Extremely important: On our democratic crisis, from Robert Kagan
Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an author, and Washington Post Editor at Large. I've summarized just some of the statements from his current article at The Post
You may already know about the Time Magazine article on Trump in which his nightmarish plans to become, in effect, a king, have again been made clear. But you may have missed Robert Kagan’s article, “We Have a Radical Democracy. Will Trump Voters Destroy it?” I think this too, is so important that I wanted to give you a summary of some of his thoughts.
To sum up my summary, he warns that not just Trump, but a growing group of “anti-liberals” believes that to install the Christian-driven, white-controlled society it wants, it must destroy the government we’ve had since the Founding Fathers created it. This isn’t new, he says, but is still very dangerous. I figured you’d want to know more.
He begins by noting that all Americans by now must see what a danger Donald Trump is to the democracy established with such care by the Founders. He urges us not to ignore the warnings, or persuade ourselves not to worry. He believes the reason many seem okay with what's going on is "not rapidly changing technology, widening inequality, unsuccessful foreign policies or unrest on university campuses but something much deeper and more fundamental." That is a decline, he writes, in what the Founders and Abraham Lincoln called “public virtue,” which, he says, the Founders worried about and Lincoln warned about.
They knew that the revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution were truly radical in the history of the world. It was revolutionary to consider all people as equals under the law, who have natural rights that everyone should have in a just world. The Founders “acknowledged that no government by the people could be sustained if the people themselves did not have sufficient dedication to the liberal ideals of the Declaration. The people had to love liberty, not just for themselves but as an abstract ideal for all humans."
Kagan feels many Americans no longer care whether our democracy survives "and are ceding the ground to those, led by Trump, who actively seek to overthrow what so many of them call ‘the regime.'” By "regime" they mean the system the Founders created. He warns that we may well lose the 1787 government created by the Constitutional Convention simply by choosing not to keep it.
He asks what more we need to know or see beyond Trump's attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power with the storming of the U.S. Capitol, the scheme to create false electoral slates in key states, the evidence that he bullied officials in some states to “find more votes” and to persuade Vice President Pence not to certify the legitimate results. “What more do they need to know than that Trump continues to insist he won that election and celebrates as heroes and ‘patriots’ the people who invaded the U.S. Capitol and smashed policemen’s faces with the stated aim of forcing Congress to negate the election results?"
Here’s the answer. He quotes a woman present at that attempted coup: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
Kagan explains the many ways we may see this year the beginning of the actual destruction of all we’ve grown up with and been sustained by, and assures that this is what Trump and his followers want, “bloodbaths” and all. He says what's really going on here is that the people who throughout history have not wanted to live under the principles most of us consider so precious, are here again, fighting to destroy that system. These “anti-liberals” feel that to get what they want, they (with Trump) must detroy that system, and that is what Trump is setting out to do (the Time Magazine article tells you in horrifying detail.)
Such people, Kagan illustrates with many examples, have at different times in history pushed right-wing beliefs including non-equality, lack of religious freedom (except for Christianity) and removal of real rights, not such "rights" as those they felt entitled to that harmed others including non-whites and women.
Today impeachment, Kagan writes—the system provided by the Founders to help us protect ourselves from this kind of person—has been allowed to fail because Senate Republicans, “out of a combination of ambition and cowardice, refused to play the vital role the Founders envisioned for them. The result is that the nightmare feared by the Founders is one election away from becoming reality."
He adds that while there are indeed people with explicit plans about how to seize power and dismantle our government, "With Trump, everything is about him and his immediate needs. He will run roughshod over the laws and Constitution simply to get what he wants for himself, his family and his business interests. Americans know that if he is elected, he would abuse the justice system to go after his opponents. They know this because he says so. ‘I am your retribution!’ he declares, and by ‘your’ he means ‘my.’ Americans know he would use his power as president to try to solve his financial problems. He did it as president and is doing it now as a presidential candidate. They know he would not respect the results of fair elections if he loses, which is the very definition of a tyrant."
But a big swath of people will vote for Trump anyway, because they want the system overthrown, as did southerners who wanted to keep slavery, and who in 1956 wanted to keep schools segregated. Kagan mentions past anti-liberal ideas about religion, too including a "second Ku Klux Klan" in the north in the 1920's, which "was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish as well as anti-Black, which was why, unlike the original Klan, it flourished outside the South. Many regard today’s Christian nationalism as a fringe movement, but it has been a powerful and often dominant force throughout America’s history."
As has occurred before, those people, and the anti-liberals of today feel the Constitution had gone "too far,"giving too much to marginalized groups like Black Americans. They feel threatened, especially now that whites are a declining percentage of our population. This is why Kagan is so worried; he fears white Christian extremists are so desperate, they may stop at nothing to make sure they dominate life in America.
He writes about influential conservative thinkers who want, instead of democracy, “conservative nationalism,” a nationhood built on Protestantism and the Bible (my italics). One—Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)—insists “We are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible” that began with “the founding of the nation of Israel.” About this Kagan writes, “There could hardly be a statement more at odds with the American Founders’ liberal, ecumenical vision."
He says some conservative intellectuals, knowing Trump can't be effective on his own, are shaping sophisticated plans to convert America into the state they feel is essential. Even though they consider Trump a "deeply flawed narcissist" suffering "from a bombastic vanity," he's “an essential vehicle for the counter-revolution."
Two of those intellectuals told him Trump has “lacked the discipline to target his creative/destructive tendencies effectively.” But this can be remedied. If Trump failed to accomplish the desired overthrow in his first term, one said, it was because he lacked “a capable leadership class.” Things will be different in his next term. What’s needed is a “self-conscious” aristocratic “class of thinkers who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” [and] who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.”
Kagan says that new elite would, like Vladimir Lenin, lead a populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored masses.” One such thinker said it’s necessary to impose the common good even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them” — which Kagan calls “a most Leninist concept indeed.”
I’ll leave you with a couple of Kagan’s bombshell paragraphs straight from the article:
The Christian commonwealth, then, would require a powerful executive freed from the Constitution’s liberal and democratic constraints. The new state,” (wrote one anti-liberal elite) “with its robust executive,” would “sear the liberal faith with hot irons,” wielding the “authority to curb the social and economic pretensions of the urban-gentry liberals.” The whiff of violence and oppression in such statements is intentional. The anti-liberal intellectuals understand that changing the liberal system will require far more than an election and a few legislative reforms.
Those elites and other anti-liberals “acknowledge that the country they want, a country subservient to the Christian God, a country whose laws are based on the Bible, cannot be created absent the overthrow of the Founders’ liberal and defiantly secular system. Even a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil M. Gorsuch, speaks of the “so-called separation of church and state. Anti-liberalism at the Supreme Court is nothing new, either.”
I've only given you a taste of Kagan’s article. For more either see his book, “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart — Again,” from which it’s adapted, or read the rest of the article. There’s so much of importance I’ve left out. I think the link below should work for you with no payment.
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/24/trump-tyranny-christian-nationalist-democracy/