The Politics of Humiliation

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.

The essay landed with force. Scholars, journalists, and anxious liberals repeated its phrases in op-eds, on cable news, on podcasts, in panel discussions, and it helped launch a whole industry of Substack newsletters on rising illiberalism. Kagan, who had once been a reliable neoconservative defender of a muscular American empire, had transformed himself into democracy’s Cassandra. But as persuasive as his warnings sounded, they carried a particular blind spot—one shared with other prophets of democratic decline such as Anne Applebaum, Yascha Mounk, and Timothy Snyder. Like Kagan, these intellectuals were skilled at diagnosing the mechanics of “backsliding” but less attentive to the cultural and emotional energies that make those mechanics possible. Kagan’s rebellion is real, but what fuels it is not only a decline of democratic institutions and the dissolving guardrails and norms, but the sense that America must forever remain entangled in world affairs, that it is our destiny and responsibility to be a world leader, no matter how unpopular this is for many Americans, as they see only sacrifice with little gain.

Kagan cemented his place within in 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.”

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:

Democracy has spread and endured because it has been nurtured and supported: by the norms of the liberal order, by global pressures and inducements to conform to those norms, by the membership requirements of liberal institutions like the EU and NATO, by the fact that the liberal order has been the wealthiest part of the world, and by the security provided by the world’s strongest power, which happens to be a democracy.

But what if there are large pockets of this country that do not see the values of these norms? Seeing our moment this way shows Kagan and company’s blind spot. They privilege the centrality of norms, institutions, and elites as central to ensuring democracy. Their model has no way of explaining why ordinary citizens might cheer while institutions collapse, except to view it as authoritarianism, which it may be. But labeling it does not explain it, nor does it pull us back from the brink

Kagan’s analysis is focused on structural fragility: the weakness of political parties, the erosion of electoral systems, the possibility of overturning election results, and the reality that election outcomes might be disputed. These are real dangers. “Today,” wrote Kagan, “as always, democracy is a fragile flower. It requires constant support, constant tending, and the plucking of weeds and fencing-off of the jungle that threaten it both from within and without.” But Kagan underplays the affective economy that sustains these structures. The sense of alienation from democracy, coupled with deep-seated wounds of humiliation, leads to the politics of revenge, in which backsliding is inevitable. Getting to the heart of this is historian Steven Hahn, who writes, that illiberalism is  “Not at the margins of evolving American society, not as dark threads that occasionally surface, not as paranoic and backward-looking responses to disruptive change, but as central fields of political and cultural force.” Illiberalism is not an alien intrusion into American democracy but a constant presence, there from the start. In the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that the country lacked “guarantees against tyranny.” From the beginning, democracy was defined as possession—guarded for some, denied to others.

This inherent contradiction bred cycles of humiliation and revenge. As any new gains were seen as coming at the expense of others. After the Civil War, the defeated South turned its shame into a politics of redemption. Reconstruction’s promise of multiracial democracy gave way to lynch mobs and segregation, justified as restoring dignity to whites. Writing at the time, black Southern Journalist Ida B. Wells pulled back the curtain on the spectacle of these lynchings as public ritual, a catharsis for white communities that believed their honor had been mocked by black advancement. Wells, writing in the  autobiography Crusaide for Justice in 1928, lynchings were “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” The political violence reasserted hierarchy. Humiliation was answered with cruelty, and cruelty was experienced as justice and the restoration of order.

The same dynamic animated later backlashes. The civil rights victories of the 1960s were followed by George Wallace’s segregationist populism and Richard Nixon’s “law and order” crusade. Political scientist Michael Rogin, writing in the policy journal Public Opinion in 1966, showed how in suburban Milwaukee, appeals to law-and-order rhetoric leveraged racial backlash from civil rights gains to shift middle-class white voters toward the GOP. He demonstrated how George Wallace transformed white resentment into a politics of performance, while Richard Nixon perfected the art of converting humiliation into “silent majority” solidarity. Wallace mocked pointy-headed intellectuals and black protesters; Nixon reassured anxious whites that humiliation would not be their fate. The politics of backlash was never primarily about policy. It was the dog whistle that signaled restoring dignity by reestablishing exclusion for those who felt a loss.

When Kagan sees the signs of open rebellion in the unraveling of democratic norms, he recognizes he is not describing something new; instead, he is recognizing the recurrence of this pattern without fully situating the present rendition into America’s emotional history. Kagan, speaking on Bill Kristol’s podcast in 2024, said, “There is a real ideological opposition to liberalism . . . a very large number of people, larger than we may have thought, really does want to change the nature of our system.” This is a follow-up to his 2021 Washington Post column: “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.” However, this rebellion, when viewed through Hahn, is not just against structures—it is fueled by the sting of humiliation, which Hahn sees as a hidden engine of illiberalism. Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill was right to see all politics as local; I might add that in the local we also find the emotional, the deepest aspects of belonging, hopes, and dreams. Our illiberal movement then might be grounded in the emotional politics of local communities, fueling populism.

Scholars such as Jan-Werner Müller and Pippa Norris emphasize that populists frame politics as a battle between virtuous people and corrupt elites. Trump perfected this script, but he infused it with the dramaturgy of humiliation and revenge. His rallies were not town halls; they were ritual theaters. As Katherine Stewart observed in The Power Worshippers, they resembled revival meetings, complete with chants, confessions, and staged exorcisms. When Trump labeled the press “enemies of the people,” the audience cheered. Trump recognized their scorn. The effect was cathartic: elites mocked them, and now they could mock back. Late-night talk show hosts made fun of them; now they will be fired. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild focused on what she called the “deep story”—her term for the narrative her Louisiana informants used to describe the feeling they had of having patiently waited their turn and following the rules for the American dream, only to see what they claim were undeserving outsiders cutting ahead of them. This was ritualized in Trump’s call-and-response and “Stop the Steal,” persecution reimagined as significance. It was better to be cheated than to be irrelevant. It meant you mattered enough for elites to conspire against you. Scholars Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have observed the same of Christian nationalism: Christians displaced in their own land, ridiculed by secular elites, crave restoration at any cost.

Kagan is right to see rebellion and to embed it in American political history, triggered, as he states, by demographic change. Demographic and cultural change, as he states, is natural and inevitable. What drives illiberalism is when this change is coupled with and empowered by institutional weakness and bad actors who exploit the weakness to gain power. While Kagan sees Trump as the catalyst for the current illiberal moment, he argues that what makes this so worrisome is that it goes deeper. The MAGA capture of the GOP signals the weakness of the institutional guardrails required to support democracy. Trump might not be exceptional, but the party’s embrace of illiberalism is. In fact, Trump built a movement through a carnival of humiliation and revenge that captured half the country and one of the two major parties. As Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg argue in How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, institutions matter less than public attachment to them. When citizens no longer feel democracy belongs to them, institutions can be dismantled with little resistance. They can simply disappear. Take the recent example of the removal of the CDC director, only in her role for twenty-nine days. A Senate-approved appointee was told by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. not to talk to the Senate, which is constitutionally required.

The prophets of doom who see growing authoritarianism issue invectives while their books commodify dread. Applebaum’s lament is personal, Snyder’s is aphoristic, Kagan’s is prophetic. Each sells briskly to anxious liberals. But anxiety is not analysis, and we deserve more than alarm bells; we need to know why this fragility is popular, sustained, commodified, and historically rooted. Liberal defenses of democracy falter because they treat politics as rational and procedural. They treat the symptom not the disease. Democracy is a system of feelings. Citizens must feel included. When those feelings collapse, no procedural reform can restore legitimacy. Lilliana Mason, in Uncivil Agreement, demonstrates how partisan identity fuses with emotion, producing politics of anger and disdain. Liberals mistake this terrain for irrational noise, but illiberals treat it as the battlefield itself.

This is why Trump’s wall resonated: not as a policy but a spectacle of exclusion. Why Ron DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act” resonated: it promised to humiliate elites who sneer at ordinary citizens. Why book bans proliferate: they symbolize revenge against cultural displacement. These are not glitches. They are affective performances of belonging. Kagan warns of rebellion, but rebellion against procedure is less threatening than what is actually happening now, rebellion fueled by humiliation. One can repair institutions. It is harder to repair wounded pride. Cruelty feels like justice; revenge feels like dignity restored.

Kagan was right when he said we are in a constitutional crisis. But America’s democratic inheritance always included this emotional shadow: from Wells’s documentation of lynching picnics to Wallace’s rallies, from Nixon’s silent majority to Trump’s MAGA carnivals, from DeSantis’s book bans to statehouse purges of opposition legislators. Each moment demonstrates that democracy falters not only when rules are broken but when humiliation curdles into resentment and performative outrage.

Here is why Hochschild’s 2024 book, Stolen Pride, offers a framework for understanding and, with it, hope. In her deep ethnography of Pikeville, Kentucky, she points to what she describes as an “empathy bridge” built by those from and in these communities who are “bridge crossers.” They see their neighbors and are known to them, even if they fundamentally disagree. But the mere act of seeing opens conversations, and it is in these difficult conversations that we see each other’s humanity.

Hochschild’s solution does not rely on elites or outsiders, nor does it focus on policies and institutions. Rather, the healing is neighbor to neighbor. Slow and steady. The bleak truth is that democracy does not need to be toppled by generals. It collapses when humiliation becomes the organizing principle of politics, when revenge feels more righteous than inclusion. That shadow has always been here, waiting, rising again whenever the wound of alienation is opened. Pope Francis told the world in 2020, “The second fundamental principle is that love must tend together and inseparably . . . towards one’s neighbor.” This is something worth striving for.