Is There Really An ‘Antiliberal Tradition’ In America?

ROBERT KAGAN

On Robert Kagan’s defense of liberalism and his critique of its opponents

BY ROBERT KAGAN

FOR THE PAST TWO DECADES, ever since publishing Of Paradise and Power in 2003, Robert Kagan has been our most insightful commentator on international affairs, the changing world order, and America’s role in the world. Already in 2009, his small book The Return of History and the End of Dreams outlined the clash between autocracy and liberal democracy that has come to define the post-Cold War world. Kagan’s ability to discern this earlier than most was rooted in his work on the history of American foreign policy (Dangerous Nation, 2007; more recently a second volume, The Ghost at the Feast, 2023), which situates America firmly within a broader struggle between freedom and autocracy originating with the American and French Revolutions. Kagan portrays America’s advocacy of liberty as a disruptive element within the international order, provoking hostility from defenders of autocracy threatened by our ideals. A master of the book-length essay, Kagan has sharpened this analysis of a democratic-autocratic struggle in The World America Made (2013) and The Jungle Grows Back (2019), books calling on Americans to defend the liberal international order that we have helped create and that has largely served us well.

In his newest book, however, Kagan turns his attention away from international relations to focus instead on American political history. Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart—Again argues that in addition to the American liberal tradition embodied in the Declaration of Independence’s ringing assertion that all men are created equal and endowed with a right to liberty, there has also been a counter-tradition of opposition to liberalism by other Americans who reject those commitments to universal liberty and equality.

In this new volume, as in his work on foreign affairs, Kagan insists on the disruptiveness of America’s founding ideals. They have been disruptive on the global stage, where they present a standing affront to all forms of authoritarian rule, and they have also been disruptive domestically for all those committed to various forms of hierarchy—racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious—who have been driven to oppose the Declaration’s liberal premises. Indeed, to see Kagan’s thesis transferred to the domestic sphere helps clarify the somewhat unusual species of intellectual that he is (a species with perhaps only one member): a revisionist historian who writes not to criticize but to defend American exceptionalism.

As it consistently has in his work on foreign policy, this approach sometimes spurs Kagan toward insightful formulations. For example, it can seem quite puzzling that Southern defenders of slavery, opposing national authority, could appeal to the idea of limited government—a liberal value—while Lincoln and other defenders of individual rights called for stronger national authority (at least in certain respects). The concept of antiliberalism helps Kagan explain this:

The general suspicion of strong government that shaped the contours of the new republic became entangled with slaveholders’ demands to limit the federal government’s authority to intrude in their affairs. Henceforth, slaveholders and white supremacists of all stripes would appeal to this libertarian founding spirit, which paradoxically both protected American liberalism against a too-powerful government but also, perversely, offered protections for the antiliberal institution of slavery.

Lockean libertarianism gets turned against itself—a helpful way of explaining this confusing aspect of our history.

KAGAN’S MOTIVATION FOR DESCRIBING this American antiliberal tradition—note, incidentally, the choice of label, not “illiberal” (i.e., merely not liberal), as one might have expected, but “antiliberal,” motivated by hostility toward liberalism—is clear enough. A vocal critic of Donald Trump and the Republican party he has remade in his image, Kagan is horrified at the prospect of a possible second Trump presidency. This is clear from his very first page, where he writes, “The presidential election of 2024 . . . is a referendum on whether the liberal democracy born out of the Revolution should continue.” Trump is the leader of those “tens of millions of Americans [who] have risen in rebellion against that system.” The book ends where it began, repeating on the final page that “2024 is the year when the antiliberals hope to overthrow the system.”

I share Kagan’s alarm at the thought that Trump might return to the White House, and I approve his desire to highlight the authoritarian impulses of Trumpism. These worthy motives and his zeal for the cause, however, lead Kagan astray. Rebellion rests upon an inappropriately narrow conception of liberalism; it does so in order to highlight a questionable “tradition” of antiliberalism; and as a result it distorts modern American conservatism.

In order to describe antiliberalism, Kagan first has to define liberalism. He does so in terms of Lockean natural rights, the rights enunciated in the Declaration. “As it emerged from the American Revolution,” writes Kagan, liberalism’s “sole function was to protect certain fundamental rights of all individuals against the state and the wider community.” (That addition of “the wider community” is more reminiscent of John Stuart Mill than the American Founders.) The “truly revolutionary” character of this Lockean assertion was the “natural” character of these rights, the insistence that they are rooted in human nature rather than granted by any particular power. On this view, “The purpose of government—the most important purpose—was to protect those rights. Period.” (That “period” seems to imply that this might be not simply the “most important” purpose of government, but perhaps even its only purpose.)

This is certainly one possible way of describing liberalism. But it is hardly the only one. I myself would identify the central preoccupation of liberalism as a concern for constitutional limitations on power rather than natural rights specifically. Not all thinkers who deserve the name “liberal” have emphasized natural rights. Edmund Burke, a reforming Whig who criticized the British crown’s treatment of its American colonies and a great defender of constitutional liberalism, criticized doctrines of natural rights. Alexis de Tocqueville, still the greatest analyst of American democracy, made little appeal to natural rights in Democracy in America. One can read figures like these out of the liberal tradition, of course, but doing so is either arbitrary or question-begging—they are not liberal because we have already decided to define liberalism in terms of natural rights.

I would prefer a more inductive approach to defining liberalism. Among the evidence we might consider would be the Preamble to the Constitution. It identifies multiple goals of limited, constitutional government: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Rights are nowhere explicitly mentioned. Perhaps they are a part of establishing justice, or perhaps they are among the blessings of liberty. But the Preamble clearly indicates that a single-minded focus on protecting rights cannot be a government’s only concern. Madison said the same thing in Federalist 37, a concise analysis of the challenges of constitution-making. There he identifies four goals that the constitutional convention needed to pursue, without which “they would have very imperfectly fulfilled the object of their appointment.” They needed to provide adequately, he says, for stability, energy in government, liberty, and the “Republican form” (that is, a government that derives its power from the people). Arguably, protecting rights belongs to “liberty,” but again it appears as only one goal of republican, constitutional, or liberal democratic government. (The fact that we use all of these labels to describe our system is itself telling.)

IF KAGAN’S DEFINITION OF LIBERALISM is unduly restrictive, his attempt to construct an antiliberal “tradition” is even more problematic. The existence of such a tradition is central to his argument. In his first chapter, he writes that along with the “radical liberalism of the founding . . . a dissenting tradition was also born, an antiliberal tradition that has done just as much to shape the nation’s course, and which is alive and thriving today.” The next chapter—entitled “The Antiliberal Tradition in America”—includes the same claim:

Scholars have written about the “liberal tradition in America,” but there has also been an antiliberal tradition in America, a powerful and persistent dissenting view that emerged at the very beginning and would shape the course of American history for the next two centuries, right up until our own time.

Kagan’s effort to portray Trump as the ultimate flowering of deep and persistent trends in American politics and culture depends on the existence of such a tradition.

A “tradition,” however, implies a coherent body of ideas, practices, and principles that are broadly shared among a group of people and that develop gradually over time through ongoing conversation and engagement among members of the group who understand themselves to be responding to each other and to their forebears about the meaning and instantiation of those same ideas, practices, and principles. But precisely this seems to be lacking from Kagan’s “antiliberal tradition.”

Kagan sees that tradition as having three primary components: racists, intolerant (illiberal) religious believers, and opponents of immigration. Kagan is at his best in tracing the long, stubborn, unrelenting history of racism and white supremacy in America, especially in the South. From the initial decision to accommodate slavery in order to win approval of the Constitution, to the failure of Reconstruction, to segregation, Jim Crow, and resistance to the civil rights movement, Kagan powerfully reminds us of how strong the opposition to racial equality has been in parts of America. He takes this story right up to the present, arguing, “The issue that carried Trump was race, not economics.” Although he supports this claim by drawing upon electoral and polling data, I am skeptical that we can better understand Trump’s primary appeal in terms of race than as a form of class-based identity politics; one of the most important trends to watch today is Trump’s surprising success at making inroads among black and Hispanic voters. Nevertheless, Kagan persuasively makes his case that racism has often motivated American antiliberalism.

The other legs of his “tradition,” however, are shakier. On religion in particular Kagan has a bit of a tin ear. It is certainly true that anti-Catholic prejudice has frequently been prominent in America, sometimes in virulent forms, often as a kind of unspoken Protestant consensus choking out public manifestations of other traditions. That prejudice has at times overlapped with ethnic hostility toward particular groups like Irish or Italians. But Kagan seems to take it for granted that “liberalism” requires a high-wall-of-separation reading of the First Amendment. In introducing the topic of religion, for instance, he writes,

Religion was another area where the liberal principles of the Revolution and the early republic did not match the actual feelings and behavior of much of the American population. Neither at the time of the Revolution nor later did most Americans, regardless of region, share Jefferson’s and Madison’s view that God had nothing to do with the founding of the republic and would not be taking part in the protection of people’s “unalienable” rights. Many if not most Americans saw God’s hand in everything, past, present, and future—and, of course it was their own God they had in mind.

It is hard to know what to do with a claim as careless and imprecise as that. It is not clear why Jefferson and Madison set the standard for liberalism of the Revolutionary era; though obviously important, they were two of the strictest separationists among the Founders and, on this issue, not necessarily representative. More to the point, it is not clear what the odd formulation about God “not taking part” in protecting our rights is even supposed to target. If it is illiberal to think that God cares about people’s rights, we will have to exclude even Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, perhaps the greatest speech in American political history, from the liberal canon. “Seeing God’s hand” in events is similarly vague; all Christians see God’s hand in everything, so if that is a problem, then Christianity itself is illiberal.

In discussing more recent times, Kagan seems oddly hostile toward any efforts for religion to influence public life. Religious conservatives were antiliberal sixty years ago for opposing the Supreme Court’s decision striking down school prayer, and they are antiliberal today for objecting to the same Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage. Kagan gives no indication that these might have been complicated issues with room for good-faith disagreement, or that constitutional scholars have spilled more ink trying to parse the First Amendment’s religion clauses than almost any other part of the document.

As for immigration, there is no doubt that ethnic prejudice and outright racism have often motivated immigration restrictionism, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century, when, as Kagan points out, the American eugenics movement was at its height. But it hardly needs saying that legitimate economic concerns or worries about assimilation and the preservation of a democratic political culture can also generate limits on immigration. Support for immigration restrictions is by no means inherently antiliberal.

Kagan’s antiliberal “tradition,” then, is not really a tradition at all. Its different factions raise quite distinct issues. It is more like a series of loose coalitions among overlapping forms of bigotry that temporarily make common cause. That is not to downplay either the significance or the harmfulness of those various bigotries; even a temporary and opportunistic coalition can do a lot of damage. And Kagan’s concise, hard-hitting account is quite effective at reminding us how persistent these aspects of American culture have been—a fact it is often more comfortable to ignore. Still, this is far from a genuine, coherent tradition of thought and practice.

FINALLY, IN HIS EAGERNESS to construct such a “tradition,” Kagan ends up misconstruing the development of postwar American conservatism. Problems arise already with his portrayal of the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt succeeded in “creating the new, liberal-oriented Democratic Party.” His New Deal “greatly expanded the role of the federal government in every aspect of national life. This spelled trouble for antiliberals.” This makes sense if we think of FDR as forming “a powerful working alliance . . . between oppressed Black people and immigrant groups and liberal white Protestants,” as he certainly did. And it also makes sense if we associate antiliberalism with defenders of states’ rights opposed to a strong federal government. But what has become of Kagan’s initial definition of liberalism in Lockean, libertarian terms? What has become of his claim that the “purpose of government—the most important purpose—was to protect those [natural] rights,” period? “Liberalism” here has simply changed its meaning, as becomes clear when Kagan writes that by 1954, with Eisenhower in the White House, “a strong liberal consensus had developed across both parties,” with the Republican party dominated by its “moderate liberal wing” and a “new, more liberal” Democratic party having emerged from the Roosevelt-Truman years (though not, as Kagan writes incorrectly, in control of the White House). The liberalism that began as classical, Lockean liberalism has silently morphed into big-government liberalism, without any attention to the change in terminology.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that postwar American conservatism appears, on Kagan’s telling, as largely antiliberal. For Kagan, the “new Right” becomes the “new” Right, with “new” in scare-quotes. William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review opposed “not alleged liberal excesses” but rather “the core of American liberalism” itself. They merely “dressed up conservative antiliberalism as a Burkean respect for history and tradition.” Kagan is correct that the conservative movement was slow to dissociate itself from calls for states’ rights that provided cover for Jim Crow. It also (a point he underplays) was prone to a certain romanticism about Southern culture. But behind “the war on ‘big government,’” he sees only “the classic European antiliberal critique of liberalism” and a clever ploy to hold together a “coalition of conservatives, both liberal and illiberal.” Strikingly absent here is any mention of Frank S. Meyer, whose “fusionism” supplied the guiding philosophy of National Review in its early years, arguing that any authentic American conservatism must also be liberal, joining a commitment to virtue with one to freedom. Meyer’s ideas helped make the conservative movement much more than a loose coalition—it has been, instead, a genuine tradition.

Similarly, the election of Ronald Reagan appears on Kagan’s telling not as a revival of classical liberalism or the high-water mark of fusionism but rather as the reawakening of antiliberalism. Speaking of the long period of Democratic dominance that began with FDR’s New Deal and continued for several decades, Kagan writes, “not until the collapse of the Democratic Party over Vietnam in the 1970s and the subsequent rise of Ronald Reagan did antiliberal conservative Republicanism return to electoral viability.” To be sure, Kagan does not lump Reagan himself among the antiliberals: “Though Reagan was comfortable with the antiliberal conservatives in his coalition, he was not one of them.” He was, we might say, an enabler of antiliberalism.

Kagan claims that this was especially true with respect to the Supreme Court, where Reagan began “the shift to the more conservative and antiliberal court that exists today.” Justice Antonin Scalia is apparently a special problem, since he “gave a boost to the jurisprudence of ‘originalism,’” a philosophy Kagan later dismisses in a single, rather breathtaking sentence as “inherently antiliberal, because it seeks to treat eighteenth-century practices and traditions as a guide to what is constitutional, rather than the liberal principles the founders promulgated knowing full well that they were at odds with Americans’ practices and traditions at the time.” It is, again, rather hard to know what to say about this. If the Founders promulgated liberal principles, one might think that liberals would regard that as an argument for, rather than against, originalism. And if originalism is so obviously misguided, and the intentions of lawgivers are irrelevant, it would be helpful to have some alternative explanation of the sense in which the Constitution is still “law.” For the past fifty years, judges and scholars have engaged in a lively debate about how best to interpret the Constitution. Brushing originalism aside in a single sentence, without argument, seems like a purely gratuitous swipe that contributes to the misrepresentation of modern conservatism while doing little to advance Kagan’s cause.

IN SPITE OF THESE SHORTCOMINGS, Rebellion is worth reading. Not simply because Kagan writes well (as always); not simply because he is provocative in valuable ways (as always); not simply because his insistence on the enduring value of America’s founding ideals is inspiring (as always). Rebellion is an important reminder that there have never been any guarantees that Americans could succeed in building a more perfect union, or that the better angels of our nature could triumph over our worse impulses. Whatever progress has been made toward extending liberty and equality more broadly has depended upon the determined labor of liberal democracy’s defenders, often in the face of fierce opposition. “One of liberalism’s great weaknesses,” Kagan writes (borrowing a trope from his work on international affairs), “has always been the belief in its own inevitability.” In place of any temptation to complacency, Kagan offers a call to arms: “The battles that Americans have fought in the past must be fought again and again.”

Against these strengths, however, must be weighed the book’s significant flaws, both as history and as conceptual analysis. Kagan tidies up a messy American history, pulling together disparate elements in order to create his antiliberal “tradition.” And he insists on an arbitrarily narrow understanding of liberalism, one that excludes people, ideas, and practices that are well within the liberal mainstream, before surreptitiously modifying the implicit meaning of liberalism that underpins his discussion of more recent history. Reality, again, has been more complicated. It may be true that past battles need to be fought again and again. But the battle lines were never as clear as Kagan makes them out to be.

Still, one might ask: Why does it matter? The battle lines are clear now. Donald Trump is indeed the antiliberal authoritarian that Kagan says he is. He has been open about his admiration for strongman rulers and his intention to punish his political enemies (or even his insufficiently obsequious friends) and to hollow out the institutions of democracy if re-elected to the presidency. Defeating him should be a priority for all supporters of liberalism. About that, Kagan is absolutely correct. If fudging the details of American history helps accomplish that goal, perhaps it is a small price to pay.

But it does matter. And not only because we should want to get the history right (though we should). It matters because Kagan’s account unduly narrows the range of political and philosophical options open to Americans in the future, after Trump is no longer on the scene. By reading Reaganite, fusionist conservatism out of the liberal mainstream and into an antiliberal tradition—alongside the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan—Kagan leaves no room in the contemporary political spectrum for defenders of classical liberalism, or for religious conservatives who believe that virtue must go hand in hand with liberty.

Where are these people to go? Kagan’s answer is clear enough: to the Democrats. There may be good reason for conservative friends of liberalism to vote for Democrats at the moment. Donald Trump has driven me to do it before and appears poised to do so again. But my own vision for a post-Trump world would not be simply a Democratic party reigning supreme as the unquestioned and, finally, no longer challenged voice of the American liberal tradition. The house of liberalism contains more mansions than that. Some of those other liberal mansions, I hope, will remain habitable for my children and grandchildren.

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