Amid the furious news whirlwind last week and the consuming protests on college campuses across the nation, you may have missed an interesting Washington Post Opinion piece: Robert Kagan’s “We have a radical democracy. Will Trump voters destroy it?” Kagen pivots off the threat former-President Donald Trump poses to democracy to address a question many now ask: Why are these voters still supporting Trump?

Kagan’s piece offers key insights that can help readers get through the next six months until Election Day. For he tethers White Christian nationalists, a major voting bloc supporting Trump, to America’s historic tradition of anti-liberalism:

Anti-liberal movements in America, whether in defense of the White race or Christianity, and more often both together, have always claimed … that a liberal government and society were depriving them of their “freedom” to live a life according to Christian teachings and were favoring various minority groups, especially Black people, at their expense. … In the 19th century, enslavers insisted they were deprived of their “freedom” to hold human beings as property; Southerners in the post-Reconstruction era insisted on their “freedom” to oppress Black citizens in their states.

Today, anti-liberals in American society are indeed deprived of their “freedom” to impose their religious and racial views on society…. What Christian nationalists call “liberal totalitarianism,” the Founders called “freedom of conscience.

You also might have missed this piece because of who the author is. Kagan is a controversial figure -- to put it in the most polite terms He is a longtime neo-conservative, who served in the Reagan administration and then strongly advocated U.S. intervention in Iraq after 9/11. The neo-cons’ “high-minded” strategies, which dripped with White saviorism, led to the catastrophe that spiraled across the Middle East – creating serious problems we are still grappling with.

As an opinion editor, though, I often regarded neo-con contributors as remarkably adept in devising categories and labels when defining their terms. I felt this might have something to do with the older generation’s roots in a vehement anti-communism, with its “righteous us vs evil them” attitudes. Now, Kagan’s reconstituted thinking focuses on liberalism – and this piece provides a valuable read.

Kagan sets up his argument by carefully defining his terms. He reaches back to the Enlightenment to lay out the central tenet of classical liberalism – which the Founders relied on in designing the new nation. The principles were radical at that time: “All human beings were created equal in their possession of certain ‘natural rights’ that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were ‘self-evident.’’ …They were inherent in what it meant to be human.”

The tension this created was clear from the start. “Liberalism is always going too far for days complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to….”

Since our nation’s beginning, Kagan writes, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, the apex predators atop the social and economic food chain, realized liberalism would significantly threaten their power. Kagan lays out a sweeping argument:

For two centuries, many White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders’ liberalism. They have been defeated in [the Civil] War and suppressed by threats of force, but more than that, they have been continually oppressed by a system designed by the Founders to preserve and strengthen liberalism against competing beliefs and hierarchies. Since World War II, the courts and the political system have pursued the Founders’ liberal goals with greater and greater fidelity, ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities hitherto deprived of their “natural rights” because of religious, racial and ethnic discrimination.

President Abraham Lincoln, as Kagan quotes, envisioned a time when this classic liberalism would be, “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere.”

To Trump supporters, according to Kagan, this expansion of liberalism is the essential problem. That’s why they continue strongly supporting Trump’s efforts to take down the establishment:

For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown. This should not come as a shock, for it is not a new phenomenon. On the contrary, it is as old as the republic.

Kagan sees this confrontation in stark terms. Perhaps that is also related to his neo-con attitudes. But it could be that his views this time deserve to be considered in our wide-ranging public debate.