In the realm of contemporary American politics, many researchers and media often focus on evangelical Christians who are conservative Protestants aligning with the Republican Party. However, not all American Christians are actively committed to party politics and support the Republican Party. This article sheds light on the diversity of American Christians’ engagement with political authority, exemplified by the progressive evangelical Christian Jim Wallis’s prophetic politics and Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh’s political theology.

Historically, tension has persisted between political and Christian authority. In the Middle Ages, there were two universal authorities: the Pope and the emperor. Pope Gelasius placed Christian authority(i.e., Church authority)above imperial authority. Modern states, however, challenged these universal authorities and monopolized people’s loyalties. In the United States, evangelical leaders recognized the importance of Christian authority and the church, yet they loved political authority. During the Cold War, they encouraged politicians to embrace Christianity and supported devout politicians to make America a Christian nation.

Jim Wallis criticized religious leaders. As an evangelical Christian, he censured “secular fundamentalists” for trying to purge faith from politics. Simultaneously, he scrutinized the Religious Right and the Bush administration, condemning their prideful belief in “God is on our side” and their adoption of a dualistic, good-evil approach which he termed “bad theology.” Like the Old Testament prophets, Wallis distanced himself from political authority. Drawing inspiration from Martin Luther King, he called upon political authorities and religious conservatives to follow the dictum, “we are on God’s side.”

While Wallis and the religious Right differed in their distance from the current administration, they still shared the assumption that the United States needed pious Christians. In contrast, Cavanaugh believes the state is insufficient for achieving peace because it has borders, features violence, and limits religion to the private sphere or the realm of the soul. So, Cavanaugh proposes the church as an alternative to the state and envisions Christians worldwide uniting through the Eucharist.

Although the focus tends to be on conservative evangelical leaders, there is an approach to contemporary American Christianity that confronts various political authorities, exemplified by Wallis and the discourse of “political theology.”

Public contestation and political participation are the two requisites a polity must fulfill in order to become a practicing democracy, or a polyarchy. This theoretical articulation, made by Robert A. Dahl more than half a century ago, is still helpful for identifying the timing and the problematic ways in which the United States transitioned into a polyarchy. As Dahl points out, political liberalization and the near universal suffrage for white males in the early decades of the nineteenth century made America a precursor of modern democracy. Yet it was not until the black civil rights movement secured the right to vote in the middle of the 1960s that the southern states, and the country as a whole, made a full transition into polyarchy.

That democratic transition was propelled by the civil rights movement, but equally critical were the assistance and legal protection offered by the federal law enforcement, specifically the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, enacted in direct response to the bloodshed and deaths in the Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama, established two unprecedented federal authorities. One was the administrative authority of the Department to send federal examiners and election observers to southern locales that had long denied the voter registration of black citizens. The other was the preclearance requirement that forced the southern state and local governments to submit any planned changes in their election laws to the Justice Department so that it ascertains that the changes would not, in the words of the Act, “have the purpose and the effect of denying and abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.”

This latter provision invited more heated disputes over the next fifty years than the former. The federal government protections for exercising the right to cast a ballot have been guaranteed in the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and therefore soon became a routine part of the political process. However, neither the Act nor the Constitution explicitly considers political representation, in other words, election to political office and the power to rule on behalf of the newly enfranchised. After 1965 the democratizers naturally demanded representation in public office, while the reactionary political elites have attempted to counter them by effectively narrowing the democratizers’ access to power in government. In 2006, Congress added to the law a provision that specified the ability of any American citizens “to elect their preferred candidate of choice” as a condition for preclearance. However, after seeing that Barack Obama was reelected to the second term, in 2013 the United States Supreme Court struck down a major provision of the Act upon which the preclearance requirement rested. The Civil Rights Division can no longer oversee the changes in state election laws. As a result, in the past ten years many states have enacted voter identification laws.

The roles of bureaucratic law enforcement during the south’s belated democratization, as well as the debate over political representation that emerged subsequently, are the two elements that deserve to be highlighted today along with Dahl’s theory of polyarchy. At a time when democracy in America is challenged by a former president and his supporters who have continued to allege stolen elections and have resorted to violence and coercion, questions of voting rights and political representation remain ever more important.

By focusing on the exclusion of Haitian refugees in the United States from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, particularly their detention inside and outside U.S. territory and their capture at the high seas, this paper takes “authoritarianism” as the institutional mediation between exclusion and acceptance. In doing so, I would like to explore how Haitian refugees were “legally” placed on the legal, social, and geographical margins, and what implications this may have for the debate over “authoritarianism” in the United States, by using the concept of “legal borderlands,” which refers to ambiguous zones inside and/or outside of the law.

The Refugee Act of 1980, enacted during the Carter administration, was supposed to have changed the previous policy of accepting applicants from communist regimes while closing the door to other applicants and bringing U.S. rules in line with international standards for refugee status, but the “refugee crisis” resulted in nullifying that aspect of the 1980 Refugee Act. What made this development possible and justified the government’s practice of interdiction at the high seas was a framework that recognized that the Haitians coming in were merely “economic migrants” and not “political refugees” who were legally obligated to protect them. In the midst of a heated confrontation between those advocating for Haitian refugees and those reluctant to accept them, the former argued that such a dichotomous understanding was itself inappropriate.

The majority of Haitians who managed to reach American soil but were not recognized as “political refugees” were detained for long periods of time under difficult conditions. The voices of Haitians and their supporters who have spoken out against the injustice of their detention in court brought to light the reality of the “legal borderlands.” The 1979 decision in the HRC v. Civiletti case, the June 1982 decision in the Louis v. Nelson case, and the June 1985 Supreme Court decision in the Jean v. Nelson case all provide glimpses of Haitian refugees being at the center of the “legal borderlands” or the very borderlands being enabled by Haitian refugees. In addition, the discussions at the Congressional hearings on the treatment of Haitian refugees made visible the fact that the “legal borderlands” are a legal black box.

To begin with, the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 UN Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees have prohibited the international return of “refugees” to their home countries where they were in danger. In the case involving Haitian refugees who challenged the legitimacy of interdiction, this non-refoulement principle have been the key point of contention. Importantly, the “legal borderlands” effectively nullify such disputes.

The “legal borderlands” that encompass “chaotic” nature are an “exceptional” area located outside of “order” and “norms,” yet it seems to construct “order” itself. If we follow the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who explained that “chaos” is encompassed by “order,” then the American legal system could not exist without a “legal borderlands,” and it is this “legal borderlands” that underpin American authority itself.

From the perspective of “authoritarianism,” we find that Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2006) foregrounds the collapse of the self-image of “America” that became the hegemonic power in the twentieth century. No Country portrays the world of “drug-war capitalism,” which can be seen as the ultimate outcome of the collapse of “liberal modernism,” a worldview that encompasses “individual freedom, market competition, democratic government, human rights, dominance by law, nationalistic institution, pursuit of happiness by techno-economic growth, and progressive view of history.” No Country provides a negative view of the contemporary “authoritative” America that led the “liberal modernism,” which, in turn, became the driving force for the “drug-war capitalism.” The narrative of No Country, however, functions as a highly ethical one that reconfigures “America” beyond the dualistic perspective of the conservative vs. the liberal. This paper interprets how the relation between “authority” and the “ethics” is actualized in the protagonist Ed Tom Bell’s characterization, focusing on the motifs of cultural war, country, violence, and law, among others.

The world of “drug-war capitalism” depicted in No Country historicizes the relation of violence and capitalism of the globalized “America.” The frontier myth generated the idea of “regeneration through violence” of America, which, in turn, had supported the self-image of “America” as the “gun-fighter nation” that kept bearing “the ethos of violence.” In No Country, however, the sheriff, Bell, does not represent such an “America” that monopolizes “the right to violence” and “the right to wealth,” but embodies the “America” that does not conform to such a self-image. Bell’s characterization reflects the end of the authoritative “gun-fighter nation,” and demonstrates his deep doubts about “America” with which he has identified himself. Accordingly, Bell’s monologues, which are put in the heads of each chapter, bear the tone of melancholic self-dialogues, but his eventual self-denial leads to a newly generated ethics.

In this context, No Country demonstrates the “responsible” ethical decision as something that paradoxically arises when loyalty to “nation” and “community” collapses. It is in this sense that Bell radically denies himself at the end of the narrative, and, in doing so, escapes from the yoke of self-image of the authoritative “America” that complicitly aligns with the world of “drug-war capitalism.” Ruthless rationality of the “drug-war capitalism” defeats “conservative” Bell, who appears as a useless old man. His figure, however, stands as a highly ethical “American” subject that keeps creating alternative selves open to the unknowable future and the “Other” beyond the fatalistic present and the fixed concept of “authority.”

The subject of this paper is a comparative study of employment by industry and job polarization between the states supporting Trump(Trump states), swing states, and the Democratic states. Section 1 overviewed previous studies around the factors of rising authoritarianism(supporting trend to Trump)in the US and identified remaining issues. Section 2 identified the differences in the employment structure by industry and job polarization, especially their degree of progress and results, in each state. Section 3 showed that they produced differences in the university degree ratio, race component, and foreign-born ratio in each state. This paper is based on the findings from previous studies, analyzing various statistics, and interviews conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although the analysis of this paper shows that the degree of progress in employment by industry and job polarization is higher in the Trump states and swing states from 1990 to 2019, the polarization of them as of 2019 is still far more advanced in the Democratic states. This paper realizes that these dynamics were the economic backgrounds affecting the population and social dynamics in each state, and analyzed the university degree ratios, race components, and foreign-born ratios in each state because these factors were related to the degree of the rise of authoritarianism. The result of population and social changes as of 2020 revealed that Democratic states still advanced in all aspects, although the pace of population and social changes were more rapid in Trump and swing states.

“Rapid degree of progress” in these factors from 1990 to 2020 may have evoked the dissatisfaction of some workers in Trump and swing states, and the “results” of the population and social changes in 2020 lead to the support for the Democrats in the Democratic states. Although some manufacturing workers had dissatisfaction and supported Trump in Democratic states, it is suggested that the support for authoritarianism was not realized in total because of the advanced population and social changes in these states. It is not deniable that the remaining relative high ratio of the manufacturing workers in Trump and swing states would lead to the support for Trump in these states.

This paper suggests that the position of the swing states is transitional or in an original position in the great employment and occupational structural changes in the US. Therefore, this suggests that the direction of the swing states might decide whether authoritarianism will take root in the US.

George Lippard (1822–1854), an essential figure in Antebellum publishing culture but often overlooked in traditional literary history, gained prominence in American literary scholarship through David S. Reynold’s Beneath the American Renaissance (1988). This essay focuses on Lippard’s novella, The Killers: A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia (1850), which is currently undergoing reevaluation. The work is based on the California House riot, a race riot that took place in Philadelphia in October 1849. The Killers, whose subject is a highly localized event, has been considered a minor work in the urban crime fiction genre, a lesser version of his well-known masterpiece, The Quaker City (1845). However, it should not be overlooked that this work was written around the time of the Compromise of 1850, which was later described as symbolic of the national conflicts over slavery and territory that led to the Civil War. In addition, given the story’s climactic plot involving images of the illegal slave trade, the Cuban expedition frenzy, and the newly acquired land of California, it should be placed in a context that goes beyond urban racial and class conflicts.

In this paper, I first examine the writing process of The Killers and how it differs from other versions published at around the same time, taking into account the work’s evaluation in previous studies as an urban crime novel that deals with issues of race and class in the city. I then elucidate how the work’s perspective on urban crime and race riots is expanded to the geopolitical issues of the Antebellum United States, particularly the illegal slave trade and the Cuban expedition, to argue that the confusion over slavery and territorial expansion surrounding the Compromise of 1850 is depicted in this work. Finally, I discuss the ambiguity regarding the consequences of the main characters in The Killers——the free black man who meet a violent death alongside the villains and the white man and woman who leave for the new land of California. The ultimate goal of this paper is to demonstrate the significance of this work in the history of American literature. Reynolds argues that so-called canonical works of American literature, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), were created in response to the ideals of radical democracy expressed in the popular, or even vulgar, works by Lippard and other sensationalist writers, and points to the significance of their read-and-discard entertainment works that formed the undercurrent of the American Renaissance. In this paper, in line with Reynolds’s argument, I reevaluate The Killers as sharing the same problematic consciousness as those of the American Renaissance writers, who drew inspiration for their work from the contradictions and ambiguities of the Compromise of 1850.

This article examines Japanese rice farming colonies in the Texas Gulf Coast at the beginning of the twentieth century. While the field of southern history often ignored the presence of Asian migrants in the past, recent studies have identified diverse ways in which Asian Americans formulated southern race relations and opened up the region to the transpacific world. Studies of Japanese settler colonialism have also uncovered how rice farming in Texas was part of Japan’s imperial overseas expansion movement. Building on these new modes of scholarly inquiry, this article argues that the Japanese settlement in Texas came to exist as a result of settlers’ amicable and yet complicit relationships with local whites. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Japanese considered the American South a promised land for rice farming and a haven from the anti-Japanese movement. At the same time, the Japanese actively absorbed the Jim Crow system while establishing their colonies.

To analyze these phenomena, this article situates Japanese settlements in the Texas Gulf Coast at the intersection between the postbellum economic revival of the South and Imperial Japan’s expansionism. After the U.S, Civil War, rice farming ventures helped restore the Gulf South economy, and the reputation of Japanese rice seeds created an incentive for Texans to welcome the Japanese. In the meantime, the Japanese found Texas to be an attractive destination for two reasons. First, chronic rice shortage in Japan’s mainland since the 1890s drove the country’s territorial expansion. Second, Japanese officials used the Texas rice farming project to repaint the American image of the Japanese as an unassimilable race. Using both American and Japanese records, this article reveals that white southerners and Japanese people carefully crafted a colonization scheme to Texas. Notably, Japanese officials planned to bring only affluent and educated elites to Texas to placate the white fear of Asian migrants. Saibara Seito, a former parliament member, a lawyer, and a Christian educator, became the model of this endeavor despite his limited experience in rice farming.

This seemingly unusual bonds between white southerners and Japanese settlers, however, also relied on anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism. Using a wide range of Japanese records, this article elucidates how Japanese settlers complied with the Jim Crow system and distanced themselves from the Chinese. When Japanese settlers wrote home, they also portrayed themselves as superior to whites while highlighting their advanced agricultural skills and the excellent quality of Japanese rice seeds. This racialized self-representation legitimized Japan’s overseas rice farming project.

Lastly, this article sheds light on Japanese settlers’ complex reactions to anti-Japanese sentiment. The naturalization problem constantly loomed over Japanese settlers’ head, and Saibara eventually left for Japan’s new settlement in Brazil in the late 1910s. Other Japanese settlers, however, continued maintaining their close relationship with locals. These Japanese farmers remained optimistic even when the anti-Japanese movement swept across the South.