NPS | You argue that the rise of administratively broad and interventionist federal power from the Progressive era to the New Deal marked a fundamental mutation of settler freedom: its internally animating democratic core is lost — even as its dominative orientation toward those external to, or deemed unfit for, membership within the national polity is effectively transferred from a national-territorial to a global scale.
The rise of the (albeit truncated) US welfare-state in this sense marks a paradoxical attrition of the egalitarian kernel of autonomous self-rule that defined settler freedom from its origin. It also goes hand in hand with greater formal inclusion of indigenous and racial others, a fact that enhances the state’s own legitimacy. Despite this, a potent settler animus is retained as a dimension of rancorous domestic politics, and also within the operations of ever more expansive US state violence around the world.
AR | You’re hitting on a central claim for me. I argue that for all the basic transformations in the US in the twentieth century — from the rise of the administrative state to civil rights successes — the country’s internal institutions and external practices have retained settler structures. A key theme of my historical account involves the rejection of the idea that, even if settlerism oriented early American history, it has little to say about the present.
For many left-liberals, a common move is to recognize the country’s oppressive roots, but then to argue that through a combination of the New Deal in the 1930s and the so-called Second Reconstruction in the 1960s, the nation was in effect fundamentally transformed on free and equal grounds. So they reject a conservative reading of the founding as perfect and unmarred, but nonetheless participate in the overall creedal story of self-fulfillment and redemption.
My view, by contrast, is that creedal arguments gained prominence out of a sense of ideological uncertainty that enveloped the United States in the early twentieth century. In particular, the closing of the frontier and the country’s emergence onto the global stage with the Spanish American War raised basic questions about the future of colonial settlement as well as the meaning of American power in the world.
In this context, many American elites began to rally around a specific reading of American universalism as the defining characteristic of the community. This view separated European imperialism on the one hand from American global influence on the other, with the latter depicted as benign tutelage fundamentally in keeping with the basic interests of nonwhite peoples.