Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

Louis Hartz crystallized this thinking in his widely read 1955 book, The Liberal Tradition in America. Hartz argued that there was no genuine conservative dissenting tradition in America, by which he meant no European-style conservatism, because there had never been feudalism and the kind of traditional class structure that had produced revolution in France. American conservatives could not seek a return to the ancien régime, as European antiliberal critics like Joseph de Maistre did in the early nineteenth century, because in America there was no ancien régime to return to. In the United States, the Revolution and the early republic were the ancien régime. The only conservatism in America, in other words, was a “liberal” conservatism—a distinctly American conservatism dedicated to preservation of a distinctly American liberalism.

The leading thinkers of this school, the young William F. Buckley and the more established conservative thinker Russell Kirk, were both antiliberal on the issues of the day, and although Buckley claimed to be fighting against what he and others regarded as the distortions and excesses of modern American liberalism—to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop!”—it was not alleged liberal excesses but the core of American liberalism that he and his colleagues opposed.

What made Buckley such an influential figure in the conservative movement was the way he framed the issues. He portrayed efforts to bring the South in line with the principles of the Declaration as “radical social experimentation.” He dressed up conservative antiliberalism as a Burkean respect for history and tradition. He attacked liberals for imposing “ideological abstractions about equality” against the South’s traditions.

This was the classic European antiliberal critique of liberalism, ostensibly justified by a Burkean respect for tradition. It was not the American Revolutionary tradition to which Buckley and his allies appealed, however, but a tradition of Anglo-Protestant white supremacy that predated the Revolution.

The Warren Court, after all, was not pulling liberal abstractions out of the air; they were the liberal abstractions of the Declaration of Independence.

When Buckley claimed to be standing “athwart history, yelling Stop!,” therefore, it was not history as of 1957; it was history as of 1776.

Opposition to “omnipotent government,” anticommunism, and the defense of “traditional” values, by which were meant chiefly white, Christian values—these became the three pillars of conservatism from Buckley to Ronald Reagan. Indeed, much of conservative politics throughout the Cold War decades, and even today, lay in deliberately blurring the distinction between liberalism and communism, suggesting that the imposition of liberal principles, including those established by the Declaration and Bill of Rights, was akin to the totalitarian impositions of the communists and even of the Nazis.

As potent as these ideas eventually became in reviving antiliberal conservatism in the 1980s and beyond, as a political force antiliberal conservatism remained weak from the 1950s through the 1970s. The overwhelming support Eisenhower received in the 1952 and 1956 elections showed that the majority of Republican voters did not strongly oppose either the New Deal or, outside the South, desegregation.

Less respectable, but more politically successful, was Joe McCarthy, whom Buckley championed long after he was disowned not only by Eisenhower but even by the onetime McCarthyite Richard Nixon.

It was Nixon again after 1968; throughout his presidency, he courted liberals, seeking détente with the Soviet communists and opening relations with “Red” China, and, far from unwinding the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, adding new government programs of his own. Conservatives stuck by Nixon on the Vietnam War and took his side against the growing left and the antiwar movement, but they had long since stopped regarding him as one of them.

In the 1964 election, many of these antiliberal conservatives, in North and South, flocked to George Wallace. The antiliberal forces in the country could still be counted in the millions, but they lacked a foothold in the main political competition.

The complaints of these groups were not primarily economic—the 1950s and ’60s, like the 1920s, were boom times in the American economy, and membership in antiliberal groups like the John Birch Society spanned all economic levels. Liberal sociologists and political thinkers of the day still attributed their dissent from American liberalism to status anxiety.

The world was changing too fast for these simple people to comprehend and adjust to; with time and education, they would. “Modernity,” after all, was a reality that could not be evaded.

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.

three decades of liberal government and New Deal policies had created what C. Wright Mills in his 1956 book, The Power Elite, called the “new class”: lawyers, journalists, university professors, the experts who flocked to government beginning in the 1930s. This new class was predominantly liberal, since such professions depended on liberalism to survive. The rise of the new class to positions of power in the economy and political system strengthened an increasingly liberal trend in government, politics, and society. As Daniel Bell put it in 1962, the New Deal had “rewoven” the very “fabric of government…with liberal thread.”

Reagan’s election owed less to the triumph of antiliberal conservatism, however, than to a collapse within liberalism. The Vietnam War fractured the liberal establishment of both parties, and there was general public disenchantment with the Great Society programs and the “welfare state” as it had evolved by the late 1970s. This disenchantment had a potent racial component, which Reagan and other Republican politicians exploited—brandishing the racially loaded stereotype of the “welfare queen.”

The idea of communal ownership was not prevalent at the time of the Revolution, nor had it ever found many adherents throughout recorded history prior to the Bolshevik Revolution (the Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Münster come to mind.) Even the French revolutionaries believed in private property. So did the founders. Those Americans, generally on the left, who have viewed the founders’ Lockean convictions as a problem that needs to be remedied may be right or wrong from some other philosophical and moral perspective, but such a view was fundamentally at odds with the liberal principles and the liberal system that the founders erected to protect them.

On the other hand, the founders were not property fetishists. None of them believed the government should have no role in the economy. They believed in tariffs and taxes, and not only to raise revenue but to protect American producers from foreign competition. Hamilton’s economic program was a deliberate bit of social engineering, designed to gain the allegiance of the owners of capital to the new government.

Reagan’s victory, in short, was not a defeat for liberalism. And the conservative antiliberals knew it. While Reagan waged a faux war on government and duked it out with liberal Democrats over foreign policy, the Republican Party’s antiliberal faction had to be satisfied with crumbs from the table.

Reagan tried to portray himself as the president of all Americans regardless of party or ideology, and his reputation today, even among Democrats, suggests that he was not entirely unsuccessful.

By the time Reagan left office, in fact, far from rejoicing at the triumph of conservatism, “a deep-seated pessimism” had taken hold among antiliberal conservatives, and for good reason.

For antiliberal conservatives, Bush was a particular disaster on the immigration question.

Bush, in this respect, was an enemy. In a statement that, as Gerstle notes, would have gotten him “tossed out of the GOP” in 2016, Bush declared in his 2000 campaign, “America has had one national creed, but many accents.” It had become “one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world”—if one stood in Miami or San Antonio or Los Angeles with eyes closed, “you could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago.” Bush, of course, was in Miami, drumming up Latino votes, when he said that, but he did not have to wear his pro-immigration stance so prominently. “For years our nation has debated this change,” he said, and “by nominating me, my party had made a choice to welcome the New America.” As president, Bush tried twice to pass immigration reform, which would include a path to citizenship for those immigrants who were in the country illegally, again working with Ted Kennedy, along with John McCain. Meanwhile, resentment against Bush grew among conservatives as he continually “ascribed his opponents’ views to nativism or bigotry.”

The core antiliberal constituencies were declining in absolute numbers in the country at large, but as a percentage of Republicans, they were growing in both numbers and influence.

The Republican congressional leadership by the late 1990s, led in the House by Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Dick Armey and Tom DeLay of Texas, was overwhelmingly from the South. As Caldwell correctly observed, the more the Republican Party became the party of the South, the more it tended to drive liberals, moderates, and even other conservatives from other regions out of the party.

This was all part of the great national re-sorting that occurred throughout the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The modern Democratic Party, once the party of slaveholders and Jim Crow, became increasingly the party of minorities, women, and other groups who wanted to see rights expanded, and the Republican Party, once the party of Lincoln, increasingly became the party of white males, eager to hold on to their primacy in American society.

a shrinking bloc of white conservative voters was increasing its influence in the Republican Party.

What happened between 2008 and 2016 that unseated the liberal conservative leadership of the Republican Party and turned it into the party of the Trump movement? Many believe it was the financial crisis of 2008 and the deep recession that followed, but polling studies show that the biggest reason was the election of the first Black president in American history.

the court had done nothing more than acknowledge the rights of a group previously discriminated against for reasons of religion and tradition. The court was not creating new rights; it was applying liberal principles to circumstances the founders had not envisioned. The idea of gay marriage was almost unimaginable in the eighteenth century, just as women’s equality had also been unimaginable to the overwhelming majority of Americans. It took time for people to realize that the prohibitions against gay marriage violated the liberal principles of the Declaration just as the prohibitions on Black people’s full participation in American society did. The Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy grounded the majority’s decision in the natural-rights liberalism of the revolutionary era and the early republic.

Although not as significant as the abolition of prayer in public schools, which still infuriated religious conservatives, or the court’s 1973 decision declaring a woman’s right to abortion, the decision on gay marriage set off powerful protests by an increasingly vocal and antiliberal “Christian nationalist” movement. “Christian nationalism” was nothing new in the United States, of course. Despite the founders’ clear views on the separation of church and state, many Americans had always believed that America was part of God’s plan and that the founders themselves meant to establish a Christian nation.