Reactionary speech in the digital age

It has been over thirty years since the publication of Albert Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction . Hirschman’s tripartite model – the perversity, futility and jeopardy theses – offers a powerful lens through which to read the historical corpus of conservative thought. Yet we must ask whether a new model of reactionary rhetoric is needed today, given the very different political atmosphere and media environment from the ones in which Hirschman originally formulated his argument. This article is premised on the view that we urgently require a new conception of reactionary rhetoric. It proposes a different analytical approach from Hirschman’s. First, it adopts a conception of conservatism as a reaction against democracy, a defence of the rich and powerful, and the preservation of hierarchy. Second, it makes a case for incorporating a media-ecological perspective to make sense of reactionary rhetoric. Synthesizing political theory with media ecology, this article proposes that if conservatism is an antidemocratic, antiegalitarian and counterrevolutionary movement, then two central and inevitable elements of conservative rhetoric are denialism and mythmaking . Conservative rhetoric, we propose, has both a negative and an affirmative dimension. The negative dimension consists of (1) the denial of social injustice, (2) the demonization of a wildly exaggerated or completely fictitious enemy and (3) the distortion of the relationship between the powerful and the victims of power. The affirmative dimension consists of (1) the sublimation of populist sentiment, (2) the naturalization of hierarchy and (3) the mythologization of social and political order.