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Political Philosophy Politics Reflections

Understanding Reactionaries

[digg-reddit-me]I tend to judge an individual’s politics on two levels. First, on a more traditional left to right spectrum (leftist to progressive to liberal to conservative to right-wing.) This left to right perspective can be further broken down – but in general, whether due to social, political, or psychological reasons, individuals in a political system can be described as belonging to a discrete place on this spectrum. The second political judgment is where they fit on what I’m calling the Political Change Spectrum – pictured below. 

Reactionary Dick Cheney to Conservative George H. W. Bush to Reformer Teddy Roosevelt to Revolutionary Che Guevera

Footnote re. spectrum. ((Though I’m pretty confident about the middle two figures, Cheney and Che don’t necessarily cleanly fit into the categories in the way I wanted them to. Clearly, Cheney is a reactionary – and Che was a revolutionary – both fit in that sense. But Cheney was primarily a reactionary concerned about taking radical measures to protect the status quo while the ideal person I would pick would be someone seeking to restore a past status quo. Cheney did seek to restore a past status quo regarding executive authority – constantly harking back to the pre-Watergate presidency – but he didn’t seem to have a historical model for other aspects of his agenda. I wanted to choose an American political figure – but I had some trouble thinking of an American revolutionary who was of historical value and ended up with real power. Even the original revolutionaries were not revolutionaries in terms of this chart – though their French counterparts a few years later were.))

These are also commonly used political terms that describe a political actor’s relationship to the status quo. To break it down further – the reactionary seeks to overturn the current order and return to a previous status quo, or alternately, to use radical measures to protect the current status quo; the conservative seeks to maintain the status quo; the reformer seeks to improve the status quo without overturning it; the revolutionary seeks to overthrow the system and put in place another one.

Political actors generally do not fall exclusively on one part of this scale – and may have some reformist positions and some reactionary ones. While a politician can take a left-wing or right-wing position,

But to a surprising degree, one can predict the actions and positions of a political actor based on their overall position on this spectrum – perhaps because it captures on a fundamental level how a political actor feels about his or her society and their natural temperament.

The reason I bring this up is a question: I have noticed that reactionaries tend to take within themselves (internalize) an exaggerated view of their enemy – and presume when making their own plans – that the enemies tactics and strategies are better than their own. What ends up happening in many of these reactionary groups is that they construct themselves on a model based on their worst fears of their enemy. The John Birch Society, for example, organized in self-sufficient cells with individual members having little to no knowledge of the group outside of their cell; they based this model on their perception of how Communist cells operated. Dick Cheney saw on September 11 the efficacy of violence and destruction to bring a people to heel; he apparently shared the view Osama Bin Laden did that America was not strong enough, not resilient enough to protect it’s way of life while remaining the same America – and so he then sought to unleash the righteous might of America on, eventually, a nation that had nothing to do with September 11 and remake the presidency into a national security dictatorship.

This internalizing of the enemy’s tactics and strategy does not only occur in reactionary groups – but I think – and this is my question – that reactionary groups are defined primarily by their worst fears of their enemy – which they then internalize and model their own organization on.

Reactionaries are more susceptible to this because they have already lost – to some degree – and generally believe their enemy must have in some way won not by honest means but by some clever stratagem. The rationale is that by imitating this stratagem the reactionaries will be able to protect their way of life. But it is impossible to maintain the status quo by radical action – because such actions inevitably upset the very thing being protected.