Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

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.

This may be one of the hardest hitting opening line of a nonfiction book I've ever read.

large numbers of Americans have always rejected the founders’ claim that all men are created equal, with “unalienable” rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and they have persistently struggled against the imposition of those liberal values on their lives. 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. Their goal has been to preserve a white, Christian supremacy, contrary to the founders’ vision, and they have tolerated the founders’ liberalism, and the workings of the democratic system, only when it has not undermined that cause. When it has, they have repeatedly rebelled against it.

Many in the revolutionary period did worry about the consequences of too much wealth, luxury, and inequality on “republican virtue.” They understood that excessive wealth in the hands of the few could give that few a power threatening to a democratic republic, that vast inequalities in means were a problem for a society dedicated to the proposition of universal equality. But the founders took no steps to limit wealth other than to permit taxes. They knew there would be fights about taxes and other financial issues that would pit the few against the many. Their system was designed to allow that conflict to occur while as much as possible safeguarding the rights of all concerned.

The protection of individual rights has always suffered in the United States during times of perceived national crisis, whether the administration was conservative or progressive, Democrat or Republican.

Critics of liberalism are right to point out that the rights-protection machine that the founders set in motion is destructive of many traditions, and that includes religious institutions. It exerts pressure on all hierarchies and belief systems that limit the freedom of individuals to think and act as they please. Liberalism, for instance, has been destructive of the traditional patriarchal hierarchy of the family. By granting women equal rights both in and out of the home, liberalism has weakened the “dominion” of men. It has changed the nature of marriage and in some ways even the definition and understanding of what marriage is for. So, of course, has technology, in the form of contraceptives and abortion, but it is liberalism that allowed women to take advantage of that technology, freeing them to play roles that were once played only by men. Hierarchy lies at the heart of traditional Christianity in both its Catholic and Protestant variations. There is God, the father of creation; then the Pope or divinely chosen king, the father of the church or realm; then the father as head of the family. That is the proper Christian order of things, and the slave was also part of this divinely ordained hierarchy. That is what many American Christians have always believed, and they have viewed liberalism, correctly, as a threat to those hierarchies. Traditional religions have also tended to demand participation by the entire society, not just pockets of believers. The idea of many...

American society was founded on liberal principles, with institutions established specifically to safeguard and promote liberalism, including public school systems that inculcate liberal values among students. The antiliberal political theorist Patrick Deneen calls this “liberal totalitarianism.”[34] The Christian in America, Rushdoony complained, “has no right to his identity; he must recognize all others and their ‘rights,’ but he himself has none.”[35] This is true if a Christian’s “rights” include the right not only to lead a Christian life himself but to impose that life on the entire society. What Christian nationalists call “liberal totalitarianism” the founders called “freedom of conscience.”

Antiliberals may complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the founders that they are really objecting to. What they seek is the overthrow of the liberal foundations of American society. What they really want, as Deneen frankly proclaims, is “regime change.” Since the birth of the American republic, many American citizens have tolerated the system only for as long as they were allowed to ignore it and keep liberalism at bay, as long as they were allowed to maintain their preliberal traditions. But whenever pressure to conform to the nation’s liberal principles has grown, millions of Americans have pushed back, resisted, and fought to retain their antiliberal ways. And when the time came when they could resist no longer, they have sought escape.

The founders labored to create something that could last. The antiliberals want to destroy what the founders created but lack a coherent plan for what could replace it. Their goal is destruction and revenge. Trump for these intellectuals is an imperfect if essential vehicle for counterrevolution. A “deeply flawed narcissist” suffering from a “bombastic vanity,” he has “lacked the discipline to target his creative/destructive tendencies effectively.” His movement remains “untutored and ill led.” Trump’s failure to execute the counterrevolution in his first term was a failure to develop “a capable leadership class,” but antiliberal intellectuals have the answer: them. They hope to use the rebellious destructiveness of the Trump movement to overthrow a liberal “elite,” against which they have been helpless by themselves, and replace it with another “elite”—a “self-conscious aristoi,” Deneen calls it, who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Like Lenin, this new would-be elite yearns to place itself at the vanguard of the populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses.[4] Indeed, according to the prominent antiliberal Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the “common good” even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for...

When the founders established the checks and balances to ensure against the rise of a tyrannical demagogue, they did not envision national parties uniting broad coalitions of interregional interests. The world they lived in was centered on the states; it was more a confederation of independent countries than a unified nation. Regional differences seemed as enormous as the vast distances that separated them in the days before motorized transportation; the needs of the growing West were radically different from the needs of the Northeast and the South. The idea that a national party could speak for all those disparate state and regional interests seemed unlikely. Nor did they imagine that a single demagogue could gain a national following, for much the same reason. The founders also hoped that the checks and balances they established in the Constitution would be sufficient to contain the ambitions of a demagogue. But this assumption rested on a further expectation: that the three branches of government—Congress, the executive, and the judiciary—would jealously guard their institutional prerogatives. For most of the country’s history, this has held true. Even when Congress was controlled by the president’s party, congressional leaders resisted executive encroachments on the legislature’s constitutional authority. But today party unity trumps interbranch rivalry. Party leaders in Congress increasingly do as their presidents bid them. Certainly, this Republican Party has become...

Trump’s hold on the imaginations of millions of Americans is extraordinary. Rarely in American history has a political figure drawn such adoration and complete loyalty while still alive and politically active. Even the revered Reagan was frequently attacked by conservatives for falling short of their expectations. Trump’s supporters never criticize him or tolerate criticism of him, even on issues on which they disagree with him. The conservative rebellion against Covid lockdowns and vaccinations during Trump’s term in office, for instance, was not driven primarily by paranoia about the government and vaccines. After all, it was their government in charge; it was the vaccine that the Trump administration had approved and worked to produce as quickly as possible. Rather, it was Trump’s critics whom they reviled. Trump said the virus would be minor and would pass quickly, and his supporters not only believed him but came up with “proof” that he was right. They turned against Anthony Fauci and the country’s health officials because their statements contradicted and embarrassed their hero and leader. A famous conservative law professor at New York University, Richard Epstein, was so slavishly loyal to Trump that he insisted at the beginning of Covid that the virus would cost no more than five hundred lives. (As of November 1, 2023, the number of Covid deaths according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 1,150,119.) Some Trump supporters who contracted Covid wo...

People are wisely reluctant to throw words like “fascism” around loosely, but it is hard to find a better word for the relationship between Trump the leader and his devoted following. Fascism is the malady to which modern democracies are particularly susceptible, and in an age of mass politics—the age we have been living in for the better part of the last two centuries—various forms of fascism have been the likeliest alternative to democracy. Modern nations are not about to establish monarchies. To have any legitimacy beyond the exercise of brute force, modern leaders must at least appear to speak for the masses. In democracies, they must create mass followings that allow them to win within the democratic system and then transform it into a system they can dominate. Hitler came to power in Germany first by winning democratic elections, by inspiring loyalty among normal middle-class Germans, by offering an alternative to the messy and often gridlocked democracy of Weimar Germany. Only then did he cement his position in power by doing away with democratic forms.

It was no surprise that elected officials increasingly feared taking on the Trump movement, and that Republican job-seekers kept silent or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism of Trump. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. But it wasn’t just ambition. There has also been something distinctly tribal in establishment Republicans’ refusal to cross Trump and the party leadership, even temporarily, when that party leadership turned in an antiliberal direction. Especially revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their eighties or nineties like George Shultz, James Baker, and Henry Kissinger, who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him publicly. Little wonder that the younger Republican establishment stars still hoping for a future in the party have also kept silent, lest they alienate important Republican policy constituencies. Whatever they thought about Trump, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler partly because they hated and feared the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, with whom, after all, they shared many basic prejudices.

The broad liberal consensus that increasingly dominated both parties in the decades following World War Two was driven not by the unstoppable force of liberalism but by events and struggles—the Depression, World War Two, and the Cold War—and by the growing political involvement and influence of ethnic minorities, women, and Black people, all of whom put pressure on both parties to live up to the nation’s liberal principles. Mid-twentieth-century America produced a new birth of freedom along multiple fronts, driven by a powerful coalition of groups seeking equal rights for themselves and providing the political energy and support for liberal reforms for others. Such fervor does not last forever, however, as Jefferson lamented during the Revolution, and as Lincoln observed in his Lyceum Speech in 1838. When a people finally acquire the rights that were denied them, they tend to move on to life’s other problems. When they are less concerned about their own rights, they become less concerned about rights in general. This happened to Americans after the perilous early years of the Revolution and the young republic. The American system was founded at a time of high anxiousness about rights, but thereafter only those whose rights had not been recognized cared about perfecting the American regime as Lincoln hoped. Everyone else, except handfuls of committed liberal ideologues like the abolitionists, tended to indifference except when confronted by crises that touched them personal...

From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party has become an active enabler of Trump’s efforts to complete the coup d’état he launched after the 2020 election. And even though there are still “establishment” Republicans in the party, like McConnell and Romney, who can see perfectly clearly where the party is taking the country—as Romney says, “A very large portion of my party doesn’t believe in the Constitution”—they have been unwilling to risk their political careers by resisting.[11] With the party firmly under his thumb, Trump is now waging his rebellion against the Constitution on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, whereby Trump runs for office and Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition. The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and in the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to January 6. Party leaders have run interference for the Trump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, using the power of Congress to undermine faith in the justice system and American government more generally, ...

And what if Trump wins? Who will stop him from fulfilling his election promise to seek “retribution”? With all the immense power of the American presidency, with his ability to control and direct the Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS, the intelligence services, and the military, what will prevent him from using the power of the state to go after his political enemies? Republicans in Congress? And if Trump himself has no agenda other than power and revenge, what about those who will staff his administration? Can the Constitution and American liberal democracy survive the arrival in power of a whole administration full of antiliberal intellectuals and policy makers? Indeed, one wonders how long will Democrats, who still make up half the country and who control the governorships and statehouses of many of the richest and most populous states, stand by passively while a second Trump administration dismantles the liberal democratic system? Or might they be the ones to declare Trump another Hitler—democratically chosen, yes, but nevertheless a clear and present danger to America’s liberal democratic institutions?

Two centuries later, the idea of nullification or secession may seem more exotic, but the basic facts of the American system remain unchanged. As James Wilson put it during the debates over ratification, the Constitution would acquire “value and authority” only with the people’s acceptance.[14] Although the Constitution was meant to be binding once adopted, and the process for amending it was made deliberately arduous, it was true at the founding and it remains true today that without broad popular acceptance of the system’s legitimacy the voluntary compact could collapse. At that point, the Union could be held together only by the force of the federal government acting in quasi-tyrannical fashion. This was one of many reasons why the American founding generation was anxious about whether the government they created could possibly last. Was popular self-government—government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as Lincoln later put it—really possible? Madison and the founders hoped that they were establishing the new system on a solid foundation of interest. But they understood that there also had to be something more, a love of freedom as an abstract ideal, a willingness to compromise, and above all a willingness to fight not only for one’s own rights but for everyone else’s rights, too. This was the “republican virtue” they believed necessary to hold the system together. Madison and his colleagues agreed that it was “chimerical” to believe that any form of...

Though it may have been shocking to see normal, decent Americans condoning a violent assault on the Capitol, that event demonstrated that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and ’30s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life.

That fight is now once again upon us. The battles that Americans have fought in the past must be fought again and again. Can Americans rise to the occasion again? More specifically, can Republican voters? It really is up to them. Let’s stipulate that there is much about modern American liberalism they don’t like, that many liberal policies don’t work or are ill-advised, that the Democrats on many issues have been too much swayed by a progressive left that is just as opposed to American liberalism as the right. Even if that is true, is it worth overthrowing the entire system, as so many antiliberal conservatives today demand? Is that what the average Republican voters have signed up for? One suspects not, but their indifference to the threat posed by Trump has made the dissolution of American liberal democracy possible. If American democracy explodes in this 2024 election year, it will be because Republican voters let it happen.

Meanwhile, the overall long-term prospects for American liberalism are actually bright, if only because the demographic shift is a reality that can’t be blinked away. White supremacy is another Lost Cause. As America becomes increasingly multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural, and as it becomes impossible for any single ethnoreligious group to dominate American politics and society, the appeal of liberalism as the only means of holding such a society together should grow. Many white people may not change their attitudes toward other racial and ethnic groups—after all, they haven’t changed in two hundred years—but their ability to fight to preserve their hierarchies will diminish because they will be too badly outnumbered. That is why 2024 is the year when the antiliberals hope to overthrow the system. It may be their last chance. Whether they succeed or not will depend on the American people, Democrats and Republicans alike. Americans who believe in the liberalism of the Revolution and the founding will have to fight for it, again. If they do not, whether out of complacency or indifference, American liberal government, and the freedoms it provides us all, will be no more.