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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Appearances
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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,
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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