A Contest Not Between Two Men, But Between Two Systems June 25, 2024 One where, if you oppose the elected leader — be he Putin, Orban, Xi, Kim Jong Un, or Trump — you have to fear “retribution.” The other — loosely known as liberal democracy (small “L,” small “D”) — where you don’t. That’s been the system I’ve enjoyed all my life and believed I always would. Yet Robert Kagan — Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart — argues that: One of liberalism’s great weaknesses has always been the belief in its own inevitability. Depending on the outcome 133 days from now, it will remain our system — or it won’t. . . . The institutions that America’s founders created to safeguard liberal democratic government cannot survive when half the country does not believe in the core principles that undergird the American system of government. The presidential election of 2024, therefore, will not be the usual contest between Republicans and Democrats. It is a referendum on whether the liberal democracy born out of the Revolution should continue. Today, tens of millions of Americans have risen in rebellion against that system. They have embraced Donald Trump as their leader because they believe he can deliver them from what they regard as the liberal oppression of American politics and society. If he wins, they will support whatever he does, including violating the Constitution to go after his enemies and political opponents, which he has promised to do. If he loses, they will reject the results and refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the federal government, just as the South did in 1860. Either way, the American liberal political and social order will fracture, perhaps irrecoverably. Although this crisis seems unprecedented, the struggle that is tearing the nation apart today is as old as the republic. The American Revolution did not just produce a new system of government dedicated to the protection of the rights of all individuals against government and community, the first of its kind in history. It also produced a reaction against those very liberal principles, by slaveholders and their white supporters, by religious movements, by those many Americans who have sought to preserve ancient, traditional hierarchies of peoples and beliefs against the leveling force of liberalism. This struggle between liberalism and antiliberalism has shaped international politics for the last two centuries and dominates the international scene today. But the same struggle has also been fought within the American system since the time of the Revolution. The idea that all Americans share a commitment to the nation’s founding principles has always been a pleasing myth, or perhaps a noble lie. We prefer to believe we all share the same fundamental goals and only disagree on the means of achieving them. But, in fact, large numbers of Americans have always rejected the founders’ claim that all men are created equal, with “unalienable” rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and they have persistently struggled against the imposition of those liberal values on their lives. Great numbers of Americans, from the time of the Revolution onward, have wished to see America in ethnoreligious terms, as fundamentally a white, Protestant nation whose character is an outgrowth of white, Christian, European civilization. Their goal has been to preserve a white, Christian supremacy, contrary to the founders’ vision, and they have tolerated the founders’ liberalism, and the workings of the democratic system, only when it has not undermined that cause. When it has, they have repeatedly rebelled against it. 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 ’50s, 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. The issues change—from fluoridated water in the 1960s to vaccines today, from allegedly communist-inspired Girl Scout handbooks in the 1950s to elementary-school curricula today. The circumstances have varied—these movements have arisen in hard times, such as after the 2008 financial crisis, and in good times, in the boom years of the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1980s and ’90s. The media environments have shifted, from newspapers to radio and TV to the internet. But the core complaint has been the same, as is the proposed remedy. All these antiliberal groups—the slaveholding South, the white Southern populists of the Jim Crow era, the Klan, the Birchers, the followers of Pat Buchanan—have feared that their idea of America as a nation of “small government, maximum freedom, and a white, Christian populace” was under attack. All have believed elite cabals involving “Wall Street,” Jewish bankers, “cosmopolitans,” Eastern intellectuals, foreign interests, and Black people have conspired to keep the common white man down. All have sought to “make America great again,” by defending and restoring the old hierarchies and traditions that predated the Revolution. The most successful leaders of these populist movements have always played to popular fears and resentments of the “elite,” the “liberal media,” and government bureaucrats who supposedly have contempt for “the people.” Like Trump, they have flouted conventional norms of political and social behavior. William Buckley noted that the very “uncouthness” of George Wallace seemed to “account for his general popularity.” James Burnham marveled at how Joseph McCarthy’s “inept acts and ignorant words” had a “charismatic” quality that well expressed the fears and angers of his devoted followers. Opponents of the late-nineteenth-century white-supremacist populist Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina called him “a transparent charlatan,” recklessly appealing to “the passions and prejudices of the ignorant” and wielding “the dynamic power of hatred.” What their critics saw as boorishness and malevolence, however, their followers saw as strength and defiance against a world stacked against them. These were not the tame “conservers” of classical liberalism that some intellectuals claim as the true “conservatism” of America. They have been rebellious opponents of the system, “wreckers,” unabashedly antiliberal in both thought and manner, and that is what made them popular. The Trump movement is no freakish aberration, therefore. Like the demon spirit in a Stephen King novel, it has always been with us, taking different forms over the decades, occupying first one party, then another, sometimes powerfully influential, other times seemingly weak and disappearing. Today it has taken control of the Republican Party as it once controlled the Democratic Party. And although people can point to many recent, proximate causes of its latest manifestation as the Trump movement, the search for such causes misses the point. The problem is not the design of the American system. It is not the Electoral College, which not so long ago favored the Democratic Party much as it today favors Republicans. It is not political polarization per se, which has often shaped American politics. It is not the internet or Fox News. It is not the economy: these movements have flourished in good times as well as bad. It is not this or that war, or any particular foreign policy. The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs. As in the past, millions of Americans are rebelling against the constitutional order and the liberalism it protects, and millions more, out of blind political allegiance, fear and hatred of the Democratic Party and “woke” culture, and out of ignorance or indifference to the consequences, are willing to go along with their party’s radical antiliberal wing even if it leads to the overthrow of the American system of government and perhaps the dissolution of the nation. . . . Writing like that may be over the head of some Trump (and Biden) supporters but it is certainly not over the head of Steve Schwarzman — one of the few major CEOs openly supporting Trump.* Steve, a friend of more than half a century, has, I believe, at least temporarily lost has way (having nicely found it not that long ago). Nor is it over the head of most Republican Senators or Congresspersons who privately detest Trump but lack the patriotism to put country over career or the courage (more understandably) to risk their own personal safety. November’s election is between two systems: One, where you have to live in fear if you criticize the leader; the other, where you don’t. *“Not a single Fortune 100 chief executive has donated to the candidate so far this year, which indicates a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican presidential candidates dating back over a century.” — Jeffrey Sonnenfeld IN CASE YOU MISSED IT EARLIER THIS MONTH What to expect If He Wins.