Though rarely read today, the 1955 book by Louis Hartz—The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution—continues to haunt and, indeed, shape US progressive thinking. His rather novel views have been digested and inculcated so effortlessly that many are unaware of the taproot of this political line.
This Harvard political scientist contended that the perceived domination of liberalism in the US (in the way John Locke defined it, with individualism and private property as foundational) was owed to the fundamental rupture of North American settlers with European politics and culture and the resultant absence of an experience on this continent with feudalism (setting aside events in the Hudson River Valley, for example, and elsewhere). This absence of feudalism resulted, he thought, in the dearth of revolutionary or reactionary trends that arose in opposition to or in defense of feudalism with—as limned by Hahn—“its prescribed social hierarchies, ascriptive norms and rights, ideas of divine rule, vertical allegiances and debased peasants” (setting aside, of course, the debased enslaved). [p. 15] These circumstances undergirded a kind of US “exceptionalism” —a “democratic hybrid unknown anywhere,” Hartz exulted—so that the inclination toward “democracy” and capitalism that could have led to internecine conflict, instead became interconnected.
Hartz was echoed to a degree by Daniel Boorstin, Lionel Trilling, Richard Hofstadter and earlier generations of Cold War intellectuals. Given the corrosiveness of that fortunately bygone era, he also shaped thinking to the left of liberalism, especially in terms of the still-reigning heralding of 1776 and the concomitant downplaying if not rationalizing of Indigenous dispossession, along with the under-theorizing of settler colonialism. Even recent scholarship, e.g., that of British historian William Pettigrew, connecting the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688—a oft-neglected precursor of 1776—to the revolt of merchants against the monarchial domination of the fabulously remunerative African Slave Trade, has not appreciably penetrated the thinking of the much-beleaguered US Left.
Fortunately, Hartz and his progeny—though still sturdily influential—have been under assault of late, most notably in Illiberal America: A History by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York University historian Steven Hahn. In these pages, he seeks to sketch—as the title suggests—a different tradition altogether. Assuredly, his book—rather than Hartz’s—should be consulted by those seeking to comprehend the Trump phenomenon, the ascendancy of right-wing populism and the repetitive sighting of fascism on these shores by analysts as diverse as the late Madeleine Albright to Yale philosopher Jason Stanley. (In this vein, consider the recent work of the godfather of neo-conservatism: In 2006 during the heyday of the Bush years and assumed unipolarity, a swaggering Robert Kagan lauded what he called a Dangerous Nation. Today this seemingly chastened writer laments in his latest book, Rebellion, what he terms in his sub-title—akin to Hahn—Anti-Liberalism). In other words, Hahn’s handiwork is a great leap forward and reflects a gathering ideological trend in diverse precincts, insofar as it marshals a history that aids in comprehension of the present troubled moment; unfortunately, it does not go far enough.
Black scholars lay the groundwork
The reconsideration of the complex history of the US has not been greeted with equanimity. To his credit, Hahn defends journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and her bestselling The1619 Project, initially debuting in the pages of The New York Times, which has been lambasted not only by politicians in Florida, Texas and elsewhere but also those to their left. She produced, says Hahn, “an ambitious effort to suggest an American origin story that took full account of the foundational roles that slavery and racism have played in American history” and, predictably, “generated a firestorm of criticism, much of the most condescending from reputable historians who seemed especially irritated that their work and wisdom had not been adequately consulted.” Alternatively, these critics defaulted to Hartz and the “liberal tradition…. tied to the universalism [sic] of the Declaration of Independence”; the Declaration explicitly upbraids the Indigenes then stoutly resisting settler colonialism. [p. 36]
Hahn could have gone further and observed that Hannah-Jones was not singular in seeking to understand the parlous state of Black America— including being ensnared by mass incarceration, spiraling infant mortality rates, disproportionate unemployment and police terror —by resort to historical excavation. (A wise writer would explore if anti-monarchism, or “republicanism” as constructed, was intrinsically incapable of incorporating faultlessly enslaved Africans and their descendants on whose backs the systemic companion—capitalism—was built.) Thus, the late Tyler Stovall of the University of California Berkeley and Santa Cruz, one of the more prolific and honored Black scholars of his generation, penned before his tragic 2021 death the stimulating White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, which cast severe doubt on the lineaments of a supposed US “liberal tradition.”
The late Black philosopher Charles Mills did the same thing in his illuminating The Racial Contract. Paramount Black intellectual Ishmael Reed of Oakland exemplified the same trend with his well-received take-down of the Disney-cum-Broadway extravaganza Hamilton that was a favorite of Dick Cheney and Barack Obama alike. Premier Haitian filmmaker, Raoul Peck, whose The Young Karl Marx is unrivalled in its empathy for the founder of scientific socialism, paralleled Hannah-Jones, Stovall, Mills and Reed with his breathtaking Exterminate All the Brutes, a sweeping castigation of the pretensions of settler colonialism.
Thus, Hahn’s important book arrives with a formidable bodyguard of pre-existing work by Black scholars and creators, and he seeks admirably to build on their ambitiousness.
Racist roots of liberalism
Unlike many US analysts who begin the story of the republic’s creation at, say, 1750 at the earliest, Hahn returns to the 17th century and ably points out that John Locke, the garlanded avatar of “liberalism,” had “investments in the newly established Royal African Company,” the embodiment of the depraved African Slave Trade. Thus, says the author, the overly touted “’liberal universalism’” contained “exclusionary impulses” that “always threaten[ed] to teeter into and fortify illiberal projects and sensibilities.” [p. 46]
Unlike numerous other scholars, Hahn points to the “powerfully illiberal strain of anti-Catholicism” embedded in the settlements formed by Protestant London, then bequeathed to those who rebelled against their rule. [p. 70] Indeed, he says, “the iconography of anti-Popery was readily adaptable to anti-monarchy.” [p. 73]
To his credit, Hahn seeks to understand the right-wing populism that was prevalent from the inception of republicanism as he delineates the largely forgotten “Paxton Boys” of Pennsylvania, who in the 1760s threatened the Crown and “generally pacifist Quakers” alike in their diabolical and murderous lust for the land of the Indigenous. [p. 79] Thus, following recent scholarship, Hahn suggests that the revolt against London was driven in no small measure by the latter’s hesitancy to continue to expend blood and treasure uprooting the Indigenous for the benefit of land speculators like George Washington. [p. 85] Hahn even unmasks the republican bona fides of the rebels by noting that how some in their ranks “approached Prince Henry of Prussia about becoming king of the United States.” [p. 92]
Continuing a verdant tradition shaped by the late Black historian, Lerone Bennett Jr., Hahn damns the sainted Abraham Lincoln with faint praise in arguing that he was “not simply an expulsionist,” trying to oust African-Americans from these shores and the Indigenous from their vast lands. [p. 135]
Margaret Sanger, epigone of “socialism and working-class feminism,” he says, was also a champion of “birth control and eugenics.” The latter, he argues, reveals the malignant intentions of Euro-American elites. He also indicts yet another feminist heroine, Victoria Woodhull, and her notion that “’if superior people are to be desired, they must be bred,’” as the vaunted republic “by the early 1920s” was “carving a path that bore resemblance to the European fascism then taking hold.” [p. 177]
Hahn is at his best when explicating the rise of this latter trend, e.g. the Ku Klux Klan which by “the early 1920s…. began to grow with exponential speed.” [p. 222] He espies the class-collaborationist essence of this fascist precursor comprised of “small businessmen…. the largest occupational group in the Klan followed by Protestant ministers” and buttressed by “skilled workers” including “union members.” [p. 223] Following his excoriation of Sanger and Woodhull, he is informative in analyzing “a separate Women of the Ku Klux Klan” which “in some states…accounted for nearly half of the entire Klan membership,” as they promoted “’KKK Feminism.’” [p.225] (The present and forthcoming work of Berkeley’s Stephanie Jones-Rogers underlines the role of Euro-American women as slaveholders, whose expropriation then fueled their migration to the KKK.) Of course, the 75 members of Congress in the 1920s who had KKK ties were overwhelmingly men. [p.226]
Just as he sits on the shoulders of Black scholars, Hahn in detailing US fascist trends extends the scholarship of John Patrick Diggins who decades ago wrote extensively about the widespread popularity of Benito Mussolini in certain US circles.
Anticommunism: a missing link
Yet assets aside, once he draws a penetrating portrait of fascist trends in the US, culminating with their defeat in 1945, he skips over the Red Scare and the Cold War, thus relinquishing the opportunity to examine that zenith of illiberalism. Instead he jumps ahead to the 1960s and analyzes the popularity of Jim Crow Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, during his race for the White House in 1968 and thereafter. During Wallace’s races “more than four steelworkers in ten backed the Alabamian” in addition to the usual suspects of businessmen, declassed elements and the like. [p. 277] Similarly, the crisis over school desegregation via busing in Boston during the 1970s “was a racism that knew no class bounds,” he says. [p. 258]
Hahn recovers somewhat in his analysis of the Obama years. He comprehends the racist reaction to Obama’s presidency that led directly to the virulent Tea Party, then the Trump years. He points to “deindustrialization” and “weakening of the labor movement” as a precursor to both, but since he does not deal frontally with anticommunism, nor the anti-Soviet deal with China which has led to the ascendancy of this Asian juggernaut, he misses the chance to forge a missing link in the creation of illiberalism. [p. 316]
In short, Hahn is stronger on racism than anticommunism: “Fears of race war,” he says in describing the 21st century landscape, “have been part of American political culture since settler colonialism encountered Native peoples they regarded as ‘savages’ and enslaved Africans became a foundation of North American settler societies.” [p. 317] To his credit, Hahn comprehends the alarming David Duke, the Klansman and Neo-Nazi who garnered an astonishing 50+% of the Euro-American vote in the 1991 gubernatorial race in Louisiana (coincidentally, just as the Soviet Union was imploding).
(Here Hahn could have performed a service if he had connected the anti-federal government hysteria of too many Euro-Americans, especially in Dixie, to the uncompensated expropriation of private property in 1865—executed by Washington—in the form of bodies of enslaved Africans—one of the more profound seizures before and after 1917.)
Toward the end of this book, Hahn laments the rise of neo-fascists and right-wing populists in Europe—though his failure to confront the Cold War and Red Scare makes this chapter ring oddly. Arguably, the undermining of Communist influence led directly to the rise of the Right he so cogently scorns. This includes the still-curious murder of Rome’s Aldo Moro in the 1970s, when that centrist was on the verge of implementing the “historic compromise” welcoming Italian Communists into government.
But herein the astute reader begins to detect a certain gap in the analysis based in part on certain earlier ellipses. Intermittently, Hahn mentions settler colonialism but does not theorize how this phenomenon too frequently contains class collaborationism, especially in the US, Southern Africa, and historic Palestine. Similarly, he tosses around casually the potent descriptor “white” but does not sufficiently interrogate this militarized identity politics of race formation which led directly to reconciliation of once-warring Protestants and Catholics, along with Christians and Jews once they crossed the Atlantic and rebranded as “white” leading—again—to class collaborationism and the “illiberalism” that he denounces.
At this juncture, there is a small library on this trend with works of various types written by David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, Theodore Allen, Karen Brodkin Sacks, Nell Irvin Painter, Neda Maghbouhleh—and others too numerous to note. This work is a necessary complement to anti-Blackness, a key component of US settler colonialism grounded in mass enslavement, Jim Crow terror and the construction of slavery and capitalism alike.
Nevertheless, this critique should not obscure the abject importance of Hahn’s intervention. It is history written with the aim of explicating today’s malignancies and, to that end, succeeds admirably.
Illiberal America: A History, by Steven Hahn (W.W. Norton & Co., 2024), 464 pp.