"The Far Center"

"So in the most basic sense, the reactionary liberal is reacting against her own feelings of political conviction, as if politics were a virus she had contracted from someone at a party. The political theorist Corey Robin has written that all reactionary movements begin with a disturbance in 'the private life of power'—the southern slaveholder, for instance, defended slavery because daily life as 'the master' had led him to perceive emancipation as an 'intolerable assault upon his person.' In this way, the reactionary is driven by a desire to recover a greatly cherished self-image; what distinguishes one type from another is the content of that image. Traditional conservatism, Robin writes, is an 'elitist movement of the masses' that aims to democratize the feeling of dictatorship: The working-class Trump supporter is meant to see his own supremacy rapturously reflected in his leader's innate grasp of power. Of reactionary liberalism, we might say the opposite: It is a populist movement of the elites, an explicit bid by the intelligentsia to defend its bourgeois way of life on the grounds that its exceptional moral sensibility gives it unique access to the human experience. The conservative says, 'You too can be superior.' The reactionary liberal says, 'I alone am average.'"

Andrea Long Chu at New York defines and criticizes "a loose coalition of disillusioned Democrats, principled humanists, staid centrists, anti-woke journalists, civil libertarians, wronged entertainers, skeptical academics, and toothless novelists, all brought together by their shared antipathy to what they regard as the illiberal left."

And Rebecca Traister makes a similar argument.