More Waa-Barking at the "No Kings!" Protests

 No Kings! Protest Overflows Grant Park in Chicago

                                              No Kings! March Fills Downtown Chicago

Yesterday, I was at the "No Kings!" protest in Chicago.  This was one of over 2,500 protests across the United States.  It was probably the single biggest mass protest in American history, with estimates of over 8 million people turning out.  The second biggest protest was the previous "No Kings!" protests in June.

There are reports that the march after the rally in Chicago stretched out over 22 city blocks.  I can attest to that.  And while it's hard to estimate crowd sizes in such circumstances, I would say the crowd had to be over 300,000.  My point of reference for that estimate is my experience in going to Dallas Cowboys football games at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.  Counting standing-room-only tickets, that stadium can hold over 100,000 people.  I have been to games with counts close to that.  Comparing those crowds exiting the stadium with what I saw yesterday suggests to me that the crowds yesterday must have been at least three or four times larger.

So what were all of these people in Chicago and around the country doing?  As I have previously said about the protests in June, when I attended the one in Grand Rapids, the "No Kings!" protests are the waa-barks of America's chimpanzee politics of resistance to Trump.  Subordinate chimpanzees utter pant-grunts to signal their fear and submission before a dominant chimp.  But subordinates can also utter waa-barks to signal their defiance of a dominant chimp.  If enough subordinates scream their waa-barks, and if the dominant chimp does not have a sufficiently strong coalition of supporters, he can be overthrown.  

If you look at the C-SPAN videos of Trump's cabinet meetings, you see Trump ordering his cabinet members to pant-grunt to him.  It often takes over an hour to go around the table with every cabinet member praising Trump as the greatest, most intelligent, most lovable leader in the history of the world.  Or if you look at the video of Trump in Ohio when he endorsed Vance for U.S. Senator, you'll hear him brag about how Vance was once a fervent critic of Trump, but now, Trump says, "he's kissing my ass."  "Kissing my ass" is Trump's fancy term for pant-grunting.

At Trump's birthday on June 14th, we saw a military parade for Trump that was a display of pant-grunting.  But we also saw that the number of spectators at the parade was small, and many of them were looking at their phones to see images of the massive crowds at the "No Kings!" protests on that same day.  The waa-barks were louder than the pant-grunts.  Yesterday, the waa-barks were even louder.  Waa-barks are one of the weapons of nonviolent resistance to oppressive dominance.

Last week, MAGA politicians warned that the "No King's" protestors were "domestic terrorists" and "Marxists" who "hated America," and that their protests would contribute to the violent insurrection of "Antifa."

I saw no evidence in Chicago for any of this.  I did see a small tent for the "Revolutionary Communists of America."  But I didn't see many people stopping off at the tent.  And I didn't see any evidence that the "No Kings!" protestors were supporting communism.  The protests pledged their loyalty to the Constitution of the United States and the American tradition of individual liberty and rights, which they saw as threatened by Trump.  I can't imagine how communists could do that.  For example, the crowd repeatedly chanted: "This Is What Democracy Looks Like."

Upholding the Constitution against Trump's unconstitutional dictatorship was the overriding theme of the protests as expressed in their signs, their chants, and in the speeches.

The next most prominent them was protecting immigrants--even illegal immigrants--from ICE.  The argument was that hard-working immigrants with families who paid their taxes and contributed to American society should be recognized as Americans with the individual rights of Americans--such as the Fourth Amendment right to due process of law.

An equally prominent theme was "We Love Chicago" and "Hands off Chicago."  Some of the most deeply emotional displays was the determination to defend Chicago and its multiethnic neighborhoods against ICE raids.  A lot of the talk was about neighbors organizing to protect their neighborhoods from ICE by people identifying ICE officers and warning their neighbors by blowing whistles in the streets and helping people escape capture by the ICE masked kidnappers.

One speaker argued that this was similar to Chicago's history of protecting fugitive slaves and refusing to obey the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a crime to help fugitive slaves running away from their slave masters.  I found this particularly interesting because it suggested that the immigration laws being enforced by ICE were unjust laws--like the Fugitive Slave Law--and therefore there was a moral obligation to disobey those laws and the ICE officers enforcing them.

There were no National Guardsmen to be seen--suggesting that the federal court order against the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago was being obey.  Nor were there any ICE officers visible.

There were a lot of Chicago Police officers, but they were mostly stationed around the edges of the crowd.  They were clearly there to intervene if necessary to keep the peace.  But they never engaged the crowd in any way, because there were no disturbances that needed to be quelled.   The remarkable peacefulness of the protestors was crucial for showing that the claim that they were "domestic terrorists" was ridiculous.

But although peaceful, they yelled their waa-barks for all the world to hear.

                     Trump Has Posted This Video as His Answer to the No Kings Protests

Elon Musk's Takeover of the U.S. Government Fulfills Curtis Yarvin's MAGA Fascism

Over the past two months, I have argued that the victory of Trump's MAGA movement is Janus-faced.  The liberal face of the movement is manifest in the multiracial and multiethnic coalition of Trump voters and in the liberal pluralism of Trump's Inaugural Address.  But the illiberal face of the movement was displayed at the inauguration by the prominence of the billionaires seated behind Trump, which suggested that Trump might be headed towards Curtis Yarvin's fascism of dictatorial rule by a multibillionaire CEO.

Now, in the first two weeks of Trump's presidency, we have seen that the illiberal face of Yarvin's fascism has prevailed, and it's the face of Elon Musk taking over the U.S. Government, which is exactly the multibillionaire oligarchy proposed by Yarvin.  (Doesn't Musk look like the perfect James Bond villain--the world's richest man who wants to take over the Earth and then Mars?  Where's James Bond when we need him most?)

Whether this exercise of fascist power can be stopped will depend upon the actions of the Congress, the courts, and the military.  The Constitution gives the Congress all the power necessary to check the exercise of arbitrary absolute power by the President and those working for him.  But there's no evidence that the congressional Republicans loyal to Trump and Musk are willing to check their assertion of dictatorial power.  

If the Republicans were to lose control of the Congress in the mid-term elections of 2026, the new Congress might try to impeach Trump again.  But in that case, Trump and Musk would overturn the elections by asserting that they were rigged, and they could call out the MAGA militias for another insurrection.

It is also possible that Trump and Musk would declare in 2026 that since the nation is in a permanent state of emergency, elections cannot be held.

The courts can declare the actions of Trump and Musk illegal and unconstitutional.  In fact, they have already violated dozens of laws.  Every time they take over or shut down a federal agency, they are violating the congressional laws that set up and regulate those agencies.  

The Supreme Court could say that Trump and Musk are in violation of the Constitution.  But as I have indicated, the Supreme Court justices loyal to Trump have already ruled--against the original meaning of the Constitution--that the President is a "King Above the Law."  

And even if the Supreme Court were to rule against Trump and Musk, they could simply ignore their ruling.  Indeed, it's likely that Trump and Musk will soon tell their Department of Justice to refuse to obey any court orders that restrict presidential rule by executive decrees.  (The intellectual impetus for what Trump and Musk are doing comes from scholars who argue for a "unitary presidency," which allows for the president to exercise arbitrary and absolute powers during times of emergency.  Much of this reasoning comes from Carl Schmitt, the legal apologist for the Nazis who insisted that the "Leader Principle" transcended the law.)

As I have suggested in the past, when Trump lost the election in 2020, some of the people around him urged him to call out the military to overturn the election, but he was warned by General Mark Milley and others that the military would not obey.  But now, we see that in planting his loyalists in the Defense Department, he could be preparing the military to support his fascist rule.  (Notice that Trump's Defense Department has revoked General Milley's security detail, which exposes him to assassination by one of Trump's militia men.)

So, it all comes down to one question.  Will the military obey the commands of Trump and Musk in support of a fascist oligarchy?  

Whether a dictator has a minimal winning coalition often depends on whether he has sufficient support in the military.

And so we see the end of America's experiment in liberal democracy coming on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.

The Liberalism of Trump's Second Inaugural Address

Detroit Pastor Lorenzo Sewell's Prayer at President Trump's Second Inauguration

Leading up to the presidential election, scholarly commentators like Robert Kagan and Steven Hahn claimed that if Donald Trump were elected, this would show the triumph of the illiberal tradition of American politics in defeating the American liberal tradition.  

As I indicated in a post last November, I agree with Kagan and Hahn that the political history of America has been a continuing battle between liberalism and illiberalism.  But I think the liberal tradition of American political thought--as expressed in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence--has ultimately prevailed over the illiberal tradition.  And I see that even in the MAGA movement.  I agree that much of Trump's rhetoric has illiberal, and even fascist, overtones.  But most of the MAGA voters accept the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence.  (I have written previously about the prominence of the Declaration of Independence in the rhetoric of the 2020 Republican National Convention.)

Here I use the term "liberalism" in the broad Lockean sense that includes both those who we call "liberals" in America and those we call "conservatives"--as opposed to the illiberal Left (such as the socialists), on the one extreme, and the illiberal Right (such as the reactionaries and fascists), on the other extreme. 

We can see the triumph of the American liberal tradition in Trump's election.  The American illiberal tradition defends the national racial, religious, and ethnic homogeneity of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America against subversion by both internal and external enemies.  (Consider the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, for example.)  But Trump's electoral victory depended on a pluralistic coalition of voters who were racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse.  As opposed to a WASPish illiberal America, it was a culturally heterogeneous liberal America that voted for Trump.  If Trump's presidency gives into his illiberal propensities, he will alienate these MAGA voters.

If Trump appealed only to illiberal voters like the proponents of Christian theocracy and the white racists, he would never win any election.  Given the religious, racial, and ethnic pluralism of the American electorate, Trump can win only with the support of a multireligious, multiracial, and multiethnic coalition that includes Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and most of the white working-class voters with large portions of the Hispanic, Asian, and black voters.  The evidence for that became clear in the 2020 election, as compared with the 2016 election, in which Trump's vote share in each of these groups trended in his favor.  That trend continued in the 2024 election. 

As I have argued previously, Trump's chimpanzee politics requires a minimum winning coalition.  Trump paid tribute to the liberal pluralism of his winning electoral coalition in the ceremony and the speech for his second inauguration.  But he also showed the illiberal face of MAGA by filling the front row seats behind him with tech CEO billionaires, which was a symbolic display of the illiberal thinking of MAGA intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin (more about that in the next post).

In his Inaugural Address, Trump proclaimed that having been miraculously saved from assassination, "I was saved by God to make America great again."  This echoes the illiberal message of the MAGA theocrats that Trump has been chosen by God as His Cyrus to save America.  But in saying that "we will not forget our God," Trump was careful to suggest that this was an ecumenical God, and therefore he did not establish any particular religious tradition as America's church.  In this way, he favored the liberal tradition of Roger Williams over the illiberal tradition of John Winthrop.

Trump's endorsement of religious pluralism was clear in his selection of clergy to deliver the opening and closing prayers--two Catholics (Cardinal Timothy Dolan and the Reverend Frank Mann), two Protestants (Franklin Graham and Lorenzo Sewell), and one Jew (Rabbi Ari Berman).  Remarkably, the first printed program for the inauguration included a Muslin cleric--Imam Husham Al-Husainy, a prominent Muslim leader in Dearborn, Michigan, who had endorsed Trump and thus helped Trump win the Muslim votes that he needed to win Michigan.  This would have been the first time in history for a Muslim cleric to appear at a presidential inauguration. There was no public explanation for why Al-Husainy was dropped from the program, but there were some newspaper reports from Michigan that Trump's pro-Israel supporters objected that Al-Husainy was sympathetic to Iran and Hezbollah.

Although the Trump voters include Protestant theocrats and Catholic integralists, the liberal religious pluralism of Trump's inauguration gave no encouragement to either group.

By endorsing such a broadly ecumenical religious pluralism, Trump was following the example set by the coronation of King Charles III two years ago, in which the monarchic head of the Church of England displayed his Lockean liberalism by allowing all religious faiths to be represented.

Moreover, one of the dramatic high points of the inaugural ceremony was Lorenzo Sewell's prayer, which was actually an abbreviated rendition of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which was appropriate since January 20th was Martin Luther King Day.  Sewell emphasized King's appeal to the Lockean liberalism of the Declaration of Independence, particularly in its principle that "all men are created equal."

King's "Dream" was that America would finally fulfill the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Trump stressed this explicitly in his speech: "Today is Martin Luther King Day.  And his honor--this will be a great honor.  But in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality.  We will make his dream come true." 

In support of this promise, Trump pointed to the racial and ethnic pluralism of his winning coalition:

"As our victory showed, the entire nation is rapidly unifying around our agenda with dramatic increases in support from virtually every element of our society: young and old, men and women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, urban, suburban, rural.  And very importantly, we had a powerful win in all seven swing states, and the popular vote, we won by millions of people."

"To the Black and Hispanic communities, I want to thank you for the tremendous outpouring of love and trust that you have shown me with your vote.  We set records, and I will not forget it.  I've heard your voices in the campaign, and I look forward to working with you in the years to come."

And yet any careful viewer of Trump's inauguration should have noticed that it was Janus-faced.  The liberal face was the invocation of King's "Dream" of equal liberty for all racial, ethnic, and religious groups.  The illiberal face was the prominent front row audience immediately behind Trump--with the seats filled by a half dozen tech CEO billionaires who are the richest human beings on the Earth.  If Trump meant this to suggest that these are to become the new oligarchic rulers of America, then he's showing the influence of the illiberal fascist Curtis Yarvin.

The Darwinian Evolution of Indigenous Americans Through Genetic and Cultural Hybridization: Refuting the "American Genocide" Argument

Ever since the early 1990s, scholars of "post-colonial theory" or "settler colonialism" have asserted that beginning with Columbus landing in the New World, European settlers have been responsible for a deliberate and systematic campaign to kill the indigenous people of the Americas, which constitutes "American Genocide" or "American Holocaust" (Stannard 1992; Whitt and Clarke 2019).  The European settlers did this so that they could steal the land that had previously belonged to the Amerindians.  

As a consequence of this, you can now go to the website of the "Native Land Digital" and see how all the land that once belonged to the indigenous peoples of America is now claimed by European settlers.  You can also see how European settler colonialists stole the indigenous lands in Australia, New Zealand, and Israel.  (The identification of the Jews in Israel as settler colonialists explains the pro-Palestinian attacks on Israel.)  If you live somewhere in these parts of the world, you can type in your street address at the Native Land Digital and identify the indigenous tribes who owned the land that you have stolen.

Previously, I have written about how Charles Darwin on his trip on the Beagle saw the brutal consequences of European attacks on indigenous peoples in South America, New Zealand, and Australia:

"Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals--the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children."

Darwin seemed to see this as a vicious expression of the natural human propensity to tribalism or xenophobia.  Others have explained this as showing the natural desire for ethnic identity as rooted in our evolved human nature:  when people favor their ethnic or racial community over others, they are practicing an extended form of kin selection that advances their ethnic genetic interests.  We have evolved to like those who look like us, because groups of people that look similar share more genes with one another than other groups.  This has been part of the reasoning from the Alt-Right supporters of Donald Trump's program for mass deportations of illegal immigrants and closing the borders to the immigration of non-European people into the United States.

I have argued that while there is a natural desire for social membership, with symbolic cues for membership in a society, there is no evidence that this must be expressed as a natural desire for ethnic or racial identity in an ethnically and racially homogeneous society.  Human beings are happy to live in multiethnic and multiracial liberal societies.  

One can see this even in Trump's MAGA movement.  Far from promoting the ethnic identity of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, Trump has actively solicited and won the support of many Black males, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, and Catholics.  And in 2024, the most pro-Trump racial demographic was American Indians!  65% of American Indian voters voted for Trump as compared with 57% of whites for Trump.

So, 533 years after Columbus landed in the New World, there are still many descendants of the Indigenous Americans alive today.  Significantly, many if not most of them are genetic and cultural hybrids--genetic and cultural mixtures of Indigenous, European, and Black people.  This illustrates the Darwinian evolution of hybridization.  (This Darwinian hybridization includes the interbreeding of the Neanderthal and human species as recently as 45,000 years ago [Curry 2024; Gibbons 2024].)  This fact by itself refutes the claim that European settler colonialism in the Americas has been responsible for an "American Genocide."

In his book Not Stolen; The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, Jeff Fynn-Paul presents this as the demographic argument against the claim of genocide in the Americas.  Scholars disagree about the population of the Indigenous people in the New World in 1491.  But they agree that the two largest population centers were in areas of the great Aztec and Inca civilizations--central Mexico and greater Peru.

If you look at the Wikipedia article on "Ethnic Groups in Latin America," you will see that in Mexico (with a population of 127 million), 70% of the people are mestizos, 14% Amerindians, and 15% whites; in Peru (with a population of 34 million), 32% are mestizos, 45% Amerindians, and 12% whites; in Ecuador (with a population of 18 million), 41% are mestizos, 39% are Amerindians, and 10% whites.  When Columbus landed in the New World, 50% of the total population of Indigenous Americans was in the Aztec region, and 25% in the Inca region.  So, as we should expect, the great majority of the people in these two regions today are either pure Indigenous Americans or mestizos (mixtures of Indigneous and European people).

So, with as many as 150 million mestizos and Amerindians living where their Indigenous ancestors lived five hundred years ago in the Aztec and Inca regions, it's hard to see the "genocide" of one hundred million Amerindians killed by Europeans as claimed by Stannard and others.

In Canada, only about 5% of the population are Indigenous people; and in the United States, only a little over 1% are Indigenous.  But that's not surprising considering that in 1491, probably less than 12% of the total Indigenous population of the Americas was in what is now Canada and the U.S.  In these two areas, the low population of the Indigenous people has been overwhelmed by the large population of European immigrants.

What is most striking in all of this is the interracial mixing.  This is depicted in this painting.

                                                     A Casta Painting by Luis de Mena, 1750

Casta is Spanish for "caste" or "race."  In the early 18th century, "casta paintings" were popular in Mexico as studies of a mixed-race society (Deans-Smith 2005).  If you click on and enlarge the image above, you can see that the "Virgin of Guadalupe" (the Virgin Mary) stands over all the mixed-race couples as a vulvic symbol of the Mother of All.  Left of the Virgin Mary is the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, where this image of the Virgin Mary is enshrined.

The first couple is a well-dressed European woman standing next to her Indian husband wearing a loin cloth and carrying a bow.  The child is painted to resemble his father.  We also see a European man coupled with a well-dressed African woman, alongside their mixed-race child.  This is what I mean by genetic and cultural hybridization.

Here the cultural hybridization is depicted by the mixture of clothing styles.  But another example of cultural hybridization is in the traditions of holidays.  In Mexico, for instance, the Day of the Dead is a vestige of Aztec religion, and it is celebrated on the evenings of November 1 and 2, which coincides with All Soul's Day in the Catholic calendar.  So, this holiday fuses Catholic and Indigenous religious practices.

I have previously written about another image of racial and cultural hybridization in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which appears in the Museum as part of the Darwinian evolutionary story of multiethnic and multiracial humanity in Mexico.  The idealized female body in the middle represents the racial and cultural hybridization of the human species:

But even if this shows the genetic and cultural survival of Indigenous people in the New World, it is true that probably over 90% of the original Amerindian population died from the infectious diseases introduced by the Europeans--such as smallpox, measles, and typhoid.  But this was not intended by the Europeans, and so it does not count as "genocide," which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationality, etc., with the intention of partially or wholly destroying that group."  Of course, the word "genocide" was first used in 1944-1945 as a term for what German Nazi leaders did in trying to exterminate Jews and other disfavored groups.  There is no evidence that the Europeans had any such deliberate and systematic policy for murdering Indigenous Americans.

We are left with Fynn-Paul's conclusion that "the Americas today are simply teeming with the descendants of the Indigenous people who were alive in 1491," and therefore "Europeans did not slaughter or displace the great majority of Indigenous people of the New World" (41-42).

REFERENCES

Curry, Andrew. 2024. "Study Reveals Kinship Among First Modern Humans in Europe." Science 386: 1207.

Deans-Smith, Susan. 2005. "Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in Eighteenth-Century Mexico and Spain." Colonial Latin American Review 14: 169-204.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. 2023. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World. New York: Bombardier Books.

Gibbons, Ann. 2024. "Neanderthals and Moderns Mingled Early and Often." Science 384: 132-133.

Stannard, David. 1992. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Whitt, Laurelyn, and Alan W. Clarke. 2019. North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Liberalism of the MAGA Voters Explains Trump's Election. But Trump's Illiberal Presidency Could Become Fascist.

Leading up to the presidential election, commentators like Robert Kagan and Steven Hahn argued that if Donald Trump were elected, this would show the triumph of the illiberal tradition of American politics in defeating the American liberal tradition.  

I agree with Kagan and Hahn that the political history of America has been a continuing battle between liberalism and illiberalism.  But I see that the liberal tradition of American political thought--as expressed in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence--has ultimately prevailed over the illiberal tradition.  And I see that even in the MAGA movement.  I agree that much of Trump's rhetoric has illiberal, and even fascist, overtones.  But most of the MAGA voters accept the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence.  (I have written previously about the prominence of the Declaration of Independence in the rhetoric of the 2020 Republican National Convention.)

Here I use the term "liberalism" in the broad Lockean sense that includes both those who we call "liberals" in America and those we call "conservatives"--as opposed to the illiberal Left (such as the socialists), on the one extreme, and the illiberal Right (such as the fascists), on the other extreme. 

We can see the triumph of the American liberal tradition in Trump's election.  The American illiberal tradition defends the national cultural homogeneity of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America against subversion by both internal and external enemies.  (Consider the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, for example.)  But Trump's electoral victory depended on a pluralistic coalition of voters who were racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse.  As opposed to a WASPish illiberal America, it was a culturally heterogeneous liberal America that voted for Trump.  If Trump's presidency gives into his illiberal propensities, he will alienate these MAGA voters.

Steven Hahn doesn't understand this because in his book Illiberal America, he describes the MAGA voters this way:

". . . When supporters of Donald Trump channel his slogan 'Make America Great Again,' they are looking back to a world before a Black man could be elected president, before people of color demanded equal rights, before feminists battled against gender exclusions and inequalities, before sexual identities began to be redefined, before American Protestants had to confront growing spiritual diversity, before immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to threaten the majority status of white people, and before the federal government served as an enabler of all these developments.  The tradition they value is anything but liberal.  It emphasizes state rights, community control, patriarchal families, rugged individualism, Christian nationalism, and some form of white supremacy" (35).

White supremacy?  Hahn offers no evidence for this. Perhaps he could point to people like Luke Meyer and Richard Spencer--white supremacists who have supported Trump.  But these people have been ostracized by the MAGA movement.  For example, Meyer was a 24-year-old regional field director for the Trump campaign in Western Pennsylvania.  But when a reporter for Politico exposed him as the person who goes by the online name Alberto Barbarossa, who co-hosts a white supremacist podcast with Richard Spencer, who was the organizer of the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Meyer was immediately fired.  The Republican Party of Pennsylvania issued a statement: "The employee in question was background-checked and vetted, but unbeknownst to us was operating separately under a pseudonym.  If we'd had any inkling about his hidden and despicable activity, he would never have been hired, and the instant we learned of it, he was fired.  We have no place in our Party or nation for people with such shameful, hateful views."  Similarly, Spencer has been condemned by Republican leaders.  After being spurned by the Republicans, Spencer endorsed Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024!

So while there have been a few white supremacists who have voted for Trump, they know that as soon as they are openly identified as white supremacists, they will be expelled from the MAGA movement.  Moreover, if Trump appealed only to illiberal voters like the white racists, he would never win any election.  Given the racial and ethnic diversity of the American electorate, Trump can win only with the support of what Patrick Ruffini has called the "multiracial populist coalition" that includes most of the white working-class voters with large portions of the Hispanic, Asian, and Black voters.  The evidence for that became clear in the 2020 election, as compared with the 2016 election, in which Trump's vote share in each of these groups trended in his favor.  That trend continued in the 2024 election.  

The crucial factor here is that many Hispanic, Asian, and Black voters are politically and culturally conservative in their values; and therefore, as the Democratic Party shifts to the Left, these conservative voters are open to being persuaded by the more conservative Republican Party.  In the 2020 election, the Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters who described themselves as conservatives moved 35 to 40 points toward Trump as compared with the 2016 election.

Democrats have assumed that Trump's threat to deport all the illegal immigrants would alienate all of the Hispanic immigrant voters.  But Ruffini's studies of Hispanic voters in Miami Dade County in Florida and along the Rio Grande in Texas found that many Hispanics who are legal immigrants resent those Hispanics who have entered the U.S. illegally, and they think they should be deported.  Amazingly, almost all of the counties along the Rio Grande, which has the largest concentration of Hispanics in the U.S., went to Trump in 2024.

The "AP VoteCast" survey for the 2024 election shows this multiracial and multiethnic shift towards Trump.   White voters split 56% for Trump and 43% for Harris. While Harris won the Black vote (83%), Trump's share (16%) was an increase over 2020.  Among Black men, Trump won 25%.  Latina women went 59% for Harris, 39% for Trump.  Latino men split evenly--49% for Harris and 48% for Trump.  Since Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic group in America, it's hard to win a presidential election without them.  Although Harris is of South Asian ancestry, Asian Americans split 54% for Harris and 39% for Trump.  In all categories, Trump's share of the nonwhite vote increased from 2016 and 2020; and that's why he won the popular election for the first time this year.  

So, how can Hahn see this as a vote for white supremacy?  

It would be better to say that this was a vote for the working class, because in all of the racial and ethnic categories, Trump got most of the votes from those people who have no college degree, while Harris got most of the votes from those with a college degree.  This gives Trump a big advantage because seven in ten American adults have never graduated from college.  Trump appeals to the natural working-class majority in American politics, while people like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris appeal to the professional elites with advanced educational degrees who work with their heads rather than their hands.

Furthermore, it's ridiculous for Hahn to claim that the MAGA voters are "looking back to a world before a Black man could be elected president," because many of the white working-class voters who have voted for Trump voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.  Indeed, Obama would have lost those elections if he had not won large portions of the white vote.  In 2012, he got 46 percent of the white vote in Pennsylvania and 47 percent in Michigan.  In 2008, 51% of the eligible voters belonged to the white working class (that is, white people without a college degree).  So, Obama could not have won without a big share of their vote, and he made explicit appeals to them in his campaign rhetoric.

And what about women?  Hahn asserts that Trump's supporters are looking back to a world "before feminists battled against gender exclusions and inequalities."  What world is that?  The world in which under the common law doctrine of coverture, married women had no legal identity separate from their husbands?  The world in which women had no right to vote?  If so, where's the evidence that Trump's supporters want to return women to that patriarchal world?  In this year's election, women between the ages of 18 and 44 split their vote between Harris (55%) and Trump (44%).  Women over 45 voted 51% for Harris and 48% for Trump.  Isn't it hard to believe Hahn's suggestion that close to half of the women voters want to repeal the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, so that they will never again have the right to vote?

But what about Hahn's claim that the MAGA voters want to go back to a world "before sexual identities began to be redefined"?  It is true that one of the themes of the Trump campaign was that allowing biological men to compete in women's athletics was unfair to women.  Another theme was that taxpayers should not be forced to pay for transgender treatments for prisoners.  But what makes such arguments illiberal?  (I have argued that liberal principles and the biology of sex differences justify sex-segregated sports and perhaps a new category of intersex sports.)

Finally, is it true that MAGA voters want to go back to a world "before American Protestants had to confront growing spiritual diversity"?  I assume that Hahn is pointing in particular to the time when Catholics were persecuted, and Protestant Christianity was considered an essential part of American national identity.  Well, again, I can't see any evidence that the MAGA movement is devoted to persecuting Catholics.  If that were so, it would be hard to explain why so many Catholics have voted for Trump--50% of them in 2020, 54% in 2024.  Since Catholics represent 22% of the electorate, Trump's winning the Catholic vote was crucial for his winning the election.

And, of course, J. D. Vance is a serious Catholic.  Moreover, one of the criticisms of Harris brought up by the Trump people was that she was anti-Catholic.  As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Harris suggested that a Trump judicial nominee should be disqualified because he was a member of the Knights of Columbus!

On all of these points, I see no evidence to sustain Hahn's claim that the MAGA voters want to go back to an illiberal America.  On the contrary, they seem to belong to a liberal coalition of voters who belong to a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious, and working-class majority in American politics.

Let's also keep in mind, as I have argued previously, that the one issue that decisively favored Trump's election was high inflation--in the summer of 2022, the highest inflation in 40 years--and no one suffers more from high inflation than working-class voters.  But there's nothing illiberal about hating high inflation.

Nevertheless, as I have argued on this blog, I also see an illiberal propensity in Trump's rhetoric towards fascism that must be restrained if he is to keep the support of his liberal coalition.

And as we see Trump appointing loyalists throughout the government who will carry out his orders, even if they are unconstitutional, his move to fascist rule appears ever clearer.   It appears that most of Trump's voters made a mistake in thinking that he was not serious about his fascist rhetoric, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake for America.

If Hahn is right about how MAGA voters understand the slogan "Make America Great Again," then we can predict that shortly after his inauguration, Trump will proclaim that his voters have given him a mandate to make America into a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant theocracy and patriarchal society in which Catholics and non-Christians are persecuted, women have no voting rights, married women have no independent legal identity because they are under the authority of their husbands, all nonwhite people are treated as inferior, and only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are permitted to immigrate to America.  

I predict that that will not happen because most Americans do not want to live in that kind of illiberal America.  They want to live in a Lockean liberal social order that is better than any illiberal order in satisfying the natural human desires of our evolved human nature.

REFERENCES

Hahn, Steven.  2024a. Illiberal America: A History.  New York: Norton.

Hahn, Steven.  2024b.  "The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism."  The New York Times. May 4.

Klein, Ezra.  2024.  "The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election."  The New York Times.  November 9.

Moore, Amanda.  2024.  "A Trump Field Director Was Fired for Being a White Nationalist."  Politico.  November 4.

Ruffin, Patrick.  2023.  Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.  New York: Simon and Schuster.

Trump and the History of Fascism: He Cannot Take Power by Majority Vote or by Force

The Roman Fasces, A Symbol of the Authority and Unity of the Ancient Roman State

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                                 The January 6th Insurrectionists Storm the Capitol Building

Is Donald Trump a fascist?  If he is, does the history of fascism help us to predict whether he is likely to take power as a fascist ruler?

My answer to the first question is Yes.  My answer to the second question is that the history of fascism tells us that fascists cannot take power by majority vote or by force, because they need to be given power by conservative elites.  For Trump to become a fascist ruler, he would have to be put into power by the political and military elites.

THE CONCEPT OF FASCISM

Since he is one of the leading historians of fascism, Robert Paxton has often been asked whether he identifies Trump as a fascist.  Up to the end of Trump's term as president, Paxton said No.  But on January 6, 2021, as he watched the Trump-inspired insurrection on Capitol Hill, which was meant to overturn the election of 2020 and keep Trump in power, he changed his mind.  A few days after the insurrection, he wrote an essay for Newsweek explaining how that insurrection was the final piece of evidence pointing to Trump's character as a fascist.

We now have even more evidence for that conclusion coming from General Mark Milley, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump's presidency, and retired General John Kelly, who was Trump's Chief of Staff for almost a year and a half.  They have reported that Trump wanted to use the military against his political opponents and that he expressed his admiration for how Hitler had used his generals.  Both Milley and Kelly told Trump that their oath to uphold the Constitution would take precedence over their loyalty to the President.  And both concluded that Trump was a fascist.

Paxton's position in the debate over Trump's fascism is unusual.  There are two questions in this debate.  Is Trump a fascist?  And is it helpful to identify him as a fascist?  Most people in the debate either say yes to both questions or no to both.  As he told the New York Times, Paxton says yes to the first question but no to the second.  Yes, Trump is a fascist.  But no it doesn't help the debate to say that, because "fascist" is "a word that generates more heat than light."  

I agree that most of the time "fascist" is a sloppy epithet that we throw around to express our moral disgust with someone we disagree with strongly, and therefore using that word enflames emotions without clarifying the debate.  But when a historian of fascism like Paxton says that Trump is a fascist and explains the exact similarities and differences between Trump and fascists like Mussolini and Hitler, that illuminates the debate by showing how the history of fascism might explain and predict Trump's behavior.

Recently, Trump has said that he is planning to use military force against the "enemy within," which includes "bad people" like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.  This convinced John Kelly (Trump's Chief of Staff from July 2017 to December 2018) that he needed to speak out, and he was interviewed by the New York Times.  Kelly read aloud a definition of fascism:

"Well, looking at the definition of fascism:  It's a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy."

"Certainly, the former president is in the far-right area, he's certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators--he has said that.  So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure."

Much of the discussion among historians is about whether there really is a "general definition of fascist."  Some historians argue that since Benito Mussolini originated the term, it should apply only to the specific historical movement of Mussolini's Italian fascism.  In 1919, Mussolini coined the Italian fascismo from fascio--a bundle or sheaf--recalling the Latin fasces:  an axe encased in a bundle of rods carried in public processions to symbolize the authority and unity of the Roman state.

This explains why the Oxford English Dictionary identifies the primary definition of "fascism" as "a nationalist political movement that controlled the government of Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini."

But then the OED also provides a generic definition of "fascism": "an authoritarian and nationalistic system of government and social organization which emerged after the end of the First World War in 1918, and became a prominent force in European politics during the 1920s and 1930s, most notably in Italy and Germany; (later also) an extreme right-wing political ideology based on the principles underlying this system."

As Paxton indicates, there are two reasons for why it's hard to reach agreement on these or any other definitions of fascism.  First, it is hard to define fascism as an ideology because the fascists did not care very much about ideas or doctrines.  They were devoted more to action than thought--they were driven more by feelings than by reason.  That explains why there is no authoritative statement of their ideas comparable to say Marx's Communist Manifesto as a statement of communist doctrines.  Mussolini and Hitler did issue some programmatic statements of fascist ideas.  But then their actions often contradicted what they had promised to do, and they never felt compelled to justify their actions as consistent with their ideas.  By contrast, Marxist leaders like Lenin and Stalin had to make elaborate arguments for why their actions were in conformity with the texts of Marx and Engels.

The second reason for why it's so hard to define fascism is that fascism never had a fixed or static identity because it changed as it passed through five stages: (1) the initial creation of a fascist movement, (2) the rooting of the movement as a party in a political system, (3) the acquisition of ruling power by the fascist leader and his party, (4) the exercise of that ruling power, and (5) the long term development of fascist power towards radicalization or dissolution.  Fascism looks different at each of these stages.  And while every fascist movement reaches Stage One, only a few reach Stage Two.  And very few--maybe only in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany--reach Stage Three by actually gaining ruling power.  (Most of what have been commonly assumed to be examples of fascists taking power--like Franco in Spain or Salazar in Portugal--are really examples of traditional authoritarianism rather than pure fascism.)

Paxton has explained this fascist history of five stages in an article--"The Five Stages of Fascism" (1998)--and he has elaborated this history and analysis in a book--The Anatomy of Fascism (2004).

Despite his reluctance to reduce fascism to a single definition, Paxton does think that from this history of fascist actions in five stages, one can deduce the ideas implicit in those actions, which he summarizes in one long "functional definition of fascism":

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion" (1998: 21; 2004: 218).

He also states this as nine "mobilizing passions" that "belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions":

(1) "a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;"

(2) "the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;"

(3) "the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;"

(4) "dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;"

(5) "the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;"

(6) "the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny;"

(7) "the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;"

(8) "the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;"

(9) "the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle."

Do Trump and his MAGA party manifest most of these fascist passions?  You can answer this for yourself by watching the video of the recent Trump rally at Madison Square Garden and checking off the items on this list.

Okay, so you're not going to watch all six and a half hours of this!  But you can skip around it and see if it shows the "mobilizing passions" of fascism.

Now there are a few items in Paxton's definition and list of passions that don't show up here.  For example, Trump and his people don't express any interest in "external expansion"--they're not proposing to invade other countries.

We also might question whether there's any "collaboration with traditional elites" here, since the speakers repeatedly attack the "elites" in the Democratic Party.  But there is certainly a collaboration with some economic elites (such as Elon Musk) and some of the conservative elites in the Republican Party.

On the other hand, there are some distinctive traits of American Fascism here that are not prominent in Paxton's sketch of fascism.  While fascists like Mussolini and Hitler have been secular or perhaps pagan, American Fascists are often Christian Nationalists defending American Christians as the Chosen People of God against their godless enemies.  So, you'll notice that the Madison Square Garden rally begins with a prayer read by Tiffany Justice, one of the founders of "Moms for Liberty," who prays for God to intervene in support of Trump's election, and she thanks God for His miracle in saving Trump from being assassinated.  Later in the rally, David Rem holds up a cross at the podium and declares that Kamala Harris is the "Devil" and "the Antichrist."  Thus, we have the image of Trump as God's Chosen One fighting for America against the forces of demonic evil led by the Antichrist in the Last Battle as described in the book of Revelation.

Previously, I have written about the Christian Evangelicals who identify Trump as being the Messiah like Cyrus in the Old Testament.

NEITHER BY VOTE NOR BY FORCE

So, how do fascists come into ruling power (Stage Three)?  And does the history of fascists taking power help us to predict whether Trump's fascism could come into power in America?

It has been commonly assumed that fascists have come to power by force alone--through a coup d'etat.  Or, occasionally, you'll hear people say that fascists like Mussolini and Hitler took power through majority vote at the ballot box.  As Paxton and other historians have shown, both claims are false.

"Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors.  Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg.  Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted."  We should see then that "no insurrectionary coup against an established state has ever so far brought fascists to power" (Paxton 1998: 17; 2004: 96-97).

The story that Mussolini's Fascists seized power over Italy through their "March on Rome" is fascist propaganda.  It is true that on October 28, 1922, about nine thousand Blackshirts marched to the gates of Rome.  But they were "poorly armed, wearing makeshift uniforms, short of food and water, and milling about in a discouraging rain" (Paxton 2004: 89).  Mussolini arrived in Rome from Milan on the morning of October 30, and he met with the King.  Although the King had plenty of soldiers who could have dispersed the Blackshirts, he foresaw that this would be bloody.  He decided, instead, to appoint Mussolini as Prime Minister.  Mussolini was bluffing, and his bluff worked.

The next day--October 31--with Mussolini already in office, ten thousand Blackshirts marched in a parade through Rome.  That evening, Mussolini had all of his Blackshirts sent out of town in fifty special trains.  The parade had established the myth that his Blackshirts had taken power by their own will and force.  October 28 became a national holiday and the first day of the Fascist New Year.

A year later, Hitler showed that he had been taken in by Mussolini's propaganda about the "March on Rome."  He attempted his own "march" on November 8, 1923.  During a nationalist rally in a Munich beer hall, he tried to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them to launch a coup d'etat against the federal government in Berlin.  This "Beer Hall Putsch" was easily put down by police who fired on the Nazi marchers.  Hitler was arrested and imprisoned.  He learned the lesson that fascist political power could not be taken by force alone as long as the police and soldiers remained loyal to the government.

Hitler also learned that while he would have to work within the parliamentary party system, he could not come to power by winning a majority vote for his party.  The Nazis became the largest party in the German Reichstag in the parliamentary elections of July 31, 1932, when they won 37.2 percent of the vote.  But this dropped to 33.1 percent in the election of November 6, 1932.  Even when Hitler had become chancellor, and he could use his Storm Troopers to intimidate voters, the Nazi Party won only 43.9 percent of the vote in the elections of March 6, 1932.  By comparison, the Italian Fascist Party won 35 out of 535 seats in the parliamentary election of May 15, 1921.

Just as Mussolini had become the Italian Prime Minister by the appointment of the King, Hitler became the German Chancellor by the appointment of President Paul Hindenburg.  In both cases, conservative elites decided that appointing fascist leaders as the heads of government was the only way to form parliamentary majorities capable of vigorous governing without having to form coalitions with radical socialist and communist parties.

These conservatives saw this as the only way to resolve the unprecedented crises that they faced.  The first crisis was the social and political crisis created in the wake of World War One, which included the threat of a communist revolution in Western Europe sparked by the Russian Revolution.  The second crisis was the Great Global Depression that began in 1929.  By 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, over 30% of the German workforce was unemployed.  Part of this was the "crisis of liberalism" insofar as it seemed that liberal democracy could not solve these problems.

On February 28, 1933, a fire set by a Dutch communist youth gutted the Reichstag building in Berlin.  This was generally believed to be the beginning of a communist coup.  This provoked President Hindenburg into using his emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, and he issued a decree suspending the legal protection of personal liberties.  This allowed Hitler's Brownshirts to use violence against Jews and others suspected of left-wing activities.  Then, on March 24 of 1933, parliament passed an Enabling Act that delegated its legislative powers to the executive.  This allowed Hitler to rule by his own personal authority from 1933 to the end of the war.  He was free to use violence against the "enemies of the people."  Here we see the fatal flaw in the Weimar Constitution--its openness to unchecked executive prerogative powers.

So, what does this history suggest as to whether and how Trump's fascism could gain ruling power in America?  First, we should say that Trump has never won an election by majority vote, although he won in 2016 in the Electoral College.  Like Hitler, he seems to have about 35-40 percent of the voters as a solid base.  When he ran in 2016, he was not clearly identified as a fascist candidate.  But now, after the January 6th insurrection and his open threats to use military force against the "enemy within," his fascist propensities have become clear to many voters.  And that's why I am predicting that Harris will win this election.

But if he does win, perhaps only in the Electoral College, can't we predict that he will make himself a fascist dictator?  And even if he loses, can't we predict that Trump will say the election has been stolen again, as it was in 2020?  And won't he lead his MAGA movement into a violent insurrection to take power by force alone?  

Well, sure, we can imagine that he will try something like this.  But from what we have seen from his failure to overturn the election of 2020, we can predict, as I argued a few years ago, that Trump will not have the guts or the guns to launch a successful coup.  

In his last year in office, Trump's fascist advisors told him that he needed to declare martial law (under the Insurrection Act) and order the military to suppress the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and to overturn the election.  He did not act on their advice because he lacked the courage to try this, and because his generals had told him they would not obey his orders if they violated the Constitution.  There is no reason to believe that there will be any change in these circumstances after the election.

Here is where I disagree with Robert Kagan's argument that regardless of whether Trump wins or loses the election, his fascism will destroy liberal democracy in America.  As I explained in my response to Kagan, the "crisis" that America faces today is nowhere near as deep as the crisis faced by Italy and Germany between the wars.  There is no threat of Communist Revolution in America despite Trump's silly assertion that the Democrats are Communists.  There is no Great Depression in America.  The American economy is more prosperous than it has ever been.

And, most importantly, there is no "crisis of liberalism" in America today comparable to what may have happened in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.  While I agree with Kagan's claim that Trump's fascism is rooted in an American tradition of illiberalism, the American liberal tradition is stronger today than it has ever been.  One sign of that is that Trump and his supporters must insist that of course Trump is not a fascist, and of course the theme of his campaign is "freedom."

Moreover, even Kagan recognizes that illiberal fascists like Trump are desperate to win this election because they recognize that America is experiencing a "demographic shift" that favors liberalism over illiberalism:  as America becomes ever more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, and religiously pluralistic, it becomes impossible for any single ethnoreligious group to dominate American politics and culture, and the appeal of liberalism as the only means of holding such a pluralistic society together will grow ever stronger.

In this election and its aftermath, we will see the confirmation of Francis Fukuyama's argument for the "end of history":  liberalism will prevail over fascism.

THE LIBERAL REFUTATION OF ILLIBERALISM: BY FORCE OF IDEAS AND ARMS

Remember the ninth "mobilizing passion" of fascism:  "the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle."

Lockean Liberals can accept that challenge and agree that liberalism must prevail over illiberalism through Darwinian cultural group selection in the war of ideas and arms.

Although ideas don't matter very much to fascism, particularly in its later stages when it takes political power, ideas do matter in the early creation of fascist movements.  I have written about the "Nazi philosophers"--from Plato and Fichte to Nietzsche and Heidegger.  And I have suggested the ways in which liberalism wins the intellectual war with illiberalism.  Indeed, the intellectual victory of liberalism has been so clear that even those who pose as antiliberals--Patrick Deneen, for example, turn out ultimately to be liberals.

Moreover, as Locke saw, there is a practical expression of the theoretical appeal of liberalism when people "vote with their feet" and choose to immigrate to those countries with more freedom, which is one form of cultural group selection.

But Locke also saw that the power of liberal ideas must ultimately be backed up with the power of liberal arms in the "Appeal to Heaven."  So, for example, the Declaration of Independence was not only a declaration of the "self-evident truths" of equal natural rights but also a declaration of war, in which the outcome would depend on the "popular Lockeanism" of the Americans fighting in the war.

Then, in 1861, the Confederate States of America declared themselves a nation conceived in the liberty of white men to enslave others and dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal; and they engaged in a great war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.  That nation did not endure because it was defeated by a Lockean liberal regime with a larger population of well-armed fighting men, including emancipated slaves, many of whom understood that they were fighting for the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  As the proslavery Southerner George Fitzhugh admitted, the Union defeat of the Confederacy was the victory of John Locke over Robert Filmer.

But that was not enough to ensure the "new birth of freedom."  The use of military force to suppress the fascist militias of the Klan in the Reconstruction Era and then in the Second Reconstruction (the Civil Rights Movement) to reform the Jim Crow South was required for overthrowing the illiberal tradition of the American South.  This included a Black tradition of armed self-defense and rebellion.  Ultimately, Lincoln's rhetoric of equal liberty defeated George Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as domination.

Similarly, in World War Two, we saw a test in war of the fascist "right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint."  And with the defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in war, we saw that there is a sense in which might does make right, when people in the state of nature exercise "the executive power of the law of nature" to resist and punish those who would dominate them.

REFERENCES

Kagan, Robert.  2024.  Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart--Again.  New York: Knopf.

Paxton, Robert O.  1998.  "The Five Faces of Fascism."  The Journal of Modern History 70 (March): 1-23.

Paxton, Robert O.  2004.  The Anatomy of Fascism.  New York: Random House.

Paxton, Robert O.  2021. "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist.  Until Now."  Newsweek, January 11.

Schmidt, Michael S.  2024.  "As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator."  The New York Times, October 22.

Zerofsky, Elisabeth. 2024. "Is It Fascism?  A Leading Historian Changes His MInd."  The New York Times, October 23.

The Crisis of the House Divided in 2024: Trump and the Antiliberal Tradition in America

Some Americans shocked by Donald Trump's MAGA movement have insisted: "This is not who we are."  President Biden has adopted that as the main theme of his campaign against Trump--that Trump and his MAGA movement are trying to overturn those moral and political principles that have always defined the American people. 

But now some historians are saying that Trump's political movement has deep roots in an American antiliberal tradition that has always been set against the liberal tradition that originated in the American Revolution and the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence: since 1776 America has been split in two--a liberal America that embraces the ideal of equal liberty for all in the Declaration of Independence and an antiliberal America that rejects it.  

Two new books make this argument:  Robert Kagan's Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart--Again and Steven Hahn's Illiberal America: A History.  In this post, I will respond to Kagan's book.

Kagan elaborates an argument that he first set forth in some articles in the Washington Post.  He makes two claims.  The first is that the American presidential election of 2024 will be like the election of 1860 in manifesting what Abraham Lincoln called the Crisis of the House Divided, which will provoke a rebellion against America's liberal democracy comparable to the South's rebellion in the Civil War.  The second claim is that this crisis in 2024 is only the most recent expression of a struggle between liberalism and antiliberalism that has been woven into American history ever since the American Revolution and most dramatically displayed in the American Civil War.

Kagan predicts that if Trump wins, he will become a dictator in punishing his enemies and exercising unlimited power in violation of the Constitution; and his supporters will allow him to do this.  If Trump loses, he will say the election was stolen, his supporters will deny the legitimacy of the federal government, and those state governments under Republican control will refuse to accept Biden's presidency, and perhaps secede from the Union and form a pro-Trump confederacy.  Either way, American liberal democracy will be dissolved.

This is possible, Kagan argues, only because the many Americans who support Trump reject the liberal principles of the American Revolution, and consequently they will justify Trump's illiberal behavior.  Trump's supporters show that they belong to an American tradition of illiberalism that stretches back to the origins of American politics.

Kagan sees the Declaration of Independence as the statement of the radical liberalism of the American Revolution--that all men are created equal and equally endowed with unalienable natural rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that governments are instituted by consent of the people to secure these rights, and that when any government fails to secure these rights, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish that government and to institute a new government that seems to them most likely to secure their safety and happiness.  

Throughout American history, the most fundamental political debates have been about how best to extend that equality of rights to all Americans.  Kagan agrees, therefore, with Lincoln's belief that this equality of rights in the Declaration was meant to be the "standard maxim for free society" that would be "constantly looked to--constantly labored for--and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and therefore constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere" (Speech on the Dred Scott Decision, June 26, 1857).

But from the beginning in 1776, according to Kagan, these principles have been rejected by many Americans who have embraced a racial, religious, and ethnic antiliberalism, in which America is defined not by its commitment to human equality of rights but by its identity as a white Protestant Anglo-Saxon nation.  The American antiliberal groups have included the slaveholding South, the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow South, the Ku Klux Clan in the 1920s, the anti-immigration movement that led to the Immigration Act of 1924, the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and 1950s, the John Birch Society conservatives, the antiliberal conservatives associated with William Buckley, the supporters of George Wallace, the movement for Pat Buchanan, the New Right around Ronald Reagan, and now the antiliberal populists who have taken control of the Republican Party under the leadership of Trump.

Kagan believes that Trump's MAGA populism shows all the elements of American antiliberalism.  The racial element is white nationalism: all white groups have voted in greater numbers for Trump than for his opponents.  The religious element is Christian nationalism:  many of Trump's most fervent supporters want to restore America's identity as a Christian nation.  The ethnic element is Anglo-Saxon and European nationalism:  Trump's anti-immigration stance is predominantly opposition to immigrants of Hispanic, African, Middle-Eastern, and Asian ethnicities.  America is for Americans, and those Americans who do not support Trump's ethnic, religious, and racial vision of America are not true Americans.

Although I agree with much of what Kagan says, I disagree with him on three points.  First, he fails to make a good intellectual argument for the Lockean and Lincolnian interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.  Second, he fails to see that over the past 250 years of American history, the liberal tradition has ultimately prevailed over the antiliberal tradition--even among American conservatives. Finally, he fails to see that as a consequence of that triumph of the liberal tradition in America, Trump and his supporters have neither the guts nor the guns for fighting a civil war to overthrow that liberal tradition.

THE LOCKEAN AND LINCOLNIAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Kagan identifies the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence (particularly in the first two paragraphs) as a concise and elegant statement of John Locke's political philosophy, and so the liberal tradition in America as based on the Declaration is a Lockean tradition of thought (13, 17, 30-31, 34, 41, 151).  Kagan says nothing, however, about Claire Rydell Arcenas's argument that the Declaration does not show Locke's influence at all.  He should have responded to her by showing the many clear echoes of Locke's language in the Declaration, as I did a few years ago.

Kagan should also have responded to Pauline Maier's claim that Lincoln's elevation of the Declaration to being America's statement of the "standard maxim for free society" was Lincoln's mythic invention.  Lincoln saw the highest moral standard for American politics stated in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence--particularly, the assertion that "all men are created equal." But Maier argued that from 1776 to 1790, almost no one thought that opening section of the Declaration was important.  It was only later, after the Jeffersonian Republicans had transformed the interpretation of the Declaration, that the "self-evident truths" of the second paragraph became the most important part of the Declaration.  

In my previous post, I answered Maier by arguing that the political philosophy of the Declaration was widely recognized beginning in 1776 as necessary for the moral justification of the Revolution, although George Mason's language in the Virginia Declaration of Rights was quoted more often than Jefferson's revision of that language, and as Maier admits, Jefferson's language had the "same content" as Mason's.  Then, beginning in the 1790s, the Jeffersonian Republicans began the tradition of quoting Jefferson's language as the most concise and eloquent statement of the founding principles of the American Revolution.  So, when Lincoln appealed to Jefferson's principles in the Declaration, he was not creating a myth but extending a tradition that had emerged early in the American founding period. 

But while Locke, Jefferson, and Lincoln all agreed that we can justify the human equality of rights as "inherent in the nature of being human"--as originally expressed in the state of nature--Kagan insists that they were wrong because liberalism is "a choice, and, at root, a faith" for which there is no rational proof or justification.  "Either one believes in its principles or one does not" (13-14).

This is not much of an argument for liberalism.  Indeed, it's not an argument at all, but rather a groundless "faith" or "choice."

Kagan simply assumes without proof that there is no empirical argument for natural rights as "inherent in the nature of being human."  He thus ignores the evolutionary historical evidence that Locke was right about the state of nature as the original condition of our human ancestors and that the American Revolutionaries were right about their being in a state of nature.  I have written about this in some previous posts.

Kagan asserts: "Since the dawn of humankind, people have been ruled by tyrannies of one form or another.  That is the norm" (10).  He offers no proof for this assertion.  And he does not respond to the evidence that I and others have presented to show that democracy is natural for human societies, because it arose in our earliest evolutionary history in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands, so that it is part of our genetically evolved human nature.

Contrary to Kagan, liberalism does not depend on a blind "faith."  Locke, Jefferson, and Lincoln were right in seeing that it can be supported with reasons and evidence that show how our natural rights arise from our evolved human nature.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE LIBERAL TRADITION IN AMERICA

Even if there is a good case to be made for liberalism, we have to wonder how successful it has been in persuading the American people.  If American history since 1776 has been a perpetual struggle between a liberal tradition and an antiliberal tradition, has one side emerged as stronger than the other?

Kagan's answer is unclear.  Sometimes he says that "large numbers of Americans" or "millions of Americans" are on the side of antiliberalism, and at other times he says that "half the country" is antiliberal.  But then he also says that at the founding "the great majority of Americans" were antiliberal.  And yet in the 1950s, antiliberalism "had fallen into minority status in both parties."  He also says that in recent history "the core antiliberal constituencies were declining in absolute numbers in the country at large, but as a percentage of Republicans, they were growing in both numbers and influence."  He quotes Glenn Ellmers (a scholar at the Claremont Institute) as saying that "most people living in the United States today--certainly more than half--are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term," because only "the 75 million people who voted" for Trump in 2020 are true Americans.  (Previously, I have written about how Trump has split the Claremont Institute, with people like Ellmers taking the side of Trump against Jaffa's legacy of Lincolnian liberal conservatism.)  But then Kagan says that no more than "tens of millions of Americans will follow Trump wherever he leads."  (See pages 3, 5, 8, 77, 89, 94, 124, 135, 141, 161, 182, 196.)

In the final paragraph of his book, Kagan concludes that the future of American liberalism looks good--if it can survive the 2024 election:

"Meanwhile, the overall long-term prospects for American liberalism are actually bright, if only because the demographic shift is a reality that can't be blinked away.  White supremacy is another Lost Cause.  As America becomes increasingly multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural, and as it becomes impossible for any single ethnoreligious group to dominate American politics and society, the appeal of liberalism as the only means of holding such a society together should grow.  Many white people may not change their attitudes toward other racial and ethnic groups--after all, they haven't changed in two hundred years--but their ability to fight to preserve their hierarchies will diminish because they will be too badly outnumbered.  That is why 2024 is the year when the antiliberals hope to overthrow the system.  It may be their last chance" (217-18).

I agree that the "demographic shift" towards a "multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural" America favors liberalism.  But I also believe that there has been an intellectual shift in the moral and political culture of America that favors liberalism.  If we don't see that intellectual shift, that's because most of what Kagan identifies as antiliberal conservatism is only a pretense of antiliberalism that disguises an underlying liberal conservatism.

For example, Kagan speaks of Patrick Deneen as one of the leading antiliberals in America today (176, 185).  But as I have argued, if you study Deneen's writing carefully, you will see that he is actually a liberal!  As an illustration, you will notice that while Deneen praises John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony as the antiliberal founding of America--in contrast to the Lockean founding in 1776--Deneen refuses to defend the theocratic code of laws in Massachusetts--such as capital punishment for adulterers, homosexuals, witches, blasphemers, and those who refuse to worship God in the right way--because Deneen believes in the liberal principle of religious liberty, and so he's on the side of Roger Williams rather than Winthrop.

If you wanted to see a true model of antiliberalism, you would have to look beyond American history to Joseph de Maistre. In reaction against the French Revolution, Maistre initiated a Counter-Enlightenment tradition of thought based on a theocratic authoritarianism--the idea that all government comes from some unquestioned coercive authority that is divinely infallible and that all such authority is derived from the Pope as God's representative on Earth.  He proposed a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy to the throne of France, ruling under the supreme authority of the Pope in both temporal and spiritual matters.  Atheists, Jews, and heretical Christians (such as the Protestants) should be suppressed.  He claimed that the rationalist rejection of Catholic Christianity and theocratic monarchy was responsible for the disorder that followed the French Revolution of 1789.  Even the most extreme right-wing Catholic Integralists in France today who profess to be in de Maistre's tradition can't endorse his theocratic authoritarianism.

As compared with de Maistre, almost all American conservatives today--even those who pretend to be antiliberal or post-liberal--are really liberal conservatives.  You can see that in the debate that has recently emerged between the "National Conservatives" and the "Freedom Conservatives."  If you compare the "statement of principles" for National Conservatism with that for Freedom Conservatism, you can see that they agree in affirming the liberal principles of individual equality and liberty, and thus reject any ethnoreligious antiliberalism.  

For example, in the National Conservatism Statement, the section on "God and Public Religion" includes this: "Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.  At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children.  Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes."  

That's a long way from the theocratic coercion of Winthrop or de Maistre.

Here's the section on "Race" in the National Conservatism Statement:  "We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact.  No person's worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test.  The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth.  We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race.  The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities.  The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole."

This "decent nationalism" is a liberal multiracial and multiethnic nationalism.

What we see here is the ultimate triumph of the liberal tradition in American history.  The critical turning point in that history was the Civil War.  That war was a test of whether a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could endure in a war with a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal.  The victory of the Union over the Confederacy was, as George Fitzhugh sadly conceded, the victory of John Locke over Robert Filmer.

Moreover, there is a good argument for saying that the military superiority of the Union over the Confederacy really was in some ways a product of the Lockean liberal culture of the North.  Consider, for instance, how the greater population of the Northern states over the Southern states arose from differences in migration.  Before the Civil War, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  At the same time, seven-eighths of the immigrants from overseas settled in the North.  (This later became important for the Union army: 24 percent of all Union soldiers were born abroad [McPherson 1997: ix].)  In the 1840s alone, the population growth in the North was 20 percent higher than in the South (Kagan, 70).  Proslavery Southern leaders saw this population growth in the North as the single greatest threat to the South, which is why they fought so hard to expand slavery into the western territories, and thus increase the number of slave states.

What we see here is what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous and powerful societies.  In this way, people "vote with their feet" in favor of freedom.

And of course, not only did many white Southerners migrate to the North, many slaves ran away to the free states, forcing Southern slaveholders to demand that people in the North capture these fugitive slaves and return them to slavery.  That's why the debate over the fugitive slave laws was so intense.

Because of its larger population, the Union had a larger pool of men from whom soldiers could be recruited.  Consequently, the Confederate soldiers were badly outnumbered by their opponents: of the 3 million Civil war soldiers, over 2.1 million (70 percent) were Union soldiers.

Now, of course, once Reconstruction was ended, the Jim Crow South did preserve some of the Southern antiliberal tradition for almost a hundred years.  But even that was eventually defeated by the liberal tradition of the Civil Rights Movement, signaled in 1965 by an American President from the South, speaking before a joint session of Congress, declaring: "We shall overcome."

TRUMP HAS NEITHER THE GUTS NOR THE GUNS FOR A CIVIL WAR

But then is it likely, as Kagan predicts, that after the election of 2024 Trump will lead his MAGA movement in a new rebellion against the American liberal tradition that will provoke another civil war?  After all, if the people do have the right to overthrow an unjust government, as the Declaration of Independence says, and if Trump and his supporters believe that the American liberal regime is unjustly oppressing them, then they should be willing and able to launch an antiliberal rebellion.

I don't think so.  As I said three years ago, the response of Trump and his supporters to his defeat in the 2020 election shows that they do not have the guts or the guns to rebel against the American liberal political order.

He did not have the guns because military leaders such as General Mark Milley (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) made it clear that they would not allow the military to support a presidential dictatorship.  And he did not have the guts because he lacked the courage to assert his dictatorial will in violation of the Constitution.  He displayed his unmanly weakness on January 6 when he failed to lead the march on the Capitol as he had promised earlier in the day, and instead he watched the attack on TV at the White House, as if it were an entertaining TV drama.  Later, he meekly condemned the insurrectionary violence that he had inspired, and he told the insurrectionists to "go home with love and in peace." As Nicholas Fuentes of the white nationalist "America First" internet broadcasts said, Trump on that day proved to be "very weak and flaccid."

Kagan writes:

"What we are witnessing, however, is not a political battle but a rebellion.  The events of January 6, 2021, proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past.  Though it may have been shocking to see normal, decent Americans condoning a violent assault on the Capitol, that event demonstrated that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions" (215).

But as shocking as the January 6th insurrection was, it could have been much more shocking.  Trump could have ordered the military to support the insurrectionists and to take control of the Capitol.  And he could have ordered his MAGA supporters to rise up and follow his leadership as the American Caesar.  He didn't do that because he didn't believe that Americans would support an antiliberal revolution to overthrow the American constitutional order.

By contrast, in 1861, Southern political leaders could count on there being a sufficiently strong antiliberal tradition in the South to support a Confederacy of states in rebellion against the national government.  

I am not convinced by Kagan's suggestion that when Trump wins or loses the presidential election of 2024, there will be such a strongly antiliberal MAGA movement that it will support Trump in becoming an antiliberal dictator.