From a Google Image Search - Salon.com
Robert Kagan is no radical. Journalists and editors see him as a neoconservative. He went to Harvard, Yale, and American University. Before 2016 (the now-pervasive Google search AI tells me) he was a Republican. Since 2016 he has been an Independent. Neoconservatism began as a movement sometime in the US in the 60s. It is characterized by aggressive foreign policy and an interest in international affairs through military force if necessary ("peace through strength"). Domestically, neocons favor equality of opportunity but feel the welfare state is "too large, bureaucratic, unwieldy, and generous." Neocons also tend to favor free market capitalism where "private business controls production, labor, and the marketplace with minimal or no government interference." Robert Kagan is a fellow at the Brookings Institute and contributes editorials to The Washington Post where I found this article last week. He recently published a book entitled Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart, Again.
Robert Kagan, like many Americans, is trying to understand why so many people favor Donald Trump and why even Republicans who don't back Trump will vote for him in November. He has the expertise to back up his theories, however, he approaches these situations from the right rather than the left.
Kagan's theory has to do with the divide between the liberal and rather radical roots of our documents, in which the founders included ideas of equality and individual freedom which did not exist in any other country of that age, and the anti-liberals who fought against these principles from the earliest days. Kagan reminds us that the founders said 1) that all human beings are created equal, 2) that all human beings had in their possession certain "natural" rights, 3) that government has the responsibility to respect and safeguard these rights, and 4) that these rights are not derived from religious belief and were not granted by a Christian God, by crown, or by constitution but were inherent in what it meant to be human.
Kagan goes on to remind us that not all Americans who lived at the same time as the founders were on board with this "new order for the ages" or novus ordo seclorum. For example, they knew slavery was contrary to these principles and still permitted it to continue ("hoping it would die a natural death") They also knew that established churches were contrary to these ideals. He tells us that "[l]eaders of the slaveholding South called the very idea of equal rights a "false doctrine."
Kagan sees our two major political groups as "liberals" and "anti-liberals". He tells us that a "significant segment of the Republican electorate wants to see the system overthrown" and that this situation arose even within the group of men who were our Founders. These men believed in democracy but only if it was an exclusively White democracy. Kagan goes on to say that the "rebellion against liberal principles may have begun in 1860" but it "never ended".
Kagan reminds us that anti-liberalism has not only been about race. "For more than a century after the revolution many, if not most White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) insisted America was a Protestant nation and Catholics were not considered equals. In fact, a second iteration of the KKK in the 1920s was anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Black. "Many regard today's Christian nationalism as a fringe movement, but it has been a powerful and often dominant force throughout American history," says Kagan. (Of course, we know this.) In fact, he says, "[F]or two centuries White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders liberal goals.
"Since World War II our courts and political systems have pursued liberal goals by ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, and recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities once deprived because of religious, racial, and ethnic discrimination. Today anti-liberals in America say they are deprived of their "freedom" to impose religious and racial views on society, on public schools, on the public square, and on the laws of the nation."
"For some time, it was possible to believe that many voters could not see the threat Donald Trump poses to America’s liberal democracy, and many still profess not to see it. But now, a little more than six months from Election Day, it’s hard to believe they don’t. The warning signs are clear enough. Trump himself offers a new reason for concern almost every day. People may choose to ignore the warnings or persuade themselves not to worry, but they can see what we all see, and that should be enough."
"How to explain their willingness to support Trump despite the risk he poses to our system of government? The answer is not rapidly changing technology, widening inequality, unsuccessful foreign policies, or unrest on university campuses but something much deeper and more fundamental. It is what the Founders worried about, and Abraham Lincoln warned about: a decline in what they called public virtue. They feared it would be hard to sustain popular support for the revolutionary liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence, and they worried that the virtuous love of liberty and equality would in time give way to narrow, selfish interest."
This is the heart of Kagan's theoretical analysis of the American divide.
You should read the rest of this seminal article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/24/trump-tyranny-christian-nationalist-democracy/