Don’t bet on America’s illiberal heart

The picture neoconservative foreign policy intellectual Robert Kagan paints in his new book, Rebellion, is dark and foreboding. As he sees it, a competition between liberalism and anti-liberalism has “been fought within the American system since the time of the Revolution.” And things are now coming to a head. Although the present crisis “seems unprecedented, the struggle that is tearing the nation apart today is as old as the republic.” No matter who wins the next election, “the American liberal political and social order will fracture, perhaps irrecoverably.”