Never Trumpers Are on a War Footing
Editor's Note
In order to wage and win a war, you must come to understand your enemy. In the case of the ongoing cold civil war between patriotic Americans and the destructive Left, the enemy willingly shares the information we need.
Chris Bray surveys recent books by two prominent critics of President Trump and finds a clear formula behind their pivot to the Left: a foolhardy optimism about the direction of the new regime, and a fundamental disdain for the common men and women of America. This enemy, Bray argues, understands the severity of the crisis and the length of action needed to resolve it, as shown by their own writings. Conservatives would do well to learn the same.
Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again, by Robert Kagan, Knopf, 256 pages.
Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy, by Tom Nichols, Oxford University Press, 272 pages.
If you want to know where we are as a country, get your hands on a copy of Robert Kagan’s new book, Rebellion. Don’t worry, you won’t even need to crack the spine and open it. Kagan, who married the Queen of Eternal War Victoria Nuland and helped found the now defunct neoconservative Project for a New American Century, has written a warning about the dangerous renascence of antiliberalism in American political life: intolerance, a rejection of minority rights, hatred of progress. America is in deep trouble, Kagan warns. We’re close to losing our democracy! You can already see the freshness and originality of his thought.
Flip it. Take the book, turn it around, and look at that back cover, which carries an excerpt from inside, getting right to the meat of the thing. The problem isn’t the media, Kagan concludes. And it isn’t government. It isn’t a problem with institutions at all: “The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs.” The thing that’s wrong with America is Americans, full stop. The country works brilliantly, except for the existence of the population. Imagine how healthy we would become if we could just get rid of them.
Should you make the mistake of opening the book, your experience will get worse in a hurry. The intellectual muddle is fatal. Here’s Kagan’s summary of the one big problem that runs through all of American history: “A straight line runs from the slaveholding South in the early to mid-nineteenth century to the post-Reconstruction South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, to the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and 1950s, to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society of the 1950s and 60s, to the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement of recent decades, to the New Right of the Reagan Era, to the Republican Party of today.”
All of those movements are precisely the same, you see. Ronald Reagan was a latter-day Ben Tillman, the Birchers merely a rebrand for the 1940s Southern Democrats, and Barry Goldwater was a fitting heir to Nathan Bedford Forrest. A shrewd mind is at work here. All, Kagan concludes, were figures representing “antiliberal groups”: “All have sought to ‘make America great again,’ by defending and restoring the old hierarchies and traditions that predated the Revolution.” The American Revolution, he means. The Dixiecrats and the Birchers and Reagan and Trump all want to restore Parliamentary supremacy and the landed aristocracy, or…something.
But pretend, for a moment, that Kagan has made some form of coherent statement about American history. He is arguing for the protection of the liberal order, the dignity of the common man and the premise that we’re all created equal. At the same time, he says, the biggest problem with America is…the American people themselves. How do those two claims fit together? What kind of politics can we frame around the dignity and inherent worth of the common man, who is stupid and worthless?
See also, on this theme, anything the former U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols has written in the last decade, such as his warning in Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy that “our fellow citizens are an intolerable threat to our own safety” — a claim that closely mirrors Kagan’s warning about America being plagued by Americans. Consider this framing very carefully: if a threat is intolerable, what do you have to do about it?
Nichols has no idea what he thinks is true or false, no apparent mental or moral map of the world. His prose sails south, then drifts north, then wanders in circles. Individual paragraphs self-refute. He has, simply, no idea at all what he even means to claim. If you doubt me, read the introduction to Our Own Worst Enemy, which you can do using the Amazon preview feature without sending the man any money. Nothing tracks. He’s just typing.
Page two explains that stupid Americans are full of pointless anger about their absurd false view that their country is in decline and their standard of living is getting worse. Nonsense, he says: “The citizens of the world’s democracies are living in a time of peace and plenty that was unimaginable a half century ago.” So why are people buying this false narrative of decline? Same writer, page four: “If you are one of the people who has lost a job, or seen your community collapse into a ghost town, or lost a loved one in a faraway war, this is a story that feels true at the most visceral level.”
Tom Nichols explains the world: We live in an era of world-historically astonishing peace and plenty, but the stupid common man is pointlessly angry and ungrateful because his community has collapsed into a ghost town and his loved ones are dying in war. Again, no need to sweat the details in the narrative — just know that ordinary Americans are extremely bad.
Kagan and Nichols summon the ghost of Bertolt Brecht, speaking about East Germany: “Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler, if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”
We face the extraordinary assumption among self-credentialed elites that America is stupid and degenerate, but American institutions are wise and effective. A nation full of ignorant trash has produced brilliance in government, genius in media, wisdom in academia, and a condition of near flawlessness from the helping professions. All elites are without failure, as are their works; all non-elites are without merit, as are their lives. A constitutional republic has produced Soviet cultural assumptions from soil that shouldn’t nurture this crop: the five-year plan is working, except for the wreckers and saboteurs.
We have descended into vanguardism: the common folk cannot understand their own true interests, but a class imbued with the appropriate consciousness has the wisdom to guide them forward. With a firm hand.
And so, for instance, the reaction to the Supreme Court’s rejection of Chevron deference is precisely what you would expect, knowing that agencies are brilliant but citizens are worthless. If we are no longer guided by experts, America will decline. “Chevron is now overruled,” the retired Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe writes. “The administrative state just died.” We plunge into ruin, unprotected by our betters.
The Associated Press quotes an environmental activist named Dustin Cranor, who lays out the stakes of the game as the Supreme Court serves up “the latest example of the far right trying to undermine the federal government’s ability to protect our oceans, waters, public lands, clean air and health.” You can’t be healthy anymore, because agencies can’t use experts to regulate your health. You probably already have a nasty cough that you can’t explain, right?
The certainty that credentialed expertise and government agencies are the single path to a healthy society comes at the nadir — let’s hope it’s the nadir — of a long decline. At best, regulatory agencies failed to stop the housing crash of 2008, and the Wall Street crisis that followed, but experts know best and we need to defer to them. The intelligence agencies, the national security think tanks, and the Pentagon led us through twenty years of war and nation-building in Afghanistan, then dropped a whole country like a bad second date and let the Taliban have it. School closures will protect us from Covid, and experts assure us that children won’t be harmed at all by the loss of face-to-face learning. Name your own top twenty examples, if you want, but the institutions of American state power don’t work, except to fill a remarkable number of rice bowls.
The astonishing degradation of the information environment proceeds from the need to cover failure; you read obvious daily falsehood in the news because the media produces covering noises to keep you from hearing the grinding of the gears. We need to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee who didn’t run for the nomination in the primaries, and didn’t win a single delegate — and we need to do that to protect democracy.
This daily sense of unreality from media grows more absurd as the century-old Progressive Era experiment of societal vanguardism arrives at its logical failure. As Kagan and Nichols show us, the collapse of the “new elite” will pass through a period of brutal blame casting. It’s all about to become your fault.
Treat that emerging message with the respect it deserves.