Overview

If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That's not us, ' think again: in Illiberal America, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberalism as deep seated in the American past as the founding ideals. Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fueled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and abolitionists. After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernized during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities. The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education, and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history, and how that history bears on the present crisis.

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Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who studies American political and social movements. His acclaimed works include A Nation Under Our Feet and A Nation Without Borders. He teaches at New York University and lives in New York City and Southold, on Long Island. Mitch Crawford grew up telling narrative, improvisational stories with his brother, using stuffed animals, tiny army men, and Star Trek action figures as characters. This carried forward to adulthood, crafting such stories with his children, as well as reading storybooks, picture books, and young adult literature aloud to all five offspring. He once read all nineteen original Gertrude Chandler Warner Boxcar Children books to his two young boys one summer, chipping away at them each night before bedtime. A high school teacher for twenty years in history, economics, fine arts, and computer science, Mitch realized that voice inflection, vocal and kinesthetic surprises, and even reading aloud helped keep his students engaged in course material. Now an actor, model, and voice-over artist, his personal branding invokes the smart, funny, and occasionally aloof dad or guy-next-door, or the serious and principled lawyer, doctor, or businessperson. This personal history and these characteristics have helped develop a sincere, trustworthy voice that resonates well with children's literature, first- and third-person POV fiction, nonfiction, biography/memoir, and self-help books. A graduate of Villanova University with a dual major in psychology and philosophy, and an MA and teacher's certification from The Ohio State University, Mitch does his homework and knows how to relate to his audience. For fun, he played volleyball for Villanova in the late 1980s when short shorts and high socks were en vogue. After twenty-five-plus years of that, he switched to tennis, which takes a lesser toll on his body (well, sort of). Mitch loves hiking and traveling with his wife, sneaking out to Five Guys with step-daughter Grace, and being outdoors with their dogs, Izzy and Grommit.

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