We Need an Insurgent Mass Movement

Aziz Rana, a political theorist and constitutional historian, anticipated many of the themes and crises of today's politics. Amid the liberal optimism of 2008–10, he warned that Barack Obama's presidency might prove to be the post-sunset afterglow of a very specific Cold War politics of meritocratic achievement and national unity. Rana calls the worldview of this unity "creedalism," for its devotion to an "American creed." It valorized bipartisanship and the idea that Americans had always been essentially committed to personal liberty, political equality, and competent but limited government, and just had to work out some imperfections through, say, the New Deal and the civil rights movement. Creedalism was the water of U.S. political life, the implicit grammar of presidential campaigns and of public education. It was how adults thought.

In his first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010), Rana advanced a different interpretation of U.S. history, anchored in the paradoxes of settler colonialism. Early settlers in North America created what was then both the most egalitarian and the most savagely hierarchical society in the world. For its insiders—white propertied and enfranchised men—the early republic maintained an unparalleled degree of political equality and popular sovereignty. But its outsiders, especially enslaved African Americans and Native Americans, were exploited and eliminated with extraordinary cruelty and intensity. And the opposites were integrally linked. For Rana, the American story is not about smoothing out wrinkles or correcting inconsistencies. It's about the struggle to radicalize and universalize settler freedom.

Rana sees the present moment as a return to the American norm, a fierce conflict between race-and-class domination and radical egalitarian democracy. The revival of a self-described socialist left and the broader turn of the Democratic Party's progressive wing to "big, structural change" have brought back the understanding that robust democracy requires economic freedom as well as the political kind. At the same time, the highly visible ethno-nationalist right and new liberal awareness of the depth of racialized

Organizations like DSA are developing "the cultural institutions … that collectively create a daily experience of liberation and community."—Aziz Rana

inequality have drawn attention to the central place that denial of real freedom has always played in U.S. political economy.

This interview is the result of many days of conversation and correspondence between Aziz Rana and Jedediah Britton-Purdy, the editor of this special section.

Jedediah Britton-Purdy:

One reason you and I have talked politics over the years is that we come to similar commitments by very different paths. My political identity runs from Valley Forge through Gettysburg and Radical Reconstruction to today's activists like the Reverend William Barber and efforts like the Green New Deal that aim to extend and radicalize a living tradition of self-rule. You self-describe as coming out of a Third Worldist tradition and being suspicious of all creedal national narratives, particularly one that belongs to an imperial colossus. If you were less personally charitable, you might call me a left creedalist. I think many people find themselves torn over what divides us, but also what holds us together: the problem of how to think about the depth and horror of inequality and violence in the United States while maintaining a sense that the country has also been, and is, a platform for people struggling to build ways of living together on more truly democratic terms.

Recently, your take has gone mainstream. The New York Times's "1619 Project," for example, tries to recenter American history on the history of slavery. You've talked in creative ways about what reparations could mean—how police reform, for example, could "decolonize" the institutions of U.S. law once we appreciate that they developed through a kind of internal racial colonialism—and how to think about global freedom of movement. Those once-fringe ideas are now running through the Democratic primaries. Is this a hopeful moment?

Aziz Rana:

We are obviously living during troubling times—the return of open white...