Steven Hahn Unmasks the Myth of Liberal America

When Reform Became Coercion: The Hidden Currents of American Political Life

For a long time, the familiar arc of American history has been told as a slow but steady march toward greater freedom: a narrative of emancipation, voting rights, and expanding civil liberties. A careful revisitation of that arc reveals a more complicated weave — reform movements that advanced rights while simultaneously authorizing new forms of control, and democratic experiments that alternately expanded and constricted membership in the political community. These are not merely episodes of moral failure to be tacked on to an otherwise uplifting story; they are structural tendencies that reappear in different eras, dressed in the language of progress.

Community, Violence, and the Limits of Local Democracy

In the early republic and the antebellum decades, local communities were the crucibles of political life. That intimacy produced vibrant participation but also produced exclusionary practices that masqueraded as communal justice. Mob expulsions, vigilante expulsions of indigenous peoples, and the exclusion of religious minorities were often defended as acts of community self-preservation, not aberrations.

Two observers — one an American speaker warning of tyranny, the other a French visitor enthralled and alarmed — came to similar conclusions through different lenses. The tension between local passions and the rule of law is a recurrent theme, and it helps explain episodes where democratic energies produced authoritarian impulses.

Prisons, Philanthropy, and the Paradox of Humanitarian Punishment

The construction of penitentiaries in the nineteenth century felt to their architects like progressive reform: replace corporal and communal punishments with institutions meant to reform the individual. Yet the same reformers who railed against slavery and corporal punishment often embraced systems that isolated, disciplined, and expelled people from civic life.

Benjamin Rush and his contemporaries exemplified this contradiction. Celebrated as critics of slavery and capital punishment, they also supported penitentiary models that codified exclusion as a tool for social order. That paradox is not simply an historical curiosity; it is the genealogy of mass incarceration and the bureaucratic logic that separates citizenship from confinement.

Modernizing Illiberalism: Eugenics, Reform, and Social Engineering

The Progressive Era is commonly invoked as the birthplace of modern liberal governance, but the intellectual and political environment of the early twentieth century also cultivated robust currents of social engineering. Eugenics migrated from medical journals into mainstream reform circles and policy cabinets. Prominent intellectuals, public officials, and reform organizations entertained ideas about selective breeding, sterilization, and the management of populations.

Margaret Sanger, W. E. B. Du Bois, university scientists, and governors alike show how reform impulses can converge with coercive techniques. The union of humanitarian language and technocratic interventions produced an unsettling hybrid: policies framed as public health or efficiency that codified hierarchies in law.

How policy language conceals power

• Health and modernization rhetoric often masked the political goal of creating boundaries around citizenship and labor.
• Sterilization statutes and vagrancy laws functioned as instruments of exclusion rather than simple public welfare measures.

International Echoes: American Practices and Global Authoritarianism

The United States did not exist in a vacuum. Fascist leaders studied and sometimes admired American practices. From immigration restrictions and racial segregation to the logic of land dispossession, twentieth-century European dictators found precedents in American policies. Admiration for authoritarian models in certain U.S. circles during the interwar years and the enthusiasm some Americans felt for foreign strongmen complicate any neat national self-image.

Understanding the transnational circulation of ideas — how policy experiments travel and are repurposed abroad — is essential to recognizing the ways in which domestic debates about order, race, and expertise shaped global political possibilities.

Communication, Speed, and the Erosion of Deliberation

Nearly two centuries separate the slow newspaper dispatches that once delayed battlefield news from the instant tweets of today's diplomats, but the effect is continuous: the speed of communication alters incentives. Deliberative restraint — the habit of taking a breath before broadcasting a judgment — was sometimes the soft infrastructure that permitted fragile political settlements to form.

Where communication is instantaneous, the temptation to perform for a public audience undermines cautious statesmanship. Diplomacy becomes a public show rather than a practice of calibrated restraint, and that change has consequences for alliances, negotiations, and long-term problem solving.

What the Past Suggests About Political Repair

The recurring lesson in this history is not that liberal ideals failed catastrophically or that progress is impossible. It is rather that the forms and language of reform frequently contain devices of exclusion and control. Recognizing that entanglement requires a different posture toward historical memory: one that neither erases accomplishment nor sanitizes coercive practice.

Repairing democratic practice involves attending to institutional design, restoring deliberative norms, and acknowledging how well-intentioned reforms can harden into mechanisms of exclusion. Long-standing problems — inequalities shaped by law, incarceration as social management, and the bureaucratic logic that sustains hierarchy — will not be resolved by gestures alone.

A Quiet Conclusion: Complexity as Civic Tool

The most useful takeaway may be an ethic of complexity. To hold competing truths in the same mind — that nineteenth-century reformers could be both emancipators and architects of discipline, that progressive technocrats could advance both rights and coercion — is to recognize the human propensity to mix humane intent with illiberal means. If citizenship is to be strengthened, it will be by practices that cultivate that complexity rather than by comforting myths of unalloyed progress.

Complexity does not excuse abuse, but it does sharpen attention to the institutions and habits that make liberal goods durable rather than fragile.