Rules for Reactionaries: How to Maintain Inequality and Stop Social Justice
Oct 2025 · NYU Press
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About this ebook
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.
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.
About the author
Lee Bebout is Professor of English at Arizona State University. Bebout teaches on and researches in the areas of race, social justice, and political culture. He is also the author of Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White
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