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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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.
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,
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Showing 41–60 of 121 · page 3 of 7
← Previous
Next →