Robert Kagan, Donald Trump, and the Liberal Imagination
Robert Kagan has an oped on Donald Trump in yesterday’s Washington Post. It’s called “This is how fascism comes to America.”
It’s got the liberal chattering classes chattering. It blames Trump on democracy and the mob, it cites Tocqueville, it gives a hand job to the Framers. For the liberal imagination, it’s the equivalent of a great massage.
And it’s got critics on the left clucking. Kagan, you see, is a neocon who supported the Iraq War, so he’s not above suspicion as a commentator on the American way of violence.
But if you say that, liberals will cry, Ad hominem!
So let’s pay closer attention to what Kagan says, while being mindful of who he is. The two points, as we’ll see, are not unrelated.
Trump, says Kagan, is not “a normal political candidate.” His appeal has nothing to do with “policy or ideology.” It has little to do with the economic anxieties of the middle class. So what is it about? According to Kagan:
What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence.
This, remember, is what makes Trump not a normal political candidate. It’s what makes him a candidate whose appeal and program “has transcended the party that produced him.”
What’s interesting about that claim is that it describes, almost to a tee, the sensibility of the extended circle of intellectuals, academics, think tankers, government officials, and journalists, radiating out of the inner circle of Robert Kagan and William Kristol, who not only pushed for the Iraq War and the War on Terror but who pushed for these violent adventures with arguments that he, Kagan, claims are peculiar to Donald Trump.
Many forget just how contemptuous these neoconservatives were about the America that emerged victorious from the Cold War, but I haven’t. For the neoconservatives, the America of Bill Clinton was a horror. In that “that age of peace and prosperity,” David Brooks would write after 9/11, “the top sitcom was Seinfeld, a show about nothing.”
The major problem of post-Cold War America was precisely that it was too consumed by “the niceties of democratic culture.” In an influential manifesto, Donald and Frederick Kagan (Robert Kagan’s father and brother) wrote—their pens dripping with bitter irony—that “the happy international situation that emerged in 1991” was “characterized by the spread of democracy, free trade, and peace.” Such a situation was “congenial to America,” with its love of “domestic comfort.”
Added Brooks: “The striking thing about the 1990s zeitgeist was the presumption of harmony. The era was shaped by the idea that there were no fundamental conflicts anymore.” Fellow traveler Robert Kaplan went even further. In The Coming Anarchy, he could barely restrain his criticism of the “healthy, well-fed” men and women of “bourgeois society.” Their love of “material possessions,” he concluded, “encourage docility” and a “lack of imagination.”
Many of these writers were equally contemptuous of the Republican Party, as Gary Dorrien documented in his Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana. Bill Kristol, Kagan’s co-conspirator and frequent co-author, derided the “brain-dead Republican Party” of the 1990s. Borrowing the language of the antiwar left of the 1960s, he called for “one, two many insurrections” against a party whose motto was “No agenda. No fireworks. No nothing.” He lambasted the “fearful complacency” that “characterizes the mood of the American establishment today.”
During the 2000 election, Kagan heaped criticism on the GOP frontrunner and eventual presidential candidate. He complained that George W. Bush’s support for the Kosovo War was “hedged, careful.” Once Bush was elected, he and Kristol complained that Bush “campaigned more as an Eisenhower than as a Reagan. Believing Americans did not want radical changes, either at home or abroad, he proposed none.” Bush was too solicitous of the “soccer moms,” whom he didn’t want to “unnerve.”
Lest we think this was a temporary blast at the virtues of prudence and restraint (or women) that Kagan now claims to champion against the adventurer Donald Trump, Kagan would repeat the same charges against Colin Powell, once he was installed as Bush’s Secretary of State. Powell liked “diplomatic pressure” and “coalition building.” That was his fatal flaw, a theme Kagan returned to ten days later, when he teamed up with Kristol to urge Bush not to listen to his secretary of state. Because Powell “was preoccupied with coalitions,” they claimed, he sought to avoid war with Saddam in 1991 and then refused to march to Baghdad to finish the job. It was his obsession with “compromises” that got the US into trouble then and would get the country into trouble now. Best to ignore his “timidity disguised as prudence.”
But the biggest charge Kagan and Kristol could think of to leverage against George W. Bush during the 2000 election was simply that he didn’t scare people enough.
Reagan in 1980 scared people, to the point where he had to spend the last few weeks of his campaign assuring everyone he did not intend to blow the whole world to pieces. Bush’s campaign from the beginning was designed not to scare anyone, anywhere, on any issue.
Well, now we’ve got a candidate who scares the shit out of people, including Robert Kagan. And what is Kagan’s response?
This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities,…
That “not with jackboots and salutes” is convenient. It severs any connection between the song of war Kagan has been singing all these years—with its descant of hostility to restraint, compromise, coalition, and prudence—and Trump’s candidacy. It refuses the possibility that Trump’s domestic belligerence is the transposition of Kagan’s international belligerence, that Trump’s “aura of crude strength and machismo” would appeal to a country that had achieved such untrammeled and uncontested mega-power, as Kagan once kvelled, that its citizens could be rightly be characterized as hailing from militaristic Mars. Small powers, Kagan sneered, like the constraint of an international order because its protects them; great powers, he cheered, “often fear rules that may constrain them.” Likewise the would-be leaders and citizens of those great powers.
It makes perfect sense for Kagan to opt for this explanation of Trump. Why liberals, many of whom opposed the Iraq War (though not the War on Terror), would applaud him, well, that’s a different story.