Kagan as Cassandra

This week on The King’s Necktie, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before in four and a half years of writing this blog: devote an entire essay to a single piece of journalism by another author.

I’m doing that because last week the conservative foreign policy thinker Robert Kagan published a juggernaut 6000 word op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here,” forcefully laying out the clear and present danger to our republic like no other piece of writing before it. It should be required reading for all Americans.

Let’s dive in.

Our Brand Is Crisis

Kagan’s point is simple: that the GOP is in the process of installing Donald Trump for a second term in 2024, regardless of the results of the election, an act that would mark the de facto end of representative democracy in the United States and the arrival of an autocratic state. Further, he states that the Democratic Party, the respectable remnants of the Republican Party (all three of them, hiding in a basement in Orange County), and other forces opposed to Trump are not reacting to this crisis with the due urgency.

I couldn’t agree more.

The US, Kagan argues, is entering “its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next…