Why Illiberalism Keeps Returning Under New Names

Jun 03, 2026

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The Strange Comfort of Expulsion

What if the most dangerous political instinct in American life is not hatred, but relief?

That sounds counterintuitive because we usually think of repression as something that comes from panic, cruelty, or naked ideology. But a closer look at American history suggests something more unsettling: expulsion is often sold as order, and order is often sold as compassion, common sense, or even democracy. Whether the target is immigrants, radicals, Black citizens, Native peoples, or political dissidents, the basic move is familiar. A community feels under siege, identifies an internal enemy, and decides that removing people is easier than changing the structure that produced the fear.

This is why the recurring story is not simply about right wing extremism. It is about the durability of illiberalism as a normal political option. It is always available, always legible, and often deeply satisfying to enough people that it can be revived whenever liberal institutions seem exhausted or inconsistent. The deeper question is not why these eruptions happen from time to time. It is why the promise of inclusion so often collapses into the logic of sorting, excluding, and expelling.

The answer may be that modern politics is built on an unresolved contradiction: the desire for universal rights alongside the craving for a bounded, homogeneous community. That contradiction does not disappear under better rhetoric. It has to be managed, fought over, and constantly redefined. And when elites fail to do that work, people reach for the older tools of hierarchy and removal.

The Hidden Continuity: From Quotas to Prisons to Border Raids

The most revealing thing about American illiberalism is that it does not always look the same. Sometimes it wears the mask of immigration policy. Sometimes it becomes mass incarceration. Sometimes it looks like anti radical raids, wartime internment, or a strongman president boasting that he alone can fix things. But beneath the changing vocabulary is a remarkably stable political grammar.

One part of that grammar is the idea that some people simply do not belong. The 1924 immigration law made this explicit, trying to preserve an America imagined as culturally and racially desirable by limiting who could enter. Later, the same instinct reappeared in Operation Wetback, which tried to push Mexican workers back across the border even though the economy depended on them. In both cases, the state did not merely regulate labor or borders. It tried to defend a vision of social membership by deciding which populations were too threatening, too foreign, or too expendable.

The same structure appears in the history of incarceration. Prison is often described as punishment, but it also functions as internal deportation. People are removed from civic life, stripped of meaningful political voice, and placed under surveillance in institutions that turn social problems into custodial ones. This is why mass incarceration can be read as a cousin of expulsion, even if the bodies do not cross a national border. They are still pushed outside the moral and political community.

That logic helps explain why these episodes recur across very different eras. The Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, Japanese American internment, anti abolitionist mob violence, the expulsion of Native peoples, and modern deportation politics all share a deep assumption: liberty is conditional when the community feels threatened. The state and the public often do not ask whether rights should be suspended. They ask whether the targeted people were ever fully entitled to them in the first place.

The central political temptation in American history is not merely to punish enemies. It is to redefine them out of the circle of rights.

This is why so much repression can be made to feel ordinary. If the targeted group is already seen as suspect, the act of removal appears less like a violation and more like housekeeping.

Why Illiberalism Feels Good to So Many People

The hardest thing to understand about illiberal politics is not why it enrages its opponents. It is why ordinary people can find it comforting.

Here the key insight is that illiberalism is not only a set of policies. It is a way of life. It offers identity, belonging, moral clarity, and a hierarchy of importance. In Klan towns, in segregated neighborhoods, in anti communist institutions, in nationalist communities, people were not always experiencing themselves as extremists. They were often participating in a social order that gave them meaning. They were joining clubs, enforcing norms, defending tradition, and telling themselves that they were preserving the real country.

That matters because it explains why backlash is often mistaken for a temporary fever. The phrase suggests something irrational, brief, and self correcting. But if the underlying world is rewarding, socially embedded, and institutionally supported, then illiberalism is not a fever. It is a habitat.

This helps make sense of why some marginalized or previously excluded people can also support exclusionary politics. A group that has gained relative stability may begin to fear newcomers, seeing them as threats to scarce status, jobs, or cultural coherence. The same pattern appears when established immigrant groups, northern Black communities, or other upwardly positioned communities react suspiciously to those arriving later. People do not need to be at the top of society to favor order over solidarity. They only need to believe they have something fragile to lose.

There is also a psychological reward in political simplicity. Liberal democracy requires patience with ambiguity, compromise, legal restraint, and disappointment. Illiberal politics offers something easier: a story in which the community is innocent, the enemy is identifiable, and force can restore equilibrium. It promises not justice, but relief from complexity.

That is why appeals to “not normalizing” a demagogue often fail by themselves. A demagogue is usually a symptom, not the disease. If enough people experience the existing order as humiliating, unstable, or morally unmoored, then the strongman does not arrive as an alien intrusion. He arrives as a solution to a feeling.

The Liberal Blind Spot: Rights Without Power

If illiberalism persists because it answers deep social needs, why does liberalism keep losing ground to it?

Because liberalism has a recurring blind spot: it is very good at rights language and much weaker at power.

That weakness matters. Rights are real, but they do not enforce themselves. Courts matter, but only if political institutions and public culture are willing to honor them. Due process means little when a society has already decided certain people are dangerous. Liberalism can celebrate equality in the abstract while tolerating hierarchies in practice, especially when those hierarchies stabilize order.

This is why liberalism repeatedly makes uneasy bargains. It condemns some forms of repression while accommodating others. It claims universality while accepting exceptions. It denounces extremism but depends on institutions that often privilege the already powerful. In moments of crisis, it sometimes sacrifices its own ideals to preserve social peace.

Japanese American internment is a brutal example. So are the anti radical crackdowns of the Red Scare. So is the way many respectable institutions bent the knee rather than resist when repression became fashionable or profitable. Universities, newspapers, unions, and bureaucracies can all become collaborators when the cost of resistance seems too high. The result is that liberalism does not merely fail against illiberalism from the outside. It often contains illiberal reflexes inside itself.

This is the part that flatters no one. It is easy to imagine liberalism as the good side and illiberalism as the bad side. But historical reality is messier. Liberal orders have often been built on selective exclusion, while illiberal movements borrow the language of popular sovereignty and community defense. Each side sometimes inhabits the other’s vocabulary.

Tocqueville saw this tension early. He admired American individualism but worried about the tyranny of the majority, local conformity, and the ease with which people might surrender liberty to a strongman if they felt their community under threat. That warning still matters because it suggests the real danger is not simply tyranny from above. It is majoritarian pressure from below, legitimized by institutions from above.

Liberalism fails when it treats power as a technical problem, while illiberalism treats power as the whole point.

That asymmetry explains a great deal.

Trump Is Not an Aberration, He Is a Concentrate

One reason Trump was so hard to process is that he seemed unprecedented in style while deeply familiar in structure.

His public cruelty, contempt for institutions, and open embrace of domination looked new at the national level. But American political history is full of local and regional forms that look astonishingly similar. Andrew Jackson’s defiance of courts, his embrace of removal, and his claim to represent the common man while expanding state power all prefigure later strongman politics. Joseph McCarthy’s anti elitist theater, his enemy hunting, and his fusion of patriotism with paranoia also feel uncannily modern. The pattern is not one of total novelty. It is one of national concentration.

Trump can be understood as a political distillation of older American currents. He combines the rhetoric of grievance, the delight in humiliation, the fantasy of cleansing, and the impulse to test whether institutions will actually stop him. That is why so many of his defenders fall back on familiar evasions. Yes, he goes too far. Yes, he is crude. But the people resisting him are worse. That defense is not an accident. It is a classic tactic of illiberal politics: redefine authoritarian behavior as necessary self defense against the true enemies within.

What changes across eras is not the underlying impulse, but the available institutional technology. In one period it is quotas. In another, raids and registries. In another, blacklists. In another, prisons. In another, executive orders and border spectacle. The mechanism changes. The underlying need to make visible who counts, and who can be pushed out, stays the same.

This is why history does not feel like a simple pendulum. It is better understood as a reservoir. Illiberalism does not vanish when it loses. It drains into institutions, habits, myths, and local cultures, waiting to be tapped when conditions shift. A post racial moment can be followed quickly by backlash not because history is fated to repeat mechanically, but because the reservoir was never empty.

What to Do When the Reservoir Rises

If illiberalism is deeply embedded, the obvious question is not how to wish it away. It is how to prevent fear from becoming policy.

The first step is to stop treating exclusion as a temporary aberration. It is a political strategy with real constituencies, not a misunderstanding that better messaging can always fix. That means naming the pattern early, before the language of common sense hardens into law.

The second step is to recognize that defending liberalism requires more than legalism. Courts matter, but they are not enough. If rights are to survive, they need a political base that can explain why inclusion is not charity but national self government. People do not defend abstract universality unless they can connect it to a vivid picture of shared life.

The third step is to understand that pure movements are a fantasy. Coalitions are made of contradictions. The task is not to find a perfectly clean faction and wait for it to win. The task is to build durable majorities that can hold their ideals while acknowledging conflict, mistrust, and disagreement. That requires a vision strong enough to attract people who do not already speak the language of justice fluently.

Finally, we need to get better at seeing the social pleasures of exclusion. If a politics offers belonging, status, and a story of dignity, then merely denouncing it as hateful will not suffice. You have to build rival forms of belonging that are more generous, more truthful, and more durable.

Key Takeaways

Treat expulsion as a recurring political technology, not a rare emergency. It shows up in immigration policy, prisons, raids, and emergency powers.
Do not confuse liberal rights with stable protection. Rights survive only when backed by power, institutions, and public commitment.
Look for the social rewards of illiberalism. Fear, belonging, and moral certainty often make exclusion attractive.
Expect contradictions in any winning coalition. Pure movements are fantasies; durable ones must manage internal tensions without surrendering their core.
Fight the story, not just the symptom. Strongmen thrive when they can present repression as rescue.

The deepest lesson is this: American democracy has never been a clean contest between freedom and its enemies. It has always been a struggle over who gets counted as part of the people, and whether the fear of disorder will be allowed to override the discipline of rights. Illiberalism keeps returning because it answers a real desire, the desire to turn complexity into certainty by pushing somebody else out.

The future of democracy depends on learning a harder skill than defeating villains. It depends on building a political home where people do not have to choose between belonging and liberty. Until that happens, the reservoir will remain there, waiting.