The picture neoconservative foreign policy intellectual Robert Kagan paints in his new book, Rebellion, is dark and foreboding. As he sees it, a competition between liberalism and anti-liberalism has “been fought within the American system since the time of the Revolution.” And things are now coming to a head. Although the present crisis “seems unprecedented, the struggle that is tearing the nation apart today is as old as the republic.” No matter who wins the next election, “the American liberal political and social order will fracture, perhaps irrecoverably.”
In Rebellion, Kagan attempts to define the anti-liberal American tradition and describe the danger it poses to the American way.
According to Kagan, the “sole function” of the founders’ liberalism “was to protect certain fundamental rights of all individuals against the state and the wider community.” Once the colonists decided to declare independence, they jettisoned the English constitution and adopted John Locke’s ideas of “natural rights” and the “social compact.” They created what Kagan calls “a rights-protection machine” and, since the founders expected more people to enjoy these rights over time, a “rights-recognition machine as well.”
In his view, this was a radical departure from all preceding forms of government. He claims that “America’s liberal Revolution was not the natural outgrowth of ‘Western’ culture, the European Enlightenment, or even the English constitution.” Nor was it a “product of an Anglo-Protestant evolution. Its origins are not to be found in Christianity,” either. And the vast gulf between the liberal revolution and the habits and thoughts of the people who undertook this revolution created an anti-liberal backlash.
Kagan has a clearer definition for liberalism than anti-liberalism. “The core and beating heart” of anti-liberalism “was the slaveholding South,” which transmuted into “the Southern Democratic Party and the conservative antiliberal white Protestant forces in the Republican Party” after the Second World War. To Kagan, “the American conservatives’ fixation on ‘small government’ was inextricably tied up, first, with the protection of slavery, and then, after the Civil War, with the South’s efforts to preserve white supremacy.” So, anti-liberalism manifests as belief in small government, white supremacy, opposition to immigration, and allowing religion to have a prominent role in public life.
A closer look reveals that, in American history, liberalism and anti-liberalism are heavily intermixed. For example, Kagan claims that advocates of small government usually have nefarious ulterior motives, but advocates of big government often do, too. Most Southerners were happy to trample on states’ rights to defend slavery, such as with the Fugitive Slave Act. Southern Whigs like the Louisiana sugar barons tended to be the most vicious slavedrivers, the most ardent oligarchs, and the biggest fans of federal infrastructure projects: Having gained their wealth off other men’s backs, they had no objection to enlarging it the same way. Alexander Stephens and his fellow ex-Whigs empowered the Confederate bureaucracy to become far more heavy-handed than the American government. The Northern Whigs, who shared the Southern Whigs’ horror for Andrew Jackson but little else, tended to despise Catholic immigrants as much as slavery. To paraphrase Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the line between liberalism and anti-liberalism rarely runs between Americans but through every American heart.
Moreover, the movements that have made the most progress toward liberalism have often done so for other reasons than the ones Kagan says. For most of American history, freedom movements have drawn heavily from the Bible for inspiration. Northern and English evangelicals sometimes made secular arguments about abolishing slavery, but they also cited Exodus 21:16’s prohibition on man-stealing and other biblical texts. The Rev. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was one of the most effective advocacy organizations of the Civil Rights Movement. Thomas Jefferson had a greater impact on American life than true secularists like Thomas Paine because he allied with Baptists, who opposed state churches to further religious freedom rather than to make the government secular.
Ironically, the closest the United States came to anti-liberal governance was under Woodrow Wilson, whom Kagan describes as a “progressive liberal reforming” president. Wilson was extremely racist, even for his time, and he hated black people and immigrants in equal measure. The Democrats’ reliance on urban machines forced him to moderate his distaste for immigrants in office, but his progressivism turbocharged his anti-black racism since expert opinion at the time had coalesced around eugenic theories of scientific racism. Like his Southern Whig heroes, Wilson wanted unelected bureaucrats to dominate the government. In the landmark “The Study of Administration,” he wrote, “What, then, is there to prevent? Well, principally, popular sovereignty.” His fellow progressives hoped bureaucracies would lead the ignorant masses to a brighter future, so as they saw it, purging the government — and the American populace, to the extent possible — of undesirable ethnic and racial minorities was merely good government.
But people rallied against Wilson’s excesses and reversed many of them. Warren Harding was a disappointing president, but he made good on his “return to normalcy” campaign pledge, as did his successor, Calvin Coolidge. Kagan describes the 1920 election as “an unprecedented attack against liberalism and progressivism in all their forms,” but the evidence he cites is the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which Wilson admired, and the 1924 Immigration Act. The Republicans did pass immigration restrictions, but even Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed such measures. And when the Democrats nearly let white supremacists who championed Wilson’s son-in-law overrun their 1924 convention, nicknamed the “Klanbake,” they lost the subsequent election.
This context makes the present situation seem less uniquely, republic-endingly dire than Rebellion suggests we should feel it is. Kagan fears that former President Donald Trump is a fascist and that the various anti-liberal forces he identifies, such as originalists and Christian nationalists, will pull the country in a dark direction.
But, for one thing, Kagan’s opponents are much less coherent than he fears. Kagan laments that “Trump’s supporters never criticize him or tolerate criticism of him,” citing the controversies over COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines. But Trump’s own supporters have booed him at rallies for talking about Operation Warp Speed, one of the best initiatives of his presidency. Trump has maintained his grip on the public imagination largely because he listens and responds to his followers: After Warp Speed drew boos, he stopped talking about it.
But even if Kagan were correct about the motives of the people he opposes, American history shows a clear way forward that avoids the breakdown of the country: prioritize some issues and attract voters. Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans picked up the remnants of the anti-immigrant “Know Nothing” party to win in 1860. Franklin D. Roosevelt allied with white supremacists and empowered fascist sympathizers like Rexford Tugwell and Hugh Johnson to get his New Deal. Surely, if the threat to the country was so great, Democrats could break off parts of Trump’s coalition, who are not nearly as bad as many of the New Dealers, to save the republic. President Joe Biden and his reelection campaign seem unwilling to do that, though, even to pick up the Latino and black people who voted for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Trump in 2020.
Fortunately, there is another bulwark, though it is one that Kagan deplores: the originalists. They attempt to interpret the Constitution according to what the founders thought it meant, which Kagan says is anti-liberal even though he believes that the founders were liberal. He fears that “even the Republican-dominated Supreme Court” cannot “be counted on to assert independent authority” if they would have to cross Trump. But originalist justices already have ruled repeatedly against Trump at the Supreme Court. The originalists have developed their project over decades across all sorts of presidencies, and there is no reason to believe that they will abandon it for any one politician.
Rebellion is a work of synthesis, and it suffers from the academy’s near-total ignorance of American religion and the South. But it is bracingly argued and thought-provoking throughout. Where it is wrong, it serves as a record of how the concerns of one historical moment can cause us to notice, and not to notice, key elements of prior eras in a way that makes the present seem more special and worrisome than it is. In reality, the present usually seems special because it is, well, present. If Trump’s presidency is affected by the stronger forces that really propel American history, perhaps a century from now, academics will write as favorably of him as they do now of Wilson. They, too, will have missed the mark.
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Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute’s Center for the Future of Liberal Society.
