Steven Hahn
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Steven Hahn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
It was kind of a noxious weed that had sprouted. A dying gasp of an old order.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
During the early phases of the Cold War, when ideas about American exceptionalism and American consensus were taking great strength.
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
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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