Donald Trump is far from being an aberration in American politics. Two recent books see him as the latest in a line of rebels against established authority and political norms. One, dating back to the time of America’s War of Independence against the British (1775-1783), places the new president in the context of American domestic politics while the other discusses him as part of a tradition going back to the years before the First World War of homage by the US far right to foreign far-right strongman leaders.
Robert Kagan* traces a straight line from the foundation of the Republic to the present day through a succession of anti-liberal groups: the southern slave-owning, secessionist confederates of the mid-nineteenth century, the segregationist Jim Crow lawmakers of the century following the Civil War (1861-65), the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and 1950s, Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society in the 1950s and 1960s, the Christian nationalist movement, the New Right of the Reagan Era and the Republican Party of today.
Narcissism and megalomania
The issues might have changed – from fluoridated water to vaccines, from allegedly communist-inspired Girl Scout handbooks to the elementary school curriculum. The economic situation and media environment might vary. But the fundamental causes of complaint were always the same: Wall Street, Jewish bankers, cosmopolitans, East Coast intellectuals, foreign interests and black people. So were the remedies: small government, maximum freedom and a white Protestant population.
Kagan is an academic and journalist who resigned from the Republican Party in 2016 over Donald Trump’s nomination as the party’s presidential candidate. He does not quite call Trump a fascist, but he comes very close. He compares him to Hitler and writes: “People are wisely reluctant to throw words like ‘fascist’ around loosely, but it is hard to find a better word for the relationship between Trump and his devoted following.” He accuses the president of narcissism and megalomania and describes him as a would-be tyrant.
He lambasts the Republican Party for not controlling its more extreme elements as far back as the Clinton presidency and for riding Trump’s coattails in return for hundreds of conservative court appointments, tax cuts, immigration restrictions and reductions in regulations of business.
Politico-philosophical shifts
The War of Independence, according to Kagan, brought about two important politico-philosophical changes in the people and their popular leaders that facilitated repeated rebellions against established authority and norms and their liberal and supposedly elitist representatives.
At the outset of their struggle with George III and the British government the American colonists were seeking not independence from Britain but the restoration of their civil rights as Englishmen dating back to Magna Carta – no taxation without representation. But before long they were fighting instead for what they regarded as their universal natural rights as individual human beings. In the famous words of the Declaration of Independence (1776):
“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.”
There was, of course, a fundamental hypocrisy in this claim in a nation where significant number of the States had economies based on slavery. Universal natural human rights, according to Kagan, have still never been accepted in the former slave states.
Inalienable rights
The second politico-philosophical shift, which was consequential on the first, was that because rights were individual to each human being rather collective to their society, each individual had the right to resist any attempt to curtail them by not only George III and his government but by any government anywhere, including in Washington DC and even state capitals.
Hence the Civil War, the continuing widespread resistance to big government and the occasional communities that try to place themselves outside all jurisdictions. Hence the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Hence the whole line of anti-liberal groups leading to Trump, all fighting for their unalienable rights. The Enlightenment view that given time and education, science and reason, all people would eventually make their way up the ladder of civilisation to liberalism is described by Kagan as “a central conceit of liberalism…a figment of the liberal imagination.”
It is shocking how what the naïve among us thought of a liberal philosophy of universal human rights like that which America’s founding fathers adopted could come to be twisted into a type of freedom that some have sought, and still seek, to use to place themselves outside the law and oppress others. The Confederacy of the Civil War thought it was fighting for its freedom – the freedom to keep slaves.
A brighter future?
After a fascinating run through American history, Kagan ends on a hopeful note: Trump could be the last throw of the dice for the anti-liberal white supremacists. Kagan was writing in early 2024, before Trump had been formally nominated and while Biden was still the prospective Democrat candidate, so he had to consider what would happen if Trump won or lost.
A Trump defeat he thinks, would not have been accepted by his supporters and would probably have led to some violence but not civil war. Some states might have formed a new confederacy and Biden, unlike Lincoln, would not have sent in the army to force them back into the Union. Result: the dissolution of the Republic.
A Trump victory, as has happened, could lead to a virtual coup by the new president, undermining the electoral and judicial processes and the president taking revenge on his enemies, unrestrained by a zombie Republican Party. The question then (and still now, at this early stage of Trump 2.0) is how long the Democrats, who, don’t forget, make up half the country and control the governorships and statehouses of many of the richest and most populous states, will stand by passively while the liberal democratic system is dismantled.
The tragic irony, according to Kagan, is that if America can get through this crisis with its liberal democracy intact the greatest danger may have passed. Trumpism is not unique, but Trump probably is. The long-term prospects for liberalism are bright, Kagan thinks. Demographic change means white supremacy is a lost cause and the appeal of liberalism as the only way to keep such a diverse society together will grow.
This optimism seems uncertain, given that half of Hispanic men and 24% of Black men voted for Trump in 2024. And immigrants who arrive poor – or at least their successor generations – can veer politically right once they achieve the American dream for themselves.
America Last
Heilbrunn** comes from the same place as Kagan (who gets a mention in his book), a desire to expose America’s far-right. But while Kagan’s focus is fascists or near-fascists at home, Heilbrunn examines their fascination with and desire to emulate undoubted fascists abroad, dating back to the First World War.
America’s far-right leaders have been fascinated throughout that period with a list of “strong men” rulers around the world, some of whom have ended up being declared enemies of their own country (the U.S.): from Kaiser Wilhelm II, through Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and Pinochet, Salazar and Verwoerd, to Putin and Orban today. The policy of these leaders of the American right has consistently been non-intervention abroad – not to help Britain in two world wars and certainly not in defence of human rights.
This elite right-wing coterie has been led in their time by intellectuals and influential figures like the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and the aviator Charles Lindberg. Every generation of Americans for more than a century has had its apologists for the world’s most wicked regimes. Older readers will remember writers and campaigners like William Buckly Jr and Pat Buchanan.
The aim of these leaders of the American right, identified by Heilbrunn in similar terms as Kagan, has again been to turn America’s founding principles on their head: liberalism stands for totalitarianism, democracy for injustice and rights for decadence. They want to protect freedom in the name of limiting it, to create a revolution to preserve tradition, to capture the future by returning to a mythical past.
They can claim, but in a twisted way, the justification of a long philosophical history going back to Plato, who was no fan of democracy – though this is not a point mentioned by Heilbrunn. Most free countries have recognised that while no system of governance is perfect, democracy is the best option provided it is of the representative, not the direct, variety. But not the American writers in Heilbrunn’s book; they want a self-appointed elite, an oligarchy – and a racist one at that.
Heilbrunn’s book’s details long discredited pseudo-scientific racial theories like the division of Europeans into Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean groups and discusses the writings of so-called intellectuals whose names are now barely remembered at all, like Lothrop Stoddard, or fading from memory. A few, such as the poet Ezra Pound, who gets a brief mention, or – it is painful to say – the newspaperman H.L.Mencken, are still remembered beyond a tight circle.
Neocons
Far- right isolationism and the turning of a blind eye to the human rights abuses of foreign dictators suffered a temporary setback with 9/11. Active resistance to the “axis of evil” became patriotic. Saddam Hussein was deposed in Iraq. George W. Bush and the neocons had the upper hand. But not for long. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars turned sour and the tide turned again in favour of isolationism. Donald Trump is lukewarm at best about NATO.
Trump is a complex character in the context of this story – against foreign wars and admiring of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, no supporter of human rights but without the traditional right-wing antisemitism. Heilbrunn mentions a visit Trump made to a Los Angeles Jewish memorial centre, where he complimented the rabbi, in 1999, ten years before his daughter married a Jewish husband. He quotes Trump as saying, with reference to Hitler: “We must recognise bigotry and prejudice and defeat it whenever it appears.”
Where Kagan’s book ends on a note of optimism, believing that the long-term prospects for liberalism are bright, at least in America, Heilbrunn’s is pessimistic at the end – even though he believed at the time he was writing that Trump would lose the election to Biden:
“The new authoritarians – from Budapest to Washington, from Moscow to Brazil – are making common cause to champion illiberal democracy. And now, as in the past, one thing remains consistent in the long and melancholy saga of the American Right’s self-abasement before foreign tyrants. It puts the American people, American ideals and American independence last, not first.”
*Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is tearing America Apart – Again. By Robert Kagan. Published by Penguin Random House (2024).
**America Last: The Right’s Century-long Romance with Foreign Dictators. By Jacob Heilbrunn. Published by Liveright (2024).
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