After last week’s episode, “The Emergency Is Here,” we got a lot of emails. And the most common reply was: You really think we’ll have midterm elections in 2026? Isn’t that naïve?I think we will have midterms. But one reason I think so many people are skeptical of that is they’re working with comparisons to other places: Mussolini’s Italy, Putin’s Russia, Pinochet’s Chile.But we don’t need to look abroad for parallels; it has happened here.Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author of “Illiberal America: A History.” In this conversation, he walks me through some of the most illiberal periods in American history: Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, Jim Crow, the Red Scare, Japanese American internment, Operation Wetback. And we discuss how this legacy can help us better understand what’s happening right now.This episode contains strong language.Book Recommendations:Democracy in America by Alexis de TocquevilleFrom the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth HintonTroubled Memory by Lawrence N. PowellThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick, Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What are the political stakes around Trump's immigration policies?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. A number of people I respect and often agree with have been making different versions of the same point. Immigration is one of Trump's best issues and one of the worst issues for Democrats. The economy is where Trump is now weak. So if you really care about the dangers Donald Trump poses, you need to beat him.
And that means focusing the country's attention on his worst issues, the places where he is most beatable. Nate Silver submitted a version of this argument, and so did California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Yeah, it's, you know, this is the distraction of the day. The art of distraction. Don't get distracted by distractions, we say, and here we zig and zag. This is the debate they want.
This is their 80-20 issue as they've described it. And I want to give this argument its due. It's not without merit. Optimal political strategy is usually to keep the focus on your opponent's worst issues. For Donald Trump right now, it's his decision to light the global economy on fire. From that perspective, focusing on Abrego Garcia is a distraction.
Trump's meeting with President Bukele is a distraction. And getting distracted is bad politics. Focus on the tariffs. Focus on the stock market chaos. Focus. But I think there are two things wrong with this. One is that the polling here isn't clear. Yes, Democrats have become afraid on the issue of immigration. They see that as a winner for Donald Trump.
But if you look at the polling on rule of law, on due process, to the extent this is framed that way, which it should be, that's actually what this is about, then Democrats are in a much better position. People do not want the Trump administration to be able to randomly disappear people living in this country without due process.
But I think this argument reflects a generalized collapse of roles and time across the political system. If this was October 2026 and you're running a congressional campaign, then what you focus on is a hard question and you should pay pretty damn close attention to the pulse. If you're choosing how to write and spend money on ads, same thing. And I wish you luck figuring it out.
But not everything that everyone else says between now and October 2026 can or should be poll tested. It is a thin vision of politics to back literally everything out from elections. When Senator Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador, and I'm very glad he did, he was representing his constituent, Obrego Garcia's wife, a U.S.
citizen and a Maryland resident, whose husband had been disappeared by the president.
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Chapter 2: How does the Trump administration's approach to immigration reflect historical patterns?
That is Van Hollen's job. That is constituent service of the highest order. And the rest of us, we have other jobs, other roles, and they're not all about winning elections. We're in the midst of an attempted authoritarian breakthrough. I don't think there's another way to say that.
How much opposition the Trump administration faces from other corridors and other power centers will matter to what they do. If it's easy to deport people to an El Salvadoran prison, they're going to do a lot more of it.
One lesson from history, I think, one reason I am so focused here, is that when the machine of disappearing people begins rolling, when that becomes a tactic, it can roll pretty damn far if it's not stopped early. It's the same with Trump's effort to break the universities, to break the law firms, to break the government. If it's easy, they will keep going. They will do more of it.
They will do it faster. If it's hard, they might not. They also have limited bandwidth, limited energy, limited attention, limited resources. The election isn't next week. We have more than 550 days until just the midterms. Civil society needs to act in the interim. There is not just one job here, and we are not in the final two weeks of an election campaign.
And then I've been hearing this other argument, an argument that can sound to me like a kind of fatalism, as if the country has already fallen, as if Donald Trump's power is already limitless, as if the fight is already lost. The most common email I got in reply to last week's episode was, isn't it naive to think we're going to have midterms at all? I think we will have midterms.
And I think one reason it can be hard to imagine a way into that is so many people are working in their head with comparisons to other places, to other times. To Putin's Russia, or Mussolini's Italy, or different authoritarian takeovers in Latin America, or even Hitler's Germany.
Much like Mussolini, Trump is actually laying out exactly what he plans to do.
This comes out of fascism and also the tradition of military dictatorships like Pinochet in Chile.
Similarities to what happened in Germany and what's happening now in America are just undeniable.
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Chapter 3: Who is Steven Hahn and what is 'Illiberal America' about?
During the early phases of the Cold War, when ideas about American exceptionalism and American consensus were taking great strength.
So in the 1830s, you also have an example of the tradition you're talking about at really full strength under Andrew Jackson. And you have a chapter on this, and particularly around Jackson's use of deportations and expulsions, which you see as central to the illiberal tradition and I think is central to the sort of story we're tracking here.
So tell me a bit about that decade from your perspective.
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
Tell me a bit about the rhetoric Jackson uses to justify the expulsions. If somebody's reading it today, how much of it would read horrifying and archaic to our ears? We don't think like that anymore. And how much would not? How much would we hear resonance in?
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.
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Chapter 4: What is illiberalism and how is it embedded in American history?
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.
But I think a modern reader, by and large, who knew anything about the history of the United States and of Native people would recognize what he was really after.
How connected is it to Jackson's politics of the common man? How much does the support of the common man, the channeling of the common man, braid itself into this project of who you have to push out so they're not part of the common man?
Right. I think he saw himself as representing the interests of white Americans in the trans Appalachian West, who themselves were in the process of trying to expand their population and settlements, which would be at the expense of Native people. And so, in a sense, what Jackson really represented was, you know, he was the first president from the Trans-Appalachian West.
He had strong support among white adults, white adult men from that area and also from the southern states because he was a slave owner and he was committed to the maintenance of slavery. So, you know, at the same time, access to politics in the in terms of voting and office holding, property holding requirements were being dropped. And so adult white men had more access than ever.
And so even though in most places people of African descent didn't, women didn't, in some ways the workforce in many, many places didn't because they were made up of women and children. But nonetheless, there was kind of this sense that the groundwork for what would be an expanse of democracy was being laid then.
Jackson is interesting, I think, in this moment particularly, because he is very explicitly talked about as a model for Donald Trump. Trump restored his portrait to the Oval Office. When you hear Trump and the people around him, like Steve Bannon in the first term, who talk a lot about Jackson, who lionize Jackson, what do you hear them connecting to in him?
Well, I think there are a number of things that they could connect to. Not least was his defiance of Supreme Court rulings on the potential expulsion of Native people. You know, he said, OK, that's fine. Let them enforce it. I think they see him as a quote-unquote strong leader who was willing and able and interested in moving directions of his own choosing.
Obviously, he had a very complicated relationship with the federal government, but he stood up very strongly because the nullification crisis in the 1830s when South Carolina said, unlike Jackson's view of the Supreme Court, no, we're not going to enforce the tariff. Jackson threatened to really crush them militarily as well as politically.
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Chapter 5: How does Alexis de Tocqueville's 'Democracy in America' relate to American illiberalism?
Herbert Crowley is a good example because he was one of the founders of the New Republic. He was one of the advocates of Teddy Roosevelt's New Nationalism. And yet he was very suspicious of what he called Jeffersonian democracy.
He thought that many people in the United States didn't understand the national purpose and that therefore politics really should be conducted by those who were trained, by those who were experts.
I mean, doesn't Hitler praise American immigration policy in this period?
So I do think that without saying that the United States was moving in a Nazi direction, I mean, there were people, obviously, who in the 1930s very much embraced what was going on in Germany on many accounts. There were many people in the 20s and into the early 30s who thought that Mussolini was really pointing out the future that the Euro-Atlantic world was headed towards.
Because he seemed to be somebody who was active, engaged, strong, and recognized the limitations of a kind of the liberal state that had really fallen into real question. You know, the Klan was the largest social movement in the 1920s, and their ideas about what the United States would be, it was an early America Firstism. I mean, that's really where it emerges.
And so, again, I think that without necessarily saying that this was Italian fascism or this was Nazi, which it wasn't. But to say that some of the ideas, some of the connections, and the overall project, the sense of who really should be participating in this, who shouldn't be participating.
But flip it, because I think so often in politics, particularly those of us who like thinking about ideas, we think about the supply side, not the demand side, to be an economist about it. We think about what politicians and political movements are offering. But those offerings only matter, right? If they meet or create demand. And so, yes, what was happening in America is not Italian fascism.
It's not Nazism. It's not anything that is anywhere else because we have our own context. But there is a demand for something.
that is at least in an early way speaking to similar anxieties, speaking to similar views about belonging, speaking to similar fears about what will happen to a country if it becomes too multicultural or the power structure changes too much or the wrong kinds of people are voting.
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Chapter 6: What was Andrew Jackson's role in the history of American illiberalism?
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.
Tell me about the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
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.
We're talking here about substance. One thing that surprises me is that there is a style to a liberalism that recurs over place and time. And it's probably a good time to bring in Joseph McCarthy, who he's a politician and a political force, I think a much bigger political force and is now remembered. And he's remembered for, you know, communist witch hunting.
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Chapter 7: How did the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids reflect illiberal tendencies in America?
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.
I think this starts to bring us into something more modern. Trump often references an immigration policy called Operation Wetback. Operation Wetback comes under President Dwight Eisenhower, who we now look back on as this icon of moderate Republicanism, even maybe a liberal Republican. We quote his speech about the defense industrial complex. What was Operation Wetback?
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
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Chapter 8: What parallels exist between McCarthyism and current political populism?
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.
Yeah, it's not the most stirring, inspirational example to end your book on.
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.
Let me ask you about liberalism itself. I would say over the past decade in particular, liberalism has felt very exhausted and very insecure. And its great victories are taken for granted.
I mean, now we're, I think, realizing again that it's actually quite remarkable for people to have rights, for there to be due process, for there to be courts where things can be checked, and for those courts to be listened to by the political system, despite the fact that they don't force that judgment at the point of a gun. And
You know, liberalism was, I think, sort of beset by critics on the left who felt it never achieved enough, right? You know, Barack Obama did not make our society post-racial, did not solve inequality, did not solve climate change. What is doing all this work made you think about liberalism itself and what a renewed version of politics around that tradition might look like?
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