Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

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...