Steven Hahn on Illberal America

Steven Hahn

Stephen Hahn, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

Ezra Klein

So in Trump's first term, we often heard the advice, don't normalize him. This is not normal. This is abnormal. We would hear, this is not who we are. And your view is this is sort of normal. This is part of who we are and always has been.

Steven Hahn

Well, I think that there was a deep desire to think about a set of liberal democratic norms, the use of the term norms, as a way of understanding how we have been as a people and how we have Practiced politics. And therefore, there was as alarming as Trump may have been, there was something comforting about thinking that this was a weird abnormality. It was kind of a noxious weed that had sprouted. A dying gasp of an old order. Either that or as a dangerous protrusion of a new order potentially coming into being, but that could be pulled out and we would go back to normal. I was really struck in 2015-16, not so much by him per se, but by journalists and other very thoughtful observers who were aghast at his various violations of liberal democratic norms, Even though for the previous two and a half, three decades, they had been undermined in so many different respects, but wanting to hold on to them and not to normalize him.

Ezra Klein

So you write that illiberalism is, quote, deeply embedded in our history, not at the margins, but very much at the center. When you say that, what is the illiberalism you're talking about?

Steven Hahn

I'm talking about a way of thinking about the world that has to do with the embrace of inequality, inherent inequalities, about hierarchies of nation and race and gender, about a desire For cultural and or religious uniformity, a particularist idea about rights, meaning you don't carry your rights with you. You may have them where they are, but you don't have them all the time. An idea of marking internal as well as external enemies and the use of exclusion or expulsion as a way of dealing with this, thinking about the access to and maintenance of power with The legitimacy of political violence. And as much as anything, really it's about the will of the community over the rule of law. And I think understanding this as a set of ideas and relationships that really preceded the European colonization of North America and has preceded liberalism and then became very

Ezra Klein

Much entangled to it but had a logic of its own. Let's go into a bit of that historical depth. One of the parts of your book I found interesting was your analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. That's normally seen as a document laying out the early structure of America's inevitable ascent into liberal democracy. And you read it quite differently.

Steven Hahn

I read it both in terms of his interest and admiration for what he saw as a robust individualism and equality, but I also read it as a series of warnings about where this could be headed. Had to do with his very long chapter on slavery and race, which he recognized infused the entire country. In fact, he thought racism was more powerful where slavery had been abolished than where slavery still existed. But I was especially interested in how he understood local democracy and local politics in general, the collective and associational activities. And what worried him was what he called the tyranny of the majority, the narrowness of mind, the way in which associations on the ground tended to emphasize certain ideas about belonging, But at the same time put those who didn't fit in into real jeopardy. He ended up arguing that he thought it was likely or is certainly possible that the United States could very, very quickly move toward a despotism and where people would be willing to Give up their rights and loyalty to a strong man. So you read this and you think, you know, I think he really had his finger on things that were going on in the 1830s that oftentimes, as you mentioned, are kind of overlooked because it Has become one of those texts that are iconic in establishing ideas of American exceptionalism. And it was republished during the early phases of the Cold War, when ideas about American exceptionalism and American consensus were taking great strength. So

Steven Hahn

About a way of thinking about the world that has to do with the embrace of inequality, inherent inequalities, about hierarchies of nation and race and gender, about a desire for cultural And or religious uniformity, a particularist idea about rights, meaning you don't carry your rights with you. You may have them where they are, but you don't have them all the time. An idea of marking internal as well as external enemies and the use of exclusion or expulsion as a way of dealing with this, thinking about the access to and maintenance of power with The legitimacy of political violence. And as much as anything, really it's about the will of the community over the rule of law. And I think understanding this as a set of ideas and relationships that really preceded the European colonization of North America and has preceded liberalism and then became very

Ezra Klein

Much entangled to it but had a logic of its own. Let's go into a bit of that historical depth. One of the parts of your book I found interesting was your analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. That's normally seen as a document laying out the early structure of America's inevitable ascent into liberal democracy. And you read it quite differently.

Steven Hahn

But I was especially interested in how he understood local democracy and local politics in general, the collective and associational activities. And what worried him was what he called the tyranny of the majority, the narrowness of mind, the way in which associations on the ground tended to emphasize certain ideas about belonging, But at the same time put those who didn't fit in into real jeopardy. He ended up arguing that he thought it was likely or is certainly possible that the United States could very, very quickly move toward a despotism and where people would be willing to Give up their rights and loyalty to a strong man. So you read this and you think, you know, I think he really had his finger on things that were going on in the 1830s that oftentimes,

Ezra Klein

And you have a chapter on this, and particularly around Jackson's use of deportations and expulsions, which you see as central to the illiberal tradition and I think is central to the Sort of story we're tracking here. So tell me a bit about that decade from your perspective. Right.

Steven Hahn

Obviously, expulsion of Native peoples from their lands east of the Mississippi to what was regarded as Indian territory, which was really the first territory in the United States That was not imagined as heading towards statehood. So it's not entirely clear what it was. This was the end of a process that had begun back in the 17th century that was directed toward removing, expelling Native people. But the thing that's important to recognize is that this was a central aspect of American society and political culture in that period. Free African Americans were targeted for expulsion. It was called colonization. This goes back to the 18th century and even Thomas Jefferson, who couldn't really imagine how white and black people could live together under conditions of freedom in some ways that Tocqueville re-articulated. But there were mobs that were focused on driving out not only African-Americans in cities where they were free or had escaped from enslavement, Catholics, Mormons. You know, Joseph Smith is murdered in the 1840s, not far from Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln's place. Abolitionists. The 1830s were a time of these anti-abolitionist riots in cities large and small because they were accused of promoting miscegenation. And what was the remedy? The remedy was to drive them out. Tell me a bit about the rhetoric Jackson uses to justify the expulsions.

Ezra Klein

If somebody's reading it today, how much of it would read horrifying and archaic to our ears? We don't think like that anymore. And how much would not?

Steven Hahn

How much would we hear resonance in? That's a really good question. And in fact, it suggests the way in which historical understanding and thinking has really changed. One of the reasons that Jackson attained heroic proportions for a very long time was his status as an enslaver and his multifaceted role as an Indian fighter tended to be diminished. And what was emphasized was his apparent support for the common man, popular democracy, the age of Jackson, so to speak. You know, Jackson thought, like many white Americans thought, that Native people didn't belong, that they were in jeopardy of basically dying out, and that what he was doing was actually In their interest. By finding a territory outside of the centers of population where Native people could in some ways be safe. You know, we only would read this in a horrifying way because of what we've learned about the really complicated history of Native peoples and how this has been a long-term process of Expulsion. So he tried to dress it up as something that he was doing as an alternative to their physical destruction and their dying out. But I think a modern reader, by and large, who knew anything about the history of the United States and of Native people, would recognize what he was really after.

Ezra Klein

How connected is it to Jackson's politics of the common man? How much does the support of the common man, the channeling of the common man, braid itself into this project of who you have to push out so they're not part of the common man.

Steven Hahn

Right. I think he saw himself as representing the interests of white Americans in the trans Appalachian West, who themselves were in the process of trying to expand their population and settlements, Which would be at the expense of Native people. And so, in a sense, what Jackson really represented was, you know, he was the first president from the Trans Appalachian West. He had strong support among white adults, white adult men from that area and also from the Southern states because he was a slave owner and he was committed to the maintenance of slavery. So, you know, at the same time, access to politics in the United States, in most states, in terms of voting and office holding, property holding requirements were being dropped. And so adult white men had more access than ever. And so even though in most places people of African descent didn't, women didn't, in some ways the workforce in many, many places didn't because they were made up of women and children. But nonetheless, there was kind of this sense that the groundwork for what would be an expanse of democracy was being laid then.

Ezra Klein

Jackson is interesting, I think, in this moment particularly, because he is very explicitly talked about as a model for Donald Trump. Trump restored his portrait to the Oval Office. When you hear Trump and the people around him, like Steve Bannon in the first term, who talk a lot about Jackson, who lionize Jackson, what do you hear them connecting to in him?

Steven Hahn

Expulsion of Native peoples from their lands east of the Mississippi to what was regarded as Indian territory, which was really the first territory in the United States that was not Imagined as heading towards statehood. So it's not entirely clear what it was. This was the end of a process that had begun back in the 17th century that was directed toward removing, expelling Native people. But the thing that's important to recognize is that this was a central aspect of American society and political culture in that period. Free African Americans were targeted for expulsion. It was called colonization. This goes back to the 18th century and even Thomas Jefferson, who couldn't really imagine how white and black people could live together under conditions of freedom in some ways that Tocqueville re-articulated. But there were mobs that were focused on driving out not only African-Americans in cities where they were free or had escaped from enslavement, Catholics, Mormons. You know, Joseph Smith is murdered in the 1840s, not far from Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln's place. Abolitionists. The 1830s were a time of these anti-abolitionist riots in cities large and small because they were accused of promoting miscegenation.

Steven Hahn

Expulsion of Native peoples from their lands east of the Mississippi to what was regarded as Indian territory, which was really the first territory in the United States that was not Imagined as heading towards statehood. So it's not entirely clear what it was. This was the end of a process that had begun back in the 17th century that was directed toward removing, expelling Native people. But the thing that's important to recognize is that this was a central aspect of American society and political culture in that period. Free African Americans were targeted for expulsion. It was called colonization. This goes back to the 18th century and even Thomas Jefferson, who couldn't really imagine how white and black people could live together under conditions of freedom in some ways that Tocqueville re-articulated. But there were mobs that were focused on driving out not only African-Americans in cities

Steven Hahn

And 1920. What were they? Well, the Palmer Raids are called the Palmer Raids because the attorney general of the United States was A. Mitchell Palmer. I think it was an example of how people who were regarded by those in power as politically objectionable could suffer all sorts of forms of repression, including expulsions of various Sorts. It included people who were isolationists, but it also included people who were on the left, first socialists who had a complicated history with that, and then after the Russian Revolution, People who were associated with the spread of communism, were those who quite simply did not fit into their view of what the United States should be, which is a republic of white Christians. And in that particular time, the federal government became involved in the repression of these movements, and whether it involved prosecuting them. I mean, Eugene Debs ran for president from jail, or whether it had to do with expelling them, not only communists and socialists, but people who were accused of anarchism. Asako and Vanzetti, you know, became a very notorious example of how that could happen. It's important to recognize that the Ku Klux Klan was in the process of reorganizing in this period. Was reestablished during the teens, but it really exploded in the 1920s. And it fed off a lot of these currents. It admired fascist regimes elsewhere. It admired the sort of political violence and paramilitarism that went into it. You know, one of the things that they did was enforce prohibition, which they regarded as an attack on the life ways of European immigrants and others who were not white Christians.

Steven Hahn

Why? Well, one of the things I try to do in the book, which is recognizing that illiberalism is not one thing. Not an unchanging static thing, it's a collection of ideas and notions of relationships or political power, is to think about how illiberalism was modernized during what we call the Progressive period. And there, the idea of social engineering, the use of eugenics, which is oftentimes not adequately accounted for by historians of the period. Disfranchisement, segregation, warfare overseas that was justified in racialized terms. The use of troops who basically got their experience in Indian wars in the trans-Mississippi West. And the idea that was advocated by people, Herbert Crowley is a good example because he was one of the founders of the New Republic. He was one of the advocates of Teddy Roosevelt's new nationalism. And yet he was very suspicious of what he called Jeffersonian democracy. He thought that many people in the United States didn't understand the national purpose and that therefore politics really should be conducted by those who were trained, by those

Ezra Klein

Who were experts. I mean, doesn't Hitler praise American immigration policy in this period?

Steven Hahn

He was a great advocate of westward expansion because this was the American version of breathing room. You know, the Nazis and American scientists were sharing a lot of their work about eugenics. I mean, they kind of sensed that they were involved in a joint project. Without saying that the United States was moving in a Nazi direction. I mean, there were people, obviously, who in the 1930s very much embraced what was going on in Germany on many accounts. There were many people in the 20s and into the early 30s who thought that Mussolini was really pointing out the future that the Euro-Atlantic world was headed, because he seemed to be Somebody who was active, engaged, strong, and recognized the limitations of a kind of the liberal state that had really fallen into real question. You know, the Klan was the largest social movement in the 1920s, and their ideas about what the United States would be, it was an early America first-ism. I mean, that's really where it emerges. And so, again, I think that without necessarily saying that this was Italian fascism or this was Nazi, which it wasn't, But to say that some of the ideas, some of the connections and the Overall project, the sense of who really should be participating in this, who shouldn't be participating. But flip

Ezra Klein

It, because I think so often in politics, particularly those of us who like thinking about ideas, we think about the supply side, not the demand side, to be an economist about it. Think about what politicians and political movements are offering, but those offerings only matter if they meet or create demand. And so, yes, what was happening in America is not Italian fascism. It's not Nazism. It's not anything that is anywhere else because we have our own context but there is a demand for something i think that's at least in an early way speaking to similar anxieties speaking To similar views about belonging speaking similar fears about what will happen to a country if it becomes too multicultural or the power structure changes too much or the wrong kinds Of people are voting. I always think we make this mistake that we're so focused on what the politicians say that we forget that what they say only matters if it matches what the voters want.

Steven Hahn

I agree. I do think it is important to recognize the kind of social basis that existed for these ideas. Because, you know, as horrific as we may find it, you know, disfranchisement and segregation, Jim Crow, as we call it, only had pushback coming from the, you know, African Americans, And not all of them, but most of them. And most white Americans and political leaders thought that this was a perfectly reasonable, perfectly modern way of choreographing the great diversity and inequalities that existed In American society.

Ezra Klein

And it's probably a good time to bring in Joseph McCarthy, who he's a politician and a political force, I think a much bigger political force and is now remembered. And he's remembered for, you know, communist witch hunting. Also a very early example of a populist style that Trump fits very well into. And it gets embraced by elite dimensions of conservatism. William F. Buckley writes a book sort of, it's sort of anti-anti is the way I'd put it. Like, okay, yeah, McCarthy maybe goes a bit too far, but the people who oppose him are the real problem, which is a very common form of Donald Trump defense. Tell me a bit about McCarthy's political style, the anti-elitism of it, the populism of it, the way he wraps up his liberalism.

Steven Hahn

Part of the reception of McCarthyism, especially among historians, was to liken it to 19th century populism because they saw very much of what you're describing, the kind of anti-elitism, His emergence out of a particular social setting, his finding of enemies, internal as well as external, at a time when mass movements were held in a lot of suspicion by historians, journalists, And scholars because they had just come out of a war recognizing that fascism was a mass movement. It wasn't simply taking a power coup d'etat on the part of a small elite or oligarchy. And so, you know, McCarthy is now, not surprisingly, getting a new look by people on the political right precisely because they felt that he had the courage to stand up to those who were Threatening American values and American politics. And he did this, you know, at great, in the end, personal cost. But I mean, you know, Joseph McCarthy fit into a framework in which a lot of this was going on anyway. And it was not only going on among Republicans, it was going on among Democrats. I mean, what historians have found is that actually the people who voted for populists in the past were not the people who voted for McCarthy, at least in terms of their social profiles. And so that was sort of debunked and that McCarthy was not a kind of new 19th century populism. He was really appealing to a different kind of constituency, obviously more native born, but not entirely native-born, people who were sort of small business types.

Ezra Klein

I want to hold on the anti-elitism and the anti-institutionalism of him for a second, because one way I've heard McCarthy being brought up as a referent to what is happening now is, look, He was on the hunt for communists. There were communists at different layers of American life. And he also had a broader view, as did many others in conservatism at that time, that the big institutions of American life had been captured. And, you know, the culture had been captured in Hollywood, and the universities were captured, and maybe even the government was captured, too. And the hunt for communists, which I've seen people analogizing now to the hunt for people who believe in DEI or anti-Semites or wokeness, also became a way to break open these institutions, To use the power of the state to cow them, and to force them to come back into some kind of alignment, or at least stop opposing the alignment with what McCarthy represented and the political Tendencies that he fought for.

Steven Hahn

How valid do you think that analogy is? Well, you know, one of the things we have to recognize is that the federal state grew enormously from the 1930s through the 1940s into the 1950s. About a world of people who were trained into these institutions, what expansive and bureaucratic institutions might involve. There's no question, I think, that he directed attention and concern to institutions that really didn't have a deep history in the United States, that were far from the direct reach Of many Americans who were themselves experiencing enormous change, whether it had to do in bigger cities. I mean, a lot of these struggles over housing, you know, people have this idea, well, it wasn't until the 1960s when the urban uprisings began, but actually it was much earlier as there Were housing shortages, there were population demographic migrations. And so I think he did appeal to those who were trying to hold on to a kind of sense of community that they saw in part being overrun. And by going after the institutions and suggesting that not only were they far from you, but they were being infested by people who didn't have your interests in mind at all, whatever You understood about socialism, communism, or the left.

Ezra Klein

One of the things we're seeing now is different institutions American life having to make this choice. Do they try to make a deal with the administration? Do they try to bend the knee to the administration? Or do they fight? I mean, Harvard just decided to fight. In the McCarthy era, how would you tell that story of the institutional response? Like, what was the period, you know, were they lockstep in trying to submit to this until something changed?

Steven Hahn

What can be learned from that now? I think the response was mostly bending the knee.

Ezra Klein

Political figures and political groups, McCarthy, Jackson, the Ku Klux Klan, that to the extent people think about an illiberal tradition, they all fit very squarely in it. One of the points of your book is that liberalism and illiberalism are often braided together in the same people. So around this time, we have Japanese internment, and you have over 100,000 people, many, many, many of them citizens, rounded up and put in camps. No due process, no ability to have a court decide if they were actually a threat to the country. And this is done by liberal hero FDR. How do you think about what leads to that?

Steven Hahn

I think that one of the challenges that liberals have had is that even though they may embrace a whole variety of ideas and relationships that we may find admirable, that nonetheless, I think they are interested in maintaining social order, that in many of them, they still do have an acceptance of cultural hierarchies. I mean, look, the liberals played a very important role in so-called McCarthyism. And they were the leaders. Arthur Schlesinger and the establishment of Americans for Democratic Action and all of this was to try to sort of hive liberals off the left of American society. Not only that, but condemn the left as followers and people who really should be subject to deep suspicion. And it was okay if you fired them, you know, from universities or other positions because they were evil. They were the internal enemies. I do think that liberals were not very well equipped for the sort of unravelings that began to take place and that they kind of begin to abandon the whole project.

Ezra Klein

Another way that I think that same dynamic can be read, and here I'm not supporting Japanese internment, but I do want to raise this as a question, is that the liberals who are nationally Successful often contain some of this countercurrent inside of them. That you are describing such a strong and present and enduring ideological faction in American politics that it isn't going to be a surprise that FDR, that Lyndon Johnson, who contains The American South inside of him, that, you know, Bill Clinton in a very different way, who's sort of a merger of unusual currents, that Barack Obama, who part of what his genius is, is Being able to speak to the white and black story and fears and anxieties and politics at the same time, that much of what ends up getting remembered as disappointing about them, I think From a different perspective, has been a pluralism that I think their defenders certainly would say, kept some of these other currents in check because, you know, it sort of drained Some of their opponents of power. Definitely Bill Clinton's defenders often say to me, I had Rahm Emanuel on the show, he said this explicitly, look, this is the guy who took crime and immigration off the table as weaknesses And welfare for the Democratic Party. And that's how Democrats came back to national power. And now it's looked back on as a terrible set of compromises, but the alternative was losing to these ideas. How do you think about that tension?

Steven Hahn

Well, I think it's important to describe it as a tension. I think it's certainly the case with many liberals who have ascended to important leadership positions in American political life, that it comes with the terrain of seeking office And dealing with complicated constituencies and our own complicated past. I mean, obviously, people in the Democratic Party through the 1960s, you know, had the southern wing of the party that they had to appease. And, you know, you can excuse it from today until tomorrow, but they did. And, you know, Johnson famously said when he was signing either the civil rights or the voting rights, you know, now we've lost the South for a generation. And that was true. It's also important for us to recognize that, you know, across our history, you know, most of the political regimes, so to speak, were regimes that were conservative. You know, the United States have a very, very, not simply overall violent history, but a politically violent history. You know, it's not as if liberal democracy and political violence were separate or parallel. I mean, they were interconnected, you know, from the beginning and usually to the benefit of people with wealth and power and people who wanted to exclude large sections of the American Public from having decision-making power and

Ezra Klein

We quote his speech about the defense industrial complex. What was Operation Wetback?

Steven Hahn

Well, you know, we need to understand that in relationship to the Bracero program, which was a sort of government-sponsored program that was meant to provide labor, mostly for big Agriculture, but not only for big agriculture, and so that immigrants had the right to work, and they usually were moving back and forth across the border. But by the 1950s, this was coming under attack, and therefore Operation Wetback was an attempt to sort of push that back across the Rio Grande and back into Mexico. But the idea was to basically deport people. And it kind of expressed, you know, one of the really complicated aspects of American economic development policy, which is on the one hand, it depended so heavily on so many different Groups of immigrants. And on the other hand, there was hostility to them, especially by that time to those of Mexico. It sort of gives us an idea of the really, you know, sort of repressive impulses and the ease of building a repressive apparatus. You know, Dwight D. Eisenhower, you know, admittedly, it's easy to look back compared to what we're situated with now. But, you know, when the Warren court came down with the Brown decision in 1954, his response was, you know, appointing Earl Warren to the court was the worst mistake he ever made. And they had to go through a second Brown decision to provide some means of enforcement.

Ezra Klein

One thing in that era, though, is you have American citizens being deported. And one reason I'm interested in it, in addition to the fact that Trump allies use it as an example now, is that it's a reminder that we have done deportations in violations of rights people Were assumed to have had many, many, many times before. I think that's right.

Steven Hahn

Certainly, we know that during the time of the Red Scare, in the period of World War I, that there were lots of immigrants who were also politically radical, who were deported and whose Rights were regarded in very, very limited ways and whose deportation was generally embraced, accepted by the public. In some ways, it's because the advent of citizenship and the 14th Amendment, strong as it was in many respects, didn't really, you know, that

Ezra Klein

To believe that people have. One thing you're gesturing at here, which I think is important, is the way in which we seem to phase in and out of periods. And oftentimes, even from a decade before what you're in, what you're about to be in feels unimaginable. And so, I mean, we talked about the Palmer raids. They lead, in a sense, to the founding of the ACLU. We're talking about Operation Wetback, but it's just over a decade later that LBJ overturns the Johnson-Reed Act. And those sort of racist quotas dissolve, at least for that period of time. And so, how do you think about this question of the cycles of it? Is it a pendulum that one action creates a backlash? Is it much more contingent and unpredictable than that? I mean, you go from Obama to Donald Trump, right? There is this way in which one era feels, it often feels much more radically different, almost radically opposite to the era that preceded it. It seems to me, I'm not somebody who thinks about pendulums.

Steven Hahn

I don't think that history repeats itself. But I do think that there are moments when circumstances make possible developments moving in any one of a number of directions. And so, you know, even if you think about Obama and Trump, I think it follows perfectly. You know, Obama gets elected and everybody was talking about how we were now in a post-racial society. And then two blinks, you know, the Tea Party is organized and basically Obama draws out a lot of deep racism in American society and senses that a black person like him should not legitimately Hold the power he does. Therefore, you have a birther movement, which really harks back to Reconstruction when, you know, Southern whites recognized that slavery was over, but the idea of empowering former Slaves was just inconceivable to them. And you realize some of the depictions of Obama, you know, in African dress and so on and so forth, I think suggests, I mean, I think, you know, it's an interesting question about— And Trump rides birtherism to the forefront of the Republican Party. I mean, he found his way into leadership precisely in that even when it was debunked even when it was absolutely clear that this was a lie. Nonetheless, most Republicans still believe that it was this idea of the general illegitimacy of certain groups of people holding power and breaking the hierarchies that they thought Were essential to stability and security in the United States.

Ezra Klein

That, in a way, looks at least facially different. People aren't leaving the country. I mean, now we're possibly going to do mass incarceration in El Salvadoran prisons as opposed to American ones. But tell me about the continuities you draw there.

Steven Hahn

I think that it's important to recognize that, first of all, we have a long history of incarcerating people. And from the birth of the penitentiary in the early 19th century on, you know, the people who were incarcerated, wherever they were incarcerated, were disproportionately poor, disproportionately Disproportionately black. I do think that basically what happened was after the enormous urban unrest in the 1960s, that there was kind of the sense that, well, they could militarily occupy big cities or they Could find other ways of pacifying and repressing the populations. And I think part of what happens is that, you know, there is a bipartisan consensus on crime as a problem that's out of control, people of color as those who are most threatening, most Dangerous, and that effectively deporting them from society and putting them in institutions where at least they were under, you know, direct surveillance and repressive control. And we have to, again, remember that, you know, what happens is they're not only expelled from communities, but they're effectively expelled from political society because not only Don't they have political rights and they had a fight for whatever civil rights they, you know, do they have a right to sue? Do they have a right to challenge the structures of power within penitentiaries? Fear that a lot of people would be okay with expelling citizens who are deemed to be true enemies of the people because of their violence or because of their racial and ethnic background. I mean, Trump is racist explicitly now. Explicitly. And whatever the courts do, he's obviously looking for a confrontation. He's interested in provocation. And he thinks basically there's nothing much they can do about it. And that may prove to be the case. So when you look across

Ezra Klein

How does the political system or at least a faction in it come together and say, the rights have gone too far? The community has expanded too much? What seems to connect the periods and what feels new to you in some of them or in this moment?

Steven Hahn

I do think that what happens is that it's very easy to invoke a notion of communities under siege being threatened. It reminded me of ideas and relationships that could so quickly be reconfigured about, you know, belonging and what the, even before the United States became the United States, but What it meant to be part of communities, what rights communities had to exclude or to expel, to punish, and who in many cases desperately tried not to be the other. One of the things we saw is that, you know, there were members of quote-unquote immigrant groups who supported Trump. And this is part of a long-term phenomenon whereby those who have arrived in established stability, this is true during the Great Migration too, where northern Black communities Were, you know, not all that comfortable with these rural Black people who were coming up who didn't really know the ways and were potentially threatening the stability of their own Communities. It's an easy thing to kind of drum up because it has been so much part of the conversation for so long.

Ezra Klein

Is Trump in the work you do, after you've done books like this, with the knowledge of American history you have, does it make him look to you like a more or less familiar figure? Does he feel like a manifestation of something common? Or does he seem very distinctive?

Steven Hahn

Well, I think one of the things that makes him seem so, quote, distinctive and unprecedented is, you know, if we think about the national level, where, you know, there's no question That it would be very difficult to find anybody who has ascended to the presidency and has behaved in the cruel and demeaning, not only to people, but to institutions, to his political Enemies. But I do think that if one is aware of what has gone on over the course of U.S. History on the state and local levels— And George Wallace in Pennsylvania. I mean, Wallace, certainly the case. And he's somebody, I think, who's really important, who did become a national figure. And I don't know what would have happened if it wasn't for the Assassin's Bullet in, you know, 1972, which basically pushed him out of a race that he was in the process of maybe winning. But, you know, you think about, you know, a world that was organized around slavery and the personal domination of people who were enslavers. You think about a variety of what one scholar has called authoritarian enclaves, not only in the South, but in other parts of the United States, where there were hierarchies of power That were long existing and that were supported by a lot of people because they basically saw benefits that came from it. And I think one of the things we have to understand about illiberalism and illiberal communities or sensibilities is that there was a lot in them that was satisfying. Mean, when people who were in the Klan in the 1920s were interviewed later, they couldn't understand. I mean, I'm talking about ordinary people like in Indiana, which was a state that was pretty much dominated by the Klan. They didn't see themselves as being involved in an extremist organization. An organization that was reinforcing community ideas, that was providing for recreation, that was embedding notions about what it means to be an American, a white person, a Christian. They may not even articulate it that way except for being a Christian. So I think one of the things we need to understand is that it's not simply those moments of rage that we, you know, can identify and then ask, why does that happen? It's a way of life that can go on in very prosaic ways until they're being threatened and then they erupt. But we need to understand the day-to lives that are created, that bring people together, that provide them with all sorts of meaning in their lives. And I think one of the things that is important about recognizing, say, illiberalism as a important current and field of force is that we have a tendency of looking at the disruptions Of the liberal tradition as simply a backlash, as angry people who are venting their fury, which doesn't really have a lot of substance and things can go back to normal easily. And I think that that's a serious mistake.

Ezra Klein

It also gets at something that I think has been a very common fantasy, which is that you can destroy this tendency, right? Maybe it's if you beat Donald Trump in the 2016 election or the 2020 election. Now I think people don't hold this view anymore, but that it was something that you could crush or you could suppress. You could make the things that are dominant in illiberal thought unsayable in polite society. You could make them illegal or unconstitutional. And that you could sort of push them to the margin. Having pushed to the margin, they don't really have a way back in, and they'll sort of fade away and wither and that'll be the end of them and i think something we're seeing with trump is That suppression can work but then if it fails it fails all at once and it turns out the thing you were trying to suppress is much stronger than you understood it to be but i do think one of The reckonings that liberalism is going through right now is a recognition that it doesn't go back it not like maybe Nikki Haley just wins and then we're just done with this whole era. That it's not the sort of, the more comfortable Republican Democratic cleavage that was around in the 90s or the 2000s to people. It's now this liberal, illiberal cleavage, which probably has much deeper roots. And there's not going to be an approach to suppression that's going to work. And there's also not going to be any final victory over it, right? You're just in this fight for the foreseeable future until something you cannot predict changes in some way you cannot currently predict, and maybe not in a way that you would like.

Steven Hahn

You know, you use the word fantasy, and I think that's a very good one, because in 2016, I think there was a sense, first of all, that there was a sense that there was no way he was going to Win. But even when he won, I think there was a sense that this was a very unusual, very toxic phenomenon that once you defeat him, would be defeated. Now, obviously, we've learned that this is not the case. And, you know, I remember shortly after he was inaugurated in 2017, there was a big demonstration in Los Angeles. And someone was carrying a sign which was, I can't believe I'm still protesting this shit. And the answer to that is you're always going to be protesting this shit because there are no final victories of anything. But I think it's also important for us to recognize that politics are very volatile, that people's political sensibilities do not fit into very neat boxes. You know, when Bernie Sanders was running in 2016, there were more than a few people who said that Bernie Sanders would be someone who would be very appealing and that, you know, they Ended up voting for Trump. But, you know, somehow or other, Sanders also touched them in ways that they found very significant, that he understood what they— But they're both also fundamentally anti-institutional Candidates. Right. I mean, very different in the way they're anti-institutional candidates.

Ezra Klein

No, in some ways. But I think we now understand this is a much more fundamental cleavage than people were looking at it as then. Absolutely. I think that's right.

Steven Hahn

But I also feel, you know, I sort of finished the book with an example of this movement in a county in East Texas in the late 19th century where, you know, someone who was part of a community Of enslavers and someone who was part of a community of enslaved came together for basically opportunistic reasons, because they shared grievance with what was going on and they knew They couldn't win local office without forming some kind of coalition. But they actually began to do it little by little. They learned a lot about each other. And in fact, over many years, they came to establish their own republic in the biracial republic where the white people who were the insurgents learned a lot about the needs of the black Community. And the black community was able to engage with what was 30 or 40 percent of the white community. And even then they called themselves populists in the 1890s. And even when the populists nationally lost, they were still winning. And, you know, in the end, they were gunned down.

Ezra Klein

It's not the most stirring, inspirational example to end your book on.

Steven Hahn

But I think it's an example of the way in which really meaningful coalitions and political connections are forged, recognizing things that are beneficial to everybody.

Steven Hahn

Don't think there's any such thing as a pure movement. As a friend of mine put it, you know, if you want to build a movement where everyone has to fit through the eye of a needle, forget it. And, you know, frankly, if you, most social movements don't last very long. But if you're going to build a movement, which I think about in a large way of

Steven Hahn

Don't think there's any such thing as a pure movement. As a friend of mine put it, you know, if you want to build a movement where everyone has to fit through the eye of a needle, forget it. And, you know, frankly, if you, most social movements don't last very long. But if you're going to build a movement, which I think about in a large way of consequence, if you're serious, and

Steven Hahn

I think that's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Okay. Well, first of all, I think Tocqueville's Democracy in America would be a good place to start. Not going into it, thinking of it as the iconic text, but going into it, thinking about it as someone who is an observer from the outside looking in and who has both admiration and reservations. Elizabeth Hinton's book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, which focuses on the 1960s into the early 1970s, and is, I think, a very, very interesting way of understanding how Illiberal sensibilities kind of infuse their way into what are major modern liberal projects and pave the way for mass incarceration, which I learned a lot from. And the third book is a book by Lawrence Powell called Troubled Memory, Anne Levy, The Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana. It's an extraordinary story about a woman who was part of the only whole family to make it out of the Lotz ghetto. And they end up in New Orleans. And when Duke runs for governor, she plays an incredibly important role in outing his Nazi past and helping to undermine his claims to power. So it kind of links fascism on both sides of the Atlantic with an incredibly inspiring