If you'd asked me a few months ago what the term reactionary meant
I could have told you that it was associated with the right wing
and that it was usually used as an insult rather than as a self-identifier.
But beyond that, I couldn't have told you what it actually meant.
It's one of those political terms that I've heard floating around
for years, but never paid direct attention to.
There seems to be quite a few of these in politics — as we saw in the last episode
with the term radical.
But as it turns out, reactionary is a word with an interesting history.
While it was originally synonymous with right wing, what really surprised me
and piqued my interest was that it doesn't have to be a right wing phenomenon
and that there are in fact left wing reactionaries as well.
Like the terms radical and revolutionary, it's one of those terms
that is associated with one side of the political aisle
when in fact it's more of a general idea that can fit anywhere
on the political spectrum.
The term reactionary, along with our entire political distinction
between left and right, has its origins with the French Revolution.
The National Assembly was a revolutionary assembly of representatives
of the commoners of France that pushed for economic reforms
that overthrew the old regime of monarchy and feudalism.
Initially, the assembly was just about reforming French society,
but ultimately led to the dethroning and execution of King Louis XVI.
Over the next decade, it was the ruling body of the country
until Napoleon took sole power as First Consul in 1799.
The National Assembly quickly became divided, with those
favoring revolution gathering to the left of the Assembly's president
and the supporters of the King gathering to his right.
One of those who gathered to the right, Baron de Gauville at this time wrote
that: “We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion
and the king took up positions to the right of the chair
so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free
rein in the opposing camp.”
As the revolution progressed and the National Assembly
became the Legislative Assembly in 1791, the so-called “Innovators”
took up the place to the left, the defenders of the Constitution
took up the right, and between them in the center were the Moderates.
This curious accident of history — the organization of a room
full of politicians
during the French Revolution — has given us a working image of politics.
It's those to the left, those to the right, and those in the middle.
This is also where the term reactionary originates from.
Its first appearance in the English language was in 1799, with the translation
of a letter by one of the leading figures of the French Revolution.
Lazare Carnot.
The term reactionary in this context, referred to the political group
who wanted to peel back the Revolution and return to pre-modern feudal monarchy.
Today, the term reactionary is used in much the same way.
Where a conservative is someone that wants to conserve the status quo,
a reactionary
is someone who wants to go back to a previous time that was more glorious.
It's not just about preserving the system.
It's an idealization of a previous form of the system.
Where Progressives want to pull the system onwards towards improvement
and the Moderate Conservatives and Liberals want to keep the system
more or less the same, Reactionaries want to push the system back.
Like the progressives, the Reactionaries see something very wrong
in the current system but the direction of their solution
isn’t onwards towards novelty but backwards towards some idealised past.
They are both radical sentiments that see the current state as problematic
but the tendencies pull in opposite directions.
Though as we’ll see in a second even this distinction isn’t so clear cut and we’ll
be looking at reactionary elements in this Progressive movement.
The reactionary idealisation of the past has resemblances to the great poet Homer
who, writing in the dark age that followed the Bronze Age Collapse,
idolised the age of the heroes that was passed.
Then there’s the five declining ages of man
that Homer’s poetic contemporary Hesiod wrote of.
There’s the Yugas of India.
And then most similar to our modern reactionaries
there was the Ancient Roman poet Ovid — writing at the dawn of the Roman Empire.
In Ovid’s account the four ages of man have been nothing
but a story of decline from the golden age — when people lived in peace
and in harmony with nature — to the silver age, the bronze age
and now the iron age in which everything has gone wrong
and people have become corrupt and selfish.
This is the spirit of reactionism.
We are seen to live in an age of decline and decadence.
For the reactionary there is something horribly wrong
with our time and the solution lies in the past.
This reactionary element was prominent in the Fascist parties
of the mid-20th century which harked back in the case of Italy to Ancient Rome
and in the case of Germany to some ancient Germanic racial purity.
But probably the most iconic and on the nose reactionism
is Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”.
There is no purer example of the reactionary spirit
than Trump.
We can even see it in his response to the Korean movie Parasite
winning big at the Oscars: “You know, I'm looking for like, we're winning.
Let's get Gone with the Wind.
Can we get like, Gone with the Wind back, please?
Sunset Boulevard.
So many great movies.
The winner is from South Korea.
I thought it was best foreign film.” It’s almost a caricature of reactionism
but it’s the perfect embodiment of it in the 21st century.
There were similar reactionary sentiments in Britain around Brexit.
But reactionary while much more common on the right can also show up on the left.
American political scientist Mark Lilla
writes about how progressives in the 90s were convinced that Americans didn’t grasp
the truth about the Reagan Revolution “since
if they did, they would overturn it.” On the left there is a sense that this
Neoliberalism that Reagan and Thatcher pioneered has been a disaster.
These progressives reactionaries want to take us back to a time
before Neoliberalism
before Americans believed: “that economic growth will do more for them
than economic redistribution, and that to grow rich is good.
It is taken as axiomatic that the experiments of the Great Society
failed and that new experiments directed by Washington would be foolhardy.
Regulation
is considered dépassé, and unions are seen as self-serving,
corrupt organizations that only retard economic growth.”
These popular Neoliberal beliefs undercut mass-adoption of a progressive mandate
and has since sucked in the centre-left
and now dominates the mainstream political worldview.
An even better example of left-wing reactionism can be found among
the anarcho-primitivists
who make Rousseau’s image of the noble savage an explicit ideal.
This is a group who believe that civilisation as a whole
has been one major disaster and so the best thing we can do is go back
to our pre-civilised roots before all this inequality and greed set in.
Civilisation is evil and so the desire which is both Progressive and Reactionary
at the same time is to get rid of the miseries of civilisation
and return to a more harmonious way of living.
There are similarities with Ovid here and also with the philosophy
of the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus.
The term reactionary then doesn’t just apply to the right wing.
But as we all know language evolves and it looks like reactionary is moving
from being a taxonomic term
which allows us to categorise certain elements of the political landscape
and is well on the way to becoming a purely rhetorical term.
With very rare exceptions, nobody identifies as a reactionary.
The negative connotations of the term have become so popular
that to self-identify as one is the move of a provocateur.
One progressive commentator Aaron Huertas coined the term
“Reactionary Centrist” in a 2018 post which he defines as: “someone who says
they’re politically neutral,
but who usually punches left while sympathizing with the right”
The article makes some really interesting observations
about the political landscape but when it comes to the term reactionary,
the only purpose of the term seems rhetorical.
There doesn’t seem
to be a pre-existing status quo that these centrists are seeking to return to.
It enlists the word reactionary
not for its descriptiveness but for its negative connotations.
And so while this video
has focused on the descriptive historical definition of reactionary
it seems that this version of reactionary may be rapidly going extinct.
The rhetorical version of the term which simply invokes — with negative
connotations — right-wing is likely
to be the only future of the term reactionary.
In which case
this video is an exercise in history rather than politics or philosophy.
That's everything for this episode of The Living Philosophy.
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