November 5, 2024. Remember this date, it could change the history of the United States. In any case, that’s what Robert Kagan, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution and star columnist for the daily newspaper, thinks. Washington Post, for whom the next American election could well be “the last election held in a unified America”. In his new book just published in English, Rebellion: how antiliberalism is tearing America apart – again (WH Allen), this former Republican and leader of the neoconservatives affirms that this election is no less than a referendum where Americans will be led to decide “for” or “against” the model of liberal democracy born at the time of the Declaration of Independence of 1776.
Since Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, the theme of “democracy in danger” has become a staple of debates on American politics; the assault on the Capitol by supporters of the outgoing president, in January 2021, being certainly the most striking example of the reality of the American democratic crisis. But for Kagan, the media obsession around the controversial personality of Trump does not allow for a detailed analysis of this crisis and distracts from the real issues of the upcoming election.
Trumpism before Trump
What will play out in the coming months could be the epilogue, he assures, of an opposition which has structured the political history of the United States. On one side, the progressive liberals who adhere with conviction to the legacy of the Founding Fathers, and on the other, the anti-liberal conservatives who have never accepted the values and institutions resulting from the American Revolution. Trump would therefore not have invented Trumpism, which would only be the latest manifestation of this illiberal conservatism: “It has always been among us, taking different forms depending on the times.”
For Robert Kagan, the birth of the American Republic was marked by an original contradiction: the Southern states demanded the inclusion in the Constitution of guarantees preventing the federal government from imposing the abolition of slavery on them. “The new Federal Constitution drawn up in 1787 and entered into force in 1789,” writes the political scientist, “was designed to create a liberal political order in which universal natural rights could be protected in the safest way. Yet it also provided for special protections for the most illiberal practice in the world: slavery. From this contradiction were born two distinct Americas, one predominantly liberal and the other necessarily illiberal.
The liberal and progressive tradition enshrines the protection of the fundamental rights of individuals (life, liberty, property) against all powers. The federal state was built around the idea of a minimal government, whose main function was to safeguard the rights and freedoms of citizens. To guarantee these freedoms, the new Republic had to get rid of all religious foundations and legitimization. But at the same time, Kagan insists, an equally powerful anti-liberal tradition was born, which took root in the slave states of the South, where a very significant part of the population, from the start, refused the idea of universality and of equal rights, which they perceived as “an absurdity contradicted by the entirety of human history”.
While in the North, abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Theodore Parker promoted women’s rights, in the South, southern theorist and senator John C. Calhoun called the idea of equal rights an “erroneous doctrine”, “unfairly inserted into the Declaration of Independence.”
An insoluble contradiction
This contradiction inevitably led to the American Civil War (1861-1865), which ended in the military defeat of the South and the occupation of its territories by the Union army. Slavery was abolished with the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, and six years later, the passage by Congress of the 15th Amendment established that “the right of citizens to vote of the United States shall not be denied or limited by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
A victory by knockout for the liberal North? On the contrary ! The Civil War only strengthened Southern hostility to the liberal principles of the Declaration. Slavery was effectively abolished, but the beliefs of white supremacists were only strengthened.
Following World War I, the 1920s represented one of the high points of illiberal conservatism in the United States. The evolution of the Ku Klux Klan in these years is, according to Kagan, “the ultimate symbol of the vitality of the anti-liberal tradition.” Under the leadership of the “Grand Imperial Wizard” Hiram Wesley Evans, the group had between 3 and 6 million members and benefited from a significant influence on the political life of the country, as evidenced by the vote on the Immigration Act of 1924, which explicitly called for preserving the “racial preponderance” of “the basic stock of the American population.”
Despite a decline in conservative and anti-liberal forces in the 1930s and 1940s, the movement was far from disappearing. “In fact, by 1954 the vast majority of white Southerners had not changed their views one iota since the days of the Civil War. The defense of white supremacy was as important to them as it was to white Southerners in 1865,” says Robert Kagan. Southern opposition to brown decisions who played a crucial role in the fight against racial segregation in American public schools, testifies to the strength of conservative and illiberal resistance. In 1956, the Southern Manifesto, a document signed by 101 members of Congress, explicitly called on Southern states not to obey desegregation laws using any legal means possible.
It was also in the 1950s that anti-liberal conservatives led an intellectual counter-offensive. Kagan thus cites an editorial by William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review, bastion of defense of the southern struggle against desegregation, in which the journalist justified the right of white communities, who would be “the advanced race”, to discriminate against black people.
From marginality to comeback
But, despite the success encountered by these authors, illiberal conservatism failed to obtain results on the political level. In fact, between 1988 and 2016, all Republican nominees were liberal and moderate conservatives. George W. Bush is certainly the most perfect incarnation, he who declared, during his 2000 campaign, that “America has a national creed, but many accents.” The most radical conservatives saw in Bush the very product of what they hated most: the liberal, progressive and multiculturalist establishment.
Relegated to the margins of the country’s political and cultural landscape, excluded from leadership positions within the Republican Party, the ultraconservative right was champing at the bit and biding its time. For Robert Kagan, the election of Barack Obama created the conditions for his comeback. Between 2008 and 2016, the Republican Party became the party of Trump. How can we explain such a turnaround, when the most conservative and illiberal candidates had until now been relegated to playing secondary roles?
The explanations most often given highlight the role played by the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed. But for Robert Kagan, if these factors played a role, the main reason was the reaction to the election of an African-American president. “Suddenly,” he explains, “an assumed racism resurfaced, even though we had not seen it expressed so openly for decades.”
On social networks, conservative accounts posted montages of Barack Obama caricatured as a monkey, and during demonstrations, members of the Tea Party (an ultraconservative movement created in 2009 within the Republican Party) marched with signs “Obanomics: monkey see , monkey spending” (racist adaptation of the saying “Monkey see, monkey do”, which refers to doing something without knowing why).
Donald Trump arrived in an ultra-favorable context to carry the demands of a movement which, for decades, had not lost its strength, but was simply waiting for the opportune moment to resurface. In his book, Robert Kagan shows very well that all the themes mobilized today by candidate Trump have been constantly present in the political history of the United States: white supremacism, denunciation of immigration in the name of the defense of white identity, anti-elitism, defense of rural people against city dwellers… But above all, a fundamental opposition to the principles supported by the liberal revolution of 1776.
America on the verge of rebellion
For Kagan, Trumpism is only the simple support of a demand more than two centuries old: “It is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the founders that they are really opposed to. What they seek, It’s the overthrow of the liberal foundations of American society. What they really want is ‘regime change.’ Certainly, Donald Trump failed during his first term and was not the hero of the illiberal overthrow.
But this second term could be different, Kagan warns: “What we are witnessing is not a political battle, but a rebellion.” A pessimistic analysis, but one that the latest episodes of the American campaign tend to validate. Trump’s recent criminal conviction has reinforced, among his supporters, the feeling that their hero is waging a civilizational war for them against a system ready to do anything to bring him down.
Trump is not mistaken. Since the verdict, he has continued to denounce a decision worthy of “a fascist regime” by recalling that “the people of this country are very intelligent, they know that all of this is a hoax”. And it works. His campaign team announced that it had raised just over $50 million in the twenty-four hours following his conviction.
As a figure of the neoconservative current, Robert Kagan harshly judges the evolution of his political camp, and believes that the Republican Party is primarily responsible for the success of Trump and the anti-liberal conservatives: “The takeover by the anti-liberal conservatives of the Republican Party since 2016 threatens American liberal democracy.” A warning that Joe Biden takes seriously. The American president considered it “inconsiderate”, “dangerous” and “irresponsible” to “question our judicial system”, and accused his opponent of “threatening democracy”. This promises a turbulent campaign.
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