The Ideology of Political Reactionaries. By Richard Shorten. New York: Routledge, 2021. 284p. $160.00 cloth.

The year 2016 was a year of surprises for political observers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. First, a referendum in the United Kingdom marked the start of that country’s messy separation from the European Union. Polls in the lead-up to the vote on “Brexit” showed a small but consistent advantage for the camp looking to “Remain” in the Union, so the victory for the group seeking to “Leave” came as a shock. When, in November, Donald Trump defied expectations to capture the American presidency, he gave onlookers further reason to doubt the reliability of opinion polls. What Richard Shorten questions, though, is not the abilities of political prognosticators or the accuracy of their statistical models; rather, what interests Shorten is the ability of analysts to make sense of political upheavals like Brexit, Trump’s electoral triumph, and surging support for parties like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France or the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany. The discourse surrounding these events, Shorten claims, revealed “the need for a far better interpretive grasp of the modern political Right” (p. 1). He aims to help meet this need and supply this grasp in The Ideology of Political Reactionaries. In the introduction, Shorten argues that common motifs used to analyze Brexit missed the mark by being either imprecise or plain wrong. Brexit was not an instance of “post-truth politics” with “charismatic” politicians appealing to “emotional” voters (pp. 1–2). Rather, it, like the election of Trump or the uptick in support for the National Rally or the AfD, is best viewed as an instance of reaction. Reaction is an “interpretive category” and an “ideology” best understood through a rhetorical approach (pp. 2–3). Examining the political Right through the lens of reaction, Shorten argues, is more fruitful than employing of-the-moment or region-specific labels like “populism” or “illiberal democracy” (p. 5). Resurrecting reaction as an interpretive category allows us to make sense of figures who are separated by time and space. We can see in reactionary rhetoric common appeals to “indignation, decadence, and conspiracy” (p. 4). The Ideology of Political Reactionaries consists of three main parts, which a short introduction precedes and a brief conclusion follows. Part I consists of two chapters that explore the pathos of reaction (indignation). The two chapters in Part II turn to the logos of reaction (decadence). And the three-chapter Part III looks at the ethos of reaction (conspiracy). In each of these multichapter parts, “historical sources of reaction are placed next to contemporary ones.” Shorten does this, he notes, “partly in conscious provocation,” but primarily to show that “reactionary thought and practice forms a distinct seam” that runs through time (p. 3). Thus, we see in Part I the writings of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre compared with books by Sarah Palin and Trump. The chapters in Part II examine Adolf Hitler’sMein Kampf and then Le Suicide français by the French polemicist Éric Zemmour. Part III turns to the words of Joseph McCarthy, Anders Breivik, and Nigel Farage. Potential readers who are part of—or who are at all sympathetic to—the mainstream Right might be tempted to dismiss out of hand a book that links a thoughtful statesman like Burke to the genocidal Hitler, or the folksy former governor Palin to the mass murderer Breivik. They should not, however, for Shorten anticipates their objection: the matching of monsters with “more benign figures,” he writes, “might imply that the book is (in social science terms) guilty of lumping or (in moral terms) guilty of relativisation and equivalence. But emphatically, the intention is neither” (p. xii). This claim might seem to conflict with Shorten’s aim at “provocation,” but it does not. Shorten’s investigation of the common rhetorical devices used by a seemingly disparate group of individuals will, indeed, provoke reflection. At the same time, he successfully avoids a trap into which he says other interpreters of the reactionary Right have fallen: “reducing [its members] to ... caricature” (p. 160). His presentation of reactionary rhetoric is largely value-neutral: When Shorten inserts his voice, he does so to assess whether a text succeeds or fails to achieve its aims —to determine if the rhetoric works—not to opine on the rightness or wrongness of those aims. If potential readers of a right-leaning bent need not fear derision and dismissal, prospective readers on the political left should be forewarned, for some of them might be disappointed when Shorten does not confirm their suspicions that Brexit supporters or Trump voters are actual, literal Nazis. According to Shorten, there are major questions on which reactionaries, including the subjects of his book, disagree. With respect to morality, “some reactionaries are resolute absolutists,” while others “incline to relativism.” Regarding knowledge, “some reactionaries are defenders of high culture,” while others dismiss “culture as the preserve of weirdos and squares.” As for religion, “some reactionaries find fault with prevailing politics and society on grounds of original sin, while others are secular and may argue for banishing faiths... from the public sphere.” Even on so fundamental a concern as the goal of life, reactionaries diverge from one another: “some reactionaries glorify action and endorse a heroic conception of virtue, while others commend solitude and withdrawal”