Trump’s Lust for Expulsion Has Deep Roots

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.