Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

There was some truth to this rather condescending view—and the political and ideological gap between the college-educated and non-college-educated would grow ever wider over the coming decades. But this analysis elided or ignored a more basic truth, which was that these people were not just responding to circumstances. They were fundamentally antiliberal in their outlook. Rich or poor, successful or unsuccessful, well educated or not, they simply did not believe in human equality or universal natural rights when it came to certain groups—Black people, in particular—and they took active steps to resist the imposition of those liberal beliefs on them. It was not modernity that they objected to; it was the advancing hegemony of the American liberal tradition bequeathed by the Revolution and the founders.