Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

The common view in the North, articulated both by Eisenhower and by the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, was that the people of the South needed time to adjust, as if just living in the American liberal democratic system would over time acculturate them to accept liberalism. Here again was a central conceit of liberalism, inherited from the Enlightenment, the idea that with time and education, with science and reason, all people must eventually make their way up the ladder of civilization to liberalism. Mid-century liberal thinkers saw antiliberal conservatism less as an ideological alternative to liberalism than as a bad adjustment to what they called “modernity,” with “modernity” itself defined in part by the triumph of liberalism. The “backlash” theory, which was essentially how Eisenhower saw the problem, held that the white people of the South had to be brought along slowly and carefully, with the underlying assumption that they would eventually get there on their own if not provoked by a hurried “radicalism.”