2024 and the American Cycle of Illiberalism

Let's start off 2024 with an optimistic take on a potentially pessimistic year.

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Ah, the first day of 2024, a time of resolutions and renewals and… other virtuous stuff that the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World ain’t gonna be doing. How did I spend the first morning of the new year? The way I spend almost every free morning — reading a physical book and furiously marking it up! Today the book that got marked up was Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis.¹ Hochschild’s polemic covers all of the ways Woodrow Wilson’s second term roiled the United States.

See if this description sounds familiar: for the previous generation or so the United States had experienced tremendous technological change, a massive wave of migration, and a surge of populist and progressive enthusiasms. And then, on top of that cauldron, between 1917 and 1921 the United States was whipsawed by a series of policy shocks, including:

• Entering World War I;

• The passage of the Espionage Act in 1917 and the Sedition Act in 1918, which empowered the federal government to severely restrict freedom of speech and assembly. This in turn generated massive federal overreach, ranging from the Postmaster General censoring the mail in furtherance of his own ideological whims² to the U.S. military spying on American civilians and planning for martial law to the development of a paramilitary organization that repeatedly violated the civil liberties of immigrants and leftists;

• An influenza pandemic that killed more than 675,000 Americans, in no small part because federal, state, and local governments concealed information and spewed out misinformation;

• A massive surge of inflation — more than 80 percent between 1917 and 1921;

• A racist president convinced that he was smarter and more righteous than everyone else in the room — and yet could not manage his way out of a paper bag. After experiencing a massive stroke, he barely governed. This empowered his underlings (including an up-and-coming J. Edgar Hoover) to abuse their offices;

• America’s first “Red Scare” in reaction to the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, in which law enforcement officials across the country exploited the powers given to them during World War I to accuse anyone and everyone of being a socialist;

• Waves of strikes and labor unrest that paralyzed modern infrastructure;

• An initial wave of anarchist violence in U.S. cities, which in turn triggered a federal overreaction that culminated in the Palmer Raids;³

• A bubbling up of anti-immigrant hysteria that eventually led to the ultra-restrictive 1924 Johnson-Reed Act.

So yeah, it was an extremely ugly moment in the United States — one that is rarely taught in high school classes. As Hochschild notes in his prologue, most U.S. history textbooks hopscotch from the end of World War I and the U.S. rejection of the Treaty of Versailles to the Roaring Twenties. That elides a tremendous amount of societal disruption that occurred between those two moments.

The parallels to the current moment are painfully obvious.⁴ And yet for the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, all of the horrors detailed by Hochschild made the book a curiously uplifting read. Robert Kaiser’s Washington Post review summarizes the effect of reading the book during the 2020s:

A fine book about a grim period a century ago that has largely disappeared from national memory but seems painfully relevant to America in the 2020s…. [Hochschild] describes vividly a time when racism, white nationalism, and anti-foreign and anti-immigrant sentiment were rampant. Reading it is almost therapeutic. Realizing (thanks to this book) that American democracy survived that dark moment and a decade later began half a century of democratic renewal made this reader more hopeful than he has been in quite a while.

Hochschild’s account demonstrates the folly of believing that Donald Trump and the era he has given us are departures from normal trends in American history. What’s normal in our past is the American vulnerability to mythical enemies, demagogues and ignoramuses.

None of this is to say that Americans concerned about what might happen in 2024 should relax and assume everything will sort themselves out. There are no Zen masters in American politics. The hysteria of 1917-1921 subsided in part because the most illiberal officials wildly exaggerated the threats facing the country. Some elected and appointed officials pushed back against the Hoovers and Palmers of the world. I suspect it also subsided because the pandemic faded and the economy recovered, causing most Americans to calm down.

I have made my concerns about a second Trump term rather plain. Those concerns remain. But it is good to remember that the country has been through spasms like this in the past century. It’s not that I want to revisit those illiberal times. It’s that I can be reasonably confident that just as bouts of American illiberalism can emerge, they can also subside.

1. Yes, this book came out in 2022. Yes, I bought it around New Year’s Day last year. Yes, it took me the whole year to get around to reading it in earnest. Shut up.

2. The Postmaster General’s legal counsel explained that he wanted to censor “pro-Germanism, pacifism and ‘high-browism.’”

3. The official FBI description of the Palmer Raids is… let’s say “an interesting read.”

4. Some of those parallels will look different depending on one’s partisan slant. But they work for both Democrats and Republicans.