This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

A number of people I respect and often agree with have been making different versions of the same point: Immigration is one of Trump’s best issues — and one of the worst issues for Democrats. The economy is where Trump is now weak. So if you really care about the dangers Donald Trump poses, you need to beat him. And that means focusing the country’s attention on his worst issues, the places where he is most beatable.

Nate Silver has made a version of this argument, and so did California governor Gavin Newsom:

Archived clip of Gavin Newsom: “This is the distraction of the day — the art of distraction. Don’t get distracted by distractions, we say. And here we zig and zag. This is the debate they want. This is their 80-20 issue, as they’ve described it.”

I want to give this argument its due. It’s not without merit. Optimal political strategy is usually to keep the focus on your opponent’s worst issues. For Donald Trump right now, it’s his decision to light the global economy on fire.

From that perspective, focusing on the wrongful deportation and detainment of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a distraction. Trump’s meeting with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador is a distraction. And getting distracted is bad politics. Focus on the tariffs. Focus on the stock market chaos. Focus.

But I think there are two things wrong with this. One is that the polling here isn’t clear. Yes, Democrats have become afraid of the issue of immigration. They see that as a winner for Donald Trump. But the Abrego Garcia case is actually about rule of law and due process. That’s how it is, and should be, framed. And on those issues, Democrats are in a much better position: People do not want the Trump administration to be able to randomly disappear people living in this country without due process.

But I think this argument reflects a generalized collapse of roles and time across the political system. If this were October 2026 and you were running a congressional campaign, then what you focus on is a hard question. And you should pay pretty damn close attention to the pulse. If you’re choosing how to write and spend money on ads, same thing. I wish you luck figuring it out.

But not everything that everyone else says between now and October 2026 can or should be poll-tested. It is a thin vision of politics to back literally everything out from elections.

When Senator Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador — and I’m very glad he did — he was representing his constituent Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia’s wife, a U.S. citizen and a Maryland resident whose husband had been disappeared by the president.

Archived clip of Chris Van Hollen: “His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted. He felt he said he felt very sad about being in a prison because he had not committed any crimes. When I asked him what was the one thing he would ask for in addition to his freedom, he said he wanted to talk to his wife, Jennifer. I told him I would work very hard to make that happen.”

That is Van Hollen’s job. That is constituent service of the highest order.

And the rest of us — we have other jobs, other roles, and they’re not all about winning elections. We’re in the midst of an attempted authoritarian breakthrough. I don’t think there’s another way to say that. How much opposition the Trump administration faces from other corridors and other power centers will matter to what they do. If it’s easy to deport people to a Salvadoran prison, they’re going to do a lot more of it.

One lesson from history is that when the machine of disappearing people begins rolling, when that becomes a tactic, it can roll pretty damn far if it’s not stopped early. It is the same with Trump’s effort to break the universities, law firms and the government: If it’s easy, they will keep going. They will do more of it. They’ll do it faster.

If it’s hard, they might not. They also have limited bandwidth, energy, attention and resources.

The election isn’t next week. We have more than 550 days until just the midterms. Civil society needs to act in the interim. There is not just one job here, and we are not in the final two weeks of an election campaign.

I have also been hearing this other argument — one that can sound to me like a kind of fatalism, as if the country has already fallen. As if Donald Trump’s power is already limitless. As if the fight is already lost. The most common email I got in a reply to last week’s episode was: Isn’t it naïve to think we’re going to have midterms at all?

I think we will have midterms. And I think one reason it can be hard to imagine a way into that is so many people are working in their head with comparisons to other places, to other times — Putin’s Russia, Mussolini’s Italy, different authoritarian takeovers in Latin America or even Hitler’s Germany.

And the problem with all those stories is that we know how they ended. At least for a time, the tyrant successfully consolidated power, the opposition lost, elections were no longer a usable check. When we start to think that the only way to understand our moment is through those moments, it becomes easy to slip into a kind of mental inevitability.

But we don’t need to look abroad for our comparisons. I’m not saying there’s no value in doing so, but it shouldn’t be the only thing we do. Deportations and expulsions and abuses of civil liberty and the taking away of rights — that’s all part of the American tradition.

Illiberalism is part of the American tradition: Jim Crow. The Red Scare. The internment of Japanese Americans. Operation Wetback.

Trump is not the first to name a domestic enemy, decide that their rights are no longer valid and turn the machinery of the state against them. There is much that is distinctive about Donald Trump, but he’s not nearly so alien a force as he’s sometimes made out to be.

America has fallen into terrible eras of illiberalism, and it has fought its way back out of them. It has done so in the context of our system, our institutions, our myths, our idea of our national character. That it has gotten so bad in the past should free us of any illusion that it cannot get much worse now. But that it has been successfully defeated in the past — or at least beaten back — should free us from the fatalism that it cannot be beaten back now.

My guest today is Steven Hahn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University. His book “Illiberal America: A History” tracks this threat of American politics back to our founding and even before. The interplay between liberalism and illiberalism has always been with us. It will always be with us. Accepting that helps bring both its power and its vulnerability into clearer focus.

Ezra Klein: Steven Hahn, welcome to the show.

Steven Hahn: Thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

In Trump’s first term, we often heard the advice: Don’t normalize him. This is not normal. We would hear: This is not who we are.

And your view is: This is sort of normal. This is part of who we are and have always been.

I think that there was a deep desire to think about a set of liberal democratic norms — the use of the term “norms” as a way of understanding how we have been as a people and how we have practiced politics.

And therefore, as alarming as Trump may have been, there was something comforting about thinking that this was a weird abnormality. It was kind of a noxious weed that had sprouted —

A dying gasp of an old order?

Either that or a dangerous protrusion of a new order potentially coming into being but that could be pulled out, and we would go back to normal.

I was really struck in 2015, 2016, not so much by Trump per se, but by journalists and other very thoughtful observers who were aghast at his various violations of liberal democratic norms. Even though, for the previous two and a half, three decades, those norms had been undermined in so many different respects. But wanting to hold on to them and not to normalize him.

You write that illiberalism is “deeply embedded in our history, not at the margins but very much at the center.” What is the illiberalism you’re talking about?

I’m talking about a way of thinking about the world that has to do with the embrace of inherent inequalities about hierarchies of nation and race and gender, about a desire for cultural and/or religious uniformity.

Illiberalism is also a particularist idea about rights — meaning you don’t carry your rights with you. You may have them where they are, but you don’t have them all the time.

And it’s an idea of marking internal as well as external enemies and the use of exclusion or expulsion as a way of dealing with this — thinking about the access to and maintenance of power with the legitimacy of political violence.

And as much as anything, it’s about the will of the community over the rule of law.

I think of illiberalism as a set of ideas and relationships that really preceded the European colonization of North America. It preceded liberalism and then became very much entangled with it — but had a logic of its own.

Let’s go into a bit of that historical depth. One of the parts of your book I found interesting was your analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” That’s normally seen as a document laying out the early structure of America’s inevitable ascent into liberal democracy. But you read it quite differently.

I do. I read it both in terms of his interest and admiration for what he saw as a robust individualism and equality. But I also read it as a series of warnings about where this could be headed.

The largest section of his warnings had to do with his very long chapter on slavery and race, which he recognized infused the entire country. In fact, he thought racism was more powerful where slavery had been abolished than where slavery still existed.

But I was especially interested in how he understood local democracy and local politics in general — the collective and associational activities. And what worried him was what he called the tyranny of the majority — the narrowness of mind, the way in which associations on the ground tended to both emphasize certain ideas about belonging but, at the same time, put those who didn’t fit in into real jeopardy.

He ended up arguing that he thought it was likely — or certainly possible — that the United States could very quickly move toward a despotism, where people would be willing to give up their rights out of loyalty to a strongman.

So I think he really had his finger on things that were going on in the 1830s that oftentimes, as you mentioned, are kind of overlooked because it has become one of those texts that are iconic in establishing ideas of American exceptionalism. And it was republished during the early phases of the Cold War, when ideas about American exceptionalism and American consensus were taking great strength.

In the 1830s, you also have an example of the tradition you’re talking about at full strength under President Andrew Jackson. You have a chapter about Jackson’s use of deportations and expulsions, which you see as central to the illiberal tradition — and to the story we’re tracking here. Tell me a bit about that decade.

Obviously, the expulsion of Native peoples from their lands east of the Mississippi to what was regarded as Indian Territory, which was really the first territory in the United States that was not imagined as heading toward statehood — so it’s not entirely clear what it was.

This was the end of a process that had begun back in the 17th century that was directed toward removing and expelling Native people.

But the thing that’s important to recognize is that this was a central aspect of American society and political culture in that period. Free African Americans were targeted for expulsion. It was called colonization. This goes back to the 18th century and even Thomas Jefferson, who couldn’t really imagine how white and Black people could live together under conditions of freedom, in some ways that Tocqueville rearticulated.

But there were mobs that were focused on driving out not only African Americans in cities where they were free or had escaped from enslavement, but also Catholics and Mormons. Joseph Smith is murdered in the 1840s, not far from Springfield, Ill., Lincoln’s place.

And abolitionists. The 1830s were a time of these anti-abolitionist riots in cities large and small because they were accused of promoting miscegenation.

And what was the remedy? The remedy was to drive them out.

Tell me a bit about the rhetoric Jackson used to justify the expulsions. If someone were reading it today, how much of it would read horrifying and archaic to our ears, and how much would not?

That’s a really good question. And in fact, it suggests the way in which historical understanding and thinking have really changed. One of the reasons that Jackson attained heroic proportions for a very long time was that his status as an enslaver and his multifaceted role as an Indian fighter tended to be diminished. And what was emphasized was his apparent support for the common man, popular democracy, the age of Jackson, so to speak.

Like many white Americans, Jackson thought that Native people didn’t belong and that they were in jeopardy of dying out. And he thought what he was doing was actually in their interest — finding a territory outside of the centers of population where Native people could, in some ways, be safe.

We only would read this in a horrifying way because of what we’ve learned about the really complicated history of Native peoples, and how this has been a long-term process of expulsion. So he tried to dress it up as something that he was doing as an alternative to their physical destruction and their dying out.

But I think a modern reader, by and large, who knew anything about the history of the United States and of Native people, would recognize what he was really after.

How connected is it to Jackson’s politics of the common man? How much does the support and the channeling of the common man braid itself into this project of who you have to push out so they’re not part of the common man?

I think Jackson saw himself as representing the interests of white Americans in the Trans-Appalachian West, who themselves were in the process of trying to expand their population and settlements, which would be at the expense of Native people.

So in a sense, what Jackson really represented was: He was the first president from the Trans-Appalachian West. He had strong support among white adults — white adult men — from that area and also from the Southern states because he was a slave owner and he was committed to the maintenance of slavery.

At the same time, access to politics in most states — in terms of voting and office holding — property-holding requirements were being dropped. So adult white men had more access than ever. And so even though in most places, people of African descent didn’t have access; women didn’t; in some ways the work force in many places didn’t, because they were made up of women and children — but nonetheless, there was this sense that the groundwork for what would be an expansive democracy was being laid then.

Jackson is interesting in this moment, particularly, because he is very explicitly talked about as a model for Donald Trump. Trump restored his portrait to the Oval Office. When you hear Trump and the people around him — like Steve Bannon in the first term — lionize Jackson, what do you hear them connecting to?

There are a number of things that they could connect to. Not least was Jackson’s defiance of Supreme Court rulings on the potential expulsion of Native people. He said: OK, that’s fine. Let them enforce it.

I think they see him as a “strong leader” who was willing, able and interested in moving in directions of his own choosing.

Obviously, he had a very complicated relationship with the federal government. But he stood up very strongly because of the Nullification Crisis in the 1830s, when South Carolina — unlike Jackson’s view of the Supreme Court — said: No, we’re not going to enforce the tariff. And Jackson threatened to crush them militarily as well as politically.

So I think they see him as an example of an early executive who was interested in expanding the powers of the presidency at a time when the president of the United States had relatively few powers, and the important power remained in the states and, nationally, in the Congress. And I think they saw him as a harbinger of what would happen later and of what Trump clearly admires.

Let me move forward in time a bit to the Red Scare. You spend some real time in the book on the Palmer raids in 1919 and 1920. What were they?

The Palmer raids are called the Palmer raids because the attorney general of the United States was Mitchell Palmer.

I think the Palmer raids were an example of how people who were regarded by those in power as politically objectionable could suffer all sorts of repression — including expulsions of various sorts.

It included people who were isolationists. But it also included people who were on the left — first, Socialists, who had a complicated history with that, and then, after the Russian Revolution, people who were associated with the spread of Communism — or those who quite simply did not fit into their view of what the United States should be, which is a republic of white Christians.

And in that particular time, the federal government became involved in the repression of these movements, whether it involved prosecuting them — Eugene Debs ran for president from jail — or expelling them — not only Communists and Socialists, but people who were accused of anarchism. Sacco and Vanzetti became a very notorious example of how that could happen.

It’s important to recognize that the Ku Klux Klan was in the process of reorganizing in this period. It was re-established during the 1910s, but it really exploded in the 1920s. And it fed off a lot of these currents: It admired fascist regimes elsewhere, as well as the political violence and paramilitarism that went into it.

And one of the things that they did was enforce Prohibition, which they regarded as an attack on the lifeways of European immigrants and others who were not white Christians.

Speaking of fascism — in the 1920s, you have Prohibition and, as you’re saying, the second K.K.K. And you argue that “the threads composing the fabric of Italian and German fascism were in earliest evidence” not in Europe but, at that moment, in America. Why?

One of the things I try to do in the book is to recognize that illiberalism is not one thing. It’s not an unchanging, static thing. It’s a collection of ideas and notions of relationships or political power.

Illiberalism was modernized during what we call the progressive period. And there the idea of social engineering — the use of eugenics, which is oftentimes not adequately accounted for by historians of the period — disenfranchisement, segregation, warfare overseas that was justified in racialized terms; the use of troops who basically got their experience in Indian wars in the Trans-Mississippi West.

Herbert Croly is a good example because he was one of the founders of The New Republic. He was one of the advocates of Teddy Roosevelt’s new nationalism. And yet he was very suspicious of what he called Jeffersonian democracy. He thought that many people in the United States didn’t understand the national purpose, and therefore politics really should be conducted by those who were trained, by those who were experts.

Doesn’t Hitler praise American immigration policy?

Not only that, but he was a great advocate of westward expansion. Because this was the American version of breathing room.

The Nazis and American scientists were sharing a lot of their work about eugenics. They sensed that they were involved in a joint project. So without saying that the United States was moving in a Nazi direction — I mean, there were people in the 1930s who very much embraced what was going on in Germany on many accounts. There were many people in the ’20s and into the early ’30s who thought that Mussolini was pointing out the future that the Euro-Atlantic world was headed toward. Because he seemed to be active, engaged, strong — and recognized the limitations of the liberal state, which had fallen into real question.

The Klan was the largest social movement in the 1920s. And their ideas about what the United States would be — it was an early “America First.” I mean, that’s really where it emerges.

So again, I think that, without necessarily saying that this was Italian fascism — which it wasn’t — but to say that some of the ideas, some of the connections and the overall project, the sense of who really should be participating in this, who shouldn’t be participating in this —

But flip it. Because so often in politics, we think about what politicians and political movements are offering. But those offerings only matter if they meet or create demand.

So, yes, what was happening in America is not Italian fascism. It’s not Nazism. It’s not anything that is anywhere else, because we have our own context.

But there is a demand for something that is speaking to similar anxieties. Speaking to similar views about belonging. Speaking to similar fears about what will happen to a country if it becomes too multicultural or the power structure changes too much or the “wrong kinds” of people are voting.

I always think we make this mistake that we’re so focused on what the politicians say that we forget that what they say only matters if it matches what the voters want.

I agree. I do think it is important to recognize the kind of social basis that existed for these ideas. Because, as horrific as we may find it, disenfranchisement and segregation — or Jim Crow, as we call it — only had pushback coming from African Americans. Not all of them but most of them.

Most white Americans and political leaders thought that this was a perfectly reasonable, perfectly modern way of choreographing the great diversity and inequalities that existed in American society.

So there’s no question that these right-wing groups really did fulfill a need: a sense of community building, a sense of what belonging was — belonging that not only included people you were comfortable with and you thought were part of the community but also nonbelonging and the resistance, expulsion or the repression of those who you saw as political threats.

Tell me about the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.

That was really the first major immigration act that was passed. It established quotas for the first time. Before then it was really the Chinese and then Asian Exclusion acts, which were not designed to have quotas but instead designed not to have people from Asia come to the United States.

The 1924 Immigration Act was different. It was organized in such a way that really did try to undercut the migration of people from certain parts of the world who were regarded as culturally unassimilable, as politically objectionable, as people who were breeders and therefore threatened the population balances in the United States — not simply by the numbers who arrived but by the population increase once they got to the United States.

When it was passed, in most major journalistic venues, it was celebrated. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times — everyone — was saying: This was the way in which we could preserve an America that we feel comfortable with. And this was a law that was enforced until 1965.

And not to mention that Jews who were trying to flee Nazi Germany and then the Holocaust were themselves harmed by this. But I think it’s part of a piece of what’s happening in the 1920s as trying to offer belonging to people who could be easily assimilated. And offering little but repression or nonbelonging to people who couldn’t.

We’re talking here about substance. One thing that surprises me is that there is a style to illiberalism that recurs over place and time.

Now is probably a good time to bring in Joseph McCarthy. He was a politician and a much bigger political force than he is now remembered. He is known for his Communist witch-hunting. He’s also a very early example of a populist style that Trump fits into very well and that gets embraced by elite dimensions of conservatism. William F. Buckley writes a book that is anti-anti-McCarthy is the way I put it — that McCarthy maybe goes a bit too far, but the people who oppose him are the real problem — which is a very common form of Donald Trump defense.

Tell me a bit about McCarthy’s political style, the anti-elitism of it, the populism of it, the way he wraps up his illiberalism.

One of the things that became part of the reception of McCarthyism, especially among historians, was to liken it to 19th-century populism. Because historians saw what you’re describing: his anti-elitism, his emergence out of a particular social setting, his finding of enemies internal as well as external, at a time when mass movements were held in a lot of suspicion by historians, journalists and scholars. Because they had just come out of a war recognizing that fascism was a mass movement. It wasn’t simply the taking of power coup d’état on the part of a small elite or oligarchy.

So McCarthy is now, not surprisingly, getting a new look by people on the political right, precisely because they felt that he had the courage to stand up to those who were threatening American values and American politics. And he did this at great personal cost.

Joseph McCarthy fit into a framework in which a lot of this was going on anyway. And it was not only going on among Republicans, it was going on among Democrats.

What historians have found is that actually, the people who voted for populists in the past were not the people who voted for McCarthy — at least in terms of their social profiles. So that was debunked. And McCarthy was not a kind of new 19th-century populism. He was really appealing to a different kind of constituency — obviously more native born, but not entirely native born, people who were sort of small-business types.

I want to hold on to the anti-elitism and the anti-institutionalism for a second. Because one way I’ve heard McCarthy being brought up as a reference to what is happening now is: Look, he was on the hunt for Communists, who were at different layers of American life. And he also had a broader view — as did many others in conservatism at that time — that the big institutions of American life had been captured: The culture had been captured in Hollywood. The universities were captured. And maybe even the government was captured, too.

And the military.

The hunt for Communists, which I’ve seen people analogizing now to the hunt for people who believe in D.E.I. or antisemites or wokeness, also became a way to break open these institutions, to use the power of the state to cow them and to force them to come back into some kind of alignment.

Based on what McCarthy represented and the political tendencies that he fought for, how valid do you think that analogy is?

One of the things we have to recognize is that the federal state grew enormously from the 1930s through the 1940s into the 1950s.

I think McCarthy was in part representing a certain unease and suspicion about a world of people who were trained into these institutions — what expansive and bureaucratic institutions might involve.

There’s no question that he directed attention and concern to institutions that really didn’t have a deep history in the United States, that were far from the direct reach of many Americans who were themselves experiencing enormous change. In bigger cities, a lot of these struggles were over housing. People have this idea that it wasn’t until the 1960s when the urban uprisings began. But actually it was much earlier as there were housing shortages and population demographic migrations.

So I think he did appeal to those who were trying to hold on to a kind of sense of community that they saw in part being overrun. And by going after the institutions and suggesting that not only were they far from you but they were being infested by people who didn’t have your interests in mind at all — whatever you understood about Socialism, Communism or the left.

One of the things we’re seeing now is different institutions in American life having to make this choice: Do they try to make a deal with the administration? Do they try to bend the knee to the administration? Or do they fight?

Harvard just decided to fight.

What was the institutional response in the McCarthy era? What could be learned from that now?

The response was mostly bending the knee. Universities, workplaces and other institutions were very quick to try to identify people who could be regarded as threats.

And for the most part, they were expelled. People lost their jobs. They were blacklisted. They were run out of important political positions. Or they were excluded from labor unions at a very critical point in our labor history in the late 1940s, early 1950s, when organizations like the C.I.O. were increasingly powerful.

So I do think that bending the knee, especially in the face of what seems to be significant power, is not uncommon and is a worrisome precedent.

We’ve been talking here about political figures and political groups that all fit squarely into the illiberal tradition: McCarthy, Jackson, the Ku Klux Klan.

One of the points of your book is that liberalism and illiberalism are often braided together in the same people. So around this time, we also have Japanese internment. Over 100,000 people, many of them citizens, were rounded up and put in camps. No due process. No ability to have a court decide if they were actually a threat to the country. And this is done by F.D.R., a liberal hero.

How do you think about what leads to that?

One of the challenges that liberals have had is that, even though they may embrace a whole variety of ideas and relationships that we may find admirable, nonetheless I think they are interested in maintaining social order. They still do have an acceptance of cultural hierarchies.

The liberals played a very important role in McCarthyism. Arthur Schlesinger and the establishment of Americans for Democratic Action was a way to try and hive off liberals from the left of American society — and not only that but to condemn the left as followers and people who really should be subject to deep suspicion: It was OK if you fired them from universities or other positions because they were evil. They were the internal enemies.

I do think that liberals were not very well equipped for the unravelings that began to take place. And they began to abandon the whole project.

Another way that I think that same dynamic could be read — and here I’m not supporting Japanese internment, but I do want to raise this as a question — is that the liberals who were nationally successful often contained some of this illiberal countercurrent inside of them.

You are describing such a strong and present and enduring ideological faction in American politics that it isn’t a surprise that many Democratic presidents are somewhat contradictory in this way. There is the example of F.D.R. But also Lyndon B. Johnson contains the American South inside of him. Bill Clinton, in a very different way, is a merger of unusual currents. Part of Barack Obama’s genius is being able to speak to the white and Black story and fears and anxieties and politics at the same time.

Much of what ends up getting remembered as disappointing about these figures is, from a different perspective, pluralism. And it drained some of their opponents of power.

Bill Clinton’s defenders will say to me — and when I had Rahm Emanuel on the show, he said this explicitly: Look, this is the guy who took crime and immigration and welfare off the table as weaknesses for the Democratic Party, and that’s how Democrats came back to national power. And now it’s looked back on as a terrible set of compromises. But the alternative was losing to these ideas.

How do you think about that tension?

I think it’s important to describe it as a tension. I think it’s certainly the case with many liberals who have ascended to important leadership positions in American political life that it comes with the terrain of seeking office and dealing with complicated constituencies and our own complicated past.

Obviously, people in the Democratic Party, up through the 1960s, had the Southern wing of the party that they had to appease. You can excuse it from today until tomorrow. But they did. And Johnson famously said when he was signing either the Civil Rights or the Voting Rights Act: We’ve lost the South for a generation. And that was true.

It’s also important for us to recognize that across our history, most of the political regimes, so to speak, were regimes that were conservative. The United States has not just an overall violent history but a politically violent history. It’s not as if liberal democracy and political violence were separate or parallel. They were interconnected from the beginning — and usually to the benefit of people with wealth and power. And people who wanted to exclude large sections of the American public from having decision-making power and authority.

I think this starts to bring us into something more modern.

Trump often references an immigration policy called Operation Wetback. Operation Wetback comes under President Dwight Eisenhower, who we now look back on as this icon of moderate or maybe even liberal Republicanism — we like to quote his speech about the military-industrial complex.

What was Operation Wetback?

We need to understand Operation Wetback in relationship to the Bracero Program, which was a government-sponsored program meant to provide labor — mostly for big agriculture but not only for big agriculture — so that immigrants had the right to work. They usually were moving back and forth across the border. But by the 1950s, this was coming under attack. And Operation Wetback was an attempt to push that back across the Rio Grande and back into Mexico.

The idea was to deport people. And it expressed one of the really complicated aspects of American economic development policy, which was, on the one hand, it depended so heavily on so many different groups of immigrants, and on the other hand, there was hostility to them, especially by that time, to Mexican immigrants.

It gives us an idea of the repressive impulses and the ease of building a repressive apparatus.

Dwight D. Eisenhower — admittedly, it’s easy to look back, compared to what we’re situated with now. But when the Warren court came down with the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Eisenhower’s response was that appointing Earl Warren to the court was the worst mistake he ever made.

And they had to go through a second Brown decision to provide some means of enforcement.

One thing in that era, though, is you have American citizens being deported.

One reason I am interested in this — in addition to the fact that Trump allies use it as an example now — is that it’s a reminder that we have done deportations in violation of rights people were assumed to have had many times before.

I think that’s right. Certainly, we know that during the time of the Red Scare, in the period of World War I, there were lots of immigrants who were also politically radical, who were deported and whose rights were regarded in very limited ways, and whose deportation was generally embraced and accepted by the public.

In some ways it’s because the advent of citizenship and the 14th Amendment, as strong as it was in many respects, didn’t really — if you compare that to the Mexican Constitution in 1916, which laid out a whole series of rights that working people and women had. Well, what are the rights that come with citizenship in the United States?

I worry, as you may worry, too, that precisely because a lot of those rights are not clearly established and because there could be any one of a variety of loopholes — whether in the language or whether in the way citizenship and rights are conceived — that we may be entering a period, in some ways marked by the Dobbs decision — of the withdrawal of rights that we had come to believe that people have.

One thing you’re gesturing at here, which I think is important, is the way in which we seem to phase in and out of periods.

We talked about the Palmer raids, which lead, in a sense, to the founding of the A.C.L.U. We’re talking about Operation Wetback, but it’s just over a decade later that L.B.J. overturns the Johnson-Reed Act, and the racist quotas dissolve — at least for that period of time.

So how do you think about the cyclical nature of this? Is it a pendulum — that one action creates a backlash? Or is it much more contingent and unpredictable than that?

You go from Obama to Donald Trump. There is this way in which one era feels almost radically opposite to the era that preceded it.

I’m not somebody who thinks about pendulums. I don’t think that history repeats itself. But I do think that there are moments when circumstances make possible developments moving in any one of a number of directions.

Even if you think about Obama and Trump, I think it follows perfectly. When Obama got elected, everybody was talking about how we were in a postracial society. And then in two blinks, the Tea Party was organized and Obama drew out a lot of deep racism in American society and the sense that a Black person like him should not legitimately hold the power he does.

And therefore you have a birther movement, which really hearkens back to Reconstruction, when Southern whites recognized that slavery was over, but the idea of empowering former slaves was just inconceivable to them.

And you realize some of the depictions of Obama in African dress and so on and so forth is an interesting question about —

And Trump rides birtherism to the forefront of the Republican Party.

Absolutely. Trump found his way into leadership precisely in that, even when it was debunked. Even when it was absolutely clear that this was a lie. Nonetheless, most Republicans still believed that it was this idea of the general illegitimacy of certain groups of people holding power and breaking the hierarchies that they thought were essential to stability and security in the United States.

In your book, you frame the rise of mass incarceration as another example of the deportation and expulsion impulse finding policy expression. In a way, that looks different — people aren’t leaving the country.

Though, now we’re possibly going to do mass incarceration in Salvadoran prisons as opposed to American ones.

But tell me about the continuities you draw there.

I think it’s important to recognize that, first of all, we have a long history of incarcerating people. From the birth of the penitentiary in the early 19th century on, the people who were incarcerated, wherever they were incarcerated, were disproportionately poor, disproportionately immigrants, disproportionately Black.

I do think that basically what happened was, after enormous urban unrest in the 1960s, there was this sense that they could militarily occupy big cities or they could find other ways of pacifying and repressing the populations.

And I think part of what happens is that there is a bipartisan consensus on crime as a problem that’s out of control, and that people of color are the most threatening and dangerous — and effectively deporting them from society and putting them in institutions where at least they were under direct surveillance and repressive control.

Again, what happens is they’re not only expelled from communities, but they’re effectively expelled from political society. Because not only don’t they have political rights, but they had to fight for civil rights. Do they have a right to sue? Do they have a right to challenge the structures of power within penitentiaries?

I fear that a lot of people would be OK with expelling citizens who are deemed to be true enemies of the people because of their violence or because of their racial and ethnic background.

Trump is racist explicitly.

Explicitly. And whatever the courts do, he’s obviously looking for a confrontation. He’s interested in provocation. And he thinks there’s nothing much they can do about it — and that may prove to be the case.

What feels to you like the commonalities across these eras of deportation and expulsion?

How does the political system — or at least a faction of it — come together and say: The rights have gone too far, the community has expanded too much?

What seems to connect the periods? And what feels new to you in some of them or in this moment?

I do think that what happens is that it’s very easy to invoke a notion of communities under siege being threatened. It reminded me of ideas and relationships that could so quickly be reconfigured about belonging, even before the United States became the United States. But what it meant to be part of communities. What rights communities had to exclude, to expel, to punish.

One of the things we saw is that there were members of “immigrant groups” who supported Trump. And this is part of a long-term phenomenon whereby those who have arrived and established stability — this is true during the Great Migration, too, when Northern Black communities were not all that comfortable with these rural Black people who were coming up, who didn’t really know the ways and were potentially threatening the stability of their own communities.

It’s an easy thing to drum up because it has been so much a part of the conversation for so long. And I do think that this is exactly what needs to be resisted and reimagined.

In the work you’ve done after your books, with the knowledge of American history you have, does Trump look to you like a more or less familiar figure? Does he feel like a manifestation of something common? Or does he seem very distinctive?

One of the things that makes him seem so distinctive and unprecedented is: If we think about the national level, where there’s no question that it would be very difficult to find anybody who has ascended to the presidency and has behaved in this cruel and demeaning way, not only to people but to institutions and his political enemies.

But I do think that if one is aware of what has gone on over the course of U.S. history on the state and local levels —

And George Wallace.

Wallace — certainly the case. And he’s somebody I think who’s really important, who did become a national figure. And I don’t know what would have happened if it wasn’t for the assassin’s bullet in 1972, which basically pushed him out of a race that he was in the process of maybe winning.

But you think about a world that was organized around slavery and the personal domination of people who were enslavers. You think about a variety of what one scholar has called “authoritarian enclaves” — not only in the South but in other parts of the United States where there were hierarchies of power that were long existing and that were supported by a lot of people because they basically saw benefits that came from it.

One of the things we have to understand about illiberalism and illiberal communities or sensibilities is that there was a lot in them that was satisfying. People who were in the Klan in the 1920s were interviewed later — I’m talking about ordinary people in Indiana, which was a state that was pretty much dominated by the Klan — and didn’t see themselves as being involved in an extremist organization. They saw themselves involved in an organization that was reinforcing community ideas, providing for recreation, embedding notions about what it means to be an American, a white person, a Christian. Though they may not even articulate it that way, except for being a Christian.

So I think one of the things we need to understand is that it’s not simply those moments of rage that we can identify and then ask: Why does that happen?

It’s a way of life that can go on in very prosaic ways until they’re being threatened. And then they erupt. But we need to understand the day-to-day lives that are created, that bring people together, that provide them with all sorts of meaning in their lives.

And I think one of the things that is important about recognizing, say, illiberalism as an important current and field of force, is that we have a tendency to look at the disruptions of the liberal tradition as simply a backlash — as angry people who are venting their fury, which doesn’t really have a lot of substance. We tend to think that things can go back to normal easily. And I think that that’s a serious mistake.

It also gets at something that I think has been a very common fantasy, which is that you can destroy this tendency if you beat Donald Trump in the 2016 election or the 2020 election. That it was something that you could crush or you could suppress. Though I don’t think people hold this view as much anymore.

It’s the idea that you could make the things that are dominant in illiberal thought unsayable in polite society. You can make them illegal or unconstitutional. And you could sort of push them to the margin and, having been pushed to the margin, they don’t really have a way back in. And they’ll fade away and wither, and that will be the end of them.

I think something we’re seeing with Trump is that suppression can work, but then if it fails, it fails all at once. And it turns out the thing you were trying to suppress is much stronger than you understood it to be.

I do think one of the reckonings that liberalism is going through right now is a recognition that it doesn’t go back. It’s not that, say, Nikki Haley just wins, and then we’re just done with this whole era. It’s not the more comfortable Republican/Democratic cleavage that was around in the ’90s or 2000s. It’s now this liberal/illiberal cleavage, which probably has much deeper roots.

And there’s not going to be an approach to suppression that’s going to work. And there’s also not going to be any final victory over it. You’re just in this fight for the foreseeable future until something you cannot predict changes in some way you cannot currently predict — and maybe not in a way that you would like.

You used the word “fantasy,” and I think that’s a very good one. Because in 2016, I think there was a sense, first of all, that there was no way Trump was going to win. But even when he won, I think there was a sense that this was a very unusual, very toxic phenomenon that once you defeat him would be defeated.

Now obviously, we’ve learned that this is not the case. I remember that shortly after he was inaugurated in 2017, there was a big demonstration in Los Angeles and someone was carrying a sign that said: I can’t believe I’m still protesting this [expletive].

And the answer to that is: You’re always going to be protesting this [expletive] because there are no final victories of anything.

But I think it’s also important for us to recognize that politics are very volatile, that people’s political sensibilities do not fit into very neat boxes. When Bernie Sanders was running in 2016, there were more than a few people who said that Bernie Sanders would be very appealing, and though they ended up voting for Trump, Sanders also touched them in ways that were very significant.

They’re both also fundamentally anti-institutional candidates. And very different in the way they’re anti-institutional candidates. But I think we now understand this is a much more fundamental cleavage than people understood it then.

Absolutely. I think that’s right.

I finished the book with an example of this movement in a county in East Texas in the late 19th century, where someone who was part of a community of enslavers and someone who was part of a community of enslaved came together for basically opportunistic reasons, because they shared grievance with what was going on, and they knew they couldn’t win local office without forming some kind of coalition.

But they actually began to do it. Little by little, they learned a lot about each other. And in fact, over many years, they came to establish their own republic, the biracial republic, where the white people who were the insurgents learned a lot about the needs of the Black community. And the Black community was able to engage with what was 30 or 40 percent of the white community.

And even then, they called themselves populists in the 1890s. And even when the populists nationally lost, they were still winning. And in the end they were gunned down by —

It’s not the most stirring, inspirational example to end the book on.

But I think it’s an example of the way in which really meaningful coalitions and political connections are forged, recognizing things that are beneficial to everybody.

Let me ask you about liberalism. I would say over the past decade, in particular, liberalism has felt very exhausted and very insecure.

Its great victories are taken for granted. Now we’re realizing again that it’s actually quite remarkable for people to have rights, for there to be due process, for there to be courts where things can be checked and for those courts to be listened to by the political system, despite the fact that they don’t force that judgment at the point of a gun.

And liberalism was beset by critics on the left who felt it never achieved enough. Barack Obama did not make our society postracial, did not solve inequality, did not solve climate change.

What has doing all this work made you think about liberalism itself and what a renewed version or politics around that tradition might look like?

One of the things we have to remember is that the sense of rights that people can enjoy, the sense of rights that people are entitled to, were products of very divisive and, in some cases, very violent struggles. And the period of time that we’re talking about when this was true is pretty short.

One of the things I was really trying to do in my book was what I would call decentering liberalism. The liberal tradition, as I try to argue, is really something that was invented in the 1940s and 1950s and holds on in many remarkable ways.

But part of the problem with liberalism is that it never really dealt very well with the issues of power. And therefore, when push comes to shove, they abandon ship or they put together projects and policies that are not going to work or become self-contradictory.

If we’re after some of the things that liberals and liberalism at least say that they’re interested in — a more egalitarian society, a world, globally as well as nationally and locally, where it’s possible for people regardless of their social, economic, racial or ethnic background to pursue a life that is meaningful to them — if we’re actually interested in that, as opposed to rhetorically interested in that, then we have to face up to what in liberalism has been inadequate.

You write about, in a sense, liberalism’s failure to be visionary, and I think that’s true. What about what a future could look like? And then the question of how you get there is related to what a future could look like.

I hear people make this move a lot. Liberalism has had its failures. It has not gotten us to utopia — though it’s had quite profound successes — so we need something that is better at confronting power.

Can you point me to a place where this alternative politics has emerged and has been better at containing right-wing illiberalism and better at pushing forward the engines of human progress?

I’d sort of like to see a small example of it working before I say: Well, that’s where our politics should go. That’s what we should excavate.

So when you say that, what are you looking toward?

Historically, I think there have been important moments in the past where social movement — even if they haven’t entirely won — were able to gain political power.

Think about abolitionism, which took on the biggest, most intractable power in the United States. And I think about abolitionism as Black abolitionism — and about enslaved people who managed to take down a system of plantation slavery that had created the wealthiest people in the United States and people who owned disproportionate power —

But Lincoln emerges in your book almost as a villain.

Well, I don’t see Lincoln as a villain. What I was trying to do there was to talk about some of the limitations.

And I don’t see Lincoln as just a racist — because I think that’s not a useful way of understanding Lincoln. If anything, you see somebody who grew and changed in very significant ways. But at the same time, he embodied a lot of the contradictions about what a national family is and who would be included in that family.

I guess that’s what I’m getting at here about this embodying of the contradiction.

Something that I was thinking about, reading your book is that there is no final victory. If you understand the illiberal currents that you’re writing about — the field of force, I think you called it, which I liked — as ever present — the political science Larry Bartels talks about the populist right as a reservoir, not a wave, that’s always there to tap in to — then it becomes more obvious, in a way, that the national figures who can lead in this country will have to embody some of the contradictions.

The idea that you will have a pure movement is not going to happen. And the reason the pure movements tend to fail is that politics is about the contradictions. And it’s about absorbing them, hopefully in a way that moves them more toward justice and just outcomes and vision and the things that I would like to see in the world, too.

But the movement between: This illiberalism is always here and always powerful, and so almost anybody you look at has had to embody some of its contradictions, even if they’re pushing away from it. And then also the sort of political verdict that: Well, isn’t there something that doesn’t have any of these contradictions that we can use as the weapon that will finally win?

I’m curious how you resolve that. Because you’re the person who has been sitting in every single decade of American history, which is full of very potent illiberalism that nobody ever quite seems to be able to push into the backroom for very long.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pure movement.

As a friend of mine put it: If you want to build a movement where everyone has to fit through the eye of a needle, forget it.

Frankly, most social movements don’t last very long. But if you’re going to build a movement, if you’re serious and if power is actually what you’re interested in, and change and using power for the point of change that will be of appeal to large numbers of people who want change and whose lives can actually be better — then I think a central issue is to confront this.

I understand why you think that. And maybe there are ways that we can move, recognizing that no one is going to be fully changed. And you’re always going to be protesting this [expletive]. Because there’s no such thing as a victory. Even if you like your side winning, there’s going to be ongoing struggles, an ongoing need for vigilance, an ongoing need for self-criticism.

And we have to find ways of reckoning our ideals and ambitions and visions and utopianism. People are not going to put themselves on the line for a world that they can’t quite imagine. And I think that is a basis for something bigger. It’s always going to be an ongoing process of rethinking, interrogating and being open to change.

I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

First of all, I think Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” would be a good place to start. Not going into it thinking of it as the iconic text, but instead as someone who is an observer from the outside looking in, and who has both admiration and reservations.

Elizabeth Hinton’s book “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” which focuses on the 1960s into the early 1970s, is a very interesting way of understanding how illiberal sensibilities infused their way into what are major modern liberal projects and paved the way for mass incarceration, which I learned a lot from.

And the third is a book by Lawrence Powell called “Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana.” It’s an extraordinary story about a woman who was part of the only whole family to make it out of the Lodz ghetto, and they end up in New Orleans. And when Duke runs for governor, she plays an incredibly important role in outing his Nazi past and helping to undermine his claims to power. So it kind of links fascism on both sides of the Atlantic with an incredibly inspiring and well-told story.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick, Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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