From Illiberalism to Hitlerism, There Is Nothing New About Trumpism – Or the Threat It Poses

“The Trump movement is no freakish aberration," neoconservative Robert Kagan writes in a new book.

(Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on April 2, 2024. Photo by Brian Snyder/Reuters)

Covering American politics over the last four decades, I could see where the Republican Party was headed long before Donald Trump seized control. It wasn’t hard.

The estrangement from facts and reason, race-based appeals, animus toward immigrants, attempts to halt social change – Trump exploited and accelerated these pre-existing trends and exposed the emptiness of the GOP’s stated principles. “It was all a lie,” reads the title of Republican strategist Stuart Stevens’ book lamenting the con man’s triumph.

What I had not fathomed was the depth and persistence of those same currents throughout the nation’s history. A new book by neoconservative intellectual Robert Kagan makes the pattern crystal clear. Indeed, it traces today’s crisis of democracy to the original fracture in Americans’ vision for their country.  

“The idea that all Americans share a commitment to the nation’s founding principles has always been a pleasing myth,” Kagan writes in Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again. “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,” he continues. They “have wished to see America in ethno-religious terms, as fundamentally a white Protestant nation whose character is an outgrowth of white Christian, European civilization.”

A longtime foreign policy adviser to Republican officials, Kagan left the party in 2016 after Trump’s emergence. In 2024, his warnings about the fragility of the American experiment sound more alarming with every passing week.

The radicalism of the founders’ vision, he writes, makes the enduring resistance of “antiliberals” no surprise. At the time of the American Revolution, societies in Europe and around the world were structured by hierarchies of race, religion, wealth, and social position.

But particular circumstances in the late 18th century led the likes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to shape an egalitarian constitutional democracy, in theory if not in practice. Kagan follows the aftershocks through two and a half centuries of political conflict.

It began with the original sin of slavery and the long struggle to secure the rights of Black Americans. But it also encompasses the travails of other disfavored parts of the population – Catholics, Jews, immigrants from Asia and southern Europe, and in recent decades, Muslims, women, and LGBTQ people.

Tides have ebbed and flowed in the battle against legal and social discrimination. Liberals gained the upper hand after the Union victory in the Civil War, passing Constitutional amendments to end slavery and award citizenship rights to the formerly enslaved.

But white southerners soon threw off Reconstruction and passed Jim Crow laws to violently suppress those rights. Waves of early 20th-century immigrants from countries like Italy, Poland, and Russia triggered a broad white Protestant backlash. Antiliberal intellectuals, echoing the racism of Adolf Hitler, asserted their genetic inferiority to justify new restrictions.

Political momentum reversed with the unifying victory in World War II, touching off social revolutions for civil rights and gender equality. But ferocious resistance re-emerged, as it always has.

Kagan explains:

A straight line runs from the slave-holding South in the early to mid-19th century, to the post-reconstruction South of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, to the Dixiecrats of the 1940’s and 1950s, to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society of the 1950s and 1960s, to the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement of recent decades, to the New Right of the Reagan era, to the Republican Party of today….

…The core complaint has been the same, as is the proposed remedy. All these anti-liberal groups…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 sought to make America great again by defending and restoring the old hierarchies and traditions that predated the Revolution.

“The Trump movement,” he concludes, “is no freakish aberration.”

So 21st-century Republicans drew energy from white anxiety over the first Black American president. Trump emerged by questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship, and steamrolled party leaders’ intention to step up outreach to blacks, Hispanics, women, and young people.

Today, Trump’s white, blue-collar, evangelical Christian base feels more embattled than ever. White Christians’ share of the population, more than 80% as late as the 1970s, has fallen below 45%.

It’s no accident that the Jan. 6 insurrection featured displays of Christian iconography and the Confederate flag. Having long avowed the genetic superiority of some groups over others, Trump uses Hitlerian language to decry immigrants crossing our southern border as “vermin…poisoning the blood of our country” in contrast to those from “nice” Nordic nations.

He has affirmed the possibility of right-wing violence if he loses in November. Sycophantic vice-presidential hopefuls such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio won’t commit to respecting the election results.

A recent Trump social media post invoked a post-2024 “Unified Reich.” In victory, Kagan fears, Trump and compliant allies could usher in a dictatorship settling the battle for an egalitarian society once and for all.

“It may be their last chance,” his book grimly observes. “Americans who believe in the liberalism of the Revolution and the founding will have to fight for it, again. If they do not, whether out of complacency or indifference, American liberal government and the freedoms it provides us all will be no more.”

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