It Didn’t Come From Nowhere (April 2025)

Robert Kagan’s latest book, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing American Apart—Again (2024), challenges the notion that what he has called Trump’s fascism(1) came from nowhere. In Rebellion, the neoconservative foreign policy theorist, argues that the Trump phenomenon has a long and unsavoury history in the U.S. The white christian(2) nationalism that has coalesced around Trump is the latest and perhaps most dangerous threat to democracy in American history. Yet, Kagan makes a strong yet controversial case that America has from the beginning nurtured antiliberalism in the forms of white supremacy and christian supremacy. These antiliberal views are contrary to the egalitarian principle in the Declaration of Independence and to the liberal principle of limited (or constitutional) government.

Kagan believes that the egalitarianism enunciated in the Declaration is neither dependent on God nor man, i.e., divine law or man-made law. Instead, it owes its origin and authority to natural law which is knowable as it is ‘self-evident’ and ‘inalienable.’ As a conservative and as an American, Kagan would never extend equality to the economic sphere of human activity nor would he countenance a version of egalitarianism such as direct democracy. The Bill of Rights would best exemplify those freedoms which, for him, guarantee equality before the law.

In Rebellion, Kagan focuses on domestic politics, but it might be worth keeping in mind that as a neocon (think of the George W. Bush administrations), the liberalism that he advocates in domestic affairs does not apply to foreign affairs. American exceptionalism in international relations is not addressed in this book, and if it were it would complicate the message. For, Kagan’s views of America’s role in the world smacks of a hubris and arrogance that he would deny non-American actors on the international national scene. That position is tenable because America is still a great power capable of acting unilaterally and there is no international counterpart to the nation-state to rein in rulebreakers. There is no international government capable of enforcing its laws, and the U.S. has made this clear over and over in its disagreements with the judgments of international organizations. The U.N. functions where countries agree to follow the law. In the case of the permanent Security Council members—the descendant states of the victors of World War II—each member possesses an absolute veto of U.N. resolutions.

Ordinarily, Kagan is principally focused on international politics. However, the arrival of Trump on the American political scene in the 2010s shook the democratic foundations of the American metropole. And metropole would be the appropriate term for the sort of interventionist foreign policy that neocons are noted for. Think back to the two American wars in west and central Asia waged in response to the Al-Qaeda attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001. Both were far more than retaliation. America’s most recent Asian wars were intended to depose regimes and set about the grand task of nation building à la the post-World War II rebuilding of Germany and Japan. Regime decapitation was successful, but the far more ambitious project of creating liberal democratic governments has failed dismally, no better image of which was the déjà vu moment when U.S. helicopters swooped in to rescue desperate Americans in Kabul as they had in Saigon nearly half a century earlier.

Kagan believes that America will overcome this latest challenge from antiliberalism, and in so doing, he effectively dials down the urgency.

[T]he overall long-term prospects for American liberalism are actually bright, if only because the demographic shift is a reality that can’t be blinked away. White supremacy is another Lost Cause. As America becomes increasingly multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural, and as it becomes impossible for any single ethnoreligious group to dominate American politics and society, the appeal of liberalism as the only means of holding such a society together should grow. Many white people may not change their attitudes toward other racial and ethnic groups—after all, they haven’t changed in two hundred years—but their ability to fight to preserve their hierarchies will diminish because they will be too badly outnumbered.

Yet, just a few sentences later, Kagan quite dramatically changes course from an evolutionary path back to liberalism to one that requires citizen activism. He acknowledges that America may never be completely rid of white supremacy or christian supremacy, though he believes demographic changes will take care of that. This is the threat that white christian nationalists in America and around the world obsess about. It is their fear and anger that drives their anti-immigrant politics. For Kagan, “The 1924 immigration legislation explicitly called for preserving the ‘racial preponderance’ of ‘the basic strain of our population,’” adding that “The Los Angeles Times headline read ‘Nordic Victory Is Seen in Drastic Restrictions’” to illustrate the spirit of the times. In his view, “the 1920s were a high-water mark of antiliberalism, the highest until now.”

In the following quote, Kagan suggests that there may well be an alternative to the long-run return of pluralism resulting from demographic realignment—one that requires citizen activism about which he declines to elaborate.

Americans who believe in the liberalism of the Revolution and the founding will have to fight for it, again. If they do not, whether out of complacency or indifference, American liberal government, and the freedoms it provides us all, will be no more.

Quite unexpectedly, he lets the Democrats off the hook, “If American democracy explodes in this 2024 election year, it will be because Republican voters let it happen.” There is no doubt that the Republican Party and those who voted for Republicans have betrayed the egalitarian and progressive ideals of American democracy. For Republicans who routinely take refuge in whataboutism (“When we do ‘these things’ you cry foul, but you do them, too, so who are you to judge?”) The following words from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism ring loud and true on over-relativizing and refusing to distinguish between the real and the fake, the true and the untrue, the good and the bad:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Nevertheless, the Democratic Party shares blame. Kagan fails to point out that the Democratic Party is supposed to be an opposition party when a Republican is in the White House. Clearly it is not. The responsibility of the Opposition in America’s two-party system is to be a critical check on the excesses of the governing party, and as of the writing of this review, at no time in recent history has the role of the Opposition been so consequential. Both parties are failing American democracy. The Republican Party is ushering in a fascist state, while the Democratic Party is not pushing back nearly as vigorously as the Republicans are pushing ahead. This is an egregiously missed opportunity for Kagan to light a fire under the Democratic Party.

In ignoring the secular rise of economic inequality in America, he misses a second opportunity. By failing to factor in the threat of plutocracy and kleptocracy to democracy in America, he is effectively denying or at least downplaying its significance in contributing to the intense antiliberal sentiments of MAGA supporters, who he grants feel disenfranchised. It would not be difficult to logically connect the vanishing American Dream and the gross distortions of income and wealth accumulation with the rise of mass fear and anger at targets—especially the non-white and non-christian—who are within easy reach.

Kagan, himself, had had enough of the backroom deals when he resigned as editor-at-large from the Washington Post. This despite Kagan being no stranger to the all too frequent intrusion of big money in American politics. In an interview with the Daily Beast, Kagan asserted that there was a quid pro quo meeting between Trump and Blue Origins executives after the Washington Post killed its pre-election editorial endorsement of the Democratic Party candidate, Kamala Harris.

In January 2025, the Washington Post blocked publication of an editorial cartoon by Ann Telnaes which depicted "Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook & Meta founder and CEO), Sam Altman (AI CEO), Patrick Soon-Shiong (LA Times publisher), the Walt DisneyCompany/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos (Washington Post owner). Telnaes quit in protest of what she deemed to be censorship.