With Eliot traveling, Eric welcomes back Robert W. Kagan, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and editor at large at the Washington Post, to the show to discuss Kagan's new book, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart - Again (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024). They discuss the origins of America's liberal tradition in the radicalism of the American Revolution. How the American Revolution differed from the French, the persistence of an anti-liberal tradition that from its inception was wrapped up with the defense of slavery and white supremacy. The persistence of that anti-liberal tradition in the 19th Century, today's Catholic integralism and Christian nationalism and the tensions between those schools of thought. The connections between anti-liberalism and America First and the connection to anti-semitism, left-wing anti-liberalism and the from whence the threat to American democracy is greatist, the stakes in the 2024 election and the global struggle against liberal democracy by Russian and Chinese autocrats.
Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart--Again:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-russia-republican-party-relations/678271/
Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
Episode Video:
Outstanding episode. I want to read this book.
One pushback, if I may. Yes, the illiberalism on the left is not a direct threat to the Constitution like the illiberalism on the right is. But the illiberalism on the left is weakening the anti-Trump coalition. Biden's attempts to appease rather than excoriate certain illiberal factions on the left is also weakening this coalition.
Here's an example. In a Siena College poll last February of Jewish voters living in New York state, 53% supported Trump to 44% supporting Biden. Jewish Americans have been the greatest defenders of liberal democracy in this country. They lost their lives in the Freedom Ride. Jews were among the first straight people to stand up for gay rights, even before their parents organized. And now the Democrats are losing this most civic-minded, most educated, and most politically active group of voters... to Trump.
The Democrats must change course immediately.
Kagan at 22:20: "Everybody who's like Bill Buckley is supporting Trump." If that were true, The Bulwark and The Dispatch would not exist.
One need not wonder what William F. Buckley would have thought of Trump. When Trump first ran for president in 2000, Buckley shared his thoughts in an essay published in Cigar Aficionado. He called out Trump as a demagogue and a narcissist. Links follow:
Mediaite summary: https://www.mediaite.com/online/heres-what-national-review-founder-william-f-buckley-wrote-about-trump-in-2000/
NR excerpts pertaining to Trump: https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/01/william-f-buckley-donald-trump-demagoguery-cigar-aficionado/
Full article: https://www.cigaraficionado.com/article/insights-politics-the-demagogues-are-running-7081
I can't disagree with anything that Kagan and Edelman have said. Unfortunately, they are so deeply out of touch with the American voters who are going to vote Trump back into office. Biden-Harris are toast in 2024. You all just don't get it. I am shaking my head is astonishment.
Please say more. How do you think they are out of touch with Trump voters and what don’t they get?
Steven Clare
just now
Political pundits and Democrats are out of touch with American voters who are unenthusiastic about Biden-Harris. At the Bulwark, only Sarah seems to be hearing what her focus groups are saying. The biggest threat to Biden-Harris are voters like me--a swing voter in a swing state, registered GOP, Never Trumper. I voted for Biden-Harris in 2020 after voting write-in for president in 2016. Biden is too old. His support of Israel is stuck in the post-WWII era--before I was born. Harris is incompetent and too liberal for my taste. I will vote Dem for US Senate and for my congressman but plan to write-in Nikki Haley for president. I am rationalizing that if Trump wins, I will have voted for a Dem Senate and House to offset his craziness.
a great epsiode - yes there were communists in italy, i remember watching the bbc Coldwar series where the communists where close to getting power, and the CIA got involved with "suitcases full of cash" and began influencing the pope and the church i beleive? :(
Italian communism in those days was supported by Moscow, like most communist movements worldwide - and like most of today's anti-liberal movements around the world, including in the US.
Outstanding. Kagan’s book at the top of stack already for next read. This pushes me to complete current
Terrific episode. I just bought Kagan's book on audio and look forward to the listen. I agree whole-heartedly with so many of the points he mentions in this conversation, especially things like religiously-ordained hierarchies leading to inevitable rejections of liberalism across the centuries of our shared history all the way up to the MAGA movement.