Rebellion
A review of Robert Kagan over in The Bulwark
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No new content this weekend, but instead I’ll send you to my most recent piece elsewhere: a review of Robert Kagan’s new book Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart—Again, published over in
on Thursday. I suggest you wander over there and take a look. Here it is.Kagan is a very smart guy and one of our finest public intellectuals. I’ve often taught his work in classes and think he has been our sharpest analyst of international affairs over the past two decades. At a time when lots of people were trying to figure out how the world would be organized after the Cold War, Kagan was the first to see clearly that its new defining principle would be the emerging face-off between liberal democracy and authoritarianism.
But his new book, on American domestic politics, leaves something to be desired. Kagan’s desire to highlight the (real) threat he sees in Trumpism leads him to oversimplify and misconstrue aspects of American political history. My conclusion: “Rebellion rests upon an inappropriately narrow conception of liberalism; it does so in order to highlight a questionable ‘tradition’ of antiliberalism; and as a result it distorts modern American conservatism.”
Read the whole thing.
Have a great weekend. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week for another installment From My Bookshelf.