"Rebellion - How Anti-Liberalism Is Tearing America Apart Again "
The antiliberal intellectuals understand that to change the liberal system will require more than legislative reforms. The founders, despite everything, did manage to erect a system that was capable of defending itself against antiliberal rebellion from within. To those who feel oppressed by liberalism, the only answer is to overthrow the system and the Constitution that undergirds it.
from the book "Rebellion - How Anti-Liberalism Is Tearing America Apart Again " by Robert Kagan
...And what about white people? Do even white Protestants agree on what constitutes the “common good”?
Will they simply live in harmony once the non-white people have been put back in their place or removed and “wokeness” is suppressed by the government? The history of Europe should dispel such fancies. White people have historically no more agreed on the “common good” than Christians. Americans used to regard it as a matter of pride that peoples who fought one another for centuries in Europe could live together peacefully in America. That was the consequence of a liberal society in which all enjoyed equal rights.
But history amply shows that this is not the normal condition of humans. It is utopian to imagine that, in the absence of the institutions and safeguards of liberalism to constrain them, these ancient divisions will not reemerge.
Antiliberal intellectuals don’t trouble themselves with such matters. The founders labored to create something that could last. The antiliberals want to destroy what the founders created but lack a coherent plan for what could replace it. Their goal is destruction and revenge. Trump for these intellectuals is an imperfect if essential vehicle for counterrevolution. A “deeply flawed narcissist” suffering from a “bombastic vanity,” he has “lacked the discipline to target his creative/destructive tendencies effectively.” His movement remains “untutored and ill led.”
Trump’s failure to execute the counterrevolution in his first term was a failure to develop “a capable leadership class,” but antiliberal intellectuals have the answer: them. They hope to use the rebellious destructiveness of the Trump movement to overthrow a liberal “elite,” against which they have been helpless by themselves, and replace it with another “elite”—a “self-conscious aristoi,” Deneen calls it, who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Like Lenin, this new would-be elite yearns to place itself at the vanguard of the populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses. Indeed, according to the prominent antiliberal Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the “common good” even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them”—a most Leninist concept indeed.
Clearly, the new antiliberal government will not be a democracy. It will be an antiliberal tyranny. The new state, Vermeule writes, with its “robust executive,” will “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 antiliberal intellectuals understand that to change the liberal system will require more than legislative reforms. The founders, despite everything, did manage to erect a system that was capable of defending itself against antiliberal rebellion from within. To those who feel oppressed by liberalism, the only answer is to overthrow the system and the Constitution that undergirds it.
For the first time since the Civil War, antiliberals have the means to do so. The antiliberal takeover of the Republican Party since Trump won the party’s nomination in 2016 threatens American liberal democracy in a way that the founders neither envisioned nor prepared defenses against. The two-party system, which the founders did not foresee, has served many useful purposes. But it has also turned out to be the trapdoor through which tyranny can sneak in and destroy democracy.
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Interesting. Is that different from American Democracy?
Is America a liberal democracy?
The antiliberals are anti-intellectuals.
As we've seen many times before, when authoritarians are faced with those who are aware of their crimes, aka "woke", their knee jerk reaction is to start trying to put people back to sleep by beating them over the head or shooting them in the street.
Calling them "intellectuals" is an insult to real intellectuals
How is democracy supposed to benefit minorities? Democracy is definitely not minority rule. Racial gerrymandering does not protect democracy, no matter what race benefits.
Are complaints about Republicans just a smoke screen to obscure minority concerns over too much democracy? The recent elections have overturned minority authoritarian grasp on government. Autocratic favoritism for minorities imposed upon the country by bureaucracies and courts is very far removed from democracy.
The bellyaching over democracy is supposed to return authoritarian power to modern liberals and progressives. That might appeal to the hippie sentimentality of old white people but its not an alternative for the future. Modern liberals killed democracy decades ago to obtain power over society. But now that minority authoritarian advantage through government has become a disadvantage. Maybe its time to put people first, protect rights rather than freedoms, and make our republic work the way it's supposed to.
Yeah, supporting radical authoritarians like the Nazi platner is incompatible with a republican form of government,