[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
YouTube knows me better than any human being. I try to hurry past this virtual street-corner drug-dealer, but YouTube suggests addictive videos I can’t resist: a mangy dog rescued from a highway margin and reborn as a beloved pet. A hot debate on current politics. The other day I wanted to listen to something intriguing to get me through a load of laundry. YouTube served up a video of Robert Kagan discussing his new book Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again. Kagan sounded so smart I wished I had more laundry so I could listen to him further.
Robert Kagan (b. 1958), a neoconservative, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His father, Donald, taught history at Yale. His brother Frederick is a military historian. Kagan received his B.A. in history from Yale, an M.P.P. from Harvard, and a Ph.D. from American University. He has advised several presidents. He was a supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Formerly a Republican, he broke with the party in 2016 over its nomination of Donald Trump.
Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again was published on April 30, 2024 by Knopf. Kirkus reports that Rebellion is “Alarming but useful … a timely, well-informed analysis … all lovers of democracy should read” the book.
Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, says, “Kagan details, mordantly, the anti-liberalism that emerged during and after the Civil War, a strain that, just as much as today’s version, insisted on a ‘Christian commonwealth’ founded essentially on wounded white working-class pride.”
In Liberal Currents, Alan Elrod writes, “Kagan manages to diagnose both the acute and chronic nature of our present crisis. Trump is unique. American antiliberalism is not. Resisting the former will not cure us of the latter, but we are faced with the most forceful wave of American antiliberalism in a generation. And America’s future depends on how we meet it.”
On publication, Rebellion was ranked the number one bestseller on Amazon’s “Radical Political Thought” category. It has about a hundred reviews, averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars. One five-star review states, “A brilliant analysis of what the founding fathers created in 1776 and what it means in the context of the age of Trump.” Another five-star review says, “Great historic content with citations … Solid logic.” And another, “If you can’t understand how people you’ve known your whole life jumped down an evil rabbit hole and wound up in some other monstrous reality, this book will put the phenomena in historical context for you.”
I don’t have a degree from Harvard or Yale and I’ve never advised a president, but I have to say, this book did not work for me. The book argues that there is a monolithic force at work in the world called “antiliberalism.” Antiliberals prefer hierarchies to equality, and totalitarianism to democracy. Antiliberals believe that men are better than women. White people are better than black people. Rich people are more deserving than the poor. Heterosexuals are better than homosexuals. Christians are better than non-Christians, Protestants are better than Catholics, Nordics from Northwestern Europe are better than Eastern and Southern Europeans, Europeans are better than non-Europeans, and those born in the U.S. are better than immigrants.
Antiliberals existed in North America at least since the seventeenth-century arrival of the Puritans. Antiliberals enacted laws preventing Catholics from residence in some areas, or voting or holding office. Antiliberals supported slavery. Antiliberals vote for Trump.
Kagan never convinced me of his argument. I will, below, summarize the book. I’ll conclude with my objections.
Kagan opens with a quote from Patrick Henry. “Virtue will slumber. The wicked will be continually watching.” This quote establishes the book’s dichotomy. There are the “virtuous” liberals and the “wicked” antiliberals. Kagan says, “A straight line runs from the slaveholding South … to the Republican Party of today … like the demon spirit in a Stephen King novel … the Trump movement … has always been with us.”
Kagan defines liberalism thus: “Its sole function was to protect certain fundamental rights of all individuals against the state and the wider community – rights that John Locke identified as life, liberty, and property.” Liberalism is “at root, a faith.” Liberalism does not “reflect the will of God.”
“Millions of Americans have wanted to believe that the founders set out to create a Christian society, insisting that there was a straight line from the Mayflower Compact to the Declaration of Independence.” “Many if not most Americans saw God’s hand in everything.”
In fact, though, the Founders “went out of their way not to establish the new republic on a religious foundation … The natural laws established by the creator could be observed and understood by human beings using only their reason. The pursuit of truth was a scientific, not a religious pursuit.” Jefferson and Madison believed that “God had nothing to do with the founding of the republic.”
The “origins” of liberalism “are not to be found in Christianity.” Christianity failed “to produce a single regime to protect the rights of all individuals equally.” “The roots of abolitionism were not primarily religious.” The Catholic Church never abolished slavery. Conversely, Kagan describes belief in liberalism as a “faith.”
Life in the colonies was more egalitarian than in the Mother Country. The reason for this was the large amount of relatively uninhabited and fertile land. Access to that land is responsible for the Revolution and its radical emphasis on liberalism. Colonists could own property, enjoy a healthy diet, and vote in larger numbers than could most men in Great Britain.
When the colonists decided to break from Great Britain, they needed a rationale. They hit upon the concept of natural rights as developed by English philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704). Belief in Locke’s natural rights was a “statement of faith.”
The Declaration of Independence expressed new ideas in world history. The government was meant to be “an individual-rights protection machine.” Not everyone believed in these rights. Slaveholders did not. Protestant “bigots” did not. “Prejudices against Catholics were almost as great as prejudices against Black people and Native Americans.” Thus, “The new, radically liberal tradition in America would from the beginning be accompanied by an antiliberal tradition every bit as potent.” “Jefferson was a racist in every sense of the word. He believed Black people were genetically inferior.” (Kagan’s usage here is an anachronism; the word “genetic” was first used in this sense in 1908.)
James Madison and others crafted the Constitution to “be the guarantor of the people’s natural rights.” The Constitution “contained a mammoth contradiction. It was designed to create a liberal political order in which universal natural rights could be most securely protected. Yet it also included special protections for the most antiliberal practice in the world: slavery.” Kagan cites the three-fifths clause and the Electoral College as compromises with antiliberal slaveholders.
“The core and beating heart” of America’s “dissenting, antiliberal tradition was the slaveholding South.” The Democratic Party was founded by Martin Van Buren as a slavery-friendly party. The Democratic Party was for over a hundred years the party of “institutionalized racism” “even under progressive liberal reforming presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
The Civil War was only a limited victory over antiliberal forces. The Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow maintained white supremacy until the Civil Rights Movement. Slavery was “restored in all but name.” Poor whites are especially to blame, because, being poor, white supremacy was their only status marker.
The contemporary descendants of pro-slavery white supremacists are “so many white Americans” who feel “more sympathy for police than for their victims … Black people” who suffer from “unwarranted killing” by racist police officers.
American religiosity is an antiliberal force. It manifested as Protestant supremacism and “bigotry” against Catholics. This bigotry was expressed in religious tests for public office that remained in force “decades after the Revolution.” “For most of the first century after the Revolution, the main victims of the continuing dominance of Protestantism in American politics were Catholics. For most Americans outside the South, Catholics were the number one enemy.” Founder John Jay, abolitionist and first SCOTUS chief justice, recommended “a wall of brass … for the exclusion of Catholics.”
A reader of Kagan might reasonably conclude that Kagan thinks that Catholics deserved Protestant exclusion, because of their “unquestioning allegiance to the pope” (which is almost a line from a Monty Python skit). The notoriously anti-Catholic Know-Nothing movement had a point. “The anti-immigrant Know-Nothing movements of the 1840s and 50s were filled with antislavery advocates who saw Catholic proslavery sympathies as an attack on American liberty.” And Catholicism was “famously sympathetic to fascist governments in the 1930s.”
Kagan touches on the mass immigration of East Asians, and Eastern and Southern Europeans into the U.S. between c. 1880 – 1924. These immigrants were often poor peasants migrating to a country at a more sophisticated civilizational level. Americans viewed them with alarm. Social Darwinism condemned them as unassimilable lower species of humanity. Madison Grant’s influential 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, gave scientific imprimatur to antiliberalism.
Many of these “New Immigrants” were hated because Catholic; others were hated not just because they were Jewish, but because they were a different kind of Jew. German Jews tended to be more modern; Eastern European Jews were from the shtetl. Antisemitism flared up. White, Protestant Americans felt anxiety as strangers arrived in large numbers and dominated some city neighborhoods. “The 1920s,” when anti-immigration Quota Acts were passed “were a high-water mark of antiliberalism.”
The Democratic Party accepted the New Immigrants and, in the North, it became less associated with Southern white supremacy and more associated with the new arrivals and urban populations. The Republican Party gained power in the South. World War II and the fight against Hitler weakened racism in the U.S. The Civil Rights Movement is comparable to a second victory in the Civil War, achieved in spite of Southerners. “The great majority of white Southerners hadn’t changed their views at all since the Civil War. Preserving white supremacy was as important to white Southerners as it had been in 1865.”
Plenty of Northerners, including those who contributed to civil rights, also didn’t care about black people. Dwight D. Eisenhower “did not especially care about Black rights.” Lyndon Johnson didn’t; he was just a “savvy politician.” William F. Buckley supported white supremacy. Ronald Reagan pushed a stereotype of a “welfare queen” and Bill Clinton reformed welfare in a way that flattered white supremacy. Some presidents promoted liberalism. George W. Bush “pushed back against the rampant Islamophobia” in America and supported immigration from Latin America.
Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington was wrong to question whether or not mass immigration of Spanish-speaking immigrants threatened American national cohesiveness. Huntington was also wrong to argue that a “distinct Anglo-Protestant culture” influenced the Declaration of Independence. Huntington listed the key elements of that culture as “the English language, Christianity, religious commitment, English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill.'” Huntington, says Kagan, “is wrong on almost every single point.”
In 2008, America elected her first black president. This turning point remade the Republican Party into the “party of Trump.” White supremacists grew restive. The Tea Party was a white supremacist backlash. Its members insulted black congressmen by using the N word. Barack Obama was treated with “open racism,” from, for example, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich. White supremacists opposed the mass immigration from Latin America because whites feared that “non-white, non-American alien invaders” were replacing them. Trayvon Martin was shot by a “white vigilante.”
The 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges SCOTUS decision, legalizing same-sex marriage, fueled further anxiety, even though “the court had done nothing more than acknowledge the rights of a group previously discriminated against for reasons of religion and tradition.” Homosexuals, in this instance, are analogous to black people. Both were denied rights because of religion and tradition. Roe v. Wade is also analogous. That decision simply extended to women rights that they had been denied by antiliberal “Christian nationalists.”
Christian nationalists are doomed to defeat because “the rights-protection machine that the founders set in motion is destructive of many traditions, and that includes religious institutions … hierarchy lies at the heart of traditional Christianity … American Christians have always viewed liberalism as a threat to those hierarchies … White Christians and many others in the antiliberal coalition insist that it is they who are oppressed.”
Opposition to the application of Critical Race Theory in government school curricula is purely white supremacist. Woke is “egalitarian” and simply respect for minorities. Opposition to Woke is white supremacist.
Demographics works against antiliberals. As the white population shrinks as a percentage of the U.S. population, as adherence to Christianity decreases, and as minorities increase, America will become more liberal. Antiliberals, panicking in the face of demographic change, seize upon Donald Trump as “an imperfect if essential vehicle for counterrevolution.” Trump is “the leading spokesman and defender of white Christian supremacy … The issue that carried Trump is race … Making America Great Again” means “restoring white cultural and political primacy.”
This ends my summary of Rebellion.
Again, Rebellion did not work for me. It did not work for me in its style. The book purports to explain Trump, but Trump is hardly mentioned in the first 189 pages. Previous to the chapter entitled, “Trump, Savior and Destroyer,” is a rehash of American history as seen by Robert Kagan. As I was reading this history, I asked myself, “Who is his audience?” Kagan must know that most readers who will pick up his book are familiar with the historical high points he rushes through. Yes, we know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while also owning slaves. Yes, we know that Lyndon B. Johnson was an imperfect man. Yes, we know that Roosevelt, while enjoying black support, compromised himself so he could keep Southern Democrats on board with his agenda. We know that Bill Clinton, the so-called “first black president,” reformed welfare.
For me, this rapid and selective review of American history was tedious reading. The tedium was interspersed with annoyance. Kagan is a scholar. He must know that when you make big, controversial statements about big, controversial historical trends, you need to back those statements up with citations to rock-solid research. Too often, Kagan either included no such notes, or he cited a questionable source.
Kagan erects a strawman. His boogeyman, white, Christian Americans, think that the Founders’ goal was to create a Christian theocracy. I’m not familiar with anyone arguing that. Kagan is arguing against something else.
A Founder once said, “The worship of God is a duty … Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature … I never doubted the existence of the Deity, that he made the world, and governed it by His Providence … The pleasures of this world are rather from God’s goodness than our own merit … Whoever shall introduce into the public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world … Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” Believe it or not, it was none other than Enlightenment poster boy, scientist, and bon vivant Benjamin Franklin who wrote those words. Historian Thomas S. Kidd insists on “thorough deist” Franklin’s Christianity – Franklin’s own kind of Christianity, but Christianity nonetheless.
The argument is not that the Founders’ goal was to create a Christian theocracy. Rather, it is entirely reasonable to point out the following. Perhaps the most famous single sentence to emerge from the Enlightenment, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” emerged from a Judeo-Christian civilization.
The passive verb “created” implies a creator. It is this creator who provides the certification for the Declaration’s worth, and, by extension, the justification for the Revolution. This creator is singular; he is not one of many gods. His creation has a teleology. He is benevolent; he loves his creation; he endows humans with rights. He wants his creation to be happy. This creator is “no respecter of persons,” as Romans 2:11 says. God has the same standards for everyone, regardless of ethnicity or social status. Every one of these ideas is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and is directly contrary to Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Pagan systems.
Kagan explains the American Revolution with a reference to John Locke. Great, but why? Why would men fight and die for John Locke? And where did John Locke come from? Locke was a lifelong Christian. He was a “skilled theologian.” “Locke adhered to the Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura, according to which the Scriptures contain all that is needed for salvation. Thus, he always made sure that his conclusions were consistent with, and indeed grounded in, Scripture,” writes philosophy and history professor Diego Lucci in the 2020 Cambridge University Press book, John Locke’s Christianity. “Locke’s natural law theory, relying on a view of God as a creator and legislator, is grounded in both natural and biblical theology, given the role that both rational and Scripture-based arguments play in his justification of natural rights and duties in the Second Treatise of Civil Government.” You would never know this from reading Kagan.
Kagan dismisses Catholicism for not abolishing slavery, and for being “famously” supportive of fascism. Catholicism’s relationship to slavery is complex. Catholicism produced individuals, orders, and pronouncements that resisted slavery. The Gniezno Doors in Poland, dating to 1175, commemorate Saint Adalbert (956 – 997), receiving a vision from Christ to free slaves, and his then freeing them. The 1537 papal bull Sublimis Deus forbade the enslavement of Native Americans. Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las casas (1484 – 1566), formerly a slave-owner, later condemned slavery and advocated for the dispossessed of the Americas. Father Peter Claver (1580 – 1684) ministered to enslaved Africans under the most difficult of conditions. The Trinitarian order was established in 1198 to purchase the freedom of slaves.
None of these facts changes what Kagan says – the Catholic Church never abolished slavery, and too many Catholics were slave traders, slave owners, and committed atrocities. But to ignore the other facts, the attempts by popes or the heroic attempts by individual Catholics, often working under threat to their own lives, to do what they could to end the suffering of slaves, is simply, well, to use Kagan’s words, “anti-Catholic bigotry.” As is Kagan’s depiction of Catholicism as “famously sympathetic to fascist governments.” See, for example, the work of Rabbi David Dalin and Prof. Ronald J. Rychlak.
As for Kagan’s pooh-poohing of Christianity as a force for liberation throughout history, he might benefit from reading Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, reviewed here.
Kagan’s hostility to Catholicism may have influenced his hostility to individual Catholics. Kagan spills a lot of ink accusing Willim F. Buckley of white supremacy. Yes, Buckley published white supremacist material. But he changed significantly – one might say that, as a Catholic, he repented – but Kagan pays little attention to Buckley’s historic and influential repentance.
Kagan mentions Trayvon Martin as a victim of antiliberal, white supremacist, irrational vigilantism. George Zimmerman shot Trayon Martin to death. Zimmerman’s Afro-Peruvian ancestry is obvious in his facial features. Characterizing him as “white” is false. Zimmerman was part of the Twin Lakes Neighborhood Watch program, administered by local police. The Watch responded to multiple neighborhood burglaries, burglaries that were, as police records show, committed by black males. “Eight robberies were reported from the start of 2011 to the time of the Martin shooting, and dozens more burglaries were attempted. Neighbors frequently reported suspicious persons lurking about, possibly casing residences. Many of the suspects were black. In July of 2011 a black teenager stole a bicycle from Zimmerman’s front porch,” reports the National Review. Zimmerman’s participation in a neighborhood watch was not irrational vigilantism. Zimmerman was found not guilty. Kagan mentions none of these facts that contradict his characterization.
Kagan supports the BLM narrative that there is an epidemic in the U.S. of white police officers murdering unarmed black men without cause. Several scholars have published analyses that contradict the BLM narrative. These scholars include Heather Mac Donald, Roland G. Fryer, and John McWhorter.
Kagan argues that any resistance to Critical Race Theory in government schools is proof of white supremacy. Anyone who accepts this assertion uncritically could benefit from reading the work of Chris Rufo; a good place to start is here.
Kagan insists that Barack Obama was subjected to racist abuse; for example, he was depicted as a monkey. So was George W. Bush, repeatedly; see here. A few moments ago, a meme came through my social media feed. It depicted Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene as a chimp. The image is one of the most brutal I’ve ever seen on social media. It’s here. Chelsea Clinton and Amy Carter, both defenseless, underage girls, were subjected to sadistic and obscene verbal abuse. Kagan makes no attempt either to prove, or to cite scholarship that proves that Barack Obama faced criticism worse than any other president. My own subjective impression is that Trump is ridiculed far more than Obama ever was.
Kagan makes the unsupported and unsupportable accusation that America suffers from “rampant Islamophobia.” “Islamophobia,” of course, is “a word invented by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons.”
Kagan asserts that Harry Truman was a Klan member. I wrote to the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum. Archivist David Clark responded. “We don’t have a membership card or receipt for payment that shows that Harry S. Truman was a member of the Klan.” Clark did send me a link to an article that complicates the issue; that article is here. Again, as with Catholicism and slavery, Kagan reduced a complex issue to a simple one that blurred the truth but that did appear to support his argument about American antiliberalism.
According to Kagan, only “antiliberalism” would cause a voter to oppose same-sex marriage or abortion. Abortion undeniably ends a unique human life. If liberalism is all about defending the right to life of even the most vulnerable, then a pro-abortion stance cannot be characterized as uncomplicatedly “liberal.”
Western Civilization has long defined marriage as a union between two consenting adults, one male and one female. These unions, when strong, are protective of women and children. The erosion of this concept is dangerous to women, children, and the wider society.
Samuel P. Huntington’s work on national cohesiveness is buttressed by Robert Putnam’s research. See John Leo’s summary, “Bowling with Our Own,” in City Journal. Diversity can erode connection between citizens. That erosion does not serve the liberalism Kagan says he cherishes; rather, anomie caused by uncontrolled immigration can serve totalitarianism. The Founders were able to accomplish their Revolution at least partly because their shared cultural features allowed them to unite in the face of a world power.
Kagan’s dichotomy between two mutually exclusive worldviews, science and Christianity, is fallacious. Kagan’s treatment of the racist panic around the c. 1880 – 1924 immigration omits key facts. Science supported the antiliberal racism Kagan reviles. Religion criticized that racism. For example, when scientists placed Ota Benga, a Pygmy, into an exhibit with apes at the Bronx Zoo, the New York Times supported that atrocity as scientific proof of Darwin. Christians, inspired by Genesis, protested the Zoo’s grotesque insult to human dignity.
Rather than continue mentioning Kagan’s tendency to report as fact historical events that are more complicated than he wants to imply, open to debate, or even simply debunked by real investigation and scholarship, I want to speak as a Catholic. Yes, there is such a thing as Protestant anti-Catholic bigotry. I have experienced it since childhood, when the Dutch Reformed kids in my hometown informed me that I was an idol-worshipping member of the Whore of Babylon and destined for Hell – and also told to have a nice day.
As an American Catholic, though, I can’t condemn early American anti-Catholicism, because in addition to being a Catholic, I am also honest, and a human being. Catholicism was a dominant power in Europe for centuries. After Martin Luther began the Reformation, some Europeans, significantly rulers, decided to remain Catholic, and others chose a variety of Protestant denominations. That choice entailed an inevitable struggle over massive resources: gold, silver, land, serfs, libraries, buildings. Needless to say, war broke out and lasted for about two hundred years. Millions of people died. Landscapes were devastated. In just one outbreak, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Catholics murdered thousands of Protestants. Evil flowed both ways. Hundreds of Catholics were executed by English authorities for offenses as minor as obtaining papal permission to marry.
It is not “bigotry” to flee people who kill you because of your religion, to seek refuge in what you perceive as an uninhabited land granted to you by God, and to choose to prevent members of that same group who persecuted you and your fellows from living next door to you or assuming power over you. As a Catholic, I can’t blame colonial American Protestants for those desires that aren’t specifically Protestant or “antiliberal.” That is human nature.
Having addressed Protestants, let me say something about Protestantism. I am very aware of the real bigotry my parents faced as children. My Slovak grandfather, a coal miner, suffered from emphysema. My father mined coal as a child. One of my relatives was murdered by killers calling him a “little Polak.” And I’m very proud to be Polish, from the same soil and tradition as Kosciuszko and Marie Sklodowska Curie.
I asked my father once about life in the Old Country, and he replied, “You see the Aborigines on TV? It was like that, except we had clothes.” Protestant countries were often friendlier to capitalism than Catholic countries. Catholic Poland had a near feudal economy into the twentieth century. Illiteracy in my grandparents’ region was around sixty percent, and they never learned to read. In mostly Protestant America, my siblings and cousins worked hard, made money, and enjoyed comfortable lives. Their children have no notion of the poverty we grew up in. A mostly Protestant America gave us that.
Again, my mother entered this country from Slovakia, which racists categorized as a “non-white” country of unassimilable peasants, in 1929, a key year for the quota acts of the 1920s. I have read the Social Darwinist material from that era. It is so insulting to people like my mother it literally makes me sick; it fills me with rage. At the same time, I understand America’s horror at the c. 1880 – 1924 immigration. Illiterate, smelly, and dirty peasants who have no concept of democracy and who would do almost any work under any conditions for any wage were a significant challenge to America. I’ll say it – the Quota Acts were justified with a hateful scientific racism that, yes, inspired Hitler. But those Quota Acts were necessary. America needed time to assimilate so many newcomers. That time to adjust was not a manifestation of antiliberalism. It was human nature. If a non-English speaking, illiterate, smelly, dirty peasant were to demand residence in Robert Kagan’s home, he would quickly understand that.
My problem with Kagan is larger than these isolated disputes. I am a friendly audience for critiques of Donald Trump. Rebellion’s argument not only did not convince me, it struck me as hate-mongering as well as inaccurate. It’s ironic that Kagan, in this text, is so dismissive, perhaps hostile, to Christianity. In Christianity, one can repent. Peter denied Jesus; Paul persecuted Christians. With repentance, both became saints. Kagan’s Trump supporters struck me as an essentialized other, incapable of rehabilitation.
Kagan opens his book with a dichotomy between “virtue” and “the wicked.” Liberals are the virtuous, for the past 248 years of American history. Antiliberals are “the wicked.” A “straight line runs” from the clearly wicked slaveowners, whipping their slaves, and my friends who voted for Trump.
Trump voters are essentially wicked. Their wickedness is in their essence. They were born that way and they have been making everything worse for us for the past 248 years. Their essential wickedness is even supernatural; they are the “demon spirit in a Stephen King novel.” I don’t think any Christian publishing house would let an author get away with such a characterization of his political or theological opponents. Even the Protestants who damn me to Hell believe I can change my fate if I just stop praying my rosary and attend their church. Kagan offers no salvation for Trump voters. Liberals are “us” and Trump voting “antiliberals” are “them.” The only salvation Kagan offers is an increase in non-white, non-Protestant Americans, whom, he believes, will increase liberalism in America.
Kagan’s belief in the salvific power of the elimination of a white, Protestant majority almost makes me want to laugh. I think, immediately, of a court case in my state of New Jersey, home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the U.S. In 2009, Judge Joseph Charles denied a restraining order to a teenage bride from Morocco in an arranged marriage. Her husband raped and tortured her. Judge Charles rightly concluded that the husband acted in accord with his Muslim beliefs. Quran verse 4:34 instructs husbands to beat their wives. Quran 2:223 informs husbands that their wives are “like farmland for you” and husbands can “plow” women however they like. A hadith reports that wives must allow husbands to penetrate them even if they are riding on a camel; “she should not refuse.” Yup, Robert Kagan, the introductions of these traditions will surely increase liberalism in the U.S. Not.
And do I really have to say this? My friends who voted for Trump include some of the best people I know. One devotes her scant free time to helping women experiencing crisis pregnancies from conception to well past the baby’s birth. Another is a model of generosity. Another is my go-to person when I have problems with my computer. He is a university professional and he helps me for free, in spite of working full time, with a bad back. These people are not “wicked,” and I, not a Trump voter, am not “virtuous” because I didn’t vote for Trump.
And do I have to say this? One of my Trump supporting friends is a white woman who attends a mostly black church. Or this? There are numerous blacks, famous and not, who support Trump. Trump has actively asked for their votes, including at a recent rally in the Bronx.
Here’s a thought. How about Kagan jettisons the intolerance and dehumanization he appears to condemn? His definition of liberalism does not address mutual respect between citizens and reasoning together to improve the country for all. Were those his values, he would recognize that support for Trump is a reaction to extremism on the left. Rather than stereotyping and hurling anathemas at Trump voters, Kagan could have recommended respectful dialogue with them. Even Van Jones, a black former Communist, and Bill Maher, who mocks Trump regularly and in the crudest of terms, recommend that.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.