Lots of labels are thrown around to define or tag political opponents. Proponents embrace other labels as a badge of honor. And a few labels are so controversial, like Christian Nationalist or Communist, that even those in sympathy with those beliefs shy away from them. 

However, the label reactionary is missing in the current political vocabulary. Whether politicians, media outlets, journalists, or political activists, both from the left and right. Conservative and Liberal are the two leading and enduring labels. Depending on your orientation, adjectives are used to acclaim or shackle them. Advocates self-identify as progressive liberals or very conservative. For critics, liberals turn into radical liberals or far-left radicals, while conservatives become far-right or radical-right. 

The easiest way to note the relative absence of using “reactionary” would be to watch liberal or conservative-oriented media. Think about how often you hear the word “reactionary” from news analysts and commentators on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News describe politicians, policies, or organizations. It would fall into the range of seldom to almost never.

In literature, this shortage can be measured by looking at the titles of best-selling books. The New York Times Best Sellers list would be the best single source, however, finding a comprehensive list outside of NYT’s closed offices is a daunting challenge.

Amazon Best Sellers ranking provides a quicker, although not as accurate, measurement of book sales. Nevertheless, since Amazon has 65 percent of the online book market share, it’s a decent sampling. Even better, it ranks non-fiction books within categories of interest, such as Political Conservatism & Liberalism. 

I reviewed that category’s top twelve sellers from October 21, 2022. The top-ranking list changes daily. Consequently, this list is just a snapshot. Checking three days later, only four of the books surveyed remained in the top 12. On both dates, no book contained the word reactionary in the title. However, the political orientation of almost all the books on both dates reflected a conservative or reactionary point of view, except for either one progressive professor or one liberal journalist

The October 21 book titles contained these words: 

• Four books with communism, communist, socialism, or Marxism 
• Three books with Liberals, liberalism, or Democrat 
• Two books with conservatism 
• One book with Radical Right  
• One book with fascism  

What would make a book have a reactionary perspective? As an adjective, according to the New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore a past status quo ante. For example, Mark Lilla’s s The Shipwrecked Mind sees reactionary as attempting to change the existing socio-economic structure and political order with the intent to oppose liberal policies promoting the social transformation of society. In contrast, Conservatives oppose those same liberal policies but are willing to work within the existing political, economic, and social (PES) infrastructure to change those policies.

            All philosophies drift from erudite definitions to widespread usage over time. In that journey, a gap grows between them in how to achieve objectives. However, the core reactionary belief has remained constant, believing that the existing society has become unstable or corrupted through liberal changes over time. The only solution to that dangerous condition is to return to a prior order. That order will provide more security, freedoms, community, or whatever is seen as lacking in the current order. 

            By applying that definition to reactionary thought, the one-day sampling of Amazon’s listed books reveals considerable popularity in accepting that view. The writers may be deemed dreadfully wrong in their reasoning and their books full of misinformation, but the attractiveness of their vision cannot be denied. 

            Look at most of the top-selling books listed on Amazon from October 21.  

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin, a prominent Fox News Commentator, is typical of others who are very conservative or perhaps reactionary. While not proclaiming themselves reactionary, they emphasize protecting an individual’s freedom to use and accumulate personal property without interference from a larger community impacted by that freedom. 

The government is seen as more than a nuisance but a potentially destructive force to individual rights. Levin, like other authors, sees core elements of Marxist ideology cloaked in deceptive labels like “progressivism,” “democratic socialism,” and “social activism.” These movements lead to a Big Government that extinguishes the free market, economic motivation, and individual freedoms.

The UnCommunist Manifesto by Aleksandar Svetski and Mark Moss also identifies liberal changes with Marxism. The authors want to change the debate from a class struggle to “individual autonomy, sovereignty, and responsibility versus the collectivist tendency toward group identity politics, rights, entitlements, and co-dependencies.” It’s not clear how far back they would go in time to get to the right balance, but they don’t fear what they see happening now.

Five other authors noted below were from Amazon’s biggest sellers list on October 21. They blame liberals and the Democrats for ruining our nation’s social fabric and ushering in the loss of liberties; one even sees liberals bringing about a new emergent Fascism. However, none of them embrace or reference the word reactionary. 

Candace Owens, in Blackout, says it’s time for a major black exodus from the shackles of the Democratic Party, which has promoted their dependency and miseducation. The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism by Glenn Beck and Justin Trask Haskins argues that there is an international conspiracy between powerful 

bankers, business leaders, and government officials to give them more money and power. 

               In Defeating Big Government Socialism: Saving America’s Future, Newt Gingrich sees big government socialists entrenched “throughout our systems of government, society, culture, and business, resulting in vaccine mandates, tax increases, rising inflation,” and just about every ill he could think of. In Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis, James Lindsay calls CRT Race Marxism, using race “as the central construct for understanding inequality” rather than relying on class conflict arising from capitalism. 

Lastly, Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen criticizes American liberalism, whether it be “libertarianism” or “progressive/modern liberalism,” AKA “liberal,” as allowing the growth of the “most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history.” In other words, converting America’s democratic republic into a statist country. 

Are these authors promoting reactionary beliefs? None of the authors identify what era they would like the nation to return to. Nor are they insurrectionists. They are not tearing down the republic and do not go beyond exposing the liberal menace and promoting policies that would stop its growth.

Underlying all their books, however, is a concept that Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto studied in their book,Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America. It was published a couple of years before Trump started the reactionary MAGA movement. 

Parker and Barreto show how the Tea Party was a reemergence of a reactionary movement in American politics that was like the right-wing reactionary movements of the past, including the Know Nothing Party, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and the John Birch Society. They all fueled a fear that America had changed for the worse. Its members are “reactionary conservatives: people who fear change of any kind—especially if it threatens to undermine their way of life.” 

These two authors do “make clear, reactionary conservatives differ in a number of ways from more conventional conservatives.” The latter “realize incremental, evolutionary change is sometimes necessary as a means of preventing revolutionary change. The reactionary conservative doesn’t want to stop at the prevention of change: he prefers to reverse whatever progress has been made to that point.” 

That definition is a dividing line between conservative and reactionary. In American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition, Andrew J. Bacevich seems to agree with Parker and Barreto in seeing a distinction between conservativism and reactionary thought. He writes that conservativism is not a “reactionary yearning for an irremediably lost past” – it “is not antirational.” Instead, it operates “upon the foundation of the tradition of civilization,” which is “the basis of the accumulated reason, experience, and wisdom of past generations.” In other words, returning to the distant past is not critical to conservativism. However, this view is a core element of reactionary beliefs that energies the MAGA movement to eliminate the last hundred years of unacceptable liberal laws. The MAGA adherents openly advocate that objective. They are not part of a secret movement, so they should openly and honestly identify as reactionaries.  

Examples abound of reactionary policies being pushed by conservative Republican candidates this fall. They want to turn back the clock to a time untouched by liberal reforms. They would retreat to a time when there was less fear of being displaced by immigrants or having to live with people who didn’t conform to their moral code or when religion-based laws didn’t have to rely on scientific evidence to justify imposing them on others. 

Kari Lake, the Republican Candidate for Arizona Governor, accuses immigrants crossing the Mexican border of bringing drugs and crime into the US, plus they are rapists. Once becoming governor, she would legally declare their increased presence as an invasion. That would allow her to have state law enforcement and military detain, arrest, and return illegal migrants to Mexico. In effect, her orientation leans into reviving the federal quota system that was dropped in 1965. From 1924 to then, immigration quotas severely immigrants from outside Western Europe.

Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance advocates eliminating no-fault divorce laws, which allow people to end a marriage without proving wrongdoing by their partner, including abuse or desertion. Vance equates this policy, enacted in California more than fifty years ago, as abandoning the morality of keeping families whole. Laws should not allow marriages to be dissolved if one spouse is beaten without proving it. The burden is on the victim. This approach returns to a time when women were morally bound to their husbands regardless of their treatment. 

North Carolina’s Republican Candidate for the Senate race is Ted Budd, who has expressed support for Texas’ six-week abortion ban. The law makes no exceptions for cases of rape or incest and forbids abortion when a “heartbeat” can be heard, which is where the six-week ban comes from. Budd’s position will play well with 35% of the state’s population, who are very religious Protestant Evangelicals. But his stance is not based on reason or science. The medical profession disputes that the heart is beating after about six weeks of pregnancy. Instead, a developed heart forms later in pregnancy. But when laws must conform to religious beliefs, science is the enemy. And that is a long step back in time to take. 

None of the above actions are in the conservative tradition of basing decisions on past generations’ reason, experience, and wisdom. Instead, they represent a yearning for an irremediably lost past. Moreover, they result from politics, augmented by immense wealth, influencing the public to turn the clock back.  

Liberals should not naively describe these policies and their proponents as just conservative or even very conservative. They are not. They are reactionary. And the proponents of these measures should proudly declare their political agenda as reactionary. 

Nick Licata is the author of Becoming A Citizen Activist and Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. He is the founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 1,300 progressive municipal officials.

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The future of the Republican Party is often framed as either continuing as a traditionally conservative party based on policy issues or becoming a personality cult around Donald Trump. 

At the beginning of the year, Liz Cheney told Robert Costa of CBS that she believes there is a “cult of personality” around Trump, representing a moral test that the Republican Party is “failing.” 

While the growth of a Trump cult is evident, there is another more significant movement that Trump reignited. And one that Cheney must take into consideration. That would be the underlying feeling of grief among the majority white population. They see their prominence slipping away as new immigrants and minorities obtain more government control. 

Elie Mystal of the Nation points out that Republicans rejected Cheney because “white conservative voters trash everything to keep themselves in power.” In other words, the core Republican base will not support any candidate who fails to address their fears of being replaced by others. 

The Republican Party landscape sees an ebbing Trumper and a waning conservative tide.

Trump, or some Trump-like presidential candidate, makes a show of appeasing the fears of the white majority through harsh anti-immigration measures and guaranteeing a pro-Christian religion constitution. But their most explosive belief is that a government conspiracy, be it federal or local, is run by radical liberals’ intent on taking away the constitutional freedoms of average Americans. 

Most traditional conservatives are comfortable with restricting immigration and emphasizing Christian values, but they do not endorse a conspiracy that undermines America’s democratic institutions. Leaders like Mitch McConnel were once the leaders of this traditional conservative Republican faction. Still, to retain their power, he and others believe they must tolerate Trump and even defend him.

By speaking without moderation, Trump successfully triggered resentment among Republicans and many non-Republicans against the disdainful “elites.” These are the people ­- all of them labeled liberals – to blame for government policies that are more concerned about gay rights, minority rights, labor rights, migrant rights, and human rights than about the rights of Americans who are white and have lived here for a long time. 

Although pre-Trump Republicans were traditional conservatives, most have been swept into the Trump tide. Participants are in an existential war between good and evil, i.e., Trump followers versus liberal Democrats and RINOs.  

Cheney refused to float along in the Trump tide  

Cheney abandoned the Trump movement despite voting for Trump’s legislation 93 percent of the time while in Congress. Perhaps she thought she could reach Trump’s voter base by explaining how corrupting Trump was to the party and the nation. Nevertheless, she voted to impeach Trump for encouraging a mob to invade the Capital to overturn a fair election. As the co-chair of the House Committee to investigate January 6, she has been the sharpest Republican critic of Trump and his allies.

Cheney won her previous primary with 73 percent of the vote. This year she garnered only 29 percent, running against a Trump-endorsed candidate who considered the 2020 election “rigged.” On election night, with her defeat inevitable, she told the audience that she could not “go along with President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election. It would’ve required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic.” Instead, she said, “I will do whatever it takes to ensure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.”

So where can Liz Cheney go in her quest to stop Trump, or a Trump mini-me like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, from becoming our next President? There are only two paths to challenge Trump from becoming President. Either beat him in the Republican primary or run as an independent. 

Cheney has only one realistic option 

Cheney understands that running in the Republican Primary is a guaranteed loss if Trump enters the race. Trump’s favorability dropped among Republicans in the wake of the January 6 riot, But it’s still above 80 percent in YouGov’s polling this summer. 

However, even if he doesn’t run, his messaging has so resonated with Republicans that a Trump acolyte will be their presidential candidate. Republicans hinting at running in their presidential primary have moved further to the right by supporting Trump’s cultural war on the liberals and preparing to challenge the legality of any Democratic victory in 2024.

 In an analysis by Washington Post, Philip Bump noticed that many Republicans who are not Trump supporters took his side in criticizing the FBI on the search of Mar-a-Lago. He saw this attack on the FBI more as possible allegiance to a belief in an evil deep state rather than to Trump personally. However, this trend among Republican candidates is more insidious than just opposing policies open to diversity. 

Unlike in the McCarthy era of exposing communists in government, the deep state is now seen as liberals leaving our gates wide open for people who do not deserve to be new Americans. Instead, they are invaders, many with criminal ties or tendencies and unwilling to assimilate into our culture. 

For most Republicans, as repeatedly measured by polls, the Democrats cannot win the next presidential election. But that belief is not based on verifiable fraud; it’s based on the necessity that they cannot win – period. If they do, this country will be lost.  Our liberties will be narrowed, our conservative values will be outlawed, and our right to defend ourselves will be stripped away. So, they repeatedly deny that Biden won the election. Cheney says, “No American should support election deniers for any position of genuine responsibility.”

By confronting the election deniers and not being silent, even die-hard conservative Liz Cheney could not win the Republican primary. Yet, she and a significant minority of Republicans are willing to campaign within our republic’s democratic framework. They believe even if the liberals win an election, a democratic republic will survive.

The message that elections should not be discounted or overthrown could propel Cheney into a formidable independent candidate. In effect, she would be turning the Trumper view on its head. Instead of our country being lost if the Democrats win, Cheney’s message would be that if a Trumper wins, our country will be lost. In effect, she says that Republicans should have a strong and viable conservative party to protect our electoral process; otherwise, the liberals will win against Trump reactionaries. Even worse, if the Trumpers win, our country will drift toward minority rule and violent conflicts.  

She should argue that Trump has hijacked the term” conservative.” He has redefined it within a Christian Nationalist framework. Although that trend goes back to Ronald Reagan’s Presidential 1980 campaign, forty years later, Trump converted that belief into the dominant Republican zeitgeist and required adhesion to it for a Republican to win a primary.

Liz Cheney is no Abraham Lincoln, but …

There are some historical parallels between Cheney and Lincoln. The idea of there being any similarity between the two may strike liberals and conservatives as a crazy notion. But they have the same path from losing a prominent Congressional race to being a national icon for a principled position in a divisive political environment.  

Cheney lost her Congressional seat to a fellow Republican because she was an outcast in her party. However, she gained national prominence for being the highest-ranking Republican member in Congress to publicly recognize the 2020 election as being fairly won by Joe Biden. 

Unlike Cheney, Lincoln was not an outcast in his party. In 1858 he was a former one-term Whig Congressman who ran for the US Senate as a Republican. He was expected to lose his Senate race and did to Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas because that state was solidly Democratic. Nevertheless, that campaign attracted national attention because he spoke bluntly about his opposition to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. 

In effect, the Dred Scott decision said that Congress had no power to regulate slavery in the territories or the nation. It opened the door for slavery to be introduced into all states and at the expense of the free poor white male farmer class. Lincoln appealed to this constituency through his campaign slogan, “vote yourself a farm.” The slogan’s strong implication was that the Dred Scott decision would promote Democratic state legislatures to allow slaves to replace white farmers. It is akin to the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision to enable every state to ban abortion. The specter of nationwide abortion bans is prompting voters to reject Republicans and, like Lincoln, question the validity of the Supreme Court’s decision. 

Lincoln’s presidential race in 1860 was critically different from what Cheney will face as an independent in 2024. Then, he was in a four-way race, which greatly fragmented the total vote. However, Cheney is not expected to face three strong presidential candidates in 2024. Since 1860, there have been only two other elections (1912 and 1948) with four nationally visible contenders. In each case, one of the major party candidates won the election. 

The newly created Republican Party in the 1850s was not even a national party. It was mainly a party of the North and the West comprised of members left from the disintegrated Whig party and the much smaller Free Soil and Liberty Parties. While the Democrat party was the only national party in 1860, it had split in two. 

Cheney’s Republican Party is not disintegrating, although deep fissures exist among its middle-class and college-educated voters. As an independent candidate, she would most likely be in a three-way race, which no independent candidate has ever won. To make a good showing, she must have a solid message to attract non-Trump Republicans and conservative independents. And she needs to articulate it as clearly as she has done on the House Committee investigating January 6.

Cheney could initiate a New Conservative Party

Lincoln had a clear position on slavery: no more expansion of it. This was anathema to the Democrats and the South. His prior debates with Douglass allowed him to explain it to the nation. Just as Cheney’s comments from the Congressional hearings have given her a national platform to present why we must save our democratic institutions from authoritarian leaders. She continues to force Republican leaders to justify why they do not condemn the January 6 attack on the Capital Building to halt the electoral vote count.  

Cheney’s conservative politics will not appeal to liberals or even moderate independents. Still, she could find support among non-Trump Republicans and conservative-leaning independents who believe our democratic process is under attack when election results are dismissed as fraudulent. These voters would most likely be conservative middle-class professionals and influencers who think Trump has ruined the Republican party by emphasizing ethnic divisions and aligning religious orthodoxy with the Constitution. They are a minority within the Republican party but have a significant presence in the media market. 

Cheney would not win the popular vote as an independent. History suggests that she may not win any electoral votes as well. In the 100 years preceding the 2024 election, only three third-party candidates have received more than one electoral vote: Robert La Follette, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace. All of them received less than 50 votes. Popular candidates like Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, Henry Wallace, John B. Anderson, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader received none. Nevertheless, as an independent, she could attract enough votes to deny Trump or a Trump-like Republican a win in a swing state.

Running as a die-hard conservative, not a reactionary or a liberal republican, she could be the “real” conservative presidential candidate in 2024. Will Cheney exceed the highwater mark established by the presidential elections in the last hundred years for the popular vote (Ross Perot at 19%) and the electoral vote (George Wallace at 46 votes)? If she did, she could spark a counter-Trump movement of traditional conservatives to retake the Republican party or create a new Conservative Party. 

Cheney could reach out to a national audience if she took a page from Lincoln’s playbook before he became the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. In February 1860, Lincoln bolstered his growing national recognition coming off the Lincoln – Douglas debates when he gave his Cooper Union address in New York. 

Lincoln argued that he and his liberal Republicans had the true “conservative” policies and not the self-proclaimed “conservative” Democrats. For example, he said his views on slavery were the same as most American founding fathers. In contrast, the Democrats rejected the founding fathers and substituted something new. Substitute slavery for the electoral process and Trumpers for Democrats, and you have Cheney making the same argument. 

            Journalist Robert J. McNamara (with the Libertarian Justice Institute) wrote that Lincoln’s Cooper Union speechpresented careful research and a forceful argument, and “it was stunningly effective.” Lincoln ended his speech by saying, “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves.” 

            Cheney might tap into Lincoln’s spirit of patriotic defiance in the face of a Trumper Republican attempting to dismantle our democratic electoral process.

Nick Licata is the author of Student Power, Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties. Now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition

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