Robert Kagan
The historian’s warning of a ‘Trump dictatorship’ went viral, spurring an early release for his book ‘Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart — Again.’ He relaxes with ‘Middlemarch’ and sports.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
Midnight, at the kitchen table, with a bowl of cornflakes.
How do you organize your books?
I own about 6,000 books and it’s a bit of a disaster. I’ve been paying research assistants to put things in order. We should have it under control by about 2028.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
I was not a great reader and have been trying to catch up ever since. I was entranced by Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” which was probably not a good thing. My best friend and I used to go to a bar underage, drink sloe gin fizzes, and pretend we were Jake and Bill. I know.
What’s the last great book you read? “Middlemarch.” If historians could show the dynamic interaction of people in a society the way George Eliot does, we’d have a much better understanding of humanity.
What books are on your night stand?
I’ve been reading about European history during and after the French Revolution in an effort to trace the complex connection between ideology and foreign policy. I’m now reading Michael Broers’s “Europe After Napoleon” and next up is Christopher Clark’s latest, “Revolutionary Spring,” about the liberal revolutions of 1848.
Describe your writing routine.
For history books, months of research, followed by attempts at writing, followed by months of research, for 10 to 12 years. For about 20 years I wrote between the time I put our kids on the school bus until the time the bus dropped them home again. Now I work until it’s time to cook dinner for my wife. My dad, who wrote about 20 books, worked 9 to 5, and never in the evening. We called him a lunch-pail historian. I’ve tried to be like that.
Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?
Yeah, when I read Salinger’s “Nine Stories” for the 73rd time.
What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?
“Middlemarch.” A lot. She is the wittiest writer in the English language.
The last book that made you furious?
Pretty much every book ever written on the Spanish-American War. Even great historians write about it cartoonishly, as a great “imperialist” folly.
Why did you title your book “Rebellion”?
That’s what the Trump movement is: a rebellion against the America that Jefferson,
Madison, Hamilton and other founders envisioned. It’s not the first anti-liberal rebellion and won’t be the last.
You compare Trumpism to “the demon spirit in a Stephen King novel.” Do you read Stephen King? Talk further about the comparison.
OK. No. I don’t read King. But my daughter does! She read “The Stand” every summer at the beach for about eight years beginning when she was 10. So I basically get it.
A reader finishes the last page and closes your book. What should s/he do next?
Engage in the political battle as if it mattered, the same way they would about rising property taxes.
What do you read to relax?
History. What can I say? And the New York Post sports page.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
That Evelyn Waugh blamed the evils of the modern industrial world on Protestantism in almost the same words as Patrick Deneen blames the evils of the modern world on liberalism. Discuss among yourselves.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
It’s basically a question of who I’d like to join me and Dorothy Thompson, the crusading anti-Nazi journalist of the 1930s and the model for Katharine Hepburn’s Tess Harding in “Woman of the Year.” I don’t know whom she’d want to join us, aside from her second husband, Sinclair Lewis, which I’d be down with. Add Reinhold Niebuhr? Was he fun?