Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

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...