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
Absolutely. I think that's right. But I also feel, you know, I sort of finished the book with an example of
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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—
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Showing 101–120 of 121 · page 6 of 7
← Previous
Next →