Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. By MelindaCooper. New York: Zone Books. 2024. 564 pp.

In her new book Counterrevolution, Melina Cooper offers a thoughtful intellectual history of how the contradictory mainstays of the current Republican party's financial vision came to dominate despite coming from unlikely, unpopular, and unprepossessing origins. Throughout, she makes an effort to explain Donald Trump and his socioeconomic milieu, although this is a welcome addition to her sweeping vision rather than a central focus. Much to her credit, she, more than any other scholar I have read, addresses why it matters that Trump heads a family business that benefited from New York City's post-recession attempts to encourage real estate developers, tracking the history of the economic policies and decisions that led to Trump's first appearance before Congress—to protest a change in tax code unfavorable to developers. At its core, Counterrevolution explores how Trump and others made opposition to taxes under all circumstances so persuasive. She also asks why “so many of us live in a world of unremitting fiscal monetary austerity” (p. 13), and Cooper addresses in detail how conservative thinkers influenced the US government in key strategic moments to turn such austerity into putatively common-sense fiscal policy. There are moments in reading the book that feel like perusing a modern version of Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. For instance, Cooper details how differences between market actors have turned into class-specific and politically salient distinctions in the past 70 or so years in the United States, tracing how Trump's Republican party became the party of small business and family business owners disgruntled with both big government and big business. At the same time, she offers a rich historical background for the ideologies and actions of particular historical thinkers on the right as they endeavored, often successfully, to persuade US citizens to hate taxes and all forms of social welfare that might benefit disadvantaged people, while maintaining well-established financial support for those profiting from certain types of assets. While charting the history of the intellectual scaffolding underlying Republican Party policies, Cooper asks: why did these particular positions become so entrenched in such a distinctive policy configuration? These are positions that represent continual austerity as desirable, frame wage increases as one of the greatest threats to the national economy, insist simultaneously on tax cuts and a balanced budget, oppose abortion rights, and so on. In exploring how these policy positions became ascendant, Cooper reminds readers that US conservative thought is but one version of neoliberalism—and a contested one at that. It was not obvious that the Republican Party of the late 1960s and early 1970s would devote itself to constantly battling for tax cuts on the wealthy, coupled with a refusal to use tax increases for the sake of a balanced budget. It turns out that this treacherous combination required a long history of persuasion. Throughout Counterrevolution, Cooper profiles the specific actors who advocated for various aspects of current Republican financial dogma. In one chapter, she shows how James M. Buchanan, an economist and central figure in the Virginia school of neoliberalism, evolved in his thinking on fiscal policy, ultimately convincing other key players that taxation was an immoral re-distribution of wealth. Many readers will be familiar with the Republican party's cyclical strategy of cutting taxes and then insisting on balanced budgets as a means to minimize or eliminate any government welfare over time. Cooper outlines how influential Buchanan was in developing political strategies underpinning these policies, such as requiring a supermajority in any legislature to vote for tax increases. As part of a recurrent theme in this book, she describes the racist roots of these political tactics, uncovering that Buchanan was borrowing heavily from 19th and early 20th century southern Democrats' strategies for disempowering Black and poor White voters. She also explains why debt default came to seem like such a reasonable threat to repeatedly wield: “Debt default was the fiscal equivalent to territorial secession and, in Buchanan's eyes, perfectly justified on moral grounds” (p. 298). In Counterrevolution's final chapter, Cooper describes the unlikely coalition of socially-conscious Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and, in some instances, Black activists, that came together to create the current state of US abortion politics. While Catholics have long been opposed to abortion and birth control, American Protestants in the 1970s were largely indifferent. Cooper tracks how fetal personhood became such a charged issue for evangelical Protestants, and shows how Catholics often set aside their social justice ideals—including more government support for families—to win over influential Protestant allies. In following these shifts, Cooper illuminates a historical thread to this political drama that has not been stressed nearly enough: Black male activists, among others, saw abortion as closely tied to the eugenics movement. This was a perspective that Catholics and other pro-life allies soon adopted as well. When Clarence Thomas, in his Dobbs opinion, alludes to his belief that having abortion available is a way to reduce and thus weaken the Black population, he is referencing a longstanding belief in the pro-life movement that abortion is racist. Cooper describes this as a kind of discursive trap for women: “As universal bearers of reproductive life, women could not assert their right to bodily autonomy without being accused of eugenic intent” (p. 320). Conservative policymakers added a final twist, casting abortion as a threat to the nation's financial well-being. Abortion was not just sacrilegious and racist—it destroyed potential workers, consumers, and taxpayers. Conservatives, readers discover, succeeded in making abortion and reducing the national debt intertwined projects (p. 306). Melinda Cooper's book speaks to a set of growing concerns among anthropologists—and not just those seeking to understand the historical roots of the fiscal logics of the far right in the United States. There is a growing subfield, the anthropology of taxation, which addresses how people's understanding of the common good is linked with, or kept separate from, their feelings about taxes and how governments redistribute resources. Counterrevolution complements any ethnographic focus on US Americans' changing views and practices about welfare and taxes. She gives valuable insight into how a handful of strategic thinkers exploited challenges in the economic processes shaping people's daily lives in the United States (such as housing costs) to gain widespread support for their fiscal commitment to austerity for the middle-class and poor, and strong government protection for the wealthy's assets. In addition, she points out that the family business and the small business owner have (often erroneously) been conflated by Republicans in the US political imaginary—a phenomenon that helps make sense of contemporary tensions between Republicans and big businesses. Anthropologists who read Cooper's book might begin to see a host of new politically-pressing research projects around how family and business are intertwined in the US. There is plenty to study at the intersection of kinship and commerce: inheritance and disinheritance, family businesses as distinct workplace structures, and so on. Cooper has opened a door for anthropologists, it is now up to us to step through.