Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart – Again
Robert Kagan
Alfred A. Knopf
243 pages
Ever since July 4, 1776, the day the United States was born, some Americans have been trying to destroy it. And they have never been stronger than they are today.
If they want democracy to work at all, they want it to work for themselves and only for themselves, meaning white males. They certainly do not want it to work for women, Catholics, Black people, Chinese (“chinks”), Italians (“wops”), Jews (“kikes”), Irish (“micks”), or anybody else who doesn’t look like them or think like them.
Their strength reached an apex in the 1860s when it erupted into the Civil War. It failed then, as it always has, but it did not die. It was followed by, among others, movements led by the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, the Citizens Council, the unified battle against desegregation, the Tea Party, and, now, the MAGA Republicans.
They’ve all had slightly different focuses, writes Robert Kagan, a neoconservative scholar and historian, but their basic driving force from Day One has always been the same: white supremacy.
Today, though, warns Kagan in this brilliant but terrifying book, MAGA Republicans are presenting “the greatest rebellion against the American liberal constitutional order since the Civil War.” And, he warns, if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, it could be the last free election held in a unified America.
If Trump wins, he writes, his backers “will support whatever he does, including violating the Constitution to go after his enemies and political opponents, which he has promised to do.”
But even if he loses, Kagan writes, “they will reject the results and refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the federal government, just as the South did in 1860. Either way, the American liberal political and social order will fracture, perhaps irrevocably.”
Kagan begins his book with the American Revolution, then traces the ever-present antiliberal faction step by step chronologically as it develops through history. It has exhibited different levels of strength in different times and has been led by different names, but it has never disappeared. And it has never been stronger than it is today, thanks largely to one man: Donald Trump.
Kagan closes with a chapter on Trump: “Trump: Savior and Destroyer,” which leaves no doubt that white supremacy is the heart and soul of Trump’s appeal. He backs up his argument by breaking down how race has played leading roles in various elections, by showing how Trump plays to white people’s fears about the declining influence of white culture in America, of how he disguises his racism in his promises to arrest and expel millions of people of color, and how he wants to prevent people of color from gaining admission to the United States.
“That was what Making America Great Again meant,” Kagan writes. “It means restoring white cultural and political primacy.”
Kagan cannot be dismissed as just another liberal Democrat spouting off his personal opinions. He is a senior fellow at the nonaligned Brookings Institution and, until Republicans nominated Trump for president in 2016, he was a lifelong Republican. He has worked on the campaigns of Republican presidential hopefuls, was a foreign policy adviser to Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), and under the administration of Ronald Reagan he was a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Schultz. He left the party only when it nominated Trump.
This is not a book of opinion; it is a book of facts. When Kagan does offer an opinion, it is so thoroughly supported by facts that it may as well be considered truth.