Jim Smith, Talking Turkey - Most Americans alive today grew up in the liberal America that flowed from the New Deal through to moderate Republicanism under Eisenhower and the Great Frontier under Kennedy, but we need to come to grips with the fact that the America we experienced was really an anomaly when looked at historically, and that America is now getting back to its true roots. Liberalism had a long run, but that run is over.
No book makes that point clearer than Illiberal America by Steven Hahn. To quote Amazon’s blurb about this book,
A storm of illiberalism, building in the United States for years, unleashed its destructive force in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. The attack on American democracy and images of mob violence led many to recoil, thinking “That’s not us.” But now we must think again, for Steven Hahn shows in his startling new history that illiberalism has deep roots in our past. To those who believe that the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence set us apart as a nation, Hahn shows that Americans have long been animated by competing values, equally deep-seated, in which the illiberal will of the community overrides individual rights, and often protects itself by excluding perceived threats, whether on grounds of race, religion, gender, economic status, or ideology.
What’s interesting to me, as a lifelong student of history, is that other countries, especially in Europe, were inspired by the Declaration of Independence, long before its illegitimate child, the U.S. Constitution, betrayed its founding principle that all men are created equal with its compromises to satisfy southerners. The two main compromises were 1) counting slaves as three-fifths of a free person for the purpose of allocating seats in the House of Representatives, and 2) creating a Senate in which the low-population southern states had the same vote as the high-population northern states.
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