# Illiberal America Pulitzer-winning historian Steven Hahn's argument that illiberalism is not a periodic fever in American life but a **continuous current running from the colonial era to the present** — as native to the political tradition as liberalism itself. Expulsions, vigilantism, religious and racial exclusion, coerced labor, anti-democratic suffrage engineering: Hahn assembles them into one through-line rather than a series of exceptions. ## The Argument Against the "aberration" narrative (in which Trumpism is a betrayal of American norms), Hahn shows illiberal politics repeatedly *winning*: Indian removal, the Confederacy and Redemption, Chinese exclusion, the 1920s Klan as mainstream civic institution, eugenics as respectable policy, McCarthyism, massive resistance. Liberal and illiberal traditions don't alternate; they coexist and contend in every era, and the illiberal one has usually commanded mass constituencies, not fringes. The implication for the present: [[Donald Trump]]-era authoritarianism has deep domestic roots and requires no foreign import to explain. ## RWKB Relevance The long-historical spine for the vault's [[Authoritarianism]] cluster — the corrective to "this is not who we are." Complements Stanley (mechanics of fascist politics) and Applebaum (the international network) with the longue-durée domestic genealogy.