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, […]

Robert Kagan, the neoconservative writer on foreign policy, was in the Washington Post yesterday announcing his defection from Donald Trump and embrace of Hillary Clinton: For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be. That’s got centrist Democrats like Jonathan Chait excited. Not only because Kagan is/was a prominent Republican and supporter of George W. Bush but also because Kagan doesn’t treat Trump as a GOP aberration but as the logical outgrowth of the Republicans’ opposition to Obama, which Kagan admits has a lot to do with bigotry and racism, and their general penchant for lawlessness and xenophobia. But before anyone gets too […]