American Reactionary Politics: A 2026 Reckoning

An update to “A Note on American Reactionary Politics” (May 2016)

March 2026

The uncanny of real experiences… invariably accords with our attempted solution and can be traced back every time to something that was once familiar and then repressed. — Sigmund Freud

In May 2016, I posted a note on the behavioral logic of American reactionary politics. I described a coalition forged in Goldwater’s long shadow, consolidated by Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and inflamed by the election of a Black president. I described a 20–25% core of the electorate — not enough to govern without additional support, but more than enough to make national life ugly. I predicted a very dark rough ride.

I wish I hadn’t been right.

Ten years later, the reactionary coalition has not merely threatened power. It has seized it, institutionalized it, and is dismantling the democratic infrastructure that once constrained it. This is not a revision of the earlier analysis. It is a reckoning with its confirmation.

Three Forces, Not Two — and a Venn Diagram

The 2016 post argued that reactionary politics is driven by two interacting forces: racial grievance — the perception that too many nonwhites are getting a piece of the pie — and what I called sanctioned transgression: the legal protection and social celebration of behaviors a dominant group has long kept forbidden. Gays out of the shadows. Women with authority over their own bodies. Gender identity made visible. These aren’t merely policy disagreements. They evoke, in Freud’s terms, the return of the repressed — suppressed urges and dreads surfacing as aggression in those unprepared to manage them.

But I understated a third force, and it deserves fuller treatment here because it is the one that made the coalition large enough to govern.

Heedless of failed promises to working class voters, the elites of both parties did well. The markets rose. Capital expanded. Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama — across administrations and party lines, the economic consensus held: globalization would lift all boats. It did not. What it lifted was the ownership class. What it left behind was a broad swath of working and lower-middle class Americans — disproportionately white, but not exclusively — whose manufacturing jobs disappeared, whose wages stagnated, whose towns hollowed out, and who received in exchange a set of retraining promises that mostly went unkept and a set of cultural signals that their way of life was either expendable or retrograde.

These are the people globalization hurt and did not protect. And here is where the Venn diagram becomes essential. The three forces — racial grievance, sanctioned transgression, and economic abandonment — do not describe three separate populations. They overlap substantially, and in that overlap is where the reactionary coalition achieved critical mass.

The white working-class voter who lost a factory job and watched his community deteriorate did not experience his grievance in purely economic terms. He experienced it alongside the perceived elevation of people he had been taught to consider beneath him, and alongside the celebration of identities and behaviors his community had always policed and condemned. Economic humiliation, racial status anxiety, and cultural dread arrived together, in the same body, in the same household. They were not separable. Trump did not create that convergence. He recognized it, named it, and weaponized it — offering not solutions but the intoxicating permission to blame and to rage.

The research of Mason, Wronski, and Kane documents the animus dimension with precision. But animus does not arise in a vacuum. It is cultivated in the soil of genuine material loss, then redirected. The Democratic Party, no less than the Republican, participated in creating that soil through decades of elite consensus that prioritized financial capital over working people. The difference is that the Republicans were more ruthless in exploiting the harvest.

What the 2016 post did not fully anticipate was the mutation of the coalition. In 2024, Trump expanded meaningfully beyond the original aggrieved white male base, including significant inroads with Latino men and working-class voters of color. This is less paradoxical than it appears. The economic abandonment dimension of the Venn diagram crosses racial lines. The appeal to masculine dominance and contempt for establishment elites travels further than racial grievance alone would predict. When all three forces converge in a single voter — economic injury, status anxiety, and cultural dread — the coalition becomes something more durable than a protest vote.

Sanctioned Transgression as Policy

In 2016 I described sanctioned transgression as a cultural provocation — something that evoked uncanny dread and triggered defensive aggression in those unprepared to tolerate it. What has changed is the dread has been institutionalized.

The systematic rollback of DEI programs, the assault on transgender rights, the dismantling of civil rights enforcement infrastructure, the targeting of universities for their diversity commitments — these are not merely expressions of grievance. They are the organized attempt to reverse sanction. To re-forbid. To restore the arrangement in which certain people and certain behaviors remained in the shadows, where the dominant group’s repressed material could stay safely projected and punished.

This is the return of the repressed weaponized as executive policy.

The clinical logic is the same as it ever was. Coercion elicits resistance or resigned compliance. What has changed is the scale of the coercion and the directness of its application. We are watching, in real time, a large-scale attempt to manage collective anxiety through enforcement rather than integration — to treat the source of uncanny dread as an enemy to be eliminated rather than a feeling to be understood.

I hope it doesn’t work. But hope is not a timeline. Repression — personal or political — follows the same arc: the surge toward liberation, the reactionary recoil, and the damage that accumulates in the interval. That damage doesn’t disappear when the cycle turns. It becomes the symptom.

The Coerced Mind, Revisited

In an earlier post on the wandering, directed, and coerced mind, I described the third condition — coerced attention — as potentially pathological: circumstances that distort and constrain the capacity to think about anything else. The political situation we are now in produces exactly this condition at a civic level. A steady flood of norm-breaking actions, each demanding response, collectively exhausts the capacity for directed thought.

That exhaustion is not incidental. It is strategic. The overwhelming pace of destabilizing action — the daily assault on institutions, language, and legal norms — is itself a technique of domination. It forecloses the wandering mind, the reflective mind, the mind capable of imagining alternatives. It keeps the citizenry in condition three: compelled, held in place, unable to attend to much else.

This is a form of governing through captured attention.

What Has Not Changed

The core dynamic I described in 2016 remains intact. The reactionary coalition is still organized around the fantasy of restoration — of a social order in which whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, and Christian normativity went without saying. The fantasy was always false — that order was never as stable or as legitimate as its beneficiaries experienced it — but the loss of its unquestioned status is experienced as violation. And violated people, especially those with cultural and now political power, are dangerous.

Trump remains what I would now call the Trickster figure: the one who gives permission to say what was not sayable, to do what was not doable, to be contemptuous of the rules that constrained the aggrieved. The Trickster does not govern. The Trickster disrupts. Governing is being done by others, more deliberately, in the space the disruption creates.

That is the more sober and frightening update. In 2016 the danger was Trump. In 2026 the danger is the institutional apparatus that has learned to use him.

A Note on Nonjudgmental Neutrality

In 2016 I acknowledged the problem of nonjudgmental neutrality in psychotherapy when the politics are these. I want to be clearer now. Nonjudgmental neutrality is a clinical technique appropriate to the consulting room. It is not a civic stance. The psychoanalytic understanding of why people hold destructive beliefs does not require us to treat those beliefs as equally valid.

Understanding the psychodynamics of reactionary politics — the grievance, the dread, the projected rage — is not the same as excusing the harm those politics produce. We can hold both: the clinical empathy that seeks to understand, and the civic judgment that names what is being done to democratic life.

In 2016 I predicted a very dark rough ride. We are on it. The question now is not whether the analysis was correct, but what follows from it — clinically, civically, personally.

I don’t think desperation brings the best out of us. But I do think clarity does. And clarity, at this point, requires saying plainly: this is not ordinary political disagreement. This is the institutionalization of a psychology that cannot tolerate the full humanity of those it has designated as transgressive.

That has a name. It has always had a name.

The Name

The word is fascism. Not as epithet. As description.

Robert Paxton, whose Anatomy of Fascism remains the essential structural account, defines it as a mass movement that mobilizes grievance and nationalist mythology to justify the seizure of state power, the dismantling of democratic norms, the scapegoating of designated enemies, and the cult of a leader who embodies the national will. Checked against that definition, what we are watching qualifies. The hesitation to say so has always been partly aesthetic — the word sounds alarmist, hyperbolic, like losing one’s analytical composure. At some point the hesitation itself becomes a form of denial.

But it is Umberto Eco who earns the greater authority here, and not only because his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” — also titled “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” — is among the most precise and useful things written on the subject. It is because Eco grew up inside it. In 1942, at the age of ten, he competed in a Fascist youth contest on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” He later spent years among SS officers, Fascists, and partisans shooting at one another. He understood fascism not as a political scientist reconstructing a historical specimen but as someone who had breathed the air from childhood. The Italian, in this case, genuinely trumps the American scholar — not in rigor, but in the phenomenological weight that lived experience provides. 

Eco’s insight was that fascism has no stable doctrine — it is a syndrome, a cluster of features that need not all be present simultaneously to constitute the thing. He identified fourteen. Among the most diagnostically useful for our present moment: the cult of tradition that treats modernity as corruption; the rejection of critical thinking as an act of disloyalty; the appeal to a frustrated middle class that feels simultaneously cheated and superior; the obsession with a plot — enemies within, enemies without, always conspiring; the equation of disagreement with betrayal; the selective populism in which the leader alone embodies and speaks for the true people; and what Eco called Ur-Fascism’s Newspeak — the systematic impoverishment of language to foreclose the complexity that independent thought requires.

None of these features requires jackboots or a formal party apparatus. They can arrive in a suit, via social media, through executive orders, and with the enthusiastic support of people who would be genuinely offended to hear the word applied to themselves. That offense is itself one of the syndrome’s features: fascism rarely announces its name.

What Eco and Paxton together give us — the lived phenomenology and the structural analysis — is a diagnostic framework that is neither alarmist nor naive. Applied to the present, it yields a sober conclusion: the movement that has seized American executive power displays the defining features of the historical phenomenon both scholars spent their careers describing.

We are not watching the approach of something that might become fascism if we are not careful. We are watching its operational present tense.

Naming it clearly is not hysteria. It is the minimum that intellectual honesty requires.

 

Related posts: Politics and Religion: Psychotherapy’s Third Rail — Why Marriage Equality Was Inevitable — Empathy, Inclusion, and Moral Dialog

 

References

Mason, L., Wronski, J., & Kane, J. V. (2021). Activating animus: The uniquely social roots of Trump support. American Political Science Review, 115(4), 1508–1516. Cambridge University Press.

Paxton, R. O. (2004). The anatomy of fascism. Alfred A. Knopf.

Eco, U. (1995, June 22). Ur-fascism [Eternal fascism: Fourteen ways of looking at a blackshirt]. The New York Review of Books.