ILLIBERAL AMERICA

A sweeping history of the right wing in American politics.

The protestations of adherents notwithstanding, there’s not much of a live-and-let-live ethos in American conservatism, born of European ideas of “fixed hierarchies (notably of gender, race, and nationality) and cultural homogeneity.” Unfortunately for them, people of different races and nationalities soon came along to undermine that cultural homogeneity, pressing for their rights—and, Hahn observes, those who have fought most consistently and persistently have always been “those who have been denied them.” Consider one of the author’s examples: The bloody King Philip’s War of 1675 ended with the destruction and enslavement of the Abenaki people, resulting in a Puritan plantation economy that favored the wealthy. Of course, the rich tended to approve of those fixed hierarchies, while the landless battled the perceived collusion among speculators and the colonial government that hindered their ownership of property. Just so, illiberal regimes in both the North and the South before and after the Civil War built economies based on involuntary servitude, whether the forced labor of enslaved people or the forced labor of the incarcerated, whose population grew dramatically following emancipation. “Between 1865 and the turn of the twentieth century,” writes Hahn, “Black prison populations from the Carolinas to Texas increased more than tenfold,” and with them the social Darwinist doctrines that presumed the inherent criminality of Black people. Modern manifestations of illiberal political repression continue this practice, while also battling on fronts familiar to all of us, from the movement to outlaw abortion to efforts to restrict voting rights. Hahn capably ferrets out antecedents, writing, sensibly, “there is no good way to understand how crime, race, and immigration became so effectively weaponized in recent years without recognizing the very deep roots that had been sunk more than a century before.”

A learned, provocative guide to modern authoritarianism masked as conservatism.