Robert Kagan believes Americans have long indulged in a “pleasing myth”: that all their countrymen “share a commitment to the nation’s founding principles.” But the uncomfortable truth, he argues in his timely and disconcerting new book, Rebellion, is that there has always been a segment of the population hostile to liberal democracy—and no shortage of figureheads to lead a revolt against it.
Kagan—a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an editor-at-large for The Washington Post—tracks this anti-liberal streak from the nation’s founding all the way to today’s MAGA movement, and issues a stark warning: Donald Trump, his allies, and his supporters have “made the dissolution of American liberal democracy possible.”
“Whether they succeed or not,” Kagan writes, “will depend on the American people, Democrats and Republicans alike.”
In a conversation with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for clarity and length, the former Reagan State Department staffer discusses the role racism has played in anti-liberal movements; how the GOP coordinates the “in-gathering of all the anti-liberal forces”; and the long-term prospects for democracy in America. “The risks,” he tells me, “are high.”
Vanity Fair: You write, in an early chapter, that “the gap between the old traditions and habits of the colonists and the universalist principles of the [American] Revolution was wide at the time of the founding and would grow wider over the course of the nineteenth century. The new, radically liberal tradition in America would from the beginning be accompanied by an antiliberal tradition every bit as potent.” Can you talk a little bit about those seeds of anti-liberalism at the founding, and how they grew over the first stretch of our history?
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Robert Kagan: The most obvious one, of course, was the fact that the republic included slavery, which I think was a practical compromise—not least because many of the founders were themselves slaveholders. So that was an obvious gap, which the founders were very aware of. I think sometimes we forget that they were not unaware of their own hypocrisy in that situation. But at the founding, they understood the system was in violation of the very liberal principles that they were trying to implant—and that the Revolution was supposedly fought for. So you have a huge gap, which is ultimately only resolved by the Civil War. And so one issue was obviously race. But another was religion. Despite many people’s efforts to reinterpret it, the founders were very clear about the separation of church and state. But in many of the states, there were religious tests, still—you had to be a Protestant to run for office. They were explicitly anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish, and so on. All of which is to say: While they had promulgated these universal principles, which is what the Constitution was designed to protect, many millions of Americans were not really believers in those principles, and were not conducting themselves as if those principles were determinative. Right at the beginning, you have people who are essentially making an ethno-religious definition of what the nation was.
You trace this anti-liberalism through the Civil War and Reconstruction, which I think are periods when we can really see it clearly. But I suspect there’s less popular recognition of the 1920s as a “high-water mark of antiliberalism.” You write that the 1920 election “was more like the 2016 election of Trump than any other American election.” What made that period so powerful for the anti-liberal movement, and how do you see that reverberating now, a century later?
In the same way that we talk about there being a backlash against liberalism or progressivism today, there was a real backlash against general trends that were occurring in the first two decades of the 20th century. During the 1920s, which we think of as being the Jazz Age, there was an enormous explosion of white supremacist attitudes in the country. There was the second Ku Klux Klan, which was much larger and more widely spread and much more legitimately accepted as an institution in 1920s America even than it had been in the post–Civil War period. In addition—and this is something that even I was struck by, because it has been so covered up in our own histories—there was the advent of eugenics as a way of looking at society. It’s amazing how we talk about how we’re upset about identity politics—but the 1920s was identity politics on steroids. It wasn’t just whites and minorities. It was gradations within white. There was a real effort to fix as the essential element of what America was as being that Protestant Anglo-Saxon tradition. And so it seems like a very innocent period, but, in fact, it was very much a victory of anti-liberalism throughout society. Then those forces were undermined by the Depression and World War II, and then we entered this period of pretty consistent liberal dominance, right up until really recently.
Yeah, and that moment in the middle of the 20th century, with the Civil Rights Movement, is this dominant period for liberalism, as you write. But the anti-liberal forces are still at work, in figures like William F. Buckley, Joe McCarthy, the Birchers, George Wallace—what allows that to return and have a resurgence during the Reagan years, toward the end of the 20th century?
Well, my explanation—and it is only an attempt at an explanation, but I’ve persuaded myself of it—is that it has to do with the re-sorting of the two political parties that, right up until the mid-to-late 1940s, were pretty evenly divided in having significant anti-liberal forces within them. The Republican Party obviously had anti-liberal forces, and they were the dominant party in the 1920s. So did the Democratic Party, because it had the South.
But in both parties, the liberal element is ascendant. In the Democratic Party, it’s obviously FDR and his successors. And in the Republican Party, you’ve got Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon, Bob Dole, et cetera. But over the course of this period—and it’s most striking, obviously, in the Reagan period—the South essentially departs from the Democratic Party because it has become captured, in their view, by minority groups and women, et cetera. They move into the Republican Party. And then you also have “white ethnics” who had been part of the Democratic coalition, but now, I think, feel sort of secure enough in the system that they no longer need liberalism to give them their equal place. And they, too, drift into the Republican Party. So what you have—and this is the paradox of the situation—is a shrinking number of whites in the country, a shrinking number of white Protestants in the country, and a shrinking number of anti-liberal forces—but all of them situated in one political party rather than divided between the two. The Republican Party becomes sort of the in-gathering of all the anti-liberal forces—and even if they’re still a shrinking minority in the country, they are increasingly influential in the Republican Party. And we basically see this, I think, occurring from the 1970s onward, until we get to this point.
The constant thread here is racism. And, as you point out, religious bigotry as well. This animates the anti-liberal streak at the founding of the country, the Civil War and its aftermath, movements in the 20th century, and obviously the reaction of Barack Obama’s presidency that gives rise to Trump and our current predicament. Do you think it’s possible to separate anti-liberalism from racism and efforts to lace these various bigotries into the fabric of the government?
Mostly no. It’s about people wanting to live in the kind of hierarchies of “traditional society.” You can call it bigotry. You could also call it traditionalism. You could understand that we’re really having a conflict over ideas. One of the problems of liberalism is the belief in its own inevitability—that it’s so clearly right that people who disagree with it are therefore clearly wrong. And as a liberal, I believe that. But liberalism is not the truth; it is a perspective. Since throughout most of human history, liberalism hasn’t existed as an idea, we shouldn’t be surprised that people resist or are even actively hostile to the effects of liberalism. We all need to be aware that liberalism does have effects on “traditional society.” And there are people who think that’s a bad thing. And if you want to have those kinds of hierarchies again, you have to change our system.
On that subject, in your introduction, you write that “the problem is not the design of the American system…. The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs.” I think that’s an important point, because I think too often we overlook the agency of those in these anti-liberal movements, as if they’re helplessly driven to Trump by economics or Russian disinformation or whatever. But I do kind of question the implication that the nagging problem of anti-liberalism has nothing to do with the system. As you write later on in the book, the “new liberal order” the founders established “was grafted onto what was in many respects a preliberal and even antiliberal society.” Wouldn’t that speak to some kind of structural flaw that’s been there the whole time?
The structural flaw would be human beings. You know what I mean? If you want to say that the attempt to create a government of the people based on the principle of natural rights and universal individual rights is ultimately not possible, that is what the founders worried about. That is what Benjamin Franklin meant when he said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That is what Abraham Lincoln worried about when he gave his Lyceum speech in 1838—that maybe it’s too much for human beings to live in a society like this. You’re really asking people to care about other people as much as they do about themselves, and that is not necessarily a normal human feeling, you know? So if what you’re saying is that, to some extent, our system is at odds with human nature, I think there’s a certain amount of truth to that. I guess what I’m trying to say is: What is breaking down in our system is not the result of the Electoral College or the way they set up the Constitution. I mean, sure, there are all kinds of problems—because of slavery, there were certain flaws, some of which were repaired, some of which weren’t repaired. But I really think it would be wrong to blame the system as much as to say, This is a really difficult thing to do, and most people in history have not done it.
I wouldn’t say that I would blame the entire system. I guess what I’m wondering is if you think these anti-liberal movements are strictly an attack on the liberal system, or if they are, in some ways, an attempt to preserve elements of the system that are anti-liberal or that have at least furthered the anti-liberal cause. Does that make sense?
Give me a “for instance.”
I guess you could look at the Electoral College, just because we already mentioned that. I wouldn’t say that is the cause of Donald Trump. But I think an anti-liberal movement could regard that as a tool that has furthered their cause in recent years. So would there be an interest, then, in preserving that?
The Electoral College is an inherently flawed system—and, again, it was part of the compromise with slavery, so it’s hard to say that it wasn’t affected by that. I must say, though: The Electoral College used to favor the Democratic Party. So it’s not like we know exactly which side the Electoral College favors. I think it may be neutral in regard to the liberal/anti-liberal question. It’s clear that the Electoral College is, to some extent, not as democratic. But I’m not sure it’s inherently not liberal. In any case, I would be in favor of all kinds of constitutional reforms if we were not in this present environment. I’m not sure I want to tinker with the Constitution right now.
One problem at a time.
If we get past this, then there are all kinds of reforms we can talk about. This is not a moment for a constitutional convention.
Well, let’s talk about getting past this, then. You’re pretty clear in the book about some uncomfortable realities, including how much of our system, as it stands, depends on this year’s election. But I was interested in the hope that you furnish toward the end of the book, that the “long-term prospects for American liberalism are actually bright.” As we move into this election season, and look ahead toward November, what’s your feeling—personally—about the future of democracy? More optimistic? More pessimistic?
Unfortunately, it does rest on the outcome of the election, which I have no confidence about one way or the other. My concern is: I don’t want to be a flip of the coin away from possibly saying that the government that was established by the founders is destroyed. I’ve never said that Trump is definitely going to win, or if he wins, that it’s definitely going to be the end of the republic. I do think the risks are high enough that people who care about preserving our system should not have any difficulty making a decision here. I don’t think even once [Joe] Biden has won that we’re out of the crisis, because I think it’s very clear that Trump will lead a rebellion against that election.
But my feeling is, if we can get past Trump in this election, then the basic demographics are against any attempt by a white minority to sort of seize control and try to reverse the liberal trends of our system, because they’re just not going to have the numbers to do it. To some extent, they will be discredited by defeat. And I also happen to believe that, although the movement is not at all unique in American history, Trump himself is pretty close to being unique. His particular personality qualities are pretty unusual for an elected official. The level of his narcissism is pretty high on the charts, in terms of normal human beings. And so I think that, in a post-Trump world, the movement he controls will go off in a lot of different directions. His ability to be a unifying figure is pretty special and not necessarily very easy to repeat. So based on the fact that Trump is sort of sui generis, and the fact that the demographics are moving in the right direction? If the system holds now, I feel pretty good about its future.
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