When New York University history professor Steven Hahn was working on his book, Illiberal America — A History, he had Donald Trump on his mind. If the so-called liberal tradition in the United States included aspirational values like the protection of universal rights through the rule of law and democratic elections, Hahn was examining the darker part of our history.
For many decades now, historians have been upending the myths and self-flattery that previously had been staples of our university and high school history curricula. While Fox News and right-wing social media have condemned historians like Hahn as “haters” of America, in Hahn’s view he has merely been carrying out the historian’s craft of describing the facts of our past and interpreting them.
Illiberalism is not a history of the United States. It’s a history of the many times that Illiberalism — racism, violence, expulsion, restrictions of democracy — broke through to the surface of our social life and of how those elements of our history survive today. “I was writing from the point of view of those who have been on the receiving end of illiberalism,” Hahn said.
One of Hahn’s previous books, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration, won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2004. He spoke to Capital & Main from his home in New York City.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Capital & Main: Did you write this book to try to explain to your readers and yourself the historical soil out of which Donald Trump emerged?
Steven Hahn: I actually began thinking about the book as Trump was becoming a serious candidate in 2015-16. Journalists kept talking about the ways in which he violated liberal democratic norms. As an historian, I wondered what norms they were talking about. By 2016, the Supreme Court had intervened in a presidential election and the Voting Rights Act had been undermined. Citizens United had opened up the spigots of big money in politics. Many states were beginning to make participating in elections more difficult through new voter ID and registration laws. It seemed to me that American democracy was already on pretty shaky ground, as it had long been.
You write that “illiberalism’s history is America’s history.” You begin this narrative of illiberalism before the American Revolution.
I do think that the groundwork for Trump was laid much earlier in our history and was not some sort of contemporary anomaly. I think it’s fair to say that most people think about a liberal tradition as central to the American historical experience.
The liberal tradition is about American exceptionalism and about a certain optimism towards the future. It’s an ideal type that expresses a view about rights, about equality, about the rule of law, about governance and the balancing of power. I was writing about how these ideals were always violated.
What are the features of Illiberalism?
There is a belief in basic inequalities, whether they’re civil, political or social. There is an embrace of what you might call ascribed or assigned hierarchies of gender or race or nationality and a desire for cultural and/or religious homogeneity. There is a sense that rights are limited, or particularistic, meaning you can have your rights but you can have your rights over there but you don’t necessarily carry them with you here, meaning in my community or neighborhood.
How is that practiced?
There is the making of internal and external enemies, and the use of exclusions and expulsions to suppress them. Politically, there is the use of violence as an acceptable means of achieving or maintaining power. More broadly, the will of the community supersedes the rule of law. Illiberalism has always run close to the surface of our history. Sometimes it explodes through, sometimes it does not, but its force has been more powerful than we have reckoned with.
Place Trump’s threat to deport 20 million people from the United States in historical context.
Expulsions and exclusions have been a central aspect of our past. Remember, Abraham Lincoln was in favor of exiling Black people to another country — colonization — at least up until 1863. Andrew Jackson became famous for massacring Seminoles and fugitives from enslavement in 1816 in Florida before he pushed for the Indian Removal Act as president in 1830, the forced removal of Native peoples from the Southeast to something called Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.
Mormons were hounded out of Ohio, Missouri and Illinois. Catholic convents were burned to the ground. Abolitionists white and Black were mobbed in Northern cities. A powerful nativist campaign in the 1850s sought to exclude Irish Catholic immigrants from the political arena. Black political leaders in the Reconstruction South were driven off or murdered. There was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which imposed a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States, and the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded Asian immigrants and set up a quota system based on national origin that favored northern Europeans.
During the Progressive period, eugenics was embraced as a way to rid society of the “feeble-minded” and the reborn Ku Klux Klan turned its vengeance on Catholics and Jews as well as Blacks. The federal government deported foreign-born immigrant radicals during and after World War I. And the mass incarcerations of the late 20th and 21st centuries not only expelled — and continues to expel — unprecedented numbers of poor people of color from their communities but also disfranchised them from political participation. Trump’s plan for deportations fits into a long history.
One premise that you explore is that historical interpretation shapes our politics. “Make America Great Again” strikes me as a slogan that asserts the same thing. If university history departments generally debunk our national myths, how is it that an idealized interpretation of our past seems politically dominant?
Trump has not been specific about when America was great, but he was obviously gesturing to a time before the Civil Rights Movement, before feminism, before the population of the United States became more culturally complex. He was imagining the 1950s or the late 1940s where there was a certain kind of stability and white dominance, male dominance.
Academic history has done a lot to change our understanding about race, slavery, minority rights, women’s experience, class. The intense conflict is over the political meaning and what we do with those interpretations. The recent efforts to ban the teaching of certain subjects — to limit or exclude slavery, race and gender — is a measure of how academic historians and their popularizers have had a large impact on the public.
You point out that there are many people who believed the role of government was to protect their “illiberal worlds,” as you define it. What were some of those worlds?
Certainly, slavery demanded the creation and defense of individual local sovereignties in order to maintain control over enslaved people. It was a community, but a community of enslavers.
This has left an indelible mark on our history. There were also all sorts of small rural communities and towns that had their own hierarchies, power relationships and ways of doing things that they were very defensive about and protective of. States’ rights and local control expresses these suspicions of outside power.
Illiberalism was widespread in the 1940s and ’50s in the struggle over integrating neighborhoods. When African Americans moved from the South into the urban North and West, some white ethnics there effectively said, “Black people can have their rights over there, but they don’t have the right to move here.” George Wallace was someone who fed off of that by creating a new language of grievance.
From the “Black codes” after Reconstruction, through the use of violent state power to bust unions, to the super-surveillance apparatus in Amazon warehouses, much of illiberalism has been directed at controlling workers and labor. Talk about that.
In the first half of the 19th century, the people who worked in the most important areas of the economy were enslaved people in the South and women and children in textile mills in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. As America industrialized its working class, there was a strong push to exercise control over what was basically a Black and European immigrant and, to some extent, Asian immigrant working class. As working people began to mobilize, there was pushback by state and local governments, but also by the courts. The courts were probably the most effective in preventing working people from achieving collective bargaining and empowering themselves by issuing injunctions against strikes and ruling on the side of contract freedom.
One of the interesting facts that jumped out at me was that in the reconstructed Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, 40,000 Protestant ministers were members. And the later Tea Party was not made up of the poor or white working class.
The reconstituted Klan was composed chiefly of middle-class types, middle- and lower-middle-class white Protestants. They controlled the politics of some states, Indiana most prominently, but also Colorado, Kansas, Texas and Oregon, in fact many places in the Midwest and Far West.
Illiberalism, in terms of its class dimensions, draws mightily from those you would call small property types. If you look at the Tea Party that emerged quickly after Obama’s election, you’re not looking at poor people or uneducated people. These were people with college degrees. Many were Protestant evangelicals. Many were veterans or had been in law enforcement. I do think the Tea Party is the best clue about the kind of social base that Trump initially depended on and then fed off. In the recent election, he broadened his base of support in some areas.
Your book paints a dark picture of the American past. Do you worry that some readers will conclude that our country is irredeemable and will therefore turn cynical and passive?
The hardest part of the book for me to write was the conclusion. I didn’t want simply to end on a dark note, but I also didn’t want to be Pollyannaish, as in “here’s how to fix it.” I don’t have any easy suggestions about that.
What I try to do is suggest that once we de-center liberalism and recognize illiberalism as an important field of force, other significant political currents also are better revealed. I write that illiberalism’s history is America’s history, though the next line is, “but not all of that history.” There were competing currents oriented to people’s rights and popular forms of democracy that we have to recognize. We had abolitionism, feminism, cooperativism, social democracy, so an incredible range of political ideas and movements, some very successful.
