The Daily Escape:
Sunrise, Avon Beach, NC – May 2024 photo by Donna Cartwright Hayden
Discussions about “Illiberalism” are suddenly popping up in Wrongo’s daily feeds from many sources. Several are reviews of a book (“Illiberal America”) by Steven Hahn, an NYU professor of history.
Hahn also wrote an article in Saturday’s NYT that condenses the arguments in his book. In his column, “The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism”, Hahn argues that American illiberalism is not a mere reaction to a dominant tradition of freedom and individual rights, but a philosophy that has long competed against liberalism for primacy in American politics.
David Leonhardt in a NYT book review of Hahn’s book says:
“This country’s liberal tradition is certainly strong. It explains the democratic radicalism of the American Revolution, the relative openness of the US immigration system in the early 19th century and the inclusiveness of the nation’s public education system in the early 20th century.”
A short version of Hahn’s thesis is that the US has long been deeply reactionary and it’s amazing we’ve gotten as far as we have without a challenge to American democracy prior to Trump. Here’s a excerpt of Hahn’s view of our history:
“Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, in “Democracy in America,” glimpsed the illiberal currents that already entangled the country’s politics. While he marveled at the “equality of conditions,” the fluidity of social life and the strength of republican institutions, he also worried about the “omnipotence of the majority.”
“What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there,” Tocqueville wrote, “but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny.” He pointed to communities “taking justice into their own hands,” and warned that “associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies.” Lamenting their intellectual conformity, Tocqueville believed that if Americans ever gave up republican government, “they will pass rapidly on to despotism,” restricting “the sphere of political rights, taking some of them away in order to entrust them to a single man.”
The slide toward despotism that Tocqueville feared may be well underway, whatever the election’s outcome. Even if they try to fool themselves into thinking that Mr. Trump won’t follow through, millions of voters seem ready to entrust their rights to “a single man” who has announced his intent to use autocratic powers for retribution, repression, expulsion and misogyny.
Only by recognizing what we’re up against can we mount an effective campaign to protect our democracy, leaning on the important political struggles — abolitionism, antimonopoly, social democracy, human rights, civil rights, feminism — that have challenged illiberalism in the past and offer the vision and political pathways to guide us in the future.
Our biggest mistake would be to believe that we’re watching an exceptional departure in the country’s history. Because from the first, Mr. Trump has tapped into deep and ever-expanding illiberal roots. Illiberalism’s history is America’s history.”
America remains a self-deluded country since many Americans have no idea just how illiberal they are, or how deep those illiberal roots run. Today’s college students are living through the consequences of illiberalism. Educational institutions with DEI programs and cultural studies majors have no qualms about siccing the police on their students.
It’s no surprise that university administrators don’t observe the liberal tolerance they espouse in their curricula. But what’s less clear is American colleges and universities exist as training grounds for lawyers, physicians, future Wall Street geniuses and other legs in the stool of elitism. These students are supposed to be compliant because those professions require it.
Time to wake up America! In a few months we’re holding a presidential election in which an illiberal ethnonationalist will stoke white fear of replacement while his Party exploits anti-antisemitism to chip away at our tenuous liberal coalition. There’s danger, and we have little time left to get it right.
No matter how much violence a Trump loss unleashes it’ll pale in comparison to the violence that will come under a Trump dictatorship.
To help you wake up, watch and listen to Van Halen’s “Ballot Or The Bullet” from their 1998 album “Van Halen III”. The song’s title comes from a 1964 speech by Malcolm X who, while speaking about the civil rights struggle, said “We’re going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet.”
Van Halen wasn’t a political band, but they appropriated Malcolm X’s speech for this tune:
Also, Eddie Van Halen played slide guitar on this, a rarity.
Sample Lyrics:
Give me liberty or give me death
No truer words have ever been said
Well are you prepared for your very last breath?
Don’t you dare start what you cannot finish
So when we face, face the adversary
No longer are we the minority
When a house is divided, it just will not stand
Once it’s decided, a line drawn in the sand
Ah, the ballot or the bullet
The choice is up to you
The ballot or the bullet
Tell me what you gonna do
The sword or the pen
Can’t be held by the same hand
That we have always had many illiberal fellow citizens is undeniable. That they have not been able to form themselves into dominent political movements is maybe more good luck than good management. The story of US Nazi sympathizers in the 30s and early 40s, squelched only by our entry into WWII is only one of the case studies within my lifetime. The rise of Trump should remind us of other charismatic figures in our fairly recent past who gathered sympathetic followers giving them at least temporary power. “Hair-on-fire” shouting is unlikely to arrouse public opposition. Maybe good story-telling and old-fashioned political campaign organizing will rouse enough Americans to deneigh the illiberal figures and forces. That’s where I’m putting my money.