Reaction

The definition is precise about what reaction wants, and it is not a return to the past in general. What is demanded is a return to a distribution in which a larger portion of the people near the top benefited, which means the constituency is people who were formerly closer to the centre and are no longer, rather than people who were never near it. That accounts for why reactionary movements draw from groups losing relative position rather than from those with the least. The structure is left untouched by design, since reactionaries have no interest in changing underlying principles, and the only offer made to the bottom is reform trickling down. Marsh's final sentence is the argument against that offer and it is arithmetic rather than moral. Reforms in a ponzi scheme will never trickle down, because what feeds the top bleeds the bottom, so a scheme benefiting more people at the top necessarily takes more from below. The two demands are therefore incompatible rather than merely unlikely to be met together. Where this leaves reaction in the framework is alongside liberation that fails, since both leave the structure standing and change only who occupies it, with the difference that liberation movements usually intend otherwise. Her account of the law of the last circle describes the same movement from another angle, since a collapsing endogroup with nothing above it sends people back to their last real or imagined loyalties.

Reaction as a political category dates to the French Revolution and has a substantial scholarly literature, with Corey Robin arguing that conservatism is fundamentally a reaction to the empowerment of subordinate groups and Albert Hirschman cataloguing the rhetorical forms reactionary argument takes. Research on status threat has found relative loss of position a stronger predictor of support for such movements than absolute deprivation, which is Marsh's constituency claim arrived at empirically. Her addition is the arithmetic, since deriving the incompatibility of restoration and trickle down from the ponzi structure turns a political observation into a structural impossibility.