The thing that I find striking, in addition to Americans not being aware always how they are bumping into others and intruding upon others, Americans… - Robert Kagan

In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.

[T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the “color revolutions” of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union -- in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?

Anti-liberals these 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, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump's core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders' America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected.