalists published a blistering report on the Obama administration and the media. It said: “In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and e-mail records. An ‘Insider Threat Program’ being implemented in every government department requires all federal employees to help prevent unauthorized disclosures of information by monitoring the behavior of their colleagues.”
“This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,” said David E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times.
I almost forgot Obama’s drone strikes. In the Harvard Political Review, writer Prince Williams called Obama “a war criminal.” He wrote, “In his recent self-aggrandizing memoir ‘A Promised Land,’ Obama defends his drone program through a messiah complex; he writes, ‘I wanted somehow to save them. … And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.’ President Obama would have the reader believe he wanted to help the suspected terrorist but simply couldn’t. In reality, he consciously and undemocratically decided the fates of thousands of lives, without due process.”
Beauchamp uses academic jargon to disguise the weakness of his premise. He can’t call Trump an outright authoritarian because Trump gives press conferences, is for gay rights, tries to keep America out of wars, and tries to remove regulations on businesses. Trump can also be an infantile crybaby, but that’s petulance, not authoritarianism. Instead, Beauchamp warns of “powerful political factions in established democracies” that “worked to alter the very fabric of the democratic system” and “were able to replace democracy with something altogether different: a system that appeared democratic at first glance but was fundamentally rigged in favor of the ruling party.” This, Beauchamp declares, is “competitive authoritarianism.”
Competitive authoritarianism “maintains formal democratic rules but breaks those rules in order to protect a special class.” They also “gerrymander, rig campaign-finance rules, control the media, politicize the justice system, and harass opposition parties — all quietly enough to maintain the veneer of democracy, but effectively enough to rig elections in their favor.” The result? “Restrictions on the free press, crackdowns on civil rights groups, politicization of courts and law enforcement, repression of ethnic or religious minorities … all examples of ways that democracy can be eroded.”
Again, with Obama’s war on the press, his contraception mandate, his drone strikes, and now Biden’s lawfare against Trump, with the stifling wokeness that puts boys in girls locker rooms and forces journalists to censor themselves, with chaotic voting regulations and an all-out assault on the Supreme Court, what Beauchamp is describing is the Left, not the Right.
Beauchamp is a supporter of what the great Polish leader Ryszard Legutko calls “the demon in democracy.” In his book The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, Legutko argued that democracies often come installed with a self-destructive bug. Freedom comes to mean freedom from any tradition or culture that does not submit to the idea of total freedom at all times and for any expression. Groups that are more traditional or hierarchical, such as the Catholic Church, are forced to comply or pay.
In The Reactionary Spirit, Beauchamp sums his thesis up this way: “Democracy does not merely enable efforts to change social hierarchies: it actually makes them inevitable. Democratic institutions both create legal avenues for members of oppressed groups to act against their own oppression, and encourage the spread of political ideas that fuel such challenges.”
In 2024, everybody in America is an oppressed group. Regardless of whether an objection to their elevation and the eradication of tradition is based on religion, human reason, science, natural law, or logic, it must be steamrolled. Guys like Beauchamp will be driving the truck.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
