Why Illiberalism is as American as its Liberal Rights
Steven Hahn reveals how deeply illiberal ideas are entrenched in the United States, challenging conventional beliefs about America's national identity.
America is often touted as a country where democracy and Enlightenment values prevailed over kings and autocracy. However, there has always been a temptation to succumb to authoritarian impulses. Members of both the right and the left have factions prepared to overrule foundational freedoms to accomplish their policy goals.
Steven Hahn’s book, Illiberal America, chronicles the history of the people dedicated to the opposite of America’s supposed founding beliefs. Hahn argues that illiberal ideas are just as American as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
The classic example is slavery, but the examples go much deeper. Margaret Sanger, an advocate for birth control in the early 1900s, was a staunch supporter of eugenics, combining the progressive women’s right to plan their pregnancies with the authoritarian impulse to select which people were fit to reproduce. Hahn remarked:
“Illiberal solutions always seemed the resort for liberal-detected problems. Thus, the nineteenth century was given over not so much to the transition from slavery to freedom as to the shifting boundaries of coercive practices, some old and sustained, others new and perhaps opaque, most retaining illiberal elements even as they were advanced by self-designated liberal advocates. We still live with what they left us.”
Rights Travel or They Don’t
One of the reasons illiberal ideas have such deep roots in the United States is the difference in how rights are viewed. Liberal believe that certain rights are guaranteed to all Americans wherever they travel in the country. Illiberal Americans believe rights are “cultivated” and “defended” within communities. Earned and conferred, not inherent.
One example is the parents who opposed busing black children to predominantly white school districts in an effort to integrate schools. One prominent organization that led opposition to busing was ROAR: Restore Our Alienated Rights. Hahn wrote:
“…they understood those rights as growing, cultivated, and defended in a community setting…built around notions of belonging and non-belonging, admission and expulsion, and especially around notions of local control and generational authority. The ‘alienated right’ most heralded was that of choosing where children would go to school, the parental rights over the lives and educations of their children: a perspective easily attached to an array of school-related controversies, as recent complaints about curricula and the holdings of school libraries reveal.”
Illiberal ideas don’t come only from the racism of the 1960s. They can also stem from the impulse to stringently police or protect their own in-groups. That tendency has allowed illiberalism to morph into modern forms that may be more recognizable to readers.
Modern Illiberalism
There are several strains of illiberalism in the United States today. They include MAGA Republicans who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and modern white supremacists emboldened by the internet conspiracy theoriests elevated to the circle of presidential advisors. However, there is one more source of it that already touches everyone, regardless of political party.
Search engines, social media sites, and now AI chatbots have become some of the most effective data-mining tools that large companies and tech entrepreneurs have.
We were already being manipulated by social media feeds that vomit the most emotional stories based on the junk information we gravitate toward. Now that LLMs like Chat-GPT can reinforce our delusions in real time, large segments of the population will be held hostage by companies with intimate details about how they think and how they can be moved. Hahn writes of the tech companies:
“…their vision of the world is hierarchical and their impulse is toward total possession of the vast numbers of users who come within their grasp. It is, in truth, a totalitarian ambition all the more perilous because it is not advanced by a political party or explicit political ideology. It masquerades as promoting spaces of endless freedoms and choices. In a society that has…widely equated technological innovation with social and poltical progress, this makes for a steep hill to climb out of potential darkness.”
Slavery, civil rights, the fight for equality among different marginalized groups, each illiberal indignity that Americans face is uniquely painful. But understanding how they fester in our politics equips us to fight the next illiberal issue of the day.