I need to begin this review with a caveat: Robert Kagan has tremendously influenced me. Kagan's book, The World America Made, was one of the substantial influences on my thinking that took me from a relatively moderate Democrat to a full-bore 2003-Cheney-Wolfowitz neoconservative in relatively short order and acted as a launching pad from which my own conservatism developed. What follows is personally painful for me to write. I greatly admire Kagan's work on international relations and history, but I cannot say the same about his political theory.
Kagan has written a new book titled Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again that purports to show the long-running influence of the "antiliberal" tradition that runs through American history in competition with liberalism. For Kagan, pre-founding state religion, slavery, nativism, the American conservative political and legal movements, and, ultimately, Donald Trump are all manifestations of the same antiliberalism. And what's the common denominator of all these for Kagan? Hostility to the liberal tradition in America.
An obvious question at this point is what Kagan means by liberalism and antiliberalism. It's one he doesn't answer very well. Kagan offers a provisional definition of liberalism, which is the theory that government exists to protect inherent, universal natural rights and that a government's legitimacy is based on consent. This is fine as a matter of basic political theory, but Kagan uses it like a computer processes code. One of the problems with computer code is that it literally takes what's given to it. If you give it code that calls for it to do something, and the code doesn't have well-defined parameters, then it will start generating absurd outputs. Similarly, Kagan's definition has no parameters to it. Almost instantly, Kagan begins lambasting anyone he doesn't find sufficiently committed to the unrestricted expansion of rights. Kagan leans heavily on selective quotations from the founders about how their system would lead to a litany of groups demanding their rights to conclude that any opposition to the expansion of rights is fundamentally antiliberal.
Kagan singles out for harsh criticism the American conservative political and legal movement on these grounds. The conservatism of William F. Buckley is considered part of the deep antiliberal tradition in America. So is the originalist and textualist legal movement. Opposing the expansion of rights facilitated by progressive living constitutionalism has branded originalists with a Scarlett Letter, but instead of "A" for adultery, it is antiliberal. For Kagan, one can only be a liberal if one supports broad, capacious understandings of rights. But there must be some way of determining what counts as a right and what doesn't. Kagan, performing the job of a hatchet man, doesn't care to engage with this question, preferring instead to polemicize.
To the extent that he does engage with it, he offers one particularly unsettling point: that liberalism is "at root, a faith." He continues:
"Although its proponents often claim it is the natural product of reason, there is no way to prove that liberal principles are either more 'rational' or more 'just' than the hierarchical worldview that has guided the vast majority of human beings for almost the entirety of recorded history. Liberalism reflects neither the will of God nor the necessity of history. Either one believes in its principles or one does not."
To be a liberal, in Kagan's understanding, is to not be sure that there's any firm, grounded reason for believing in liberalism and still believing it. To be a liberal is an act of the will. This doesn't help those of us on the allegedly "antiliberal" right who want to use natural law and reason to show the universal validity of the liberal principles that Kagan holds dear, but it does help explain why he's so quick to label anyone opposed to an expansive definition of natural rights as an antiliberal. Kagan's liberalism is beyond reason, and thus, there is no way to use reason to explain why some rights claims are valid rather than others.
It explains why Kagan is so harsh towards originalists, who attempt to use text, history, and tradition to discern what constitutes a right in our Constitutional order. The very act of appealing to past practice is considered the mark of antiliberalism because of the antiliberal currents that run through history. He says so explicitly, stating that the court's originalism is "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." But this also runs into difficulties, considering that the American Founding, in Kagan's terms, was the beginning of liberalism. While there are long illiberal chapters in the American story, which Kagan (to his credit) documents chapter and verse, Kagan dogmatically assumes, a priori, that appealing to the past inherently means appealing to the antiliberal tradition. Kagan is not a legal scholar, so he can be forgiven for not offering a way of addressing what and how we discern valid rights claims from invalid ones, but if we're to take his definition seriously, there is none. Kagan might say that we're supposed to use liberal principles, but apart from vague notions of freedom, it's not clear what those are. And if the only criteria are those vague ideas of freedom and the maximization of autonomy, anything is a right if we will it.
The issue is that Kagan's definition of liberalism is murky and poorly defined. For Kagan, liberalism is about protecting rights and the American constitutional order. But one presumes only certain rights, and certain elements of the constitutional order. At various points, Kagan characterizes the conservative movement's attack on big government as antiliberal. Accordingly, rights to economic freedom are then presumptively antiliberal in Kagan's book. What he neglects to mention is how "antiliberal" originalism very explicitly relies on liberal principles and the American constitutional tradition of limited government.
On political economy, Kagan reprises the arguments of turn-of-the-century progressives in appealing to Alexander Hamilton to justify economic regulation. Hamilton supported an energetic national government that performed concrete actions to help move business along and lubricate commerce. Indeed, the progressive movement, with its denial of the possibility of natural rights and fixed government powers, tried to appropriate Hamilton for its own ends. But Hamilton also signed onto a Constitutional compact that provided clear limits on state power. Kagan doesn't spend any time calling into question their liberal bona fides, just as he offhandedly refers to the New Deal and Great Society initiatives as being part of that same liberal tradition. Just as the American left performed a bait and switch in the early 20th century by reclaiming the word "liberal" for themselves, Kagan follows suit, refusing to explain how one goes from supporting the American constitutional order to opposing it while still being a liberal, but that defending it means being antiliberal. Nor does he ever stop to consider that actual, explicit antiliberals like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule are openly opposed to originalism because of its fealty to liberal political and philosophical principles. One can find much that is wrong with them. But, unlike Kagan, they're at least political theorists who understand what they're actually fighting against.
With regard to the American conservative movement, Kagan's book fails for similar reasons. Kagan draws a straight line between antiliberal movements such as nativism, slavery, and Jim Crow and the post-war American conservative movement. Kagan pays lip service to the idea that American conservatism is devoted to conserving the liberal principles of the American Founding but ultimately rejects it. In Kagan's telling, William F. Buckley was not a defender of the American Constitution or classical liberalism, but an antiliberal defender of preserving the past. The only other canonical conservative thinker he lists with Buckley is Russell Kirk, who was skeptical of the liberal tradition in America. It's an odd choice to make Kirk one of the stand-ins for the conservative intellectual movement in America. Kirk is an easy target for Kagan because of his argument that American Constitutionalism is an outgrowth of the English tradition rather than universal natural rights, but he wasn't representative of the conservative movement more broadly. Kirk is widely read, but his actual influence on the conservative movement was limited. Kirk's non-interventionism, ambivalence about free markets, and the concept of natural rights put him at odds with much of the conservative movement. At no point in the book does Kagan mention the much more representative Frank Meyer or the concept of fusionism—the idea that classically liberal principles and traditional, religious notions of virtue were mutually reinforcing and equally important in the conservative mind. Acknowledging this would undoubtedly complicate Kagan's narrative about the American right.
Kagan also spends pages illustrating Buckley and National Review's early, shameful position on segregation, embodied in the grotesque editorial titled "Why the South Must Prevail." Indeed, it was shameful and grotesque, which Buckley himself later admitted. But one would never gather that from the book. Buckley famously reversed his stance on Civil Rights in the early 1960s. By 1963, Buckley was criticizing George Wallace for selectively excluding black people from government aid and privately inquiring to his mother how to "reconcile Christian fraternity" with "the separation of the races." By 1965, Buckley was criticizing the business owners refusing to serve black people and praising the Voting Rights Act. By 1969, in his mayoral campaign, he was endorsing "special treatment that might make up for centuries of oppression" and going after racially discriminatory labor unions. None of this even gets to his efforts to purge the John Birch Society from the American conservative movement and barring National Review writers from writing for the anti-semitic, nativist, racist American Mercury.
Kagan plays fast and loose in other contexts with whom he defines as liberal and antiliberal. Kagan violently oscillates between strict, legalistic distinctions as it relates to thinkers like Montesquieu, Burke, and Rousseau—arguing that each of them is sufficiently at odds with liberalism to merit disqualification from the tradition—but will freely hand out the label to Republicans he finds sufficiently moderate like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. At one point, to illustrate George W. Bush's liberal bona fides, he says Bush never used his religion in politics. Never mind that George W. Bush was staunchly pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and anti-stem cell research. On abortion, Bush supported and signed pro-life legislation. On gay marriage, he used the issue as a key part of his 2004 campaign. And on stem cell research, Bush's Council on Bioethics relied heavily on the Judeo-Christian tradition in ultimately rejecting it. How does Kagan then get to claim him as "liberal" on his own terms? Because of Bush's pro-immigration stance. But Romney, another one of Kagan's listed "liberal" Republicans, was famous in his 2012 campaign for his hawkishness on the issue—urging illegal immigrants to "self-deport." By the end of the book, there is no theoretical consistency left to the labels of liberal and antiliberal.
Eventually, one must abandon Kagan's definition in search of something else. Kagan is not a bad guy, but the book is primarily a polemic. And polemics are hardly efforts in intellectual honesty. They're often about bombast, and finger-pointing. Kagan's lopsided narrative is inevitable when you try to reduce history down to a binary of good and evil. For Kagan, to be "antiliberal" is to be against the great American tradition, to be against progress, to be the bad guy in the long-running fight of good and evil in this country. In this binary, you eventually have to start putting people in one of the camps. It doesn't matter if George W. Bush doesn't perfectly fit the "liberal" bill—he was a good guy in Kagan's telling, and so he gets moral merit. Buckley, on the other hand, despite spending decades atoning for his grotesque defense of segregation and spending his entire career devoted to the defense of American liberal Founding principles, is lumped in with the bad guys. Kagan is more concerned about assigning moral merit than doing an actual analysis of liberalism and antiliberalism, which is why he bends the definition of "liberal" to include those he personally finds less objectionable.
The simplest way to read Kagan's book is as an apologia for one side of our current culture wars. Kagan used to be a man of the right and was heavily involved in conservative organizations, but he goes out of his way to signal to the readers where he stands on today's flashpoints. Kagan spends pages detailing how wokeness, despite some excesses, is the logical conclusion of the liberal mindset, that religion in politics is a malignant force, and that the originalist Supreme Court is a highly partisan actor, as demonstrated by its role in deciding Bush v. Gore. But wait, wasn't Kagan a Bush guy? Wasn't Bush "one of the good ones?"
Kagan is, I take it, genuinely concerned about the dangers of a second Trump Administration and what it might mean for our democracy. I share many of these worries. I actually have very little to take issue with as it relates to his characterization of Donald Trump. Trump's allies often told us throughout his Presidency to take him seriously, but not literally. Kagan gives a long, well-researched account of various illiberal movements in American history and wants to be seen as a credible narrator of it, but also wants to be a harsh polemicist against the American right, even when the circumstances don't really warrant it. We're supposed to take what he says seriously but also not look too closely at the details. He gets to constantly go back and forth between being a credible historian, bound to higher standards of proof and objectivity, and a harsh political polemicist, running interference for the American left. If this attitude was wrong for Trump in his political rhetoric, it's certainly wrong for Kagan.
As has been alluded to throughout this essay, Kagan's understanding of liberalism is a caricature. For Kagan, liberalism is an unprovable faith, unable to be justified according to reason while eroding other religions. Kagan writes, "[c]ritics of liberalism are right to point out that the rights-protection machine that the founders set in motion is destructive of many traditions, and that includes religious institutions. It exerts pressure on all hierarchies and belief systems that limit the freedom of individuals to think and act as they please." Presumably, for Kagan, this is a good thing. At no point does he suggest it's not. Throughout the book, Kagan goes out of his way to minimize religion, particularly Christianity's role in many of Kagan's celebrated movements for liberal social reform. Kagan's vision of unbounded autonomy and the essential goodness of liberalism's corrosive effect on pre-liberal institutions of church, family, and community is the kind of straw man that liberalism's harshest critics, such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, use to discredit it—but Kagan sees it as a good thing. Kagan is ostensibly committed to protecting and preserving liberalism, but he gives such a bleak version of it that saps it of any appeal whatsoever. For Kagan, individual freedom and traditional values are fundamentally at odds. To some extent, he's right about this. But when he suggests they are irreconcilable, he makes a grave error. If one has to ultimately bend the knee to woke demands and an atomistic social individualism that saps communities of their vitality, then Kagan shouldn't be surprised when, as Graeme Wood recounted, the Yale Political Philosophy professor "[Bryan] Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism." In the battle for young hearts and minds, liberalism is losing. It's losing because of a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of its detractors, and, apparently, some of its defenders as well.
Conservative thinkers like Harry Jaffa were adamant that Lockean means were not only compatible with but necessary to achieve Aristotelian ends. Virtue and public happiness are best achieved in a free, liberal society. Pre-liberal notions of duty and the good perform an invaluable role in shaping souls to use their freedom well. Further, only in a liberal society is true virtue achieved—virtue can only be attained through free choice. Where it is compelled through force, a man might act morally, but he is not moral at his core. This is an abbreviated case for liberalism, but it has been made throughout the West for generations, including by many of Kagan's alleged "antiliberals." It is also one that Kagan himself would benefit from, and that would help fortify America against demagogic authoritarianism.