Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

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.