Does America face another civil war?

A neoconservative thinker raises the spectre of secession – but this anti-Trump screed fails to convince

REBELLION by Robert Kagan

256pp, WH Allen, T £16.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.99 “The idea that all Americans share a commitment to the nation’s founding principles has always been a pleasurable myth, or perhaps a noble lie.” It’s a cliché, as Robert Kagan knows, but no less true for that: the novel circumstances of the United States’ creation haven’t spared it from the ravages of division. The commandments of the Founding Fathers have never been as clearcut as national mythology suggests. The US constitution has been amended for a reason.

A “noble lie” that reduces American nationhood to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – followed to the letter, if not in spirit – is easy to maintain in times of peace, when the spectre of civil war has seemingly been exorcised. Yet the election of Donald Trump brought that ghost back to the feast. Kagan’s latest book, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart Again, locates Trumpism in a dark American tradition: the “anti-liberal” heritage of slaveholders, insurrectionists and subversives.

Modern America is indebted to the manner of its formation. That the country was “created” was itself an oddity; Kagan frames the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence as a consequence of the search for a “justification for breaking free of British control”. That search led the Founding Fathers to Rousseau’s untested concept of natural rights, instead of the hereditary principle that was still hegemonic in Europe. While Washington and co were still “white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon men”, in creating a “rights protection machine” they had “struck a blow against all manner of privileges and hierarchies”. The declaration, and its levelling force of individualism, set America on a path towards the liberal expansion of rights.

Yet, Kagan writes, there was a “mammoth contradiction” in the carving-out of exemptions for slavery. (Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration, did not emancipate his slaves.) Yet the rights-recognition machine thundered on, which meant that a union of North and South wasn’t going to last forever – not without “military coercion”. Jefferson Davis’s struggle for “inherited rights” over the “rights of men” made clear the degree of separation. Secession, then, was a reassertion of Southern realities. They weren’t revolutionaries, they were resisting one – the American revolution.

Rebellion is more polemic than history. Kagan argues that a secession crisis threatens once again to tear apart the foundations of the American nation, this time under the Trumpist banner. His background is here relevant: he served under Ronald Reagan, set up a hawkish think-tank with Bill Kristol, and married the great diplomat Victoria Nuland. He is, in short, neoconservative royalty. He has written several books on foreign policy, but Rebellion is his first centred solely around domestic affairs; having spent his career cheerleading America’s place as a global policeman, he has brought the war on terror home.

Illiberalism is portrayed in Rebellion as an unbroken thread, with the charge of “white supremacy” ascribed to Klansmen and the National Review editor William F Buckley Jr in the same breath.

Opposition to “globalism” can only be “anti-Semitism”. Resistance to “rights expansion” is traced all the way back to anti-American slaveholders. Lyndon Johnson may have been a “tyrant” when he enforced civil rights at gunpoint, but in some ways so too was Lincoln, as Kagan admits. Kagan, it seems, has no problem with American authoritarianism when it’s employed for a moral cause. The reconstruction of the South, he thinks, failed to break their rebellious spirit; the belief that racists “needed time to adjust, as if just living in the American liberal system would over time acculturate them to accept liberalism”, was a painful miscalculation. Only the decisive action to enter the Second World War allowed America’s “liberal golden age” to start. But, for Kagan, the year is once again 1938, and the nation is appeasing the illiberals. Take the “Muslim bans”, attacks on the justice system, election denial, corruption, sleaze; Trump’s thuggish character has been tantamount to a direct attack on America.

Kagan’s geopolitical framework is rigidly black-and-white, and applied to domestic politics, it reduces complex intellectual trends to a hysterical battle of ultimate good and ultimate evil – a hysteria that’s characteristic of neoconservative thought. Kagan has played fast and loose with Hitlerisation-byproxy before, but here his relentless attempts to link the Führer to Trumpism strain credulity. Hitler is mentioned by name four times in the concluding chapter in relation to the former (and perhaps future) US president; fascism, about a dozen. Mass politics itself is seen as suspect, for “in democracies” the voters allow bad men to win – that is, we’re reminded, how “Hitler came to power in Germany”.

Rebellion fails to convince. Reclamation of the nation is not the same as secession from it. Kagan can only see the former president as something foreign to the United States altogether, closer to German fascists and Southern rebels than to Buckley. It is not enough to call Trump an anti-liberal: Kagan’s Trump Derangement Syndrome compels him to overstep, conjuring fantastical visions of goose-stepping invaders and “secession”. “For the first time since the Civil War”, Kagan warns, a fundamental challenge to America has arisen: “regime change”.

Opponents of Trumpism ought to recognise the dangers of this overwrought rhetoric. A conservative refusal to play second fiddle to liberalism does not mean that an insurrection is imminent. When Trump exhorts the audience at his re-election campaign rallies “to fight… to restore our American birthright”, he looks to the founding of the nation to frame his patriotic revival. Trump’s view of what it means to be an American citizen may be narrower than some modern liberals prefer, but he never rejects the concept of “Americanness” outright. No one man has ownership of history; Kagan should know better that a shared interpretation of founding principles is nothing more than a pleasurable myth.

Complex intellectual trends are reduced to a battle of ultimate good and ultimate evil