What’s the Matter With the Democrats?
What’s the Matter With the Democrats?
Two new books reveal the shortcomings at the heart of the liberal critique of Trump voters.
Illiberal America: A History
by Steven Hahn
W.W. Norton & Company, 2024, 464 pp.
Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again
by Robert Kagan
Knopf, 2024, 256 pp.
It’s been a hard year for the Democrats. Well before concerns over President Joe Biden’s age rocked the presidential campaign, the party was forced to confront a grim political reality: voters did not decisively prefer them to the Republicans. Despite Donald Trump’s criminal conviction, open bigotry, history of sexual assault, semi-incoherent ramblings, and general unfitness for office; despite January 6, the end of national abortion rights, and the stumbles of the Republican House majority; despite a notable drop in violent crime and an economy that is performing statistically as well as it has in years—the best Democrats could hope for in November was a slim victory. Whatever effect swapping Biden for Harris might have, it won’t alter the underlying reality: the Democrats are roughly as popular as Trump’s Republicans, and the general election could be decided by a coin flip.
For a certain type of Democratic-aligned commentator, all this is utterly inexplicable. “Is there really one person voting for that guy?” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough exclaimed about Trump in March. “How stupid would you have to be?” Economist Paul Krugman expressed similar confusion in the New York Times in May. Economic data suggested that Biden’s economy was in “remarkably good shape,” yet polling indicated most Americans felt it was falling apart. Krugman threw up his hands: “It’s surprisingly hard to pin down where negative views of the economy are coming from,” he wrote, calling the situation a “vibecession.”
Efforts to unravel this enigma have usually taken a “what’s the matter with Kansas?” approach—focusing on what’s wrong with Trump voters. Their media habits and religious predilections are favorite targets: Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and evangelical Christianity all share in the blame. A large group of Americans, the argument goes, simply don’t identify with the egalitarian culture of liberalism, seeing in Trump a champion of old hierarchies (patriarchal, Christian, and/or white supremacist) that they are more comfortable with. Some view Trump’s followers as, in effect, agents of a new fascism, while others have posited that the former president, while not an outright fascist, is an expression of popular opposition to liberal values. Whatever the exact diagnosis, the point is the same: the biggest problem confronting the United States today is Trump, his voters, and their bigotry.
Two recent books, Robert Kagan’s Rebellion and Steven Hahn’s Illiberal America, show that this form of inquiry remains widespread—and that it is largely exhausted of political insight. Each locates Trumpism at the end of a long counter-liberal tradition. By reinforcing the familiar idea that the Trump movement reflects some of the darker aspects of American history, while obscuring other explanations for the present political juncture, Kagan does more to hinder our understanding than to deepen it. Hahn comes closer to offering something new, but is likewise limited by the nature of the question, “What is wrong with them?” It’s long past time for Trump’s opponents to ask instead, “What might be wrong with us?”
Kagan’s simplistic and morally charged analysis depicts Trumpism as a modern manifestation of an ancient evil: anti-liberalism. “Like the demon spirit in a Stephen King novel,” Kagan writes, anti-liberalism has “always been with us, taking different forms over the decades.” Rebellion turns U.S. history into a long-running battle between this demon and the spirit of the American Revolution.
In Kagan’s story, the liberal “radicalism” of the American Revolution became a slow but nigh-unstoppable solvent, eroding traditional cultural hierarchies. “The founders,” Kagan writes, “created not only a rights-protection machine but . . . a rights-recognition machine,” one which seems to work almost independently of human will. Regardless of the founders’ initial preferences, “groups of people whose rights were not recognized in American society at the time of the Revolution” were able to “claim those rights as . . . liberal ideals . . . took hold.” Unleashed by the American Revolution, liberalism strolled down the prison block of the premodern world, unlocking cell after cell.
Some of the founders, Kagan argues, accepted this expansion of rights as an inevitable consequence of their revolution, or at worst a problem for future generations to sort out; but others took to the dark side and began organizing the opposition. At first they came predominantly from the ranks of Southern slaveholders, whose anti-liberal counterrevolution reached its apex in the Three-fifths Compromise of the Constitutional Convention, which granted states additional representation in the federal government equivalent to three-fifths of their population of enslaved people. A Constitution “designed to create a liberal political order in which universal natural rights could be most securely protected,” Kagan writes, also “included special protections for the most antiliberal practice in the world: slavery.”
The result was two Americas, one liberal and one anti-liberal—not exactly coextensive with the antebellum North and South, but inspired by their differences. Kagan traces their forever war across American history. “A straight line runs from the slaveholding South . . . to the second Ku Klux Klan . . . to the Dixiecrats of the 1940s . . . to the New Right of the Reagan Era, to the Republican Party of today.” This anti-liberal force propelled Trump to power in 2016 and threatens to do so again.
This seemingly powerful story has some truth to it but is nevertheless a vast oversimplification. Although a learned historian, Kagan is tendentiously selective in his rush to advance his polemic. The populist movement, for example, is reduced in his telling from a broad coalition to little more than a gathering of Southern racists. Kagan breezily dismisses any role for economic inequality in this history with the assertion that anti-liberal movements “have flourished in good times as well as bad.” Rebellion flattens the past into a narrative about some bad people who happen to share certain characteristics with Trump, but doesn’t tell us much about why they believe what they do, or how they might be stopped.
Steven Hahn also wants to show that Trumpism is no historical outlier, but he resists the temptation to shoehorn American history into a morality tale. Illiberal America, a more serious work of history, dismantles the very premise of a “liberal tradition” on which Kagan’s argument rests. The idea that U.S. history is defined by an expanding liberalism is, Hahn counters, a narrative cobbled together by intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century seeking to define the United States against its opponents in the Cold War. By claiming that the American Revolution had created a liberal order that grew over time, writers like Louis Hartz, author of the seminal 1955 volume The Liberal Tradition in America, were able to incorporate darker parts of U.S. history—including slavery and the genocide of Indigenous Americans—into a narrative of freedom not unlike Kagan’s.
Before the 1950s, few Americans saw the national story in this light, and for good reason: the reality they lived was, as Hahn writes, “messier, more complex, and less comfortable.” Instead of a battle between liberalism and illiberalism, Hahn reveals a United States where liberal ideas and outcomes coexisted with illiberal ones. Any strides made toward social equality reflected the complicated interests and desires of various historical actors, not the virtuous spirit of liberalism unleashed. Focusing on events traditionally seen as key moments of liberal progress, Hahn demonstrates how the liberal and illiberal were regularly part of the same package.
The era of Jacksonian democracy in the 1830s, for example, occurred under the banner of an illiberal ideology that gave new status to poor white males even as it justified the violent expropriation of Native American lands in order to expand slavery. Similar inconsistencies can be seen among anti-slavery figures in the 1840s and ’50s, who pushed for an end to the “peculiar institution” while reviling Catholic immigrants and advocating for anti-vagrancy laws and the expansion of penitentiaries. At the turn of the century, the Progressive movement embraced social uplift and workers’ rights yet also forcefully disciplined radical labor unions and supported eugenicist ideas. And the architects of the New Deal helped parts of the working class but also empowered undemocratic corporations to control more of American life, and partnered with the rulers of the apartheid South to preserve white supremacy in the region. Hahn follows this story into the present—an age of, as he terms it, “illiberal darkness” rising against the social advancements of the past half century.
As Hahn makes clear, anything one might call progress in the American past has almost always been mixed with something less appealing. The boundaries between good guys and bad guys were not always apparent. “Illiberalism’s history,” Hahn rightly asserts, “is America’s history” too: liberalism is but “one of a number of currents” that have defined the United States, not the only stream. Trump therefore is neither a startling departure from American tradition nor a reincarnation of Kagan’s transhistorical demon, but instead just another entry in a long list of villains and semi-villains from a complex past.
This is a good point, but not enough to sustain an entire book. Illiberalism is too broad a category to provide sharp analysis of the past or present. Hahn makes other interventions along the way, but they are never engaged with in a sustained enough way to prevent the narrative from devolving into a catalog of illiberal horrors. Hahn’s readers will likely draw much the same conclusions as Kagan’s: there have been lots of terrible people in history, and Trump and his voters are among them. Cue Scarborough and Krugman: How could anyone be that stupid? Why the vibecession?
One of Hahn’s comments early in the book points to an answer that could have been the centerpiece of a more illuminating discussion. “Illiberalism,” Hahn writes, “is . . . a political and cultural disposition of the right.” Yet “time and time again men and women . . . happily brandishing liberal credentials” have made “quick resort . . . to illiberal solutions simply to maintain order.” Hahn’s book is full of instances of wealthy people and their allies disempowering and controlling those who threaten the social order or the distribution of wealth. Sometimes those elites openly reject liberal principles and movements, but at other times the liberals themselves do the dirty work. A commitment to liberal principles, in other words, has not necessarily meant a thorough commitment to all forms of justice—economic justice especially. Nor have those who have embraced illiberalism always been entirely without legitimate grievance. Some have experienced the advance of liberalism as a program of class warfare rather than one of liberation.
Kagan’s misread populists are a fine example of this. Born of the opposition of small farmers and craftsmen to the increasing power of railroad owners and industrialists—amid crushing deflation engineered by the U.S. government to protect capital owners—some populists experimented with multiracial coalitions to protest the injustices of the age. In a vignette toward the end of his book, Hahn movingly describes one such group: white farmers in rural East Texas laid aside their ancestral racism to ally with their black neighbors against both the robber barons and the Jim Crow laws that disfranchised black voters. A racist like South Carolina Senator Ben Tillman—a rich white landowner who exploited populist rage to gain power in the Democratic Party—represents less the real spirit of populist discontent than its manipulation by those pursuing other ends. In an era defined by both the end of slavery and the proletarianization of millions of Americans, Tillman and his ilk were able to sublimate rage against the latter into anger at the former.
Over the past forty years, the United States has shown an increasing commitment to social equality alongside growing income and wealth inequality. The expansion of liberal rights that centrist Democrats rightly celebrate has been married to the grinding advance of economic injustice. Working- and middle-class wages began to stagnate in the early 1980s and have hardly grown in real terms since. Stable career opportunities have progressively disappeared, while the cost of a home has increased roughly 1,600 percent since 1970. Elites have restructured the economy around extracting value for shareholders rather than customer service or product quality, leaving most Americans with the feeling they are being scammed. Wealth has fled hollowed-out rural communities, forcing people to decamp from their place of birth for more lucrative careers, moving from job to job if they’re lucky, and from gig to gig if they’re not. Call it a vibecession, but a recent New York Times poll found that roughly 70 percent of Americans believe their country needs significant political and economic reform.
Given all this, it should not be surprising that voters are hardly thrilled with the party most identified with the status quo: the Democrats. Though Trump is certainly committed to preserving the current distribution of wealth, he is the first major party candidate to effectively capitalize on the failures of neoliberalism. If Trump or someone like him could figure out how to mobilize that discontent further, to attack segments of wealth without alienating the capitalists that most support him, then a decisive illiberal majority could be within reach.
For Democrats, this means that business as usual—a coalition built around trumpeting liberal social values while making only minor adjustments to the current economic order—will no longer work. The pursuit of greater social equality is a moral necessity that cannot be abandoned, but it’s hardly a political winner without an ambitious program of egalitarian economic reform. The anti-liberals, after all, are always lying in wait. It’s well past time to stop worrying about why people aren’t voting for Democrats, and to start giving them new reasons why they should.
Sean T. Byrnes is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in Middle Tennessee. His work has appeared in Time, the New Republic, and Jacobin, and he is the author of Disunited Nations: US Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right from LSU Press.
