Steven Hahn

After last week’s episode, “The Emergency Is Here,” we got a lot of emails. And the most common reply was: You really think we’ll have midterm elections in 2026? Isn’t that naïve? I think we will have midterms. But one reason I think so many people are skeptical of that is they’re working with comparisons to other places: Mussolini’s Italy, Putin’s Russia, Pinochet’s Chile. But we don’t need to look abroad for parallels; it has happened here. Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author of “Illiberal America: A History.” In this conversation, he walks me through some of the most illiberal periods in American history: Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, Jim Crow, the Red Scare, Japanese American internment, Operation Wetback. And we discuss how this legacy can help us better understand what’s happening right now. This episode contains strong language.