For decades, Robert Kagan has been a careful and respected and analyst and historian of foreign policy and international politics; one who has assiduously mapped not only trends but also contingencies. However, about five years ago he turned to attempting to describe and defend what he called “liberalism,” though without defining what that liberalism was.
An early result was his article in the Washington Post, “The Strongmen Strike Back.” This article was notable in many ways, not only for its length of nearly 10,000 words, but also for an ideological analysis that becomes caricature. This was quite different from Kaplan’s earlier work.
As I wrote at the time:
His approach is deeply Manichaean and almost messianic: “Only with the advent of Enlightenment liberalism did people begin to believe that the individual conscience, as well as the individual’s body, should be inviolate and protected from the intrusions of state and church.”
He described contemporary notions of rights and religious freedom as products of the “Enlightenment” and maintained that “Liberalism is all that keeps us, and has ever kept us, from being burned at the stake for what we believe.” But, as I noted then, “the notion of natural right was developed in eleventh- and twelfth-century canon law, and religious defenses of religious freedom were being propounded centuries before the Enlightenment.”i
Now Kagan has developed these same themes at book length in Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart Again. The book suffers from the same flaws as the earlier article, lumping together very disparate people and things as long as they can be portrayed as ‘antiliberal,’ or at least ‘nonliberal.’
He maintains that in America “half the country does not believe in the core principles that undergird the American system of government.” To justify this contention, he gives a tendentious reading of American history, again with Manichean overtones. He states that there is “a straight line” (emphasis added) from the slaveholding south, to anti-Reconstructionism, to the Ku Klux Klan, to McCarthy and the John Birch Society, “to the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement of recent decades, to the New Right of the Reagan Era, to the Republican Party of today.”
In covering more recent years he raises the familiar specter of “Christian Nationalism,” and “white, Christian supremacy,” which seems to include anybody that seeks to have their faith shape their political outlook.ii He singles out R.J. Rushdoony and Reconstructionism with its emphasis on Old Testament law as important and baleful influences on current religious conservatives, seemingly unaware that this was a widely-rejected fringe movement consisting in large part of Rushdoony’s extended family. Drawing on secondary sources, he also pairs Rushdoony with Abraham Kuyper as having similar outlooks and does not appear to know that the latter was the famously pro-pluralism Prime Minister of the Netherlands.
Kaplan is at pains to try to show that liberalism, especially the liberalism of the American Founding, owes nothing to any religious views and is at pains to separate religion and politics. He states that American colonists instead turned to the “very modern” notion of “natural rights” however, as noted above, “natural rights” were a product of 11th and 12th century canon law.
Kaplan also leans heavily on John Locke as the chief intellectual shaper of the American revolution, and stresses that Locke saw rights as inherent in the nature of being human. But his summaries of Locke ignore its religious aspects.
In the opening paragraphs of his Second Treatise on Government, Locke emphasizes that even the “State of Nature is governed by a law that creates obligations for everyone.” Part of this is that, since God created us, we are his property and not our own. Since that law says that we cannot seize or destroy another’s property, then as a result “everyone is obliged to preserve himself….”
Consequently, since as God’s property we lack power over our own life then we cannot through a social contract transfer to others such a power. Hence others cannot, without strong reason, destroy us. This means that in society we have rights. Locke’s argument is that the rights that we have are derived from our prior duty to preserve ourselves as ones created and therefore owned by God.
For Locke, rights are derived from the fact that God created us. They are relational and creational more than natural or innate. The American Declaration of Independence reiterates this theme in its second sentence; ” that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….”
In contrast, Fareed Zakaria’s recent and good Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present finds many of liberalism’s roots in the largely Calvinist sixteenth-century Dutch Republic.
One need not agree with all of Zakaria’s arguments to realize that the political views shaping America draw on a range of resources, including very religious ones.
Kagan’s book illuminates little and often misrepresents those with views different from his own. In this way it contributes to the currents dividing America. It would be good if Kaplan returned to writing on international affairs, where his skills are needed.