by Ferenc Laczó
Review of Robert Kagan, Rebellion. How Antiliberalism Is Tearing American Apart – Again (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024).
What we are witnessing in US politics these days is not a regular battle, not just the usual partisan fight, but an antiliberal rebellion that threatens the liberal constitutional order – and it is far from certain that it would not succeed. The struggle between the forces of liberalism and those of antiliberalism, however, is as old as the republic; it should be approached and analyzed historically. These are two key starting points for the reflections offered on the pages of Robert Kagan’s timely new book Rebellion.
In an introduction and six chapters, Kagan – a liberal thinker recurrently labelled ‘neoconservative’ – intends to demonstrate that antiliberals have only tolerated the workings of the democratic system when it has not undermined their cause of white, Christian supremacy.
In his interpretation, Donald Trump may be a highly idiosyncratic politician, but his movement is thus far from a freakish aberration in US history; it is much rather the newest, if also a most threatening manifestation of powerful antiliberal currents.
A key historical argument of Rebellion is that through its new focus on natural rights and the social compact, the American Revolution made a radical leap in the theory of government. The constitution was understood as a set of laws that existed prior to and outside of government, establishing the limits of the latter’s powers. In accordance with that, Kagan sees American liberalism as centered around the idea that government should do nothing more and nothing less than defend the fundamental rights of all individuals against the state and the wider community.
The equal and unalienable rights of all men being its true and only essence, the American Republic was, first and foremost, an individual-rights-protecting machine and, in declaring the rights of all people, a rights-recognizing machine as well, he elaborates.
In the book’s remarkable formulation: liberalism has no teleology and is not inherently progressive either except through the progress that comes from the expanding recognition of rights.
It is a crucial point in the book’s larger argument that there was a glaring contradiction between the lofty promise and purpose of the US’ foundation, and the realities and prejudices of American society. The gap between the old traditions and habits of the colonists and the universalist principles of the Revolution would only grow wider over the course of the nineteenth century, Kagan argues (p. 36). The great majority of slaveholders understood clearly, the author reminds us, that the liberal spirit of the Revolution and the founding of a new republic on radical liberal principles posed a grave threat to their ‘way of life.’ (I ought to note that in Kagan’s rather scholastic interpretation, American liberalism was not directly tied to religion, culture, or even race, nor was it tied to chronology, privileging those who had come first.) As a result, two Americas were crystallized from the very beginning, a liberal and an antiliberal one, with the latter simultaneously operating inside and outside the constitutional order.
According to the book’s overarching claim, the emergence and predominance of liberalism in the US were the products of much contingency, even as the chapter in the very middle (“The Civil Rights Revolution”) shows precisely how the balance shifted dramatically in favor of liberalism during the twentieth century. After antiliberalism’s high point around 1920–24, the Great Depression led to the expansion of federal government, placed class issues at the center, and mobilized more liberally disposed Catholics as well. It did so just before the war with German racism badly damaged the whole intellectual edifice of antiliberal white supremacy, Kagan explains. For the first time in many years, “a powerful working alliance was forged between oppressed Black people and immigrant groups and liberal white Protestants,” he writes (p. 121). All these would help establish a broad liberal consensus by the 1950s and 1960s which was able to control all three branches of the federal government just when the latter’s power and authority was at its highest.
If the liberal revolution that created the United States was unprecedented in Kagan’s eyes while the ‘liberal consensus’ that emerged in twentieth-century America amounted to a rather contingent development, the latter is also because antiliberal forces were not just responding variously to changing circumstances.
Much rather, significant parts of American society have been fundamentally antiliberal in their outlook, Kagan emphasizes throughout. They did not believe in human equality and universal natural rights when it came to certain groups and took active steps to resist the imposition of those liberal beliefs on them.
As the author puts it, it was “not modernity that they objected to, it was the advancing hegemony of the American liberal tradition bequeathed by the Revolution and the founders” (p. 148).
Through the above, Rebellion pursues a polemic regarding the history of liberalism and antiliberalism that I see as consisting of three main layers. The author disagrees with the notion that there is ‘inevitable moral progress upward toward liberalism’ – people might not become more enlightened over time, he notes skeptically – and rejects interpretations that there was no genuine conservative dissenting tradition in US history. If Kagan is critically disposed towards such liberal teleologies, his liberalism is – layer number two – clearly opposed to cultural essentialism too. Rather characteristically, he assesses Samuel Huntington’s assertions that the principles of the Declaration were the product of a distinct Anglo-Protestant culture “wrong on almost every single point” (p. 159). Kagan reserves some of his harshest words for contemporary representatives of common-good conservatism though, such as Adrian Vermeule or Patrick Deneen, whom he describes as Leninists seeking to liberate the nation from the founders’ liberal vision without as much as sketching a coherent plan.
Through those multilayered polemical engagements, Robert Kagan develops his own interpretation of the history of the present. He underlines that antiliberal conservatism remained a weak political force throughout the 1970s; its representatives would return to power, for the first time since the 1920s, under Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Even if Reagan was clearly not one of them, they were able to hatch institutions in the 1980s that would play an important role in the takeover of the Republican Party in 2016.
By the latter date, a deep-seated pessimism had taken hold of such antiliberal conservatives, a pessimism that, as the book repeatedly makes clear, had more to do with their racism than with their economic plight or any demonstrable status anxiety.
With a clear shift of public opinion in a liberal direction and the absolute numbers of antiliberals in decline, a fateful dynamic was unleashed, Rebellion argues. By the 2000s, the Republican Party had effectively become an ingathering of Christian conservatives, white supremacists, and conservative antiliberal intellectuals – a bastion of antiliberalism. It became a party primarily of Southern white males who regard the recent mainstream of both parties as representing the Eastern elite, urban, liberal consensus and thus equally out of touch with the average white American. This newly dominant group among Republicans would soon drive out liberals, moderates, and even conservatives from other regions.
The political effect of this ingathering would manifest after 2008 when antiliberals managed to unseat the liberal conservative leadership of the Republican Party. They would soon help subordinate their party to the Trump movement just when a whole body of Republicans opportunistically shifted in an antiliberal direction too. For the first time since the antebellum South controlled the Democrats, an antiliberal movement has thus taken full control of a major political party, Rebellion asserts. What is worse, since Trump’s narcissism has turned into megalomania, making him into a would-be tyrant, antiliberals currently possess – for the first time since the Civil War – the means to overthrow the system.
In other words, if the United States was created as a liberal republic in an otherwise remarkably antiliberal society, we might now be on the verge of the reverse: antiliberal rule over a predominantly liberal society.
The voluntary compact at the heart of the US could collapse as a result, Kagan warns, and in that case the federal government would only be able to hold the country together in quasi-tyrannical fashion. National dissolution has become a real prospect.
If such scenarios are shocking to hear and will sound alarmist to certain readers, Kagan is quick to make a useful historical comparison: articulating such scenarios would not have had a similar effect in the eight decades following the American Revolution, and for good reasons, he suggests.
That is because threats of nullification and secession can be viewed as the flip side of Americans’ Lockean heritage, he argues, that a people may overthrow or sever their allegiance to their government if they believe it is not performing its primary function of protecting their rights (p. 213).
What Kagan seems to be after is not to ‘shock and alarm’ but much rather to clarify the unusually high current stakes; as he himself notes, the long-term prospects for American liberalism in fact seem bright, so 2020 may well be the last chance of antiliberals to overthrow the system.
What Rebellion ultimately shows is that Americans as a people have never been as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions, with significant parts of society rather consistently opposed to the Revolution’s radical departure. Kagan thereby asserts that the key issues may have shifted over time but the divisions they aroused have remained strikingly similar; he suggests that even as the concrete manifestations of liberalism and antiliberalism have evolved, the basic character of their antagonism has remained relatively stable since the 18th century.
It is precisely this anti-contextualist approach to the history of liberalism and antiliberalism that enables Kagan to send a clear political message: antiliberals may have been an inevitable part of American society from the very beginning but they have also been unfailingly opposed to America’s foundational ideas, the reader is meant to conclude.
The resigned combativeness of such a perspective – antiliberals need to be urgently defeated but antiliberalism can never be overcome – might be the most striking aspect of Robert Kagan’s learned re-examination of US history. While Rebellions offers a third interpretation, one beyond liberal teleology and antiliberal rejectionism, it does not ambition to articulate a political position that would go beyond a sophisticated apologia for mainstream American political traditions. Kagan’s intriguing brand of liberalism thus appears on these pages – just as he claims about liberalism in general – as a choice and, at its root, a faith.
