The Frontiers of American Reaction Initiative explores the cultural and intellectual production that enables and characterizes today’s reactionary movements. The exploration of culture is undertaken at the intersection of symbolic politics, framing techniques, cultural habits, and collective actions, going from the most obvious topics such as music, movies, and monumental national history to national heritage themes, museum exhibitions, re-enactment groups, memory performances, and other identity-building performances. Illiberal and far-right cultural production contributes to the mainstreaming of their ideas and therefore to a new cultural understanding of “normal” that may over time facilitate the legitimization of new political projects and policies. How these cultural productions, paired with the intellectual production of today’s reactionary elites, is changing American life is the object of study for this initiative.
