All countries have their patriots, but few are as proud as America’s. They exult in the lofty ideals of the Founding Fathers. They marvel at their country’s economic and military might (while imagining the rest of the world to be covetous). Past injustice, if acknowledged, is brushed off, perhaps by invoking Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
For many Americans, Donald Trump’s takeover first of the Republican Party, then the White House, has put the kibosh on such historical rosiness. It is not just that supporters of Mr Trump attempted to sack the Capitol on 6 January 2021; it is that Americans may well vote to return him to the presidency in a few months’ time. To try to make sense of this turn towards illiberalism and right-wing nationalism, two recent books search for answers in the uglier parts of America’s history.
One, Illiberal America by Steven Hahn, a Pulitzer-prizewinning historian, argues that America has long been deeply illiberal. The country’s commitment to the ideals set out in its constitution was hollow from the start, he suggests, and Trumpism is merely the latest in a long string of failures. The other, America Last by Jacob Heilbrunn, provides a much simpler—and more successful—historical observation. The author looks at some conservatives’ infatuation with foreign autocrats over the course of the past century.
Mr Hahn’s book is an all-encompassing indictment. As he sees it, illiberal ideas are “deeply embedded in our history, not at the margins but very much at the centre, infusing the soil of social and political life”. Americans tell themselves a heartwarming, just-so story about their country—one in which the nation slowly but surely rids itself of slavery, segregation and sexism.
Mr Hahn argues that this is inadequate. Over almost 500 pages he capably shades in the dark chapters of the country’s history. There is the foundational sin of human slavery, which the constitution explicitly protected, as well as the mass expulsions of Native Americans and Mormons; the censorship of speech and stifling of dissent; and successive waves of xenophobia that washed over American politics.
In the days of the First World War, for instance, an organisation of citizens called the American Protective League took it upon itself, with the blessing of the Department of Justice, to identify anarchists and alleged traitors. Some of the historical resonances are eerie. The isolationist tendencies of the America First Committee, which opposed entry into the Second World War, prefigured the appeal of the contemporary MAGA movement.
Though Mr Hahn is right that liberal gains often prompt backlash, his contention that illiberalism ought to be at the centre of American history is not convincingly proven. His narrative feels jarringly pessimistic. Consider his gloomy description of the suffragette movement: “Although woman suffrage was finally enacted across the nation in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment, thanks to nearly a century of struggle, the political rights of black women were ignored, and the turnout rates among white women would prove no better than among white men.”
There are many such examples. The drafting of the constitution—a revolutionary document despite its flaws—is breezed past so that Mr Hahn can write about its anti-federalist opponents. Rather than dwell on the Reconstruction amendments to the constitution made after the Civil War, which banned slavery and guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote, Mr Hahn focuses on an exception clause that enabled convict labour. The civil-rights movement is dwelt on much less than white efforts to resist it. This is a narrative in which George Wallace, the demagogic and segregationist governor of Alabama, is a weightier presence than civil-rights leaders such as King.
Furthermore, when Mr Hahn’s narrative reaches the present day, it sputters into incoherence. He suggests that neoliberalism (a nebulous term that goes undefined) enabled right-wing illiberalism of the Trumpian variety; exactly how is not made clear. Various grievances are mentioned: private prisons, militarised police forces, the emergence of tech giants who “have no interest in the personal rights and sovereignties that liberal societies claim to rest upon”. These things do not seem to add up to the provocative indictment of American liberalism that is promised.
