Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

Virtue will slumber. The wicked will be continually watching: Consequently you will be undone. —Patrick Henry, Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 9, 1788

The institutions that America’s founders created to safeguard liberal democratic government cannot survive when half the country does not believe in the core principles that undergird the American system of government. The presidential election of 2024, therefore, will not be the usual contest between Republicans and Democrats. It is a referendum on whether the liberal democracy born out of the Revolution should continue. Today, tens of millions of Americans have risen in rebellion against that system. They have embraced Donald Trump as their leader because they believe he can deliver them from what they regard as the liberal oppression of American politics and society. If he wins, they will support whatever he does, including violating the Constitution to go after his enemies and political opponents, which he has promised to do. If he loses, they will reject the results and refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the federal government, just as the South did in 1860. Either way, the American liberal political and social order will fracture, perhaps irrecoverably.

This struggle between liberalism and antiliberalism has shaped international politics for the last two centuries and dominates the international scene today. But the same struggle has also been fought within the American system since the time of the Revolution.

The idea that all Americans share a commitment to the nation’s founding principles has always been a pleasing myth, or perhaps a noble lie.

Great numbers of Americans, from the time of the Revolution onward, have wished to see America in ethnoreligious terms, as fundamentally a white, Protestant nation whose character is an outgrowth of white, Christian, European civilization.

A straight line runs from the slaveholding South in the early to mid-nineteenth century to the post-Reconstruction South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, to the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and ’50s, to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society of the 1950s and ’60s, to the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement of recent decades, to the New Right of the Reagan Era, to the Republican Party of today.

All these antiliberal groups—the slaveholding South, the white Southern populists of the Jim Crow era, the Klan, the Birchers, the followers of Pat Buchanan—have feared that their idea of America as a nation of “small government, maximum freedom, and a white, Christian populace” was under attack.[1]

The most successful leaders of these populist movements have always played to popular fears and resentments of the “elite,” the “liberal media,” and government bureaucrats who supposedly have contempt for “the people.”

James Burnham marveled at how Joseph McCarthy’s “inept acts and ignorant words” had a “charismatic” quality that well expressed the fears and angers of his devoted followers.

What their critics saw as boorishness and malevolence, however, their followers saw as strength and defiance against a world stacked against them.

These were not the tame “conservers” of classical liberalism that some intellectuals claim as the true “conservatism” of America. They have been rebellious opponents of the system, “wreckers,” unabashedly antiliberal in both thought and manner, and that is what made them popular.

although people can point to many recent, proximate causes of its latest manifestation as the Trump movement, the search for such causes misses the point. The problem is not the design of the American system. It is not the Electoral College, which not so long ago favored the Democratic Party much as it today favors Republicans. It is not political polarization per se, which has often shaped American politics. It is not the internet or Fox News. It is not the economy: these movements have flourished in good times as well as bad. It is not this or that war, or any particular foreign policy. The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs. As in the past, millions of Americans are rebelling against the constitutional order and the liberalism it protects, and millions more, out of blind political allegiance, fear and hatred of the Democratic Party and “woke” culture, and out of ignorance or indifference to the consequences, are willing to go along with their party’s radical antiliberal wing even if it leads to the overthrow of the American system of government and perhaps the dissolution of the nation.

The world that is rising into existence is still half encumbered by the remains of the world that is waning into decay; and amid the vast perplexity of human affairs, none can say how much of ancient institutions and former customs will remain, or how much will completely disappear…. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1831)

A liberal tradition was born with the American Revolution, and the radical liberalism of the founding continues to shape and even dominate politics and society in America. But a dissenting tradition was also born, an antiliberal tradition that has done just as much to shape the nation’s course, and which is alive and thriving today.

One of liberalism’s great weaknesses has always been the belief in its own inevitability.

But the inevitability of liberalism is a liberal myth. From a historical perspective, liberalism, freedom, protection of the rights of the individual have been the rare aberration. Since the dawn of humankind, people have been ruled by tyrannies of one form or another. That is the norm. The predominance of liberalism in the modern world is the exception. It is the product of accident and contingency, of time and place, of wars won and lost. It is due more than anything to the rise of a powerful and all-but-invulnerable liberal power that, like all great powers in history, has shaped the world around it according to its beliefs.

The American Revolution and the founding of the liberal republic were a radical departure, and it is the reaction to that radical liberalism which is the source of today’s political and social crisis.

liberalism itself the final destination on some journey of human existence, the natural endpoint of some concept of “modernization.” Rather, it is a choice, and, at root, a faith. Although its proponents often claim it is the natural product of reason, there is no way to prove that liberal principles are either more “rational” or more “just” than the hierarchical worldview that has guided the vast majority of human beings for almost the entirety of recorded history. Liberalism reflects neither the will of God nor the necessity of history. Either one believes in its principles or one does not.

Government, Rousseau believed, had to “force a citizen to be free,” and he saw the role of the state as not merely safeguarding the people’s interests but seeing to their “moral development.”

In the end, what later historians have celebrated as the “age of the democratic revolution” produced no actual democracies. By the time of Waterloo, the only nation that had democratized at all was the United States.

The increasing role of the state naturally tended to strengthen the British Crown, just as it had strengthened monarchy on the Continent.

The Americans were not joining and advancing an already existing liberal movement when they made their Revolution, therefore. They were embarking on a new direction of their own.

“Men came to accept the idea of equality…because as they looked around them, they saw men equal.”

Despite the special conditions that pertained in the colonies that tended to undermine the authority of London, Wood argues, until the Revolutionary period, “the theoretical underpinnings of their social thought remained largely monarchical.”

they were mostly under the impression, understandable if mistaken, that the great freedoms they enjoyed and the lack of oppressive hierarchies in their society were, in fact, the product of that constitution, rather than of their unique North American circumstances.

From time immemorial, peoples had organized themselves by family, tribe, and, in the modern era, by nations where collectives of tribes were rooted in a common land and linked by common blood, ethnicity, and, usually, religious belief. Few societies in history had ever recognized individual rights at all. Those that did had recognized rights for their own kind, not for others. Even in societies where religions other than the state religion were tolerated, that tolerance was conditional.

It may have been true, as modern liberals have argued, borrowing from the very unliberal Hegel, that all human beings seek “recognition” of their dignity as humans. But although they seek recognition for themselves, their family, their tribe, their co-religionists, their compatriots, few ever acknowledge that others who are not like them—who are of different religions, tribes, and nations—also have an equal right to “recognition.”

They were led by unusual and unforeseen circumstances to adopt this radical, universalist ideology.

Jefferson acknowledged as much in the Declaration. The “truths” which he declared to be “self-evident,” that all men were “created equal” and were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and that “to secure these rights” governments were “instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” were not a description of fact. This was a statement of faith, or, as Jefferson and his colleagues saw it, a statement of reason deduced from nature. Locke’s philosophy, although it claimed to be based on empirical observation, was on some critical issues based more on Euclidian logic than on observable reality.

Thomas Paine wanted to believe that, as a result of the Revolution, Americans’ “style and manner of thinking” had also “undergone a revolution”: “We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts than those we formerly used.”[37]

A majority of colonists before the Revolution, it is fair to say, did not believe in universal rights, certainly not the slaveholders who dominated the Southern colonies, but not the Northerners, either, whose prejudices against Catholics were almost as great as their prejudices against Black people and Native Americans.

The new, radically liberal tradition in America would from the beginning be accompanied by an antiliberal tradition every bit as potent.

the revolutionary and founding generations, with their unusually intense obsession with their own individual rights, ensured that the question of individual rights and how best to protect them would be the central issue of American politics and society for the rest of the life of the republic. Future generations of Americans would have to grapple continually with the contradictions between the lofty promise and purpose of the founding, and the realities of American society, including the many racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices of its people.

there could be no doubt of the intentions of the revolutionary and founding generations. The system of government they created in this period was first and foremost an individual-rights-protection machine.

The question for them was how much of their rights and autonomy were they willing to part with in order to make a government possible? For many Americans, the answer was: as little as possible. For the drafters of the federal Constitution, the answer was: as little as possible consistent with an effective, functioning government capable of defending itself in an anarchic world.

Such a system could function only if the majority of the people accepted the government’s authority voluntarily, and they would only do so if they believed its powers were sufficiently circumscribed. Taken far enough, this was not a prescription for strong government but for anarchy.

The Americans did not quite fall into anarchy, but suspicion of government, any government, became an animating force in American politics and remains so today.

Geography, again, determined politics. As first the Puritans, then the British, and now the leaders of the early republic learned, it was not easy to impose anything on people who lived at great distances in undeveloped frontier regions and who always had the option to move elsewhere.

The Americans’ circumstances in the first years of the new republic would shape the tenor of American politics and society thereafter, ensuring that the government’s authority would always be precarious. This was the Lockean dilemma. If the people had an inherent right to overthrow a government that they deemed systematically unwilling or unable to defend their natural rights, then no government could survive without substantial—and continuing—popular consent. As Jefferson put it, “Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them.”

The English constitution had been understood as a contract between the Crown and its subjects, from Magna Carta to the settlement of 1688, a contract that safeguarded the people’s traditional rights and freedoms. This distinguished the English from most monarchies on the European Continent, who ruled, they claimed, by divine right, which gave them absolute power. The English idea of a contract between the king and the nobility or the people did make a revolutionary presumption, that both the nobility and the people had rights which the king was bound to respect.

As Lincoln would later put it, the Constitution was just the framework for the protection and realization of the principles of the Declaration, including the principle of universal individual rights.

there is no escaping the clear intent of the founders, which Lincoln recognized. And, indeed, it was on the question of religion that the founders were the most radical. They went out of their way not to establish the new republic on a religious foundation and were more successful in this than the supposedly more radical French Revolution—even Napoleon felt the need of a Concordat granting the Catholic Church an official role in French society (when he wasn’t persecuting Catholic priests for not accepting his authority over the Pope’s).[48]

Unlike the Mayflower Compact, which required godly behavior of all citizens so that all might have a chance at salvation, the Declaration had nothing to do with the afterlife or with godly behavior in this life. It was about the preservation of “natural rights,” an entirely worldly task, to be carried out by human beings with no assistance from God, following principles of natural rights that they did not require God in order to comprehend.

God is also absent from the federal Constitution.

religion, but only apart from government. Whatever Jefferson’s private views of the universe and “nature’s God” may have been, he and his colleagues believed that the intermingling of religion and government had been and always would be the path to tyranny. The issue, for them, was not merely religion but “freedom of conscience,” without which, they believed, there could be no freedom at all.

In answer to that most fundamental question—who is an American?—the founders were clear that it could be any free person on American soil who was willing to abide by the laws and the Constitution of the United States. American liberalism was not tied to religion, culture, or even race. Free Black people in most Northern states were citizens. Nor was it tied to chronology, privileging those who came first over those who came later. This, too, was partly a reflection of reality. The new American republic was already a nation of immigrants.

The new federal Constitution drafted in 1787 and coming into force in 1789, therefore, contained a mammoth contradiction. It was designed to create a liberal political order in which universal natural rights could be most securely protected. Yet it also included special protections for the most antiliberal practice in the world: slavery. This contradiction in effect created two distinct Americas, one predominantly liberal, and one determinedly and necessarily antiliberal.

The general suspicion of strong government that shaped the contours of the new republic became entangled with the slaveholders’ demands to limit the federal government’s ability to intrude in their affairs. Henceforth, slaveholders and white supremacists of all stripes would appeal to this libertarian founding spirit, which paradoxically both protected American liberalism against a too-powerful government but also, perversely, offered protections for the antiliberal institution of slavery.

the party controlled by the “slave power,” as Northern antislavery politicians called it, managed to hold the White House for forty-four years out of the sixty years between 1801 and the outbreak of the Civil War. Every northern president in this period was either favorable to slavery or indifferent but, in any case, took no steps against it.

This was the great disjunction produced by the American founding. Americans may have changed their views concerning what made a government legitimate. The oppressions of the British Empire may have made them acutely conscious and jealous of what they now called their universal natural rights. But they were still the same people they had been before circumstances drove them to adopt this new theory of government. For the great majority of Americans there had been no lessening of racial, religious, or ethnic prejudice, no rethinking of the role of women, no gradual abandonment of religious traditions. The new liberal order was grafted onto what was in many respects a preliberal and even antiliberal society.