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
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,
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.
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.
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...
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
But, you know, somehow or other, Sanders also touched on them in ways that they found very significant, that he understood.
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