Illiberal America by Steven Hahn
If liberalism is a slippery word to define, how about illiberalism? Steven Hahn writes that illiberals advocate ethnocentric projects of mobilization and governance, religiously inscribed boundaries of belonging, hypermasculine relations of gender and sexuality, violent means of sizing power and repressive responses to dissent.
In Illiberal America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian recognizes than even such an inclusive description will miss some points. Liberal and illiberal tendencies have been at work in America from colonial times. The Mayflower Compact, once taught in U.S. schools as the forerunner of the Constitution, had participatory democratic and exclusionary aspects. It was a theocracy of white men.
Hahn gives short shrift to the myth of the “noble frontiersman.” In reality, they sound MAGA, complaining about dispossession by the elites and preying on those more vulnerable than themselves, Native, Black or white. Thomas Jefferson probably never intended the universal rights he put forth in the Declaration of Independence to be widely applied. It was a statement of political equality between Americans and British, yet later on his words were interpreted literally and became a touchstone for democracy and civil rights for everyone and inspired the abolition of slavery.
Coercive labor, however, continued to enjoy the protection of the U.S. Constitution after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. “The explosion of criminal offenses on the statute books of states and municipalities that clearly targeted Black men” led to the “leasing of Black convicts to private interests—especially railroad and mining companies,” Hahn writes. And then there were wars against Native Americans and Indian reservations, the brutal conquest of the Philippines, the racially-minded immigration quotas, the Ku Klux Klan’s role in enforcing Prohibition and the American Legion’s role—post World War I—as vigilantes for corporations. Benito Mussolini was made an honorary member of the Legion.
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Perhaps the most intriguing pages of Illiberal America concern the inspiration Adolf Hitler derived from America’s model of limited immigration, eugenic laws and Jim Crow. His planned conquest of Eastern Europe was patterned after the “winning of the west” by the U.S.
Illiberal America concludes with Marjorie Taylor Green’s call for a “national divorce” of red and blue states, with the reds amenable to restricting voting and civil rights. According to polls, nearly half of GOP voters agree. “Illiberalism is America’s history,” Hahn writes, adding a crucial point: “But not all of that history.”
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