Few events in my undergraduate experience were as intellectually fruitful as my chance encounter with Aziz Rana’s The Two Faces of American Freedom. I discovered the book in a seminar on populism and democracy, alongside works by the conventional greats of American history – Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, and the like – and a smattering of contemporary contributors. Rana’s Two Faces more than the others seemed to capture the perplexing spirit of autumn 2017, nine months into an unanticipated presidency whose governing philosophy, if such a thing cohered, people had taken to describing charitably as “populist.”
The recent ten-year anniversary of Two Faces seemed a fitting occasion to reach out to Rana. In honor of the tenth anniversary of Two Faces, our conversation focused on the legacies of empire in today’s populism, emphasizing the closeness of radical democracy and settler exclusion. Revisiting key arguments from the book, we complicate traditional narratives of American history to make room for a richer story of membership and inclusion.
Henry Brooks
I want to start with a vignette from your book: it’s 1880, and the frontier is still the dynamic force in American economic and political life. More than twenty states have passed laws permitting European immigrants to vote, regardless of their citizenship status (so-called “resident voting” laws). The federal government has passed a law permitting non-citizens to receive land grants. How did such a progressive vision take hold in America?
Aziz Rana
The really distinctive feature of early American history was how a rich internal account of freedom—what I call “freedom as self-rule”—ended up being joined to a very rigid politics of exclusion and land expropriation. The settlers that came from England carried with them a radicalized version of the republican tradition. According to this account, in order to be free you had to have control over all of the central sites of collective decision-making: political, economic, and spiritual.
What those settlers realized pretty early on was that, in order for this kind of project to work, there would have to be enough land for everybody—because it’s basically an agricultural society—so that they could actually enjoy things like independent proprietorship and homesteading. And there would have to be enough people to actually settle the land. So they developed policies to induce folks from Europe to come over to the U.S. That’s why, by the late nineteenth century, you have practices like non-citizen voting in a majority of the states and territories and non-citizen access to western land grants.