Is the United States an Illiberal Democracy?

“Protect our democracy” has been the clarion call for those opposed to another Trump presidency and a warning for those who remain on the fence.  Not without good reason.  During his presidential term and in the four years that followed, Trump has shown a disregard or active hostility to the institutions and procedures meant to sustain a democratic politics and political culture, and he has vowed to erect an autocratic regime if he gains re-election in November.  He has hurdled constitutional guardrails, envisioned detention camps and mass deportations for undocumented immigrants, threatened retribution against his many enemies in public life, promised to upend the federal bureaucracy and appoint thousands of loyalists ready to bend to his political will, and assume dictatorial powers on “day one.”  In 2016, observers chafed at his many violations of “liberal democratic norms”; eight years and one presidential term later, Trump is regarded as a lethal threat to the entire edifice of American democracy.

Artist: Pedro Camargo

The problem for the moment and for going forward is that such a perspective tends to be historically short-sighted.  There is often a sense that our democracy and related political norms were comfortably in place until Trump and his MAGA movement came along and that we can return to them once these noxious forces are defeated.  Easily forgotten is the perilous state in which American democracy found itself well before Trump emerged on the scene – and which made Trump’s ascendancy possible – and the illiberal currents that have long run close to the surface of American political life, ready to burst through.  Illiberalism, that is, with its scorn for equality and universal rights, its narrow view of democratic practice, its desire for cultural conformity, its contempt for internal as well as external enemies, its acceptance of violence as a means of achieving and maintaining power, and its celebration of the will of the community over the rule of law has been far more a feature of our social and political history that we have been prepared to recognize.[1]

The apparent shock at Donald Trump’s violations of liberal democratic norms during the 2016 presidential campaign was, in fact, registered years after those “norms” had already come under concerted attack.  Beginning in the late 1980s, the neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klansman David Duke won election to the Louisiana state legislature and subsequently received about 60 percent of the white Louisiana vote in his quest to become, first, the state’s governor and, then, the state’s senator.  The Republican party paid heed to what Duke had achieved and started its lurch toward white nationalism and America Firstism with Pat Buchanan in the lead.  Far-right domestic terrorists had been growing in number and one of them carried out a deadly attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City.  Bill Clinton’s administration happily supported and signed a highly punitive crime bill accelerating mass incarceration, the effective expulsion and disfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of Americans, most of them people of color.  And the election of 1996 had the lowest turnout of eligible voters since the 1920s.[2]

In the new century, the Supreme Court further weakened the foundation of political democracy by intervening in a contested presidential election in 2000, opening the spigots of big money for election contributions (Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission)), and gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder) which had previously won bipartisan support and protected the political rights and access to power for those who lived in parts of the country with very deep histories of racial discrimination.  Many states there then took matters into their own hands, erecting barriers to voting and gerrymandering districts that had previously supported minority candidates for office.  Wildly unbalanced – to the advantage of right-wing Republicans — state legislatures and congressional delegations followed.

These illiberal eruptions were already anticipated in the 1970s when Richard Nixon used the power and institutions of the presidency to harass his political enemies, steal from his political opponents, and undermine the electoral process while waging war against the Vietnamese abroad and crime at home.  His “southern strategy,” promotion of the “silent” white majority, and distaste for civil rights helped fan popular rebellions against desegregation and feminism, not to mention the persecution and assassination of Black militants by the FBI and local law enforcement.  Indeed, the militarization of the police was well underway by the time Nixon became president and, in the wake of urban rebellions during the 1960s, the counter-insurgency tactics developed in colonial wars were imported to train law enforcement officers facing social and political unrest.[3]

Developments such as these suggest important illiberal connections between the 1960s and 1970s, and although we generally think of the 1960s as the salad days of modern liberalism – the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Society, the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts – we need to recognize very different political currents moving across the decade.  Barry Goldwater led a sunbelt-based right-wing seizure of the Republican party in 1964, and while his thumping defeat convinced many observers to pronounce an epitaph for conservatism, Goldwater opened a door to the political future far more presciently than his successful rival Lyndon Johnson.  Weaving threads of anti-communism, anti-statism, vigilantism, localism, and racism, the Goldwater campaign energized the political right from the John Birch Society to the Young Americans for Freedom, and left important organizational footholds from southern California to the Carolinas.[4]

No one was a less likely beneficiary of bubbling sixties illiberalism than George C. Wallace.  Elected governor of Alabama in 1962, Wallace gained notoriety for promising segregation forever and then attempting to block the federally enforced integration of the University of Alabama.  After explosive demonstrations in Birmingham and the murderous bombing of a Black-church there, Martin Luther King could describe Wallace as “perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today,” apparently a pariah on the national scene.  Yet, remarkably, Wallace soon set out on an extended tour of college campuses in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, and, rather than talking race and segregation, he spoke about state rights, constitutional limits, and the dangers of unbridled federal power while bantering with hecklers, responding courteously to critics, and injecting humor into his address.[5]

Many of the college students were bewildered by what they saw and heard as Wallace was honing a new language of grievance in which race was veiled by ringing defenses of local control and individual freedom coupled with attacks on federal overreach, especially in the area of civil rights.  The early fruits of this of this strategy became evident in March 1964 when Wallace declared (not in Alabama but in the Wisconsin hometown of Joseph McCarthy) his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination and quickly won one-third of the vote in the Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland primaries before pulling out of the race.  Four years later, Wallace set out as an independent, aided at the grassroots by the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens Council, and a raft of other far-right groups, and at one point in the 1968 presidential race was polling at over 20 percent and threatening to leave the election’s outcome in the hands of the House of Representatives.  Although Richard Nixon’s emphasis on “law and order” and some Wallace missteps helped secure the presidency for Nixon that year, together Nixon and Wallace received nearly 60 percent of the popular vote, and Wallace clearly tapped into deep illiberal sensibilities among white voters North and West as well as South.  At one packed Wallace rally, a correspondent from The New Republic remarked on the “menace in the blood shout of the crowd” reminiscent of “Berlin in the 1930s.”  That rally was held in New York’s Madison Square Garden; 20,000 attended.[6]

Wallace and the following he built – with a rhetoric of domestic enemies, Black and white, liberal and left, to be crushed – have generally been ignored as political antecedents of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.  That is a serious mistake.  Wallace recognized the flags of opportunity unfurling in the post-World War II era around Cold War anti-communism and racialized housing issues, intensified by the war-related migration of African Americans into northern and western cities: indeed, how white privilege (GI Bill, federally backed suburbanization) fueled rather than diminished racism in white ethnic communities.  In this, Wallace was feeding off a much deeper history of racially and politically charged mobilizations advanced by the federal persecution of radicals during and immediately after the First World War, the lethal anti-Black riots that tore through East St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and other cities between 1917 and 1919, and the dramatic rise to political influence and power of the Ku Klux Klan.[7]

The reactionary 1920s often seem an odd fit between the modern liberalisms of the New Deal in the 1930s and the Progressive period of the 1900s and 1910s.  But this ignores both the illiberal pulses in Progressivism and the impact of world-wide reaction in the 1920s and 1930s.  Across their political spectrum, Progressives mounted an attack on the atomized individualism, unbridled competition, and neoclassical economics that had marked the Gilded Age.  Instead, they argued that society was composed of groups pursuing their interests and that the state could play an important role in administering the marketplace and forging partnerships with capital and labor.  But the cultural and political dispositions of many Progressives were more in the direction of modernizing illiberalism than in modernizing liberalism.  Embracing perspectives of science and rationality, they were enlivened by the notion of social engineering – carried out by the private sector and the state – to effectively reconstruct a culturally complex and conflict-ridden social order.  They mostly believed that the corporation represented the economic way forward, that politics should be the province of trained experts who grasped the “national purpose,” that the grassroots democracy of the nineteenth century resulted in both corruption and inefficiency, and that a better society could be produced by scientific breeding, soon known as “eugenics.”[8]

Not surprisingly, the ethnic and racial hierarchies that eugenics embodied found powerful expression both in the rise of Jim Crow in the South and the thirst for imperial conquest nationally.  Many Progressives doubted the wisdom of a democracy that included the uneducated and the poor, had no problem with segregation as a rational solution to racial conflict, and saw the United States as an international agent of civilization for peoples thought unable to govern themselves.[9]

In some ways, the statist, anti-democratic, politically repressive, racist, and imperialist currents of Progressivism anticipated European fascism of the next decades and help us understand the widespread admiration for Mussolini’s regime in Italy, for the harassment of labor leaders and socialists by fascist squads, and for the eugenics research that linked scientists in the United States and Nazi Germany.  Prohibition, immigration restriction, 100% Americanism, Christian fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-unionism – pushed for and often enforced by the Klan – won support through the highest reaches of the state, and left a legacy that would bedevil the New Deal as well as the prospects for social democracy thereafter.[10]

Progressives like Herbert Croly – architect of Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” and founder of The New Republic – may have sneered at the grassroots “Jeffersonian” democracy of the nineteenth century, yet, in truth, from the time of the early republic, that democracy was already highly illiberal in its exclusions, expulsions, and often its violent character.  By the late 1830s, most states had eliminated property qualifications for voting and holding office, but everywhere the political citizen was white and male even though the labor force in the most dynamic sectors – cotton and textiles – was chiefly made up of women, children, and the enslaved, none of whom were politically and civilly enfranchised.  So much for the United States standing alone in industrializing with an enfranchised working class.  What’s more, the democratic reforms of the 1820s and 1830s were accompanied by a level of expulsive violence against African Americans, Catholics, Mormons, abolitionists, and Native peoples that deeply worried the young Abraham Lincoln – who denounced widespread mob violence in his 1838 Lyceum address — fearing as he did that the visions of the founders would be destroyed.[11]

The democratizations of the 1820s and 1830s took place at a moment when most Euro-Americans were Protestant and relatively few were economically dependent wage laborers.  All that would change with the massive influx of Irish Catholics in the 1840s which provoked a nativist movement – designed at least to politically disempower them – which found great success in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic and threatened to replace the Whigs as the second of the major political parties (after the Democrats).  Even so, nativism proved to be a force in the new Republican party and for the next century laced itself through American political life and culture.  Needless to say, the deepening conflict over the future of slavery in the United States demonstrated quite clearly that our political institutions could not handle such fundamental divisions; violence erupted in the halls of Congress and state legislatures and on the plains of Kansas even before the guns were fired at Fort Sumter beginning the second bloodiest war of the entire nineteenth century world.[12]

No moment in the history of American democracy compares to the abolition of slavery and the extension of citizenship to all Black people and political rights to Black men.  An interracial democracy seemed possible, Black men and women showed their commitment to democratic politics, and Black votes kept the Republican party in power in the crucial early years of Reconstruction.  But the counter-revolution quickly erupted.  White paramilitary squads murdered Black organizers and officers as well as their white supporters, drove Black elected officials from office in local coups, and eventually toppled Black and Republican power across the former Confederate South.  And their success would have been impossible without a national abandonment of African Americans – consigning them to the “tender mercies” of their former enslavers – and a growing distaste for the active participation of Blacks and immigrants in the political process across the country.[13]

Popular movements of urban and rural producers during the Gilded Age were crushed by local elites, often with the assistance of the state and federal governments and the courts.  The disfranchisement of African-American men in the 1890s and 1900s was only the most extreme version of the attack on popular democracy during the Progressive era – European immigrants faced literacy tests and residency requirements – which the Supreme Court validated in Plessy v. Ferguson (1996), Williams v. Mississippi (1898), and the Insular Cases which determined that men and women under American imperial rule were not entitled to constitutional rights.  When all was done, turnout of eligible voters in local and national elections began to drop precipitously – even after the advent of woman’s suffrage – and, along with further registration requirements, established the basis for political participation to this day.[14]

To argue that American democracy and society had strong illiberal features throughout our history is not to say that illiberalism cleared the board of opposition.  Far from it.  The eruption of illiberal movements, policies, and sensibilities often occurred in the face of significant social changes and especially popular mobilizations demanding the expansion of civil and political rights and the broadening of democracy itself.  In some cases, these mobilizations were liberal in their projects and goals.  Yet, in many cases they fed off other political currents – sometimes trans-Atlantic in nature – such as producerism, cooperativism, radical abolitionism, populism, social democracy, and socialism.  Liberalism and illiberalism, while extremely powerful, took their places aside other political ideologies and sensibilities and were often contested by them.

Taking illiberalism seriously, recognizing the illiberal influences on our democracy, understanding that illiberalism is not just a rageful backlash but a deeply laid political and cultural experience – in effect de-centering liberalism as our main political tradition –both helps us see the how varied and complex our political culture is and has been and helps us reckon with what American democracy has long been up against.

[1] For an extended discussion of this argument see my recent book, Illiberal America:  A History (New York, 2004).

[2] See, for example, Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory:  Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana (Chapel Hill, 2000); Nicole Hemmer, Partisans:  The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (New York, 2022); Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse, Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (New York, 2020); Katherine Belew, Bring the War Home:  The White Power Movemnebnt and Paramilitary America (Cambridge MA, 2018); Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (Princeton NJ, 2022).

[3] Rick Perlstein, Nixonland:  The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York, 2008); Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire:  The Untold Story of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (New York, 2021); Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders:  How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkelely, 2019); Radley Balko, The Rise of the Warrior Cop:  The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York, 2014).

[4] David Farber and Jeff Roche, eds., The Conservative Sixties (New York, 2003); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors:  The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2002), Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift:  The Rise of the Sunbelt and Its Challenge to the Easter Establishment (New York, 1975); Matthew Dallek, Birchers:  How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (New York, 2023).

[5] Easily the best treatment of Wallace is Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage:  The Origiuns of the New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics (New York, 1995).  But also see, Ben Hubing, George Wallace in Wisconsin:  The Divisive Campaigns that Shaped a Civil Rights Legacy (Charleston SC, 2022), and Stephen Lesher, George Wallace:  American Populist (Cambridge MA 19984).

[6] Carter, Politics of Rage, 364-67; Lesher, Wallace, 400-23.

[7] Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996); Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the Ku Klux Klan:  The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York, 1917); Adam Hochschild, American Midnight:  The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (New York, 2022).

[8] Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers:  Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton, 2016); Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 (New York, 1988); Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York, 1909); Michael McGirr, A Fierce Discontent:  The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York, 2003).

[9] C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951); Julie Greene, The Canal Builders:  Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York, 2009); Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government:  Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, 2006); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of American Culture (Cambridge MA, 20092).

[10] John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism:  The View from America (Princeton, 1972); James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model:  The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, 2017); Katy Hull, The Machine Has a Soul:  American Sympathy with Italian Fascism (Princeton, 2021); Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York, 2013).

[11] Leonard Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”:  Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970):  Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic:  The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York, 2020); Samantha Seeley, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain:  Migration and the Making of the United States (Chapel Hill, 2021); Benjamin E. Park, The Kingdom of Nauvoo:  The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (New York, 2020); Maura Jane Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1820-1860 (New York, 2018); Abraham Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” 27 January 1838, in Roy P. Basler, ed., Abraham Lincoln:  His Speeches and Writings (New York, 1946), 76-85.

[12] Tyler, Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery:  The Northern Known Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York, 1992); Joanne Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (New York, 2019).

[13] See, for example, Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet:  Black Political Struggle in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge MA, 2003); Eric Foner, Reconstruction:  America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988).

[14] Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders:  The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (New York, 2016), 401-500; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote:  The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000), 116-74; Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1970).