Bending the knee in the face of apparent significant power is not uncommon and is a worrisome precedent for current institutions facing pressure from executive power.

Tocqueville thought racism was more powerful in places where slavery had been abolished than where slavery still existed, suggesting that free Black Americans in northern cities faced organized campaigns of expulsion.

Jackson justified Indian removal by claiming that Native peoples didn't belong, were dying out anyway, and that finding territory outside population centers was actually in their interest for safety—a rationalization that modern readers can see through only because of what we've learned about the long-term history of Native expulsion, not because the justification itself reads as obviously false to ears of that era.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, though normally read as a document establishing America's inevitable ascent into liberal democracy, actually contains extensive warnings about where America could be headed, particularly around slavery, racism, and the tyranny of the majority in local politics that could rapidly push the United States toward despotism where people would surrender rights to a strong man.

Andrew Jackson's expulsion of Native peoples from lands east of the Mississippi River to 'Indian territory' (which was not imagined as heading toward statehood) was the capstone of a process begun in the 17th century and represented a central, not marginal, aspect of American political culture in that era.

During the 1830s, free African-Americans were targeted for expulsion through colonization schemes (a policy reaching back to Thomas Jefferson); Catholic, Mormon, and abolitionist groups were driven out of cities through organized mobs; Joseph Smith was murdered in the 1840s near Springfield, Illinois; anti-abolitionist riots occurred in large and small cities because abolitionists were accused of promoting miscegenation.

Trump and his advisors like Steve Bannon lionize Andrew Jackson as a model for defiance of Supreme Court rulings on Native expulsion (referencing Jackson's 'let them enforce it' response), as a strong executive willing to expand presidential powers when the presidency had relatively few powers, and as a harbinger of executive overreach that Trump admires.

The Palmer Raids (1919-1920) under Attorney General Mitchell Palmer targeted political groups deemed objectionable by those in power, including isolationists, socialists, communists, and people associated with anarchism, reflecting the desire to enforce a vision of the United States as 'a republic of white Christians' through expulsion of those who didn't fit.

Eugene Debs ran for president from jail, and Sacco and Vanzetti became notorious examples of political expulsion during the Red Scare, with the federal government becoming involved in repression of leftist movements through prosecution and deportation.

Hitler praised American immigration policy and westward expansion as the American version of Lebensraum (breathing room), and Nazis and American scientists shared eugenics work, suggesting they saw themselves as involved in a joint project.

Disfranchisement, segregation, and Jim Crow had pushback only from African-Americans (not all of them) and most white Americans and political leaders thought these were perfectly reasonable, modern ways of managing diversity and inequality, indicating widespread social support for illiberal policies.

Right-wing movements and groups fulfilled a need not just for exclusion but for community-building, a sense of belonging that included people one was comfortable with while creating non-belonging and subjecting those outside the group to resistance, expulsion, or repression.

Joseph McCarthy represents a populist political style appealing to anti-elitism and anti-institutionalism; he is now getting new appreciation from the political right precisely because they view him as having had the courage to stand up to those threatening American values, though his constituency was not the same as 19th-century populists—it was more native-born, small business types.

The federal state grew enormously from the 1930s-1950s, and McCarthy represented unease and suspicion about expansive bureaucratic institutions that were far from direct reach of many Americans experiencing urban change, housing shortages, and demographic migrations, to which McCarthy appealed as someone trying to hold onto a sense of community being overrun.

In the McCarthy era, institutional response was mostly 'bending the knee'—universities, workplaces, and other institutions quickly tried to identify and expel people who could be regarded as threats, resulting in job losses, blacklisting, and exclusion from labor unions at a critical moment in labor history (late 1940s-early 1950s).

Liberals were not well equipped for social unravelings in the mid-20th century and began to abandon their project of reconciling rights with social order, suggesting that liberalism's internal contradictions (commitment to individual rights vs. commitment to social order) make it fragile when those contradictions become acute.

Building national political power requires appealing to complicated constituencies with complicated histories; Democratic presidents through the 1960s had to manage a southern segregationist wing, and LBJ recognized he would 'lose the South for a generation' by signing civil rights legislation, yet the alternative to compromise with illiberal impulses was to cede power to those impulses entirely.

Lawrence Powell's Troubled Memory tells the story of a woman from the Lodz Ghetto who escapes to New Orleans and plays an important role in outing David Duke's Nazi past and undermining his gubernatorial campaign, linking fascism on both sides of the Atlantic and providing an inspiring well-told story of resistance.

During the Red Scare (World War I period), immigrants who were politically radical were deported with very limited rights; during Operation Wetback, American citizens were deported in violation of rights they were assumed to have, showing that the US has repeatedly deported people, including citizens, in violations of rights assumed to have been established by the 14th Amendment.

The Mexican Constitution of 1916 established a broader series of rights for working people and women than US citizenship has established, suggesting that the protection of rights through constitutional language is not automatic and US citizenship rights are comparatively thin.