In the fall of 2021, the noted foreign policy conservative and center-right intellectual Robert Kagan published an opinion essay in the Washington Post that quickly became one of the most cited pieces of the year. He declared that “our constitutional crisis is already here.” His claim was stark: democracy in America was not on the verge of collapse; it was already in collapse, in rebellion against itself. Kagan warned that “the United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War,” and that the threat was not simply partisan or personality-driven but systemic. What was significant about this piece was its author. While others were making similar claims, they were typically on the left. Kagan was firmly from the right, the son of Donald Kagan, a leading conservative intellectual, and brother to another, the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Kagan. “The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War,” he wrote, “with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.” Jarring words in 2021, but today downright prophetic.
Kagan cemented his place within the canon of decline with the 2024 publication of Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart Again, where he furthered the arguments of his earlier essay, becoming a leading defender of classical American liberalism. His brand of liberalism is a reframing of Bush-Era neoconservatism into a modern antidote to rising illiberalism. The canon of democratic-decline literature speaks to a rapidly changing world marked by rising authoritarianism, in which intellectuals have filled bookstores over the past decade, attempting to map our current moment. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die (2018), supplied the now-standard checklist: norm erosion, rule-breaking, and authoritarian encroachment disguised as legality. Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy (2020) was more personal, lamenting the betrayal of liberal ideals by colleagues who defected to illiberal populism. Timothy Snyder’s pocket-sized On Tyranny (2017) offered twenty bite-sized lessons from history and four main ways we can preserve democracy: 1) protect institutions, 2) protect the truth and information, 3) have civic courage, and 4) resist. He demands that above all, we “do not obey in advance.”
Robert Kagan, who had once been a reliable neoconservative defender of a muscular American empire, transformed himself into democracy’s Cassandra.
Together, these works form a recognizable genre: the liberal jeremiad. They warn that democracy is fragile, that institutions must be defended, and that vigilance is the price of liberty. They collectively demand that the United States has the responsibility to be the world’s beacon of democracy. Their collective approach to their subject privileges the role of elites and elite institutions as guardians, who must aggressively defend our institutions and explain our place in the global order to those who have forgotten these lessons.
Kagan is right when he writes that “the institutions that America’s founders created to safeguard liberal democratic government cannot survive when half the country does not believe in the core principles that undergird the American system of government.” But his solution misses the very reason we seem to be in this mess. In an earlier book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and our Imperiled World (2018), Kagan stated:
