Stephen Hahn, Illiberal America: A History (W.W. Norton, 2024)
A Joe Biden executive order issued seven weeks ago significantly rolled back the classic liberal right to asylum in the United Stated for masses of Latin Americans desperate to escape miserable conditions imposed by US capitalism-imperialism. The order “would,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted, “rush vulnerable people through already fast-tracked deportation proceedings, sending people in need of protection to their deaths.”
An attempt to counter Republican threats to his re-election resulting from the “immigration crisis” at the United States’ imperially stolen southern border, Biden’s move reprised a vicious Trump administration policy that was challenged by the ACLU and shot down in federal court in 2018.
“By reviving Trump’s asylum law,” US Senator Alex Padilla said, “President Biden has undermined American values and abandoned our nation’s obligations to provide people fleeing persecution, violence, and authoritarianism with an opportunity to seek refuge in the U.S.”
But did Biden really “undermine American values”?
White nationalist and nativist Trumpism is not some deviant anomaly for the supposedly exceptional United States’ long liberal-democratic march down the path to a “more perfect union.” As the leading liberal historian Steven Hahn shows in his richly researched and well-crafted book Illiberal America: A History, Trumpism has “deep roots” in potent “illiberal disposition[s] and ideolog[ies]” that run through the nation’s history from its origins through the present. “Americans,” Hahn argues, “ have long been animated by competing values, equally deep-seated, in which the illiberal will of the community overrides individual rights, and often protects itself by excluding perceived threats, whether on grounds of race, religion, gender, economic status, or ideology.”
Hahn digs into the underappreciated power of these tendencies and principles in the colonial era (Hahn’s second chapter), the early US republic (the third chapter), the years of “Jacksonian democracy” (chapter four), the racist assault on Reconstruction (chapter five), the corporatist and shockingly eugenicist not-so Progressive Age (chapter six), the reactionary and repressive 1920s (chapter seven), the right-wing response to the 1960s rebellions (chapter eight, “The Other 1960s”), the “Neoliberal” Carter-to-Clinton years (chapter ten), and the chilling Bush43-Obama44-Trump45 years (his final chapter).
Many liberal Americans look at January 6 and the latest Trump or Trumpist outrage and think to themselves “That’s not us.” They should think again. “Illiberalism,” Hahn demonstrates, “is part of the American bedrock….Illiberal ideas, relations, practices, sensibilities, places of empowerment, cultural hierarchies, and political projects have been” — Hahn writes in his conclusion — “deeply embedded in our history, not at the margins but very much at the center, including the soil of social and political life, and often ensnaring or entangling much else that grows there” (Hahn, Illiberal America, 351).
And it is bipartisan. While “illiberalism” is “a political and cultural disposition and ideology of the right,” Hahn notes, it has often infiltrated the politics of its supposed liberal opponents. “Time and again,” Hahn writes, “men and women regarded as liberals….make quick resort, when faced with challenges to their ideas of how the world should work, to illiberal solutions …to maintain order and right their political ships” ( Hahn, Illiberal America, p. 10)
That is an apt reflection on the supposed liberal Biden’s ugly executive order and on much more that Biden and his “party of inauthentic opposition” – as Sheldon Wolin once incisively labelled the Democrats – say and do these days. Think also of the “liberal” Obama administration and Democratic mayors’ repression of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall and winter of 2011-12 and President Biden and various other Democratic authorities’ (including craven university presidents) recent channeling of false right-wing attacks on student protesters as “antisemitic” – something that has encouraged the repression of remarkable young people who have risen up against Washington’s Biden-led backing of Israel’s sick racist and genocidal war on Gaza. I could go on — and have[1].
I am in significant agreement with Hahn. The sixth chapter, titled “America Was Never Great,” of my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America is a bracing tour through the richly racist, nativist, sexist, classist, repressive, imperialist, and (to use Hahn’s word) “illiberal” sides of American history. It offers a hard-hitting refutation of Biden’s 2019 campaign reference to the Trump presidency as “an aberrant moment in time” that ran contrary to “the character of this nation – to who we are….to the soul of this nation.”
I diverge from Hahn, however, when it comes to the current juncture. Hahn’s deep dives into the dark and NOT liberal sides of British North American and United States history is highly recommended reading, but “illiberalism” is too big, too squishy, and too moderate a term for the openly Hitlerian neofascism that animates the main subject matter of Hahn’s final chapter – Trumpism.
Hahn is right to argue that reactionary disdain for the ideals of democracy and equality are richly interwoven with the much celebrated “liberal tradition” in the making of American history. But we are not at present merely in the middle of an ongoing “same as it ever was” tango between liberalism and its conservative, “illiberal” negation. Quantity has changed to quality after nearly a half-century of vicious capitalist-imperialist neoliberalism. The unmentionably bourgeois electoral, parliamentary, and “rule of law” democracy that has (with some very archaic and right-leaning constitutional characteristics) provided the institutional, political, and ideological sea in which American liberalism has swum for more than 240 years is unraveling before our very all-too disbelieving eyes under the pressure of long simmering contradictions in domestic and global capitalism-imperialism. US “illiberalism” has morphed and congealed into a violent and cultist neofascism that openly defies both electoral outcomes its adherents don’t like and the rule of law when it punishes its leaders and adherents instead of its political opponents. This new, late neoliberal-era Amerikaner fascism[2] has taken over one of the nation’s two dominant political organizations, the now openly radical and retributionist formerly republican, now Republi-fascist Party of Trump (RfPOT). The other reigning political organization (the dismal Democrats) is a neo-Weimar/-Vichy party of counterfeit resistance, complicity, and appeasement.
The final chapter of Illiberal America, on the Bush43-Obama44-Trump45 years (the Biden presidency gets no mention), is titled “Specters of War and Replacement.” Well, yes: talk of civil war and white replacement theory are core parts of a neofascist ideology[3] that has taken over one of the nation’s two dominant political parties today – a political pathology what was on just slightly muted display at the recently concluded and richly dystopian Republican National Convention[3A].
The dreaded F-word does appear in Hahn’s book, to be sure. His chapter on the 1920s and 1930s is titled “Fascist Pulses” and recounts the revanchist, repressive, racist and “illiberal” aspects of interwar America – harsh immigration restriction, KKK terrorism, Red Scare, and Jim Crow – that helped inspire and inform classic historical European fascism under Hitler and Mussolini.
Hahn might want to have a look at my aforementioned book, at Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, at Henry Giroux and Anthony DiMaggio’s recent Fascism on Trial and on much more including above all the weekly Refuse Fascism podcasts to try to get his finger on the Amerikaner fascist pulse in the present century.
Hahn’s book ends with a statement of concern that “authoritarian solutions have an appeal” to many US Americans today “not seen since the early decades of the twentieth century.” Yes, but authoritarian is another one of those too-big and squishy words. Capitalism itself is not fascist but it certainly is authoritarian, as Hahn would quickly glean from a stint at the bottom of any large American workplace – say, as a custodian at his elite university[4]. The Soviet Union was authoritarian but not fascist (and indeed more than 20 million Russians died in the Soviet Union’s life or death ware with the German fascist Third Reich). “Communist” China today is chillingly authoritarian state capitalist but not fascist.
The new neoliberal-era fascist menace today represents a change in the political and ideological superstructure atop an already authoritarian class rule system – capitalism-imperialism.
Historians naturally excel at determining how deeply rooted in the past current developments are. But their emphasis on continuity can blind them to radical departure — to discontinuity. Sometimes we need to use historical knowledge not only to find the old in the new but to properly discern how the present is breaking and different from what came before.
The current juncture is not “same as it ever was,” the ongoing dance of liberal and illiberal. We are in significantly new and uncharted US American historical waters to no small degree with Trumpism-fascism.
And speaking of the present, it is unsettling to a read a “2024” book that purports to instruct us on contemporary US politics – albeit from a deeply historical perspective – yet says next to nothing about the ongoing Biden years, during which time Trump and his party have left no serious doubt (as I have been showing on The Paul Street Report) about the fascist nature of their agenda.
The problem here is worse than failure to keep up with and properly process current events – a chronic occupational and intellectual hazard in the history profession [5]. That Hahn fails or refuses to properly identify the currently dominant American “illiberalism” (Trumpism) as neofascism suggests that he at least passively aligns with other (and lesser) liberal-leftish American historians (Samuel Moyn, Bruce Kuklick, Daniel Bessner, and the preposterous Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins[6]) on the denialist side of the (I think) goofy academic “fascism debate” regarding Trump and Trumpism. That’s a shame but hardly negates the eloquence and import of Illiberal America, which offers a learned and brilliant retort to those who look at Trump and Trumpism and say, “that’s not what/who America is.”
Endnotes
1. See Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008), The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010), and “‘Progressive’ Obama: He’s Melting – TPP Wipes Away the Last Shreds of Illusion,” CounterPunch, June 19, 2015, on the neoliberal illiberalism of presidential candidate and president Obama.
2. As far as I am aware, I am the initiator of the use of the term “Amerikaner” in radical political discourse. It is a play on the name of the white Dutch-Anglo minority that imposed a savage Third World fascist regime of racial apartheid and white minority rule on South Africa during the 19th and 20th Centuries. Like the Afrikaners, I maintain, the core Trump base and the heavily evangelical American white nationalist movement that both preceded Trump and will succeed him is heir to an earlier history of genocidal and imperialist white settlement. It is opposed to majority rule democracy and committed to the imposition of racial and ethnic separatism and inequality. White fears of coming minority white demographic status (projected by 2050) in the increasingly non-white United States are one aspect of the parallel, reflected in the adoption of the term by certain part of the nation’s fascistic alt-right. See Paul Street, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021).
3. See Jason Stanley and Federico Finchelstein, “White Replacement Theory is Fascism’s New Name,” Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2022. I have taken to calling it “FRT,” an acronym for fascist replacement theory inspired by the right’s obsession with “CRT” (Critical Race Theory).
3A. See Paul Street, “Fact- and Fash-Checking Trump’s 92-Minute RNC Lie Fest,” The Paul Street Report, July 21, 2024.
4. To his credit, Hahn does criticize his own industry (“institutions of higher learning”) for exploiting adjunct professors. See Illiberal America, p. 341.
5. But there are exceptions. I regularly hear from a brilliant Marxist American historian of the colonial and revolutionary era (!) who is as remarkably up to date and astute on the very latest current events as any sharp journalist and who understands very well the fascist nature of the contemporary Trump Republican party and the related enabling role and complicity of the Democrats.
6. For a critique of the academic “fascism debate” on Trump and Trumpism, see my May 29, 2024 TPSR essay “There’s a ‘Fascism Debate’ in the Summer of 2024? Really? Why?” The opening pages of this essay summarize recent openly fascist tendencies in Trump and Trumpism. The second part of the essay critiques the bizarre Steinmetz-Jenkins-edited “2024” volume Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, which is dedicated to ending the “debate.” More than twenty of the thirty previously published essays collected in this strange volume came out between 2020 and 2022. All but one of them were originally published before 2023. A handful appeared long before Trump was first elected. There’s just one primary or secondary source dated after 2022 in the book’s endnotes. Steinmetz-Jenkins’ introduction to his “2024” anthology cites sources only from 2017 to 2021, with one exception: University of Pennsylvania historian Bruce Kuklick’s condescending and denialist volume Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture, a film history which wrongly argues that “fascism has little informational meaning in the United States, but instead, it is used to denigrate or insult.”
