Description
Illiberal politics and reactionary nostalgia will shape the next fifty years. Attacking vulnerabilities in the existing liberal international order, populist leaders promise illiberal futures that draw on idealised pasts, for electoral gain. We locate today’s nostalgia in a larger universe of illiberal politics—a category including both left radicals and right reactionaries. We distinguish reaction by its backward-looking orientation toward an idealized past. We internally differentiate reactionary movements on two vectors: whether they are elitist or populist and whether they are moderate or radical in degree of reaction. We argue most reactionaries today are populist and comparatively moderate. We then identify two pathways through which reactionaries may transform world politics. In one scenario, reactionary alliances may capture existing intergovernmental organizations, rolling back liberal policies but leaving their basic structures intact. Given reactionaries’ revisionist promises, however, institutional capture may have unintended consequences. In a second scenario, even movements geared to limited disruption may become more radically transformative, whether intentionally or otherwise. While the former promises to further compromise liberal world ordering, the latter risks overthrowing the system. We map these possibilities onto the typology of reactionaries, weighing their relative risks of systemic transformation.
