Last week, millions of Americans celebrated our nation’s founding and with it our history of political and social inclusion. It is this history, of newcomers adding to the tapestry of the American experience, that is the foundation of our creedal nationalism, of the contested belief that “Americans are united by principles despite their ethnic, cultural and religious plurality.”
I was at an Independence Day celebration of this belief at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home and plantation in Virginia, where dozens of new American citizens were welcomed into the national community with a festive naturalization ceremony, opened — as you might imagine — with a solemn reading of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.
Less central to our collective cultural memory than our history of inclusion — but no less central to American history as it actually unfolded — is a politics of expulsion, of the removal of people, groups and even ideas deemed incompatible with the national spirit, narrowly defined.
“The suspicion of outsiders and quick resort to expulsion,” the historian Steven Hahn observes in “Illiberal America: A History,” is one of the defining features of the illiberal current in the American political tradition. If illiberalism — in stark contrast to the universalist claims of liberalism — ties rights and belonging to membership in specific communities of race, ethnicity, religion and gender; if it is “marked by social and cultural exclusions” and sees “violence as a legitimate and potentially necessary means” of wielding power, then it is only natural that illiberal movements or societies would wield expulsion as one method to discipline dissidents and outsiders.
In an antebellum 19th century in which illiberalism was woven into the political fabric of much of the United States, expulsion was common practice. It was, Hahn writes, “a popular solution to the social ‘problems’ presented by African Americans, Catholics, Mormons, Masons and Native peoples, indeed by any group capable of defying the hegemony of a white Christian republic.”
And so there was the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced tens of thousands of Indigenous Americans from their homes in the Southeast onto a “Trail of Tears” into Western territories that Anglo-American settlers would soon covet as well. There was the American Colonization Society, whose illustrious supporters — among its founding members were Henry Clay of Kentucky, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and John Randolph of Virginia — saw forced removal and colonization to Africa as the only viable solution to the problem of slavery in the United States.
Abolitionists were expelled from towns, cities and entire states at the hands of anti-abolitionists. Free Black Americans were expelled from free states and territories by lawmakers wielding their broad police power to regulate internal order and morality. Mormons were chased across the country from New York to Ohio to Missouri, where armed conflict broke out between Mormons and non-Mormons after the latter tried to keep the former from voting. “The Mormons must be treated as enemies,” Gov. Lilburn Boggs of Missouri proclaimed amid the bloody Mormon War of 1838, “and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.”
The politics of expulsion continued through the 19th century and into the 20th. There were the anti-Chinese campaigns that produced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and sparked pogroms against Chinese immigrants. “During 1885 and 1886,” the historian Adam Goodman writes in “The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants,” “at least 168 communities carried out Chinese expulsion and self-deportation campaigns, relying on a combination of force and coercion in hopes of accomplishing what the federal government could not, or would not, do. Many of these purges involved violence; some concluded in massacres.”
The Palmer raids of 1919 and 1920 led to the arrest of thousands of suspected left-wing radicals and labor activists and the deportation of hundreds of foreign citizens as punishment for their political views. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act closed American shores to countless people deemed incompatible with the nation’s supposed Nordic heritage. (“It is both natural and wise that the American race wishes to preserve its unity and does not care to see the present blend greatly changed,” The New York Times editorialized in support of the law.) Under Franklin Roosevelt, the federal government forcibly relocated around 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II, and under Dwight Eisenhower the Border Patrol swept up and deported more than a million Mexican residents of the United States, some of them American citizens.
Needless to say, the politics of expulsion are still with us. And worse, the renewed vitality of illiberalism in American life has opened new space for broad efforts to remove those Americans who don’t fit the illiberal vision of the nation. At the largest scale is Donald Trump’s plan, should he win the White House a second time, to remove up to 20 million people suspected of unauthorized entry.
If carried out, this would be one of the largest forced displacements of a population in human history, meant to cleanse the United States of people who, the former president says, “are poisoning the blood of our country.”
At the level of state politics, Republican-led legislatures and Republican executive officials are adopting a politics of expulsion that targets sexual minorities and gender nonconforming people. In Texas, for example, Gov. Greg Abbott directed the state’s family policing agency to investigate parents whose children received puberty-blocking treatments, part of a broader state effort to end gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Texas’s official hostility toward gender nonconforming children has had the predictable effect of pushing families out of the state in search of less hostile climates. The inescapable message to transgender young people from the attack on gender-affirming care is that you do not belong.
Policies that force women to leave their states to receive basic reproductive care are variations on a theme. As are the mounting efforts, by conservative and liberal politicians alike, to wield the punitive arm of the state against homeless people, a dynamic that speaks directly to the historical truth that liberalism and illiberalism are tangled up in each other — that there are, as the legal historian Aziz Rana has argued, two faces of American freedom
It is important to say that there are clear competing sentiments to the politics of expulsion. One of the most powerful crosscurrents to illiberalism in American life is a broad-minded and democratic egalitarianism. Our problem is that one of those forces, illiberalism, has the backing of a major political party and the other, democratic egalitarianism, is still fighting for the kind of robust institutional expression it once enjoyed in American life.
Which means, in practice, that the fight to restrain the politics of expulsion has no choice but to begin from the bottom up. But then that has always been true of the struggle for a better world.