Rules for Reactionaries

by Lee Bebout

A tongue-in-cheek analysis of the communication strategies used to obstruct social justice movements

In our increasingly polarized society, violence and echo chambers drown out all possibility of civil discourse. Thinly veiled racism, misogyny, and homophobia dominate media coverage. Again and again, national debates on race, gender, and justice go in circles. Is our language failing us?

Rules for Reactionaries serves as both a faux guidebook for ultraconservative debaters and an analysis of their rhetorical strategies. Lee Bebout lays out how language can be manipulated by those who wish to suppress progressivism and maintain structures of inequality. Taking his readers across the turbulent political landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, he delineates the rhetorical strategies that have long been used to hinder progressive movements. Bebout identifies evasive tactics such as “All Lives Matter” and “Not All Men,” which promote conservative viewpoints and disrupt calls for change. It’s an old problem that keeps rearing its ugly head, and the only way to disrupt it is to anticipate and identify it.

Rules for Reactionaries reveals how language both reflects and shapes our politics. By reminding us each of the power we possess, Bebout challenges us to not only combat the rhetoric of reactionaries, but to change our own way of thinking.

Genres: Politics

279 pages, Paperback

Published October 14, 2025

Reviews

[Stetson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bebout argues that his book "builds on and contributes to a long and growing body of work on right-oriented political culture." He claims to be working in the tradition of Richard Hofstadter, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Bell and acknowledges alliances with contemporaries like Corey Robin, Kathleen Belew, and Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, who he sees as providing important supportive scholarship. Despite these claims, the book is quite flimsy and none of his claimed intellectual ancestors or contemporaries have ever really understood right-wing politics or even acknowledged its legitimacy, Subsequently, Rules for Reactionaries functions as sophomoric rhetorical analysis of an enormous swath of mixed liberal and conservative political commentary, which draws Bebout's critical attention merely by dint of being to the right of his die-hard, left-wing progressive positioning (which we can only gather as being reactively anti-status quo and pro equality... really detailed and specific there Bebout). It's not much more sophisticated than what is published by goofy internet socialists like Nathan J. Robinson or Ben Burgis. It is the usual muddled and digressive review of alleged "language strategies that allow for inequality to remain entrenched," aka all the dirty tricks of the big bad far righties. To people like Bebout, reactionaries somehow manage to be both incredibly dumb (and thus obviously wrong about everything) and rhetorical geniuses at the same time so their pro-inequality politics keep winning regardless of democratic outcomes.

The main body of the book follow five alleged reactionary rhetorical strategies: 1) Define and Disavow 2) Weaponize Victimhood 3) Build Reactionary Utopias 4) Label Your Opponents Extreme 5) Misdirect by Blaming a Convenient Cause. Bebout produces a number of examples of purported reactionaries using such tactics, but the issue is that plenty of progressives use that exact same rhetorical tactics. Many lefties define opponents or certain arguments as racist or sexist and disavow (or ostracize) those who make such arguments. Many progressives have weaponized victimhood by claiming that historically marginalized or oppressed groups should be given special status or privilege. Many progressives have utopian (or even nostalgic) fantasies that could be achieved only if conservatives surrendered or gave up their values and political goals. Many progressives have worked assiduously to prevent conservative or right-wing ideas from being "platformed" or "normalized." Many progressives have relied on misdirection when trying to account for why their previous attempts at engineering social and material equality have failed miserably (this book essentially being one long exercise in rule #5). As should already be clear, Bebout rhetorical analysis fails to be specific to conservatives. More fundamentally, he never provides a methodology for identifying specific rhetorical modes as promoting the status quo nor does he lay claim to a specific epistemology nor does he provide any systematic evidence to connect rhetoric to political outcomes. The only basis for really deciding that the rhetorical techniques are reactionary and have had reactionary results are his mere assertion that they are and various stereotyped understandings about the valence and consequence of various political ideas.

Hilariously, the ironic title draws obvious inspiration from Saul Alinsky's handbook for left-wing activists (Rules for Radicals), which was obviously not committed to rhetorical combat as the mechanism for allocating political power. Bebout even concedes (in a footnote) that "Alinsky's approach was morally agnostic about the means and ends of community organizing and social transformation," which is quite the euphemistic way of saying that Alinsky was an immoral troublemaker. The acknowledged lineage raises questions about Bebout's belief in the importance of dialogue in a democratic polity. Bebout does actually address such questions but only because many of his ideological compatriots actively disdain free expression and believe that their equality agenda must be forced upon the polity whether they want it or not. However, his justification is a position of incoherent ambivalence:

My ambivalence regarding deliberative democracy and its role in forging social justice emerges from the way that the calls for a national conversation that opened this introduction perform the work of 'cruel optimism.' According to Lauren Berlant, cruel optimism names a relation that 'exists when something you desire is actual an obstacle to your flourishing.' In this case, call for national conversations invite those invested in reactionary entrenchment to participate in shaping the contours and direction of what justice can look like and how it may be achieved. These calls erroneously assume that all act in good faith and with similar goals. As such, the romantic desire for a national conversation to heal our wounds often works to maintain the status quo.

So Bebout thinks we need a "national conversation" to help policy move in the material and structural directions necessary, but then this national conversation will inevitably include reactionaries, who are of course beyond the pale, and thus the conversation will be hijacked. He tries to resolve this be saying there is some middle path between naivety and cynicism, but whatever this middle path is remains largely unspecified or at least underspecified.

At the very conclusion of the work, he identifies nine counter-strategies, though he admits that there are contradictions within these strategies and that "Surely others could elucidate a broader array of methods for navigating thorny dialogues and challenging reactionary entrenchment." He basically ends his book by saying others could have made a better one! Let's take Bebout's own advise and not bother with his book.

Disclaimer: I received this book as an ARC at Netgalley.

Rules for Reactionaries
1. Define and Disavow
2. Weaponize Victimhood
3. Build Reactionary Utopias
4. Label Your Opponents Extreme
5. Misdirect by Blaming a Convenient Cause

Additional Rules for Reactionaries
-Call for patience
-Highlight progress to obscure existing challenges
-Use one for of inequality to deny another
-Misdirect through whataboutism
-Misdirect through bothsiderism
-Call for civility
-Call for free speech, the diversity of opinions, and the marketplace of ideas
-Accept calls for justice and then delay action through emphasis on process
-Nullification by generalization or calls for nuance
-Inoculate by adopting and diffusing reactionary identities
-Declare overcorrection
-Deploy a logic of possession
-Claim to be looking out for the aggrieved community
-Label your opponents as irrational
-Normalize inequality

Nine Strategies to Counter Reaction Entrenchment
1. Determine whether it is worth engaging and potentially refuse
2. Enter these conservations with a commitment to introspection and accountability
3. Call attention to the words, logics, and practices of others and not their character
4. Recognize rhetorical patterns, and call attention to them as a means of disruption
5. Ask questions that allow people to unpack their thinking
6. Shift the central question or terrain of debate to promote more fruitful conversation
7. Recognize secondary audiences and shift attention to them, even if indirectly
8. Develop and deploy counterframing, counternarratives, and scripted responses
9. Foster humanities modes of inquiry and literacy

[Sarah Jensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

⚔️ Rules for Reactionaries: How to Maintain Inequality and Stop Social Justice by Lee Bebout

A scalpel-sharp dissection of systemic oppression—dressed as a villain’s playbook for the modern age.

✨ Review
🔍 Brutal Honesty: Exposes the coded tactics of inequality—gerrymandering, gaslighting, and “tradition”—with the clarity of an X-ray.

🎭 Satirical Edge: Wields irony like a weapon, framing reactionary logic as a dystopian manual (chilling because it works).

📊 Historical Ammo: Traces centuries of systemic sabotage, proving reactionaries recycle the same playbook (just with new dog whistles).

💡 Resistance Toolkit: For activists, it’s a reverse-engineering goldmine—know thy enemy’s moves to dismantle them.

🔥 Provocative Fuel: Guaranteed to spark debates, from dinner tables to protests (handle with gloves—it burns complacency).

⭐ Star Breakdown (0–5)
Impact: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5) (A Molotov cocktail for the mind.)
Research Depth: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4.7/5) (Annotated like a war strategist’s diary.)
Accessibility: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5) (Jargon decoded—but still dense in spots.)
Originality: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4.5/5) (The Art of War for white supremacy.)
Urgency: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5) (Read it before they ban it.)
Overall: 4.6/5 - A forbidden handbook—equal parts enlightening and enraging, with footnotes that double as battle scars.

🙏 Thank you to NetGalley and Lee Bebout for the advance review copy. This isn’t just analysis—it’s an alarm bell. Pair with Mythohistorical Interventions (Bebout’s prior work) for maximum context.

Note: For readers of Caste and How to Be an Antiracist. Keep a highlighter—and a stress ball—handy.

[Dan Leiser · Rating 4 out of 5]

This as an successful examination into the rhetorical strategies of those soldiers of reactionary entrenchment. This book examines those and the systems of inequality that they look to uphold across all forms of the discourse.

Is this an analytical guidebook? This will make this a successful book and I think that it does that.

There is a wealth of strategies to find in this book to create progressive and forward thinking conversations that will help to shift and shake a narrative that is overwrought, or overused, or highly manipulative. If that’s what you are looking for, much like myself going into this, than this book is for you.

The book serves its premise very well. There are times when I think it could’ve been a long form article but that may be because of my own personal fascination of this topic and less an indication of his writing. He avoided the overused tactic of relying on great thinkers of the past too often, and brought more contemporary thinkers into it, even bringing up Jay Smooth, which I appreciated.

Would recommend this book to anyone interesting in trying to identify the strategies used and being able to put a name to them. As well as a way to engage in productive conversations.