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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE ILLIBERALISM AT AMERICA’S CORE  
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Julian E. Zelizer
May 2, 2024
The New Republic
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_ A new history argues that illiberalism is not a backlash but a
central feature from the founding to today. _

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_lliberal America: A History_
Steven Hahn
W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13: 978-0393635928

For much of the twentieth century, the American right was suspiciously
absent from historians’ grand narratives of the United States. In
the early Cold War, social scientists and political theorists held
that the United States was exceptional. Because the United States was
not born out of a feudal tradition, Louis Hartz famously argued, the
country lacked the extremes of left and right that were found in
Western Europe. A liberal consensus bound the nation together, for
better or worse. National debate perpetually took place within rigid
ideological limits. As the renowned historian Richard Hofstadter
observed in _The American Political Tradition
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1948, contestants from the major parties “shared a belief in the
rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the
value of competition.” However fiercely they competed, they
“accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary
qualities of man.”

In this view of history, illiberal forces—ranging from xenophobic
and antisemitic Populists in the late nineteenth century to a nexus of
“Radical Right” anti-communist organizations in the post–World
War II period—were characterized as marginal elements that could
never withstand the overwhelming power of liberal pluralism. The
sociologist Daniel Bell recognized
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there was a strain of the electorate that felt “dispossessed” and
subscribed to “Protestant fundamentalism … nativism,
nationalism.” Yet, as he wrote in 1955, he believed that the
“saving glory” of the country was that “politics has always been
a pragmatic give-and-take rather than a series of
wars-to-the-death.”

 
Over the years, historians have chipped away at the liberal consensus.
The baby boom generation of historians, coming out of the tumultuous
1960s, emphasized critiques of liberalism from the left, with
bottom-up histories that explored the lives of workers, immigrants,
Black and Native Americans, and other groups who had often been left
out of earlier work centered on presidents, business leaders, and
national elites. Indeed, few historians have done as much as Steven
Hahn to trace political resistance from the leftward side of the
political spectrum. His landmark book, _The Roots of Southern
Populism_
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provided a history of the changing political economy of Up-country
Georgia, which fueled the rise of a Southern populism that challenged
individualism and free-market principles. In his Pulitzer
Prize–winning book, _A Nation Under Our Feet
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Hahn wrote the history of Black resistance to the different
manifestations of white supremacy that took hold in the United States,
from fighting against slavery to taking on Jim Crow.

 

And starting in the 1990s, historians of conservatism showed a vibrant
right, buckling against the liberal tradition. Kim Phillips-Fein has
examined the network of business leaders who directed the mobilization
against the New Deal and its legacy. Thomas Sugrue captured the
dynamics of the Northern white backlash in the late 1940s and early
1950s. Rick Perlstein’s _Before the Storm
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the right from the activists who elevated Arizona Senator Barry
Goldwater to the top of the Republican ticket in 1964 to _Nixonland
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Lisa McGirr’s _Suburban Warriors
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power of places such as Orange County, California, while Matthew
Lassiter and Joseph Crespino focus on Republican appeals to suburban
voters just outside cities like Charlotte and Jackson.

Yet these new studies of the right mostly left intact the idea that
liberalism was the dominant tradition in the United States; they just
set out to document how the right fought against it. They primarily
wrote about how a grassroots modern conservative movement in the 1970s
and 1980s, sometimes earlier, finally broke the hold of the liberal
consensus—after the New Left had already shaken it up as a result of
Vietnam—and pushed the nation rightward. In his new
book, _Illiberal America
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Hahn aims to tell a different kind of story: one in which illiberalism
is not a backlash but a central feature from the founding to today,
and in which reaction is an ever-present mode of American political
activity.

Hahn’s point is not to dismiss liberalism, which he characterizes as
an ideology that imagines “rights-bearing individuals,” “civic
inclusiveness,” “representative institutions of governance,”
“the rule of law and equal standing before it,” democratic
“methods of representation,” and the “mediation of power”
through “civil and political devices.” His intention, he writes,
is to unpack the “shaky foundations on which liberal principles
often rested” and “the ability of some social groups to use those
principles to define their own communities while refusing it to
others.”

Hahn defines illiberalism as being founded, like its liberal
adversary, on a key set of principles. Illiberalism emphasizes a
“suspicion of outsiders” to the community that justifies the
“quick resort to expulsion.” In this tradition, the needs of the
community triumph over the individual, and rights are limited to both
local geographic spaces and a small number of actions. “Cultural
homogeneity” is prized over pluralism and difference, and
“enforced coercively.” Illiberal politics demand resistance to
some forms of authority—especially to state functions like taxation
and regulation—while submitting to others, including religion.

To puncture the architecture of Louis Hartz’s argument, Hahn begins
the book by rejecting the assertion that the nation was born without a
feudal tradition and was always moving in the direction of enlightened
belief. The colonists, Hahn suggests, clearly expressed
“neo-feudal” ambitions. He points to the harshness of indentured
servitude in the Colonies: In the mid–eighteenth century, most
Europeans in the American Colonial countryside were “tenants,
laborers, and servants as they lived in states of dependency (wives
and children) in the households of property owners.” Between 20 and
30 percent of the workforce in the Virginia and Maryland Colonies were
indentured servants, treated as the property of their masters.
Corporal punishment was a common way to control workers. The cost for
trying to escape usually entailed whipping, lashings, and beatings.
Few ever enjoyed the “freedom dues” that were promised
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someone finished their contract, because the mortality rate was so
high for servants as a result of disease and sheer exhaustion. Of
course, the other forced labor pool available to wealthier whites were
enslaved Africans who lived under brutal conditions and were stripped
of their humanity. Hahn’s disturbing origins story is not just a
tale of a people who were “moving toward something more open, more
tolerant and more liberally included,” he writes, but also of a
country shaped by “neo-feudal dreams, regimes of coerced labor,
social hierarchies, and strong cultural and religious allegiances.”

In the 1830s, the era of “Jacksonian Democracy,” illiberalism
inspired recurring bouts of white terrorism. Andrew Jackson made his
name
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Hahn reminds us, not just through the Battle of New Orleans in 1815
but with brutal assaults on the Seminole and Creek Nations, on
fugitive slaves, and with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The 1830s
witnessed ferocious assaults on Native Americans, Black Americans,
Roman Catholics, and Mormons. This period, Hahn writes, saw “a
political culture that thrived on sidearms, street gangs, truncheons,
and fists as well as rallies, conventions, and grassroots
mobilizations.”

Hahn also emphasizes the intensity of the anti-abolitionist movement:
Violence against abolitionist gatherings broke out in big cities like
New York and Philadelphia as well as smaller towns such as Concord,
New Hampshire. In October 1835, the abolitionist William Lloyd
Garrison was violently heaved with a rope through the streets of
Boston by an angry pro-slavery mob. Opponents of freeing
slaves burned down
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abolitionist meeting site at Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia in May
1838. These events, Hahn argues, were more than vigilante outbursts.
“Although some of the rioters came from the lower reaches of the
social order, looking to vent their hostilities and dissatisfactions,
the leadership came chiefly from the ranks of merchants, bankers,
lawyers, and public officials,” many from established, influential
families. The “idea of ‘mobs’ and ‘riots,’” Hahn points
out, “obscures what was really the persistence of older forms of
political expression.”

The atmosphere of illiberal violence even “suffused the halls of
legislative power.” Even though Ohio and Illinois outlawed slavery
in 1802 and 1848, “Black Laws” curtailed the ability of freed
Black men to vote and otherwise participate in civic life. And,
building on the work [[link removed]] of
the historian Joanne Freeman, Hahn recounts how physical altercations
became a regular part of democratic and legislative politics at the
state and local level. The speaker of the Arkansas House stabbed a
colleague to death following a verbal insult in 1837. In 1838, a
Maryland congressman named William Graves killed
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Representative Jonathan Cilley in a rifle duel near the Anacostia
bridge in Washington, following accusations of bribery. And, most
famously, in 1856 South Carolina’s Preston Brooks pummeled
Massachusetts’s Charles Sumner into a bloody pulp on the floor of
the United States Senate chamber.

While Hahn joins scholars who explain these clashes as manifestations
of the hardening divide over slavery, he paints a broader portrait of
a nation where brute force was an endemic element of an illiberal
culture; where weapons, street gangs, and militias were a routine way
of handling differences and maintaining control. “The arenas of
formal electoral politics and of intimidation and expulsion were more
interconnected than we might imagine,” he writes.

Illiberalism repeatedly proved its capacity to survive bursts of
support for social rights and pluralism. In the post–Civil War
period, when the liberal commitment to social rights seemed to be
gaining momentum with the end of slavery and the passage of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, dark clouds hovered over
Reconstruction. Republicans separated the end of slavery from the
guarantee of freedom for African Americans. The convict lease system,
founded in the 1840s, was vastly expanded
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the Reconstruction period, and carceral repression chipped away at the
potential for genuine liberation. Radical Republicans in Congress saw
their agenda thwarted by Southern Democrats. The contested election of
1876 was settled when Democrats agreed for Rutherford Hayes instead of
Samuel Tilden to become president in exchange for ending
Reconstruction. When Jim Crow laws were imposed in the South during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the promise of
racial justice ended. In 1921, white mobs destroyed the vibrant Black
community in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The lines between liberalism and illiberalism were not always easy to
discern. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
illiberalism attached itself to a political movement that was
theoretically committed to ameliorating social inequities. The ideas
born out of the neo-feudal past were woven into a Progressive reform
movement that promised to guide the United States in its transition
into the modern era of industrialization and urbanization. While the
Progressive era cast expertise and bureaucratization as the means to a
more rational and prosperous future, it also produced social
engineering, eugenics, and Theodore Roosevelt’s justifications
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imperialism.

It wasn’t much of a surprise that Mussolini was admired in many
quarters of this so-called liberal nation. By the mid-1920s, the
mainstream American press was publishing
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stories about Il Duce. The American Legion lionized the Italian
leader, inviting him to speak at its annual convention in 1923 (he
declined). Mussolini, Hahn explains, likewise admired the United
States, citing some of the nation’s great authors, such as Emerson
and Twain, as inspirations. Adolf Hitler also drew on the United
States, from the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s to the Jim
Crow system in the South, in crafting his regime. All of this was not
hard to do. There was plenty of good, old-fashioned American
illiberalism that they could tap into as they constructed brutal,
fascist governments in Italy and Germany. As scholars such as Stefan
Kühl and James Q. Whitman have documented in their books _The Nazi
Connection
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Model [[link removed]]_, German and American
eugenic thinkers with ties to the burgeoning university system shared
ideas and funding to promote a science of discrimination and,
ultimately, genocide.
 

Even in the heyday of liberalism and of its left-wing critics in the
Age of Aquarius, powerful elected officials embraced illiberalism with
gusto. Alabama Governor George Wallace, who ran in 1968 as a
third-party candidate for president, embodied the rising forces of
postwar reaction. The ultimate practitioner of “grievance
politics,” Wallace stitched together a campaign on the far-right
American Independent Party ticket, gaining traction through opposition
to the civil rights revolution. Whereas a decade ago Wallace’s 1964
and 1968 campaigns were treated by historians as ugly sidebars to the
main contests (Goldwater versus LBJ and Humphrey versus Nixon), Hahn
brings together the recent literature that has shown how the
governor’s racist, reactionary, populist, and often violent appeal
tapped into a deep seam that ran throughout working- and middle-class
America—from Selma to Detroit. Wallace’s defeat at the ballot box
in 1968 should not be confused with a defeat for the ideas he
represented. Though on its own Hahn’s argument is not
earth-shattering, in the context of the long history of illiberalism,
we can see that in many ways it was Wallace rather than his
competitors who, as Hahn puts it, “anticipated the country’s
political direction” and defined the tenor of conservative politics
for decades to come.

Nor was the postwar university immune from illiberal forces. Less
famous than the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, though no
less influential, was Young Americans for Freedom. Created in 1960,
the organization proclaimed
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stand against the power of the state and the threat of communism.
YAF’s Sharon Statement touted individual freedom, law and order, and
federalism. YAF had chapters on campuses all over the country by the
time that Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968. The student
organization became a starting place for some of the most important
conservative figures of the 1970s, such as Pat Buchanan, Richard
Viguerie, and Terry Dolan.

Given illiberalism’s deep roots in our political culture, the first
few decades of the twenty-first century should not have come as a
surprise. When Tea Party activists challenged the legitimacy of the
first Black American president and conservative media hosts
entertained the “great replacement theory,” they were tapping into
some of our oldest national values—though not the ones we like to
talk about. Illiberalism was never fringe, as Louis Hartz’s
generation believed it to be. Rather, illiberalism inspired law and
elected officials, built political movements, and spawned mob action.

 
Seventy-six years since Richard Hofstadter published _The American
Political Tradition_, _Illiberal America_ mostly succeeds in showing
the persistence of reaction, if not its dominance.

What Hahn, and the voluminous scholarship on which his book is built,
make clear is that the notion of an inevitable liberal “consensus”
that grew organically out of the nation’s founding was wrong. New
Hahn, as well as old Hahn, have demonstrated clearly that modern
liberalism had to survive in a fraught political culture, one where
liberal values were hard to secure and often barely survived. Our
national history has been much more layered and complex than
Hofstadter’s generation understood. There has been no “American
Political Tradition.” There are multiple traditions, each with
strong roots in the polity.

Still, the fact that liberalism has been fiercely contested doesn’t
mean it has not exerted immense influence. From the Emancipation
Proclamation to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, to FDR’s
New Deal policies in the 1930s, to LBJ’s Great Society in the 1960s,
to President Joe Biden’s ambitious environmental programs since
2021, liberal ideas have thrived, and they have changed the United
States.

More important, liberalism has been able to inscribe itself through
enduring legislation (think Social Security and Medicare). It was
funny but not a surprise that, when Tea Party activists protested
President Barack Obama’s health care proposal in 2010, which would
have entailed spending cuts in existing programs, they held up
placards that read KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE! Furthermore,
grassroots movements from abolitionism, to unionism, to civil rights,
to feminism and gay rights have been enormously successful in
transforming liberal ideals that were initially dismissed as radical
into conventional wisdom. Same-sex marriage now barely causes a stir,
whereas back in 1977, orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant was able
to whip up a storm against an ordinance in Dade County, Florida, that
guaranteed civil rights for gay Americans.

And, unlike illiberal tenets, the ideas of liberalism have found much
more success at becoming the avowed philosophy of mainstream political
leaders. While a Democrat such as President Biden has no problem
praising the value of a strong federal government and the protection
of civil rights, Republicans until recently have relied on code words
when they saw benefit in connecting themselves to illiberalism. As
Thomas and Mary Edsall argued in their classic book from the
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most leaders in the modern Republican Party relied on dog whistles.
Their reluctance to directly invoke these kinds of ideas suggests that
in many respects the pull of liberalism has remained stronger.

What Hahn’s provocative synthesis should stimulate is a new look at
liberalism itself. We must rethink how we understand the success of a
President Franklin Roosevelt or Johnson, given the intensity of the
obstacles that they faced. Programs such as Medicare must not be
treated as the obvious alternative to bolder social democratic
options, or nothing, but as the product of grassroots activists,
interest groups, and nonprofits, as well as elected officials. This
was the story of the 2020 election, which Biden’s campaign—running
on the liberal principles of the rule of law and the importance of
democracy—won on the shoulders of everyone who had started to
mobilize four years earlier.

As we approach the 2024 election, the potent role of illiberalism in
our politics has never been clearer. And, as Hahn demonstrates,
upholding liberal values will require, as it long has, a serious and
sustained fight.

 

Julian E. Zelizer is a political historian at Princeton University.
His new book, _In Defense of Partisanship_, will be published in
January 2025.

* U.S. history
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* Liberalism
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* illiberalism
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* democracy
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