At this critical juncture in American history, NYU Professor of History Steven Hahn has taken his readers on a much needed tour of U.S. history’s « illiberal » side in Illiberal America: A History (W.W. Norton, 2024). In the process, he effectively undermines what was then still largely the consensus view when I was a student, the view most famously associated with Louis Hartz and his 1955 classic, The Liberal Tradition in America. Hahn « asks readers to suspend their assumptions about the long and enduring American liberal tradition and instead recognize illiberal currents that flowed across the Atlantic and took hold well before what we would call liberalism ever appeared. » He aims to show « how our present-day reckoning with the rise of a militant and illiberal set of movements has lengthy and constantly ramifying roots. »
Contrary to the traditional Hartz thesis, Hahn recalls the neo-feudal, hierarchical, and pseudo-aristocratic aspects of early English settlements in North America and the colonial order which ensued. « The social relations that marked the turn of the eighteenth century, and continued for long thereafter, can far better be understood as a spectrum of dependencies along which ‘free labor,’ in a form familiar to us, was at the far end. »
In the course of his reinterpretation of American history, Hahn calls our attention to the long tradition of anti-Catholicism, « how anti-Catholic and anti-aristocratic sensibilities could feed off one another. » He highlights. links between anti-federalism and « the Christian evangelism of the Great Awakening. » In anti-federalism, he discerns a persistent theme which we can certainly recognize today – « a special appeal to those who recognized power in personal and familial terms, saw themselves as members of communities bounded by ethnicity, culture, and faith, were wary of outsiders and distant legal and political institutions, and imagine proper government as closely aligned with them and protective of their ‘manners, sentiments, and interests’. »
Hahn, here has decentralized the theoretically more dominant liberal tradition, highlighting instead the surprising range of alternative political currents that have characterized our country, not necessarily at first in reaction to liberalism but even prior to liberalism as a redeployment of other and older ideas and institutions, embodying them in all sorts of deeply rooted American ideas and practices ranging from slavery and Jim Crow, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, Nativism (in particular anti-Catholicism), and such complex phenomena as the early 20th-century Progressive Movement with its interest in eugenics and its anti-democratic cult of expertise. These same currents have clearly resurfaced again in our current political polarization in the aftermath of the backlash against Obama’s election that led us to where we are now. Ultimately it usually has come down to some exclusivist attempt to limit participation in the political process, thus foreclosing the possibilities participation uniquely provides, a process we see the increasingly authoritarian elements in our electoral politics currently engaged in.
« History, » Hahn concludes, « is a burden and an inspiration. It is buried deep within each of us, and hovers over the worlds that have been made and the future for which many now struggle. »
