Rules for Reactionaries

How to Maintain Inequality and Stop Social Justice

Lee Bebout

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English

New York University Press
14 October 2025

Social discrimination; Central government policies

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.

By: Lee Bebout
Imprint: New York University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 127mm,
ISBN: 9781479829514
ISBN 10: 147982951X
Pages: 280
Publication Date: 14 October 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

Reviews for Rules for Reactionaries: How to Maintain Inequality and Stop Social Justice

""Lee Bebout's brilliant and trenchant analysis of reactionary entrenchment and the rhetorical strategies deployed to block social change is deeply needed at this moment in our history. I can think of no better book to help us better understand our present and worsening national crisis."" - Jeff Crane, California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt