Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

the average American, confronted with the kaleidoscope of alleged foreign threats—anarchists, communists, unpatriotic Germans and Irish, socialists, Jews, Italians—turned against all things foreign. Wilson and his League of Nations fell victim to this mood, actively and aggressively stirred up by Theodore Roosevelt in his last days, and by Henry Cabot Lodge and other Republicans. With shameless hypocrisy, these two leading internationalist Republicans now openly equated “internationalism” with Bolshevism and pointedly, and absurdly, singled out the Jewish Leon Trotsky as the evil genius behind it all. It was they, not the Taft Republicans of the 1930s, who began the anticommunist red-baiting and stoked the paranoia about “internationalists” and “globalists” at home and abroad seeking to undermine America—all for the purpose of defeating Wilson. Rather remarkably, even a century later, Republicans are still warning of “globalists” and “cosmopolitans.”