Are You A Reactionary?

If so, own it.

In a previous column I discussed the way the MAGA movement, whether you are for it or against it, is not what political theorists would categorize as conventionally conservative even if it advocates several standard conservative policy positions. In that column I focused on the issue of attitudes toward the status quo. Here, however, I want to suggest a more substantive issue.

As a matter of public policy, Republicans have been on a mission to repeal both the 1930s and the 1960s. By the “1930s” I mean the New Deal conception of the role of government and the welfare state it created— Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the whole regulatory function and apparatus of the federal government.

By the “1960s” I mean the social changes captured by the familiar idea of the culture wars—birth control, abortion, sexual orientation, the role of women, the reassertion of religion into public affairs. Among many slogans back then, one encapsulates the ethos of the time: “There will be respect for authority when authority is respectable.”

As a matter of political theory, the attempt to erase the 1930s and 1960s is not conservative but reactionary—aggressively so—in the classic political sense: a rejection of social, political, and economic change to return to a real or imagined ideal time in the past.

This is not a Democratic as opposed to Republican view—look at criticism of President Trump by such conservative stalwarts as National Review and The Wall Street Journal. As longtime conservative David Brooks writes recently in “I Should Have Seen This Coming” (The Atlantic), “Trumpian nihilism has eviscerated conservatism. The people in this administration are not conservatives. They are the opposite of conservatives.”

As Axios notes recently (“Donald Trump, A 1950s Man”), “the nostalgia Trump evokes is a key part of his hold on his electorate—tapping into a lingering fear about a changing America that leaves many in his base feeling like strangers in their own land.”

For a long, long time, Democrats have been unable to recognize and address such fears. President Trump is a symptom rather than a cause, but he’s an accelerant to an already burning fire. During the 2015-2016 Iowa Republican caucus campaign, Trump was essentially the entertainment at events, the warm-up act preceding the “realistic” candidates. Yet he defeated them all by tapping into lingering fears of national decline.

I’ve noted quite often in speeches I’ve given that Republicans recognized—Democrats didn’t have a clue, and many still don’t—the strain of anger and grievance in working class and rural America. To see that strain in popular culture, watch Alan Jackson’s 1999 music video called “The Little Man” and Merle Haggard’s 1982 (yes, that long ago) music video called “Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?”

We don’t often hear the term “liberal” from Democrats anymore—it’s more likely to be “progressive,” reflecting the concentration on social and cultural issues rather than economics, even though the Progressive movement itself at the start of the 20^th century had a predominantly economic focus.

I began college just as the 1960s became “the Sixties.” Female students were required to live in university-approved housing for their first two years, whereas male students were required to do so only for their freshman year. Female (not male) students had curfews in that university-approved housing: theoretically subject to bed checks and even grounding, they had to be in by midnight Sunday-Thursday, 1:00 a.m. on Friday nights, and 1:30 a.m. on Saturday nights. And coed dormitories—gasp!—were still a radical idea. (We did change all of this.)

I can’t imagine that those wanting to roll back the Sixties want to reestablish rules like these, but who knows? Look into Christian Nationalism; it seeks a restoration of traditional authority.

As to economics, the current raging issue of tariffs involves not just a rejection of the 1930s in favor of what Trump lauds as the President McKinley era, but points us back, I suggest, to the 18^th-century era of mercantilism (see Investopedia). Mercantilism advocated maximizing exports and minimizing imports on the assumption that a trade deficit is a sign of national weakness and vulnerability.

It's contrary to the theory of comparative advantage, according to which countries produce those things they can do most cheaply and efficiently and buy those things they cannot produce so cheaply and efficiently from other countries that can.

The concept of international cooperation, based upon the idea of the division of labor, holds that you do what you do best, and we will do what we do best. Economic cooperation contrasts with economic autarky, which seems to presuppose international relations and trade as based not on cooperation but on relations of dominance and submission.

This is not the idea of free-market economics and laissez-faire government that Republicans since the New Deal have claimed they support. Tariffs interfere in a free market by protecting less-efficient producers from competition.

So, Republicans, in my view, are using this significant and substantial strain of anger and grievance to pursue their longstanding policy of repealing the 1930s and 1960s. As Trump stated in his 2025 Inaugural Address, “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and, indeed, their freedom.”

It’s one thing to point out problems that need repair; it’s an entirely different thing to suggest that we need to reverse “betrayals” to restore a golden age from the past.

If you support this course of action, okay. But at least be honest enough with yourself and others to acknowledge that you are not a conservative.

You are a reactionary. Own it.

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