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A number of people I respect and often agree with have been making different versions of the same point. Immigration is one of Trump's best issues and one of the worst issues for Democrats. So if you really care about the dangers Donald Trump poses, you need to beat him. And that means focusing the country's attention on his worst issues, the places where he is most beatable.
Nate Silver has made a version of his argument, and so did California Governor Gavin Newsom. Yeah, it's, you know, this is the distraction of the day. The art of distraction. Don't get distracted by distractions, we say, and here we zig and zag. This is the debate they want. This is their 80-20 issue as they've described it.
And I want to give this argument its due. It's not without merit. Optimal political strategy is usually to keep the focus on your opponent's worst issues. For Donald Trump right now, it's his decision to light the global economy on fire. From that perspective, focusing on Abrego Garcia is a distraction. Trump's meeting with President Bukele is a distraction. And getting distracted is bad politics. Focus on the tariffs. Focus on the stock market chaos. Focus.
One is that the polling here isn't clear. Yes, Democrats have become afraid on the issue of immigration. They see that as a winner for Donald Trump. But if you look at the polling on rule of law on due process, to the extent this is framed that way, which it should be, that's actually what this is about. then Democrats are in a much better position. People do not want the Trump administration to be able to randomly disappear. People living in this country without due process.
But I think this argument reflects a generalized collapse of roles and time across the political system. If this was October 2026 and you're running a congressional campaign, then what you focus on is a hard question and you should pay pretty damn close attention to the pulse. If you're choosing how to write and spend money on ads, same thing.
But not everything that everyone else says between now and October 2026 can or should be poll tested. It is a thin vision of politics to back literally everything out from elections. When Senator Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador, and I'm very glad he did, he was representing his constituent, Abrego Garcia's wife, a U.S. citizen and a Maryland resident whose husband had been disappeared by the president.
His conversation with me was the first communication he'd had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted. He said he felt very sad about being in a prison because he had not committed any crime. When I asked him what was the one thing he would ask for in addition to his freedom, he said he wanted to talk to his wife, Jen. I told him I would work very hard to make that happen. That is Van Hollen's job. That is constituent service of the highest order.
And the rest of us, we have other jobs, other roles, and they're not all about winning elections. We're in the midst of an attempted authoritarian breakthrough. I don't think there's another way to say that. How much opposition the Trump administration faces from other corridors and other power centers will matter to what they do.
If it's easy to deport people to an El Salvadoran prison, they're going to do a lot more of it. One lesson from history, I think, one reason I am so focused here, is that when the machine of disappearing people begins rolling, when that becomes a tactic, it can roll pretty damn far if it's not stopped early.
It's the same with Trump's effort to break the universities, to break the law firms, to break the government. If it's easy, they will keep going. They will do more of it. They will do it faster. If it's hard, they might not. They also have limited bandwidth, limited energy, limited attention, limited resources.
The election isn't next week. We have more than 550 days until just the midterms. Civil society needs to act in the interim. There is not just one job here, and we are not in the final two weeks of an election campaign. And then I've been hearing this other argument, an argument that can sound to me like a kind of fatalism, as if the country has already fallen, as if Donald Trump's power is already limitless, as if the fight is already long.
The most common email I got in reply to last week's episode was, isn't it naive to think we're going to have midterms at all? And I think one reason it can be hard to imagine a way into that is so many people are working in their head with comparisons to other places, to other times. or different authorian takeovers in Latin America.
Much like Mussolini, Trump is actually laying out exactly what he plans to do. This comes out of fascism and also the tradition of military dictatorships like Pinochet in Chile. Similarities to what happened in Germany and what's happening now in America. are just undeniable consider this It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.
And all I'm saying is that when the five alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control. And the problem with all those stories is that we know how they ended. At least for a time, the tyrant successfully consolidated power. The opposition lost. Elections were no longer a usable check.
When we start to think that the only way to understand our moment is through those moments, it becomes easy to slip into a kind of mental inevitability. But we don't need to look abroad for our comparisons. Not saying there's no value in doing so, but it shouldn't be the only thing we do. Deportations and expulsions and abuses of civil liberty and the taking away of rights, that's all part of the American tradition.
Illiberalism is part of the American tradition. Jim Crow, the Red Scare, Japanese-American internment, Operation Wetback. Trump is not the first to name a domestic enemy, decide that their rights are no longer valid, and turn the machinery of the state against them. There is much that is distinctive about Donald Trump, but he's not nearly so alien a force as he is sometimes made out to be.
America has fallen into terrible eras of liberalism, and it has fought its way back out of them. It has done so in the context of our system, our institutions, our myths, our idea of our national character. That it has gotten so bad in the past should free us of any illusion that it cannot get much worse now. but that it has been successfully defeated in the past, at least beaten back, should free us from the fatalism that it cannot be beaten back now.
My guest today is Stephen Hahn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at NYU. His book, Illiberal America, tracks this thread of American politics back to our founding and even before. The interplay between liberalism and illiberalism has always been with us. It will always be with us. Accepting that helps bring both its power and its vulnerability into clearer focus.
Stephen Hahn, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it. 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. 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.
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. 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? 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 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.
inevitable ascent into liberal democracy. And you read it quite differently. I do. 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. The largest section of his warnings 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. in 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 in the 1830s, you also have an example of the tradition you're talking about at really full strength under Andrew Jackson. 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. Tell me a bit about that decade from your perspective.
Right. Obviously, the 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. 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? Well, I think there are a number of things that they could connect to, not least. was his defiance of Supreme Court rulings. on the potential expulsion of Native people. You know, he said, okay, that's fine. Let them enforce it.
I think they see him as a quote-unquote strong leader who was willing and able and interested in moving directions of his own. Choosing obviously had a very complicated relationship with the federal government, but he stood up very strongly because the nullification crisis. In the 1830s, when South Carolina said, unlike Jackson's view of the Supreme Court, no, we're not going to enforce the tariff.
Jackson threatened to really crush them militarily as well as politically. So I think they see him as an example of an early executive. who was interested in expanding the powers of the presidency at a time when the president of the United States really had relatively few powers. And, you know, the important power remained in the state. and nationally in the Congress. And I think they saw him as a harbinger of what would happen later and what Trump clearly admires.
Let me move forward in time a bit to the Red Scare. You spend some real time in the book on the Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920. What were they? Well, the Pomerades are called the Pomerades 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, Massaco and Vanzetti, you know, became 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. It 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. Speaking of fascism, you have this argument that in the 20s, you have prohibition, as you're saying, the second KKK. The threads composing the fabric of Italian and German fascism were an earliest evidence. Not in Europe, but at that moment in America. Why? Well, one of the things I try to do in the book, which is...
recognizing that illiberalism is not one thing. It's 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 who were experts. I mean, doesn't Hitler praise American immigration policy in this period? 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. So I do think that 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 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. We think about what politicians and political movements are offering. But those offerings only matter. 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 absolutely right. That is at least in an early way speaking to similar anxieties.
Speaking to similar views about belonging. Speaking to 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. 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. So there's no question that these right-wing groups... A need, but, you know, a sense of community building, a sense of what belonging was. belonging that not only included people you were comfortable with and you thought were part of the community, but non-belonging and the resistance or expulsion of those or the repression of those who you saw as political threat.
Tell me about the Johnson Reed Act of 1924. Well, you know, that was really the first major immigration act that was passed. It established quotas for the first time. Before then, it was really the Chinese and then Asian Exclusion Act. which were not designed to have quotas, but designed not to have people from Asia come to the United States. The 1924 Immigration Act was different. And it was organized in such a way that it really did.
try to undercut the migration of people from certain parts of the world who were regarded as culturally unassimilable, as politically objectionable, as people who were breeders. and therefore threaten the population balances in the United States not simply by the numbers who arrive, but by the population increase once they got to the United States. And, you know, when it was passed, I mean, in most major...
journalistic venues. It was celebrated. The New York Times, the LA Times, everyone sort of saying, yeah, this was the way in which we could preserve an America that we feel comfortable with. You know, this was a law that was in force until 1965, not to mention that, you know, Jews who were trying to flee Nazi Germany and then the Holocaust. were themselves harmed by this. But I think it's part of a piece.
of what's happening in the 1920s as trying to offer belonging to people who could be easily assimilated and offering little but repression or non-belonging to people. I'm Brian Rosenthal. I'm an investigative reporter at The New York Times. My dad is a scientist. My career has been devoted to scientific teaching and research.
I remember growing up, I didn't fully understand what he was doing every day. But now that I work as an investigative journalist, I do understand. So you have to start with facts. From those facts, a hypothesis appears. and then you work on trying to test. I do the same thing, obtaining documents, crunching the data, and I've talked to as many people as possible to get to the bottom of the story.
The New York Times does not publish until we can prove that something is true. The best scientists are able to do that deep work. because they receive funding from their university or from the government. We as journalists depend on funding from subscribers. You can support that type of work by subscribing to The New York Times. We're talking here about substance. One thing that surprises me is that there is a style to a liberalism that recurs over place and time.
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. He's also a very early example of a populist style that Trump fits very well in. and it gets embraced by elite dimensions of conservatism. William F. Buckley writes a book, sort of,
It's sort of anti-anti-McCarthy is the way I would 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.
is a liberalism. Well, you know, one of the things that became 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. You know, I think McCarthy was... in part representing a certain unease and suspicions about that. 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 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. One of the things we're seeing now is different institutions in 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? Harvard just decided to fight. In the McCarthy era, how would you tell that story of the institutional response? What was the period? Were they lockstep in trying to submit to this until something changed? What can be learned from that now? I think the response was mostly bending the knee.
I think that universities, workplaces, other institutions were very quick to try to identify people who could be regarded as threats. And for the most part, they were expelled. People lost their jobs. They were blacklisted. They were run out of important political positions or they could not seek. They were excluded from labor unions at a very critical point in our labor history in the late 1940s, early 1950s, when organizations like the CIO were increasingly...
So I do think that bending the knee, especially in the face of what seems to be significant power, is not uncommon and is a worrisome precedent. So we've been talking here about 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.
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...
I mean, look, the liberals played a very important role in so-called McCarthyism. I mean, 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. Another way that I think that same dynamic could 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 were 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. 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? 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.
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 authority. I think this starts to bring us into something more modern. Trump often references an immigration policy called Operation Wetback.
Operation Wetback comes under President Dwight Eisenhower, who we now look back on as this icon of moderate republicanism, even maybe a liberal republican. We quote his speech about the defense industrial complex. 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. And it kind of expressed, you know, one of the really complicated aspects of American economic development policy, which was on the one hand, it depended so heavily on so many different groups of.
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. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 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. 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. 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, as strong as it was in many respects, didn't really, you know, if you compare that to the Mexican Constitution in 1916. that laid out a whole series of rites. that working people had, that women had, and you compare it to a sense of, well, what are the rights? that come with citizenship in the United States. I worry, as you may worry too, that precisely because a lot of those rights are not clearly established.
And because there could be any one of a variety of loopholes, whether in the language or whether in the way citizenship and rights are conceived. that we may be entering a period, you know, in some ways marked by like the Dobbs decision of the really withdrawal of rights that we had come 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. I don't think that history repeats itself. But I do think that there are moments. when the 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 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. And 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.
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. In your book, you frame the rise in era of mass incarceration. as another example of the deportation and expulsion impulse, finding policy expression. 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. 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 immigrants, 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 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? I fear that a lot of people would be okay with expelling... 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.
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 these different episodes, we've talked about some of them, there are others in your book. What feel to you like the commonalities of these eras of deportation and expulsion? 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? 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 in relationships that could so quickly be... about 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 and 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. And I do think that this is exactly what needs to be resisted and reimagined. 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? Well, I think one of the things that makes him seem so quote distinctive and unprecedented. is if we think about the national level, where 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 level...
And George Wallace and Patrick Buchanan. 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 Bulletin. 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. I 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. They saw themselves involved in 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-day 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 an 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. It also gets at something that I think has been a very common fantasy, which is that you can destroy this tendency.
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 can make the things that are dominant in illiberal thought unsayable in polite society. You can 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's 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. 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. Well, you know, you used 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... 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. But they're both also fundamentally anti-institutional.
Right. I mean, very different in the way there are institutional candidates. 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. 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 is 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. It's not the most stirring, inspirational example to end your book on. 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. Let me ask you about liberalism itself. I would say over the past decade in particular, liberalism has felt very exhausted and very insecure. And its great victories are taken for granted. I mean, now we're, I think, realizing again that it's actually quite remarkable for people to have rights.
for there to be due process, for there to be courts where things can be checked and for those courts to be listened to by the political system, despite the fact that they don't force that judgment at the point of a gun. You know, liberalism was, I think, sort of beset by critics on the left who felt it never achieved enough, right? You know, Barack Obama did not make our society post-racial, did not solve inequality, did not solve climate change.
What is doing all this work made you think about liberalism itself and what a renewed version of politics around that tradition might look like? You know, one of the things we have to remember is that the sense of right... that people can enjoy, the sense of rights that people are entitled to, were products of very, very divisive and very, very, in some cases, violent struggles.
And that the period of time that we're talking about when this was true is pretty short. I mean, one of the things I was really trying to do in my book... was what I would call de-centering liberalism. The liberal tradition, as I try to argue, is really something that's kind of invented in the 1940s and 1950s and holds on in many remarkable ways. But part of the problem with liberalism is that it never really dealt very well with the issues of power.
And therefore, when push comes to shove, they abandon ship or they sort of put together projects and policies that are not going to work. or become self-contradictory. If what we're after... Some of the things that liberals and liberalism at least say that they're interested in, a more egalitarian society, a world in which... globally as well as nationally and locally, where it's possible for people, regardless of their social, economic, racial, or ethnic background, to pursue a life.
that is meaningful to them. If we're actually interested in that, it's supposed to rhetorically interested in that. then we have to face up to really what liberalism has been inadequate. You write about, in a sense, liberalism's failure to be visionary. And I think that's true. What about, you know, what a future could look like? And then the question of how you get there is related to what a future could look like.
I hear people make this move a lot. Liberalism has had its failures. It has not gotten us to utopia, though it's had quite profound successes. So we need something that is better confronting power. And then I will say the question I'll ask you, but I'm pretty sure I know the answer to it. Can you point me in all the states we have, the history and the different countries?
of a place where this alternative politics has emerged and has been better at containing right-wing liberalism, has been better at pushing forward the engines of human progress. I'd sort of like to see the small example of it working before I say, well, that's where our politics should go. That's what we should excavate. So when you say that, what are you looking toward? Well, historically I think there have been important moments in the past.
Whereas social movements have, even if they haven't entirely won or were able to gain political power as we think about abolitionism, which took on... the most intractable power in the United States. And I think about abolitionism as black abolitionism and about enslaved people who manage. to take down. a system of plantation slavery that had created the wealthiest people in the United States and people who own disproportionate power.
But Lincoln emerges in your book almost as a villain. Well, I don't see Lincoln as a villain. What I was trying to do there was to talk about some of the limitations. And I don't see putting Lincoln, you know, well, that he's just a racist. Because, you know, I think that's not a useful way of understanding Lincoln. If anything, you know, you see somebody who...
grew and changed in very, very significant ways. But at the same time, he kind of embodied a lot of the contradictions about what a national family... is and who would be included in that family. But I guess that's what I'm getting at here about this embodying of the contradiction. It's something that I was thinking about reading your book a lot, and it relates to my own struggle.
with the realization that there is no final victory and that if you understand the kinds of politics the liberal currents that you're writing about the field of force i think you called it which i like If you understand it is ever-present, the political scientist Larry Patel talks about the populist right as a reservoir, not a wave, but a reservoir that's always there to tap into.
then it becomes more obvious in a way that the national figures who can lead in this country will have to embody some of the contradictions. The idea that you will have a pure movement. is not going to happen. And the reason why the peer movements tend to fail is that politics is about the contradictions, and it's about...
absorbing them hopefully in a way that moves them more towards justice and just outcomes and vision and the things that I would like to see in the world too. But I guess that sort of movement between... This illiberalism is always here and always powerful. And so sort of almost anybody you look at has had to embody some of its contradictions, even if they're pushing away from it. And then also the sort of political verdict that
Well, isn't there something that doesn't have any of these contradictions that we can use as the weapon that will finally win? I'm curious how you resolve that, because you're the person, not me, who's been sitting in like every single decade of American history is full of. a very potent illiberalism that nobody ever quite seems to be able to push into the back room for very long. I 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, 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 if power is actually what you're interested in and change and using power for the point of change that will appeal to large numbers of people who want change and whose lives can actually be better. I think a central issue is to confront it. You know, it's that I understand why you think that. And maybe there are ways that we can move, recognizing that no one's going to be fully changed.
and that you're always going to be protesting this shit, because there's no such thing as a victory, even if you like your side winning, that there's going to be ongoing... struggles, ongoing need for vigilance, ongoing need for self-criticism. And we have to find ways of reckoning our ideals and ambitions and visions and utopianism. people are not going to put themselves on the line for a world that they can't quite imagine. And I think that is a basis.
For something bigger, it's always going to be an ongoing process of rethinking, interrogating, and changing, being open to change. I think that's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you 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 paved 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. Louisiana. It's an extraordinary story about a woman who was part of the only whole family to make it out of the Lott's 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 and well-told story. Stephen Hahn, thank you very much. Thank you. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Jack McCordick, Annie Galvin, and Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Sahota and Isaac Jones.
Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobol and Kristen Lynn. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.