Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

Scholars have written about the “liberal tradition in America,” but there has also been an antiliberal tradition in America, a powerful and persistent dissenting view that emerged at the very beginning and would shape the course of American history for the next two centuries, right up until our own time.

The core and beating heart of this dissenting, antiliberal tradition was the slaveholding South.

as humans often do when confronted with a clash between interest and principle, it was the principle they jettisoned.

the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the flow in the opposite direction.

The social theorist George Fitzhugh argued that the United States was founded on false “abstractions,” that “life and liberty” were not, in fact, “unalienable.” They had been “sold in all countries, and in all ages, and must be sold so long as human nature lasts.” It was the North, he insisted, not the South, that was out of step with the broad sweep of human history. The “peculiar institution” was not slavery; it was liberalism.[13]

As the Southern journalist W. J. Cash explained, the “common white” was no less loyal to the South and its institutions than the rich plantation owner. The reason was race. Non-slaveholding white people were just as “determined to keep the black man in chains” as the slaveholders and saw Northern antislavery agitation as just as much a danger to them.

Already, women at abolitionist meetings were “unsex[ing]” themselves by pouring out “false and foul execrations against slavery and the Bible.” It was all of a piece—“slavery, marriage, religion” were the “pillars” of human society, and they were all threatened by the same liberal ideals that produced abolitionism.[18] As one mid-nineteenth-century Southern Presbyterian leader put it, “The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.”

What would later become the American conservatives’ fixation on “small government” was inextricably tied up, first, with the protection of slavery, and then, after the Civil War, with the South’s efforts to preserve white supremacy. The South demanded “strict construction” of the Constitution, a kind of “originalism” that focused on the language of the Constitution, which protected slavery, against the liberals’ appeal to the Declaration and the “spirit” of the Revolution, which tended to undermine slavery. —

In those early years of crisis and excitement, “the jealousy, envy, and avarice” that were part of human nature were “smothered and rendered inactive,” and the “deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge” were directed exclusively at Britain. But that heightened state in which the Declaration had been promulgated was fading in people’s memories. The original “pillars of the temple of liberty” had “crumbled away.” It was left to the present generation to replace them with new pillars.[25]

The founders and the revolutionary generation had well understood that even “the people” could be tyrants, and that the protection of “natural rights” would sometimes require overruling the decisions of the majority. The nation was founded not on the principle of “popular sovereignty” but on the belief that all individuals possessed natural rights that could not be abridged even by democratic processes.

Southern leaders pointed out after the outbreak of the Civil War that they were not the “revolutionists” but were “resisting revolution.” And they were right. They were resisting the American Revolution.

As the president of the new Southern Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, correctly observed, “We are not engaged in a quixotic fight for the rights of men. Our struggle is for inherited rights…. We are conservative.”

George Washington had foreseen from the beginning that the struggle between liberalism and antiliberalism had to be settled if the Union was to survive. And it could only be settled in one way. “Nothing but the rooting out of slavery,” he had warned, could “perpetuate the existence of the union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”[30]

The “Radical” Republicans, so-called by their opponents, attempted to do this but were stymied both by Southern resistance and by Northern unwillingness to expend the resources and energy that would be required to transform the South sufficiently to make it reliably liberal. This, combined with the indifference, at best, of most Northerners to the plight of the formerly enslaved Black people, practically ensured that the South would emerge with white supremacy intact.

“it was the common white,” according to Cash, “and particularly the poor white properly so-called—in whom the Yankee’s activities generated the greatest terror and rage, in whom race obsession and passion for getting the Negro safely bound again in his old place were most fully developed.”[5]

the common assumption about the inevitability of liberalism has led to constant underestimation of the power of antiliberal sentiments in America. We simply assume that, with time, people become enlightened. Yet the views of white Southerners did not change: not in the 1870s, when they fought against Black equality; not in the 1920s, when the second Klan spread across the South like wildfire; not in the 1960s, when George Wallace spoke for millions when he declared “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” And not today, when the unwarranted killing of Black people by police inspires for so many white Americans more sympathy for the police than for their victims.

Restoring the Union not only ensured a continuation of the vibrant antiliberal tradition in America, it also gave antiliberalism a continuing foothold within the constitutional system, even as “purified” by the Civil War amendments. The Democratic Party, which had been captured by the slaveholders in the antebellum years, remained the party of the South, and therefore of institutionalized racism, after the war and for the next century, even under progressive liberal reforming presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Indeed, if Southern slavery and white racism posed the most profound challenge to the new liberal ideals of the American government, virulent anti-Catholicism was a close second. For most Americans outside the South, Catholics were the number-one enemy.

some of the attacks on Catholics came from liberals. Catholicism, they argued, which theoretically required unquestioning allegiance to the Pope, was inherently hostile to liberty. This charge against Catholicism as antiliberal and antidemocratic would remain conventional wisdom in American academic circles, not to mention the public at large, until deep into the second half of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, there was a kernel of truth in it, inasmuch as many Catholics in antebellum America shared with the Southern slaveholders an uneasiness about liberal individualism. Since Catholics had been among the chief victims of the French Revolution, they naturally harbored deep hostility toward the liberal ideals that allegedly informed it.

Only as a result of the American Revolution had a significant number of non-slaveholding Protestants in the North turned against slavery. Yet most Catholics, even in the North, did not make the same journey. All the major Protestant denominations in the mid-nineteenth century had important antislavery wings, but the Catholics did not.

The fact that Catholics seemed aligned with Southern slaveholders made them targets for the principled and for the bigoted.

The Irish Catholic immigrants who fled famine and oppression in the British Isles were generally regarded as subhuman, and not white, by much of the native white American population. As Irish immigrants came to dominate the Catholic Church in America, the hostility of the vast majority of American Protestants only deepened.

Lincoln’s Republican Party, which saw itself as rededicating the nation to the Declaration and the original principles of the Revolution, tended to welcome immigration.

Roosevelt was one of the last spokesmen for the American “melting pot,” however. By his time, even progressives were having second thoughts. Progressives, after all, were themselves overwhelmingly white and Protestant, and many shared the broader concern that immigration would dilute and degrade the Anglo-Saxon culture which so many believed was the essential foundation of American liberties.

This loss of confidence about the American powers of assimilation and absorption was part of a much larger loss of faith in liberalism itself. World War One marked a turning point. Whether it just happened to coincide with a rising tide of xenophobia, or whether it caused it, the war strengthened demands for protecting the “Nordic” strain in America from the poison of other racial strands.

By the 1920s, onetime liberal intellectuals like Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Lippmann were explicitly abandoning liberalism as lacking the necessary “ruthlessness” to survive. “We need something less circumspect than liberalism to save the world,” Niebuhr argued.[39] He turned temporarily to communism, Lippmann temporarily to conservatism.

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.”

But though the presidents were silent, the 1920s were a high-water mark of antiliberalism, the highest until now.

That the election of 1920 produced this nobody of a president whom Americans barely remember today has hidden the fact that the election was a political and ideological tsunami. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s became the ultimate symbol of the continuing vibrancy of the antiliberal tradition in America, spreading from the South to much of America. The new Klan’s target was the whole collection of alien peoples and beliefs. Whereas the original Klan had stuck to its narrow mission in the South of keeping Black people down and liberal whites out, this second incarnation of the Klan broadened its geographical scope to include the whole country and broadened its targets to include Catholics and Jews.

The original Klan operated in secrecy as a guerrilla organization continuing the Civil War by other means, using violence and terror under cover of night to kill opponents both Black and white.

The great success of the Klan as a national organization revealed, among other things, the insecurity of middle-class white Protestants. It was not economic insecurity, however. The heyday of the second Klan, after all, came during the booming economy of the 1920s. The Klan had “no economic program” and revered “the pursuit of profit.” Nor was the stereotype of Klan members as rural bumpkins accurate. Some 50 percent of members lived in cities, more than 30 percent in large cities. Klan members did blame “elites” for the nation’s ills, but those elites were not the wealthy but the “big-city liberal professionals, secular urbanites who promoted cosmopolitanism” and who “looked down on Klanspeople as stupid and/or irrational and/or out of step with modernity.” As Gordon observes, this disrespect for the Klan “only intensified its hostility and sense of righteousness.”

Mid-century liberal thinkers called it status anxiety, a response to “the entry into society of formerly ‘disenfranchised’ elements, particularly the children of immigrants and members of minority ethnic groups.”

As Seymour Martin Lipset observed, “The Klan, with its attack on metropolitan ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the more traditional minority ethnic scapegoats, seems to have provided an outlet to the frustrated residents of provincial America, who felt their values, power, and status slipping away.”

Over the course of the 1920s and ’30s, Republicans became more and more the party of white Protestant, nonurban America, while the Democratic Party became more and more a coalition of urban ethnic minorities plus, of course, the antiliberal racist South.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, antiliberal Republicans were a beleaguered minority.

Even the two great demagogues of the era, Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin, began as enthusiastic supporters of Roosevelt and pushed redistributionist economic plans before the former was assassinated and the latter turned against Roosevelt and made anti-Semitism and isolationism his leading issues.

As an editorial in The Nation put it, Smith’s candidacy was itself a symbol to most intellectuals “of tolerance in American life—racial, religious, and social tolerance, accepting into the American family the city-dwellers who have come to us within the last century.”[6]

The Depression helped energize the most liberal elements of twentieth-century Catholicism—namely, those devoted to assisting the poor and disadvantaged against an uncaring and, at best, amoral capitalist system. Here was one place where the Catholic critique of liberal individualism temporarily meshed with popular views. The collective, government-centered response of the New Deal was more in keeping with Catholic teachings than the “rugged individualism” of unfettered capitalism. In 1931, Pope Pius XI released his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, in which he declared that “the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces.”

World War Two dealt the most devastating blow of all to all the different strains of antiliberalism—racial, ethnic, and religious. The effect of the war on the ongoing struggle between liberalism and antiliberalism was visible on several fronts. First was the nature of the enemy. That Hitler was the ultimate promoter of the racist views that had grown so popular in the United States was not lost on contemporaries. The Nazi implementation of eugenics policies, the institutionalization and militarization of “Nordic” supremacy, so badly discredited the vast and influential school of eugenics in the United States that Americans today barely know such a thing existed.

After 1941, such news about the Holocaust as reached America discredited anti-Semitism and forced those who held anti-Semitic views—probably a majority of the American population—to keep them largely to themselves. In short, the whole intellectual edifice of antiliberal white supremacy, which had dominated the American academy, American intellectual circles, and the general prejudices of average white Protestants, was badly damaged by the war with German racism.

No small part of the liberal gains in this period was due simply to the crumbling of the old immovable wall of religious, ethnic, and racial antiliberalism. It was not that the South ceased to resist and to fight for its antiliberal position, but it was increasingly isolated, and the dominance it had still enjoyed in the 1920s was gone. With that powerful obstacle removed, new groups seeking equality in the American system had more room to maneuver and to make use of the tools provided by the founders for pressing for their rights. Part of this revolution was circumstantial—the Depression, the war, and their effect on electoral politics—but the rest was a matter of appealing to the liberal ideals of the founding and making use of the principles of the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, and the “purified” post–Civil War Constitution.

the movement toward greater and greater fulfillment of the liberal principles of the Revolution and early republic was relentless, certainly from the Southern point of view. The Southern Democratic Party and the conservative antiliberal white Protestant forces in the Republican Party had been the twin pillars of the antiliberal movement. But between the Depression and the war, the conservative antiliberal wing of the Republicans had been widely discredited and pushed to the fringe. The dominant forces in the party were now moderate and liberal. The first Republican president since 1928, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had considered running as a Democrat.

Put another way, the North was in charge in a way it had not been since the election of Lincoln.

To many Americans outside the South, it was extraordinary how little the South had changed over the course of a century in which so much else had changed.

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.”

this notion of inevitable moral progress upward toward liberalism was and is a figment of the liberal imagination, as the South has proved again and again over the course of two and a half centuries. In fact, in 1954 the great majority of white Southerners hadn’t changed their views at all since the Civil War. Preserving white supremacy was as important to white Southerners then as it had been ...

As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, a Black person had to be “willing to risk martyrdom in order to move and stir the conscience of his community and the nation.” Rather than submit to “surreptitious cruelty in thousands of dark jail cells and on countless shadowed street corners,” the Black citizen must “force his oppressor to commit his brutality openly…with the rest of the world looking on.”[16] The

In signing into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which gave the federal Justice Department oversight of Southern state elections to ensure their openness and fairness to Black people, he gave a paean not to white generosity but to Black courage and Black virtue. Comparing the recent defiance of Black people against the racists of Selma, Alabama, to the battles at Lexington and Concord, Johnson told a joint session of Congress that the “real hero of this struggle” was the “American Negro.

Johnson concluded, “This cause must be our cause too. It is not just Negroes, but all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Mid-century liberal commentators like Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter treated the conservatives of their era as fringe holdovers from an earlier time, like Japanese soldiers still fighting the Second World War in island caves. This “Radical Right,” as they called it, needed to be explained psychologically more than ideologically, as the product of “authoritarian personalities.” They even referred to this right as “pseudo-conservative,” borrowing from Theodor Adorno—not truly conservative in the sense of wanting to preserve institutions and traditions, but revolutionary in its hostility to the existing system.