Steven Hahn
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
You know, we only would read this in a horrifying way because of what we've learned about the really complicated history of Native peoples. and how this has been a long-term process of expulsion. So he tried to dress it up as something that he was doing as an alternative to their physical destruction and their dying out.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
But I think a modern reader, by and large, who knew anything about the history of the United States and of Native people would recognize what he was really after.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Right. I think he saw himself as representing the interests of white Americans in the trans Appalachian West, who themselves were in the process of trying to expand their population and settlements, which would be at the expense of Native people. And so, in a sense, what Jackson really represented was, you know, he was the first president from the Trans-Appalachian West.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
He had strong support among white adults, white adult men from that area and also from the southern states because he was a slave owner and he was committed to the maintenance of slavery. So, you know, at the same time, access to politics in the in terms of voting and office holding, property holding requirements were being dropped. And so adult white men had more access than ever.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And so even though in most places people of African descent didn't, women didn't, in some ways the workforce in many, many places didn't because they were made up of women and children. But nonetheless, there was kind of this sense that the groundwork for what would be an expanse of democracy was being laid then.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, I think there are a number of things that they could connect to. Not least was his defiance of Supreme Court rulings on the potential expulsion of Native people. You know, he said, OK, that's fine. Let them enforce it. I think they see him as a quote-unquote strong leader who was willing and able and interested in moving directions of his own choosing.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Obviously, he had a very complicated relationship with the federal government, but he stood up very strongly because the nullification crisis in the 1830s when South Carolina said, unlike Jackson's view of the Supreme Court, no, we're not going to enforce the tariff. Jackson threatened to really crush them militarily as well as politically.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
So I think they see him as, you know, an example of an early executive who was interested in expanding the powers of the presidency at a time when the president of the United States really had relatively few powers. And, you know, the important power remained in the states and nationally in the Congress.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And I think they saw him as a harbinger of what would happen later and what Trump clearly admires.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, the Pomerades are called the Pomerades because the Attorney General of the United States was A. Mitchell Palmer. I think it was an example of how people who were regarded by those in power as politically objectionable
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
could suffer all sorts of forms of repression, including expulsions of various sorts that included people who were isolationists, but it's also included people who were on the left, first socialists who had a complicated history with that, and then after the Russian Revolution, people who were associated with the spread of communism.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
were those who quite simply did not fit into their view of what the United States should be, which is a republic of white Christians. And in that particular time, the federal government became involved in in the repression of these movements and whether it involved prosecuting them. I mean, Eugene Debs ran for president from jail.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Or whether it had to do with expelling them, not only communists and socialists, but people who were accused of Anarchism, Asako and Vanzetti, you know, became a very notorious example of how that could happen. It's important to recognize that the Ku Klux Klan was in the process of reorganizing in this period. It was reestablished during the teens, but it really exploded later.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
in the 1920s, and it fed off a lot of these currents. It admired fascist regimes elsewhere. It admired the sort of political violence and paramilitarism that went into it. You know, one of the things that they did was enforce prohibition, which they regarded as an attack on the life ways of European immigrants and others who were not white Christians.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, one of the things I try to do in the book, which is recognizing that illiberalism is not one thing. It's not an unchanging, static thing. It's a collection of ideas and notions of relationships or political power. is to think about how illiberalism was modernized during what we call the progressive period.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And there, the idea of social engineering, the use of eugenics, which is oftentimes not adequately accounted for by historians of the period, disfranchisement, segregation, warfare overseas that was justified in racialized terms, the use of troops who basically got their experience in Indian wars in the Trans-Mississippi West, and the idea that was advocated by people.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Herbert Crowley is a good example because he was one of the founders of the New Republic. He was one of the advocates of Teddy Roosevelt's New Nationalism. And yet he was very suspicious of what he called Jeffersonian democracy.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
He thought that many people in the United States didn't understand the national purpose and that therefore politics really should be conducted by those who were trained, by those who were experts.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
So I do think that without saying that the United States was moving in a Nazi direction, I mean, there were people, obviously, who in the 1930s very much embraced what was going on in Germany on many accounts. There were many people in the 20s and into the early 30s who thought that Mussolini was really pointing out the future that the Euro-Atlantic world was headed towards.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Because he seemed to be somebody who was active, engaged, strong, and recognized the limitations of a kind of the liberal state that had really fallen into real question. You know, the Klan was the largest social movement in the 1920s, and their ideas about what the United States would be, it was an early America Firstism. I mean, that's really where it emerges.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And so, again, I think that without necessarily saying that this was Italian fascism or this was Nazi, which it wasn't. But to say that some of the ideas, some of the connections, and the overall project, the sense of who really should be participating in this, who shouldn't be participating.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I agree. I do think it is important to recognize the kind of social basis that existed for these ideas. Because, you know, as horrific as we may find it, you know, disenfranchisement and segregation, Jim Crow, as we call it, only had pushback coming from the, you know, African-Americans and not all of them. but most of them.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And most white Americans and political leaders thought that this was a perfectly reasonable, perfectly modern way of choreographing the great diversity and inequalities that existed in American society. So there's no question that these right-wing groups really did fulfill a need, but, you know, a sense of community building,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
a sense of what belonging was, belonging that not only included people you were comfortable with and you thought were part of the community, but non-belonging and the resistance or expulsion of those or the repression of those who you saw as political threats.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, you know, that was really the first major immigration act that was passed. It established quotas for the first time. Before then, it was really the Chinese and then Asian Exclusion Acts, which were not designed to have quotas, but designed not to have people from Asia come to the United States. The 1924 Immigration Act was different, and it was organized in such a way that it
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
really did try to undercut the migration of people from certain parts of the world who were regarded as culturally unassimilable, as politically objectionable, as people who were breeders and therefore threatened the population balances in the United States, not simply by the numbers who arrive, but by the population increase once they got to the United States.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And, you know, when it was passed, I mean, in most major journalistic venues, it was celebrated. The New York Times, the LA Times, everyone sort of saying, yeah, this was the way in which we could preserve an America that we feel comfortable with.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
This was a law that was in force until 1965, not to mention that Jews who were trying to flee Nazi Germany and then the Holocaust were themselves harmed by this. But I think it's part of a piece of what's happening in the 1920s as trying to offer belonging to people who could be easily assimilated and offering little but repression or non-belonging to people who couldn't.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, you know, one of the things that became part of the reception of McCarthyism, especially among historians, was to liken it to 19th century populism because they saw very much of what you're describing, the kind of anti-elitism that
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
his emergence out of a particular social setting, his finding of enemies, internal as well as external, at a time when mass movements were held in a lot of suspicion by historians, journalists, and scholars because they had just come out of a war recognizing that fascism was a mass movement. It wasn't simply taking a power coup d'etat on the part of a small group. elite or oligarchy.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And so, you know, McCarthy is now, not surprisingly, getting a new look by people on the political right precisely because they felt that he had the courage to stand up to those who were threatening American values and American politics. And he did this, you know, at great, in the end, personal cost.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
But, I mean, you know, Joseph McCarthy fit into a framework in which a lot of this was going on anyway. And it was not only going on among Republicans. It was going on among Democrats. I mean, what historians have found is that actually the people who voted for populists in the past were not the people who voted for McCarthy, at least in terms of their social profiles.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And so that was sort of debunked. and that McCarthy was not a kind of new 19th century populism. He was really appealing to a different kind of constituency, obviously more native-born, but not entirely native-born, people who were sort of small business types.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
You know, one of the things we have to recognize is that the federal state grew enormously from the 1930s through the 1940s into the 1950s. You know, I think McCarthy was in part representing a certain unease and suspicions about that, about a world of people who were trained into these institutions, what expansive and bureaucratic institutions might involve.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
There's no question, I think, that he directed attention and concern to institutions that really didn't have a deep history in the United States, that were far from the direct reach of many Americans who were themselves experiencing enormous change, whether it had to do in bigger cities.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I mean, a lot of these struggles over housing, you know, people have this idea, well, it wasn't until the 1960s when the urban uprisings began, but actually it was much earlier as there were housing shortages, there were population demographic migrations. And so I think he did appeal to those who were trying to hold on to a kind of sense of community that they saw in part being overrun.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And by going after the institutions and suggesting that not only were they far from you, but they were being infested by people who didn't have your interests in mind at all, whatever you understood about socialism, communism, or the left.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I think the response was mostly bending the knee. I think that universities, workplaces, other institutions were very quick to try to identify people who could be regarded as threats. And for the most part, they were expelled. People lost their jobs. They were blacklisted. They were run out of important political positions or they could not seek.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
They were excluded from labor unions at a very critical point in our labor history in the late 1940s, early 1950s, when organizations like the CIO were increasingly powerful. So I do think that bending the knee, especially in the face of what seems to be significant power is not uncommon and is a worrisome precedent.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I think that one of the challenges that liberals have had is that even though they may embrace a whole variety of ideas and relationships that we may find admirable, that nonetheless, I think they are interested in maintaining social order. That in many of them, they still do have an acceptance of cultural hierarchies. I mean, look, the liberals played a very important role
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
in so-called McCarthyism. I mean, they were the leaders. Arthur Schlesinger and the establishment of Americans for Democratic Action and all of this was to try to sort of hive liberals off the left of American society. Not only that, but condemn the left as followers and people who really should be subject to deep suspicion. And it was okay if you fired them
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
you know, from universities or other positions because they were evil. They were the internal enemies. I do think that liberals were not very well equipped for the sort of unravelings that began to take place and that they kind of begin to abandon the whole project.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, I think it's important to describe it as a tension. I think it's certainly the case with many liberals who have ascended to important leadership positions in American political life, that it comes with the terrain of seeking office and dealing with complicated constituencies and our own issues. complicated past.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I mean, obviously, people in the Democratic Party through the 1960s, you know, had the southern wing of the party that they had to appease. And, you know, you can excuse it from today until tomorrow, but they did. And, you know, Johnson famously said when he was signing either the civil rights or the voting rights, you know, now we've lost the South for a
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
It's also important for us to recognize that, you know, across our history, you know, most of the political regimes, so to speak, were regimes that were conservative. You know, the United States have a very, very, not simply overall violent history, but a politically violent history. You know, it's not as if liberal democracy and political violence were separate or parallel.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I mean, they were interconnected historically. you know, from the beginning and usually to the benefit of people with wealth and power and people who wanted to exclude large sections of the American public from having decision-making power and authority.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, you know, we need to understand that in relationship to the Bracero program, which was a sort of government-sponsored program that was meant to provide labor, mostly for big agriculture, but not only for big agriculture, and so that immigrants had the right to work. And they usually were moving back and forth across the border,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
But by the 1950s, this was coming under attack, and therefore Operation Redback was an attempt to sort of push that back across the Rio Grande and back into Mexico. But the idea was to basically deport people. And it kind of expressed, you know, one of the really complicated aspects of American politics
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
economic development policy, which was on the one hand, it depended so heavily on so many different groups of immigrants. And on the other hand, there was hostility to them, especially by that time to those of Mexico. It sort of gives us an idea of the really, you know, sort of repressive impulses and the ease of building a repressive apparatus.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Dwight D. Eisenhower, admittedly, it's easy to look back compared to what we're situated with now. But when the Warren court came down with the Brown decision in 1954, his response was appointing Earl Warren to the court was the worst mistake he ever made. And they had to go through a second Brown decision to provide some means of enforcement
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I think that's right. Certainly, we know that during the time of the Red Scare, in the period of World War I, that there were lots of immigrants who were also politically radical, who were deported and whose rights were regarded in very, very limited ways, and whose deportation was generally embraced, accepted by the public.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
In some ways, it's because the advent of citizenship and the 14th Amendment, as strong as it was in many respects, didn't really, you know, if you compare that to the Mexican Constitution in 1916, that laid out a whole series of rights that working people had, that women had, And you compare it to a sense of, well, what are the rights that come with citizenship in the United States?
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I worry, as you may worry too, that precisely because a lot of those rights are not clearly established and because there could be any one of a variety of loopholes, whether in the language or whether in the way citizenship and rights are conceived,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
that we may be entering a period, you know, in some ways marked by, like, the Dobbs decision of the really withdrawal of rights that we had come to believe that people have.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
It seems to me, I'm not somebody who thinks about pendulums. I don't think that history repeats itself. But I do think that there are moments where, when circumstances make possible developments moving in any one of a number of directions. And so, even if you think about Obama and Trump, I think it follows perfectly.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Obama gets elected and everybody was talking about how we were now in a post-racial society. And then two blinks, you know, the Tea Party is organized and basically Obama draws out a lot of deep racism in American society and senses that a black person like him should not legitimately hold the power he does. And therefore you have a birther movement, which really harks back to Reconstruction,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
when, you know, Southern whites recognized that slavery was over, but the idea of empowering former slaves was just inconceivable to them. And you realize some of the depictions of Obama, you know, in African dress and so on and so forth, I think suggests, I mean, I think, you know, it's an interesting question about... And Trump rides birtherism to the forefront of the Republican Party.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I mean, he found his way into leadership precisely in that even when it was debunked, even when it was absolutely clear that this was a lie, nonetheless, most Republicans still believed that it was this idea of the general illegitimacy of certain groups of people holding power and breaking the hierarchies that they thought were essential to stability and security in the United States.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I think that it's important to recognize that, first of all, we have a long history of incarcerating people. And from the birth of the penitentiary in the early 19th century on... You know, the people who were incarcerated, wherever they were incarcerated, were disproportionately poor, disproportionately immigrants, disproportionately Black.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I do think that basically what happened was after the enormous urban unrest in the 1960s, that there was kind of the sense that, well, they could militarily occupy big cities or they could find other ways of pacifying and repressing the populations.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And I think part of what happens is that, you know, there is a bipartisan consensus on crime as a problem that's out of control, people of color as those who are most threatening, most dangerous, and that effectively deporting them from society and putting them in institutions where at least they were under, you know, direct surveillance and repressive control.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And we have to, again, remember that, you know, what happens is they're not only expelled from communities, but they're effectively expelled from political society, because not only don't they have political rights, and they had a fight for whatever civil rights they, you know, do they have a right to sue? Do they have a right to challenge the,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
structures of power within penitentiaries, I fear that a lot of people would be okay with expelling citizens who are deemed to be true enemies of the people because of their violence or because of their racial and ethnic background. I mean, Trump is racist explicitly now. Explicitly. And whatever the courts do, he's obviously looking to for confrontation.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
He's interested in provocation, and he thinks basically there's nothing much they can do about it, and that may prove to be the case.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I do think that what happens is that it's very easy to invoke a notion of communities under siege, being threatened. It reminded me of...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
ideas and relationships that could so quickly be reconfigured about belonging and what the, even before the United States became the United States, but what it meant to be part of communities, what rights communities had to exclude or to expel, to punish, and who in many cases desperately tried not to be the other. One of the things we saw is that there were members of
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
quote unquote, immigrant groups who supported Trump. And this is part of a long-term phenomenon whereby those who have arrived in established stability, this is true during the Great Migration too, where Northern Black communities were, you know, not all that comfortable with these rural Black people who were coming up who didn't really know the ways and were potentially threatening
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
the stability of their own communities. It's an easy thing to kind of drum up because it has been so much part of the conversation for so long. And I do think that this is exactly what needs to be resisted and reimagined.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, I think one of the things that makes him seem so, quote, distinctive and unprecedented is, you know, if we think about the national level, where, you know, there's no question that it would be very difficult to find anybody who has ascended to the presidency and has behaved in the cruel and demeaning, not only to people, but to institutions, to his political enemies.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
But I do think that if one is aware of what has gone on over the course of U.S. history on the state and local levels, George Wallace, certainly the case. And he's somebody I think who's really important, who did become a national figure.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And I don't know what would have happened if it wasn't for the assassin's bullet in 1972, which basically pushed him out of a race that he was in the process of maybe winning. But, you know, you think about a world that was organized around slavery and the personal domination of people who were enslavers.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
You think about a variety of what one scholar has called authoritarian enclaves, not only in the South, but in other parts of the United States, where there were hierarchies of power. that were long existing, and that were supported by a lot of people because they basically saw benefits that came from it.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And I think one of the things we have to understand about illiberalism and illiberal communities or sensibilities is that there was a lot of in them that was satisfying. I mean, when people who were in the Klan in the 1920s were interviewed later, they couldn't understand. I mean, I'm talking about ordinary people like in Indiana, which was a state that was pretty much dominated by the Klan.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
They didn't see themselves as being involved in an extremist organization. They saw themselves involved in an organization that was reinforcing community ideas, that was providing for recreation, that was embedding notions about what it means to be an American, a white person, a Christian. They may not even articulate it that way except for being a Christian.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
So I think one of the things we need to understand is that it's not simply those moments of rage that— that we can identify and then ask, why does that happen? It's a way of life that can go on in very prosaic ways until they're being threatened, and then they erupt.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
But we need to understand the day-to-day lives that are created, that bring people together, that provide them with all sorts of meaning in their lives. And I think one of the things that...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
is important about recognizing, say, illiberalism as a important current and field of force is that we have a tendency of looking at the disruptions of the liberal tradition as simply a backlash, as angry people who are venting, their fury, which doesn't really have a lot of substance and things can go back to normal easily. And I think that that's a serious mistake.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, you know, you use the word fantasy, and I think that's a very good one because in 2016, I think there was a sense, first of all, that there was a sense that there was no way he was going to win. But even when he won, I think there was a sense that this was a very unusual, very toxic phenomenon that once you defeat him, would be defeated again.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Now, obviously, we've learned that this is not the case. And, you know, I remember shortly after he was inaugurated in 2017, there was a big demonstration in Los Angeles, and someone was carrying a sign which was, I can't believe I'm still protesting this shit. And the answer to that is you're always going to be protesting this shit because there are no final victories of anything.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
But I think it's also important for us to recognize that politics are very volatile. that people's political sensibilities do not fit into very neat boxes. You know, when Bernie Sanders was running in 2016, there were more than a few people who said that Bernie Sanders would be someone who would be very appealing and that, you know, they ended up voting for Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
But, you know, somehow or other, Sanders also touched on them in ways that they found very significant, that he understood.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Absolutely. I think that's right. But I also feel, you know, I sort of finished the book with an example of
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
This movement in a county in East Texas in the late 19th century where, you know, someone who was part of a community of enslavers and someone who was part of a community of enslaved came together for basically opportunistic reasons because they shared grievance with what was going on and they knew they couldn't win local office without forming some kind of coalition.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
But they actually began to do it little by little. They learned a lot about each other. And in fact, over many years, they came to establish their own republic in the biracial republic where the white people who were the insurgents learned a lot about the needs of the black community. And the black community was able to engage with what was 30 or 40 percent of of the white community.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And even then they call themselves populists in the 1890s. And even when the populists nationally lost, they were still winning. And, you know, in the end, they were gunned down.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
But I think it's an example of the way in which really meaningful coalitions And political connections are forged, recognizing things that are beneficial to everybody.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
You know, one of the things we have to remember is that the sense of rights that people can enjoy, the sense of rights that people are entitled to, were products of very, very divisive and very, very, in some cases, violent struggles. And that the period of time that we're talking about when this was true is pretty short.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I mean, one of the things I was really trying to do in my book was what I would call de-centering liberalism. The liberal tradition, as I try to argue, is really something that's kind of invented in the 1940s and 1950s and holds on in many remarkable ways. But part of the problem with liberalism is that it never really dealt very well with the issues of power.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And therefore, when push comes to shove, they abandon ship or they sort of put together projects and policies that are not going to work or become self-contradictory. if what we're after is some of the things that liberals and liberalism at least say that they're interested in, a more egalitarian society, a world in which globally as well as nationally and locally
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
where it's possible for people, regardless of their social, economic, racial, or ethnic background, to pursue a life that is meaningful to them. If we're actually interested in that, as opposed to rhetorically interested in that, then we have to face up to really what liberalism has been inadequate. You write about, in a sense, liberalism's failure to be visionary. And I think that's true.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
What about, you know, what a future could look like? And then the question of how you get there is related to what a future could look like.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, historically, I think there have been important moments in the past where social movements have, even if they haven't entirely won or were able to gain political power as we think about abolitionism, which took on the most intractable power in the United States. And I think about abolitionism as black abolitionism,
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And about enslaved people who managed to take down a system of plantation slavery that had created the wealthiest people in the United States and people who owned disproportionate power. But Lincoln emerges in your book almost as a villain. Well, I don't see Lincoln as a villain. What I was trying to do there was to talk about some of the limitations.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And I don't see putting Lincoln, you know, well, that he's just a racist because, you know, I think that's not a useful way of understanding Lincoln. If anything, you know, you see somebody who... grew and changed in very, very significant ways. But at the same time, he kind of embodied a lot of the contradictions about what a national family is and who would be included in that family.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I don't think there's any such thing as a pure movement. As a friend of mine put it, you know, if you want to build a movement where everyone has to fit through the eye of a needle, forget it. And, you know, frankly, most social movements don't last very long. But if you're going to build a movement, which I think about in a large way of consequence, if you're serious—
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And if power is actually what you're interested in, and change, and using power for the point of change that will appeal to large numbers of people who want change and whose lives can actually be better. I think a central issue is to confront this. You know, it's that I understand why you think that. And...
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Maybe there are ways that we can move, recognize that no one's going to be fully changed, and that you're always going to be protesting this shit, because there's no such thing as a victory, even if you like your side winning, that there's going to be ongoing struggles, ongoing need for vigilance, ongoing need for self-criticism.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And we have to find ways of reckoning our ideals and ambitions and visions and utopianism. People are not going to put themselves on the line for a world that they can't quite imagine. And I think that is a basis for something bigger. It's always going to be an ongoing process of rethinking, interrogating, and changing, being open to change.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, first of all, I think Tocqueville's Democracy in America would be a good place to start. Not going into it thinking of it as the iconic text, but going into it thinking about it as someone who is an observer from the outside looking in and who has both admiration and reservations. Elizabeth Hinton's book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, is
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
which focuses on the 1960s into the early 1970s and is, I think, a very, very interesting way of understanding how illiberal sensibilities kind of infuse their way into what are major modern liberal projects and pave the way for mass incarceration, which I learned a lot from.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And the third book is a book by Lawrence Powell called Troubled Memory, Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Dukes, Louisiana. It's an extraordinary story about a woman who was part of the only whole family to make it out of the Lotz ghetto. And they end up in New Orleans.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And when Duke runs for governor, she plays an incredibly important role in outing his Nazi past and helping to undermine his claims to power. So it kind of links fascism on both sides of the Atlantic with an incredibly inspiring and well-told story.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Well, I think that there was a deep desire to think about a set of liberal democratic norms, the use of the term norms. As a way of understanding how we have been as a people and how we have practiced politics, and therefore there was, as alarming as Trump may have been, there was something comforting about thinking that this was a weird abnormality.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
It was kind of a noxious weed that had sprouted. A dying gasp of an old order.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
either that or as a dangerous protrusion of a new order potentially coming into being, but that could be pulled out and we would go back to normal. I was really struck in 2015-16, not so much by him per se, but by journalists and other very thoughtful observers who were aghast
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
at his various violations of liberal democratic norms, even though for the previous two and a half, three decades, they had been undermined in so many different respects, but wanting to hold on to them and not to normalize him.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I'm talking about a way of thinking about the world that has to do with the embrace of inequality, inherent inequalities, about hierarchies of nation and race and gender, about a desire for cultural and or religious uniformity, a particularist idea about rights, You don't have them all the time.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
An idea of marking internal as well as external enemies and the use of exclusion or expulsion as a way of dealing with this. Thinking about the access to and maintenance of power with the legitimacy of political violence. And as much as anything, really it's about the will of the community over the rule of law.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
And I think understanding this as a set of ideas and relationships that really preceded the European colonization of North America and has preceded liberalism and then became very much entangled to it but had a logic of its own.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
I do. I read it both in terms of his interest and admiration for what he saw as a robust individualism and equality, but I also read it as a series of warnings that about where this could be headed. The largest section of his warnings had to do with his very long chapter on slavery and race, which he recognized infused the entire country.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
In fact, he thought racism was more powerful where slavery had been abolished than where slavery still existed. But I was especially interested in how he understood local democracy and local politics in general, the collective and associational activities. And what worried him was what he called the tyranny of the majority.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
The narrowness of mind, the way in which associations on the ground tended to emphasize certain ideas about belonging, but at the same time put those who didn't fit in into real jeopardy.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
He ended up arguing that he thought it was likely or is certainly possible that the United States could very, very quickly move toward a despotism and where people would be willing to give up their rights in loyalty to a strongman.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
So you read this and you think, you know, I think he really had his finger on things that were going on in the 1830s that oftentimes, as you mentioned, are kind of overlooked because it has become one of those texts that are iconic in establishing ideas of American exceptionalism. And it was republished.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
During the early phases of the Cold War, when ideas about American exceptionalism and American consensus were taking great strength.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
Right. Obviously, the expulsion of Native peoples from their lands east of the Mississippi to what was regarded as Indian territory, which was really the first territory in the United States that was not imagined as heading towards statehood. So it's not entirely clear what it was. This was the end of a process that had begun back in the 17th
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
century that was directed toward removing, expelling Native people. But the thing that's important to recognize is that this was a central aspect of American society and political culture in that period. Free African Americans were targeted for expulsion. It was called colonization. This goes back to the 18th century and even Thomas Jefferson, who couldn't really imagine how white and black people
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
could live together under conditions of freedom in some ways that Tocqueville re-articulated. But there were mobs that were focused on driving out not only African Americans in cities where they were free or had escaped from enslavement, Catholics, Mormons, you know, Joseph Smith is murdered in the 1840s, not far from Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln's place, abolitionists.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
The 1830s were a time of these anti-abolitionist riots in cities large and small because they were accused of promoting miscegenation. And what was the remedy? The remedy was to drive them out
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
That's a really good question. And in fact, it suggests the way in which historical understanding and thinking has really changed. One of the reasons that Jackson attained heroic proportions for a very long time was his status as an enslaver and his multifaceted role as an Indian fighter tended to be diminished. And what was emphasized was his apparent weakness.
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very American Roots of Trumpism
for the common man, popular democracy, the age of Jackson, so to speak. You know, Jackson thought, like many white Americans thought, that Native people didn't belong, that they were in jeopardy of basically dying out And that what he was doing was actually in their interest by finding a territory outside of the centers of population where Native people could in some ways be safe.