Reviewing The Two Faces of American Freedom (December 2025)

Aziz Rana is a professor of constitutional law at Boston College. His most recent book is The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them, published in 2024. A review of that book is included in my Artifacts of a Troubled and Troublesome Species published in 2025. In the review, I wrote that one of the book’s shortcomings was that while Rana addresses the threat to representative government represented by the Supreme Court, he fails to give sufficient space to the dangers of presidentialism. After having just read The Two Faces of American Freedom, it is reassuring to find that Rana had previously addressed the exceptional presidency. In Two Faces, he writes

The idea of a direct representative relationship between president and people-at the heart of Roosevelt's democratic vision of the new social welfare state fundamentally undermined the Federalist theory of democracy, particularly the notion that no existing body or branch of government enjoyed sovereign power.

Reading these words 11 years later, it seems Rana was prescient. President Donald Trump has arguably perfected the strategy of bypassing Congress and the Court by appealing to public sentiment.(1) But in 2014 when Two Faces was published, Trump had not yet even appeared on the national political scene as a viable presidential candidate. Thus, for Rana, not a MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporter, a disproportionately powerful president should concern us no matter their political stripe. It should not matter whether the man in the White House who can do something about everything is our man.

Rana’s book doesn’t anticipate Trump populism of the second half of the 2010s and the mid-2020s, although it could easily incorporate these years as yet another manifestation of white supremacy, Christian fundamentalism and xenophobia at home and continued American use of military and economic power to extract concessions from other countries (minus the humanitarian blind). What Rana calls the plebiscitary presidency is manifest in the FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) presidency, a period reviled as anathema to the present day by conservatives, but with little imagination, it could apply just as well to the Trump years, which represent a political dystopia for establishment and progressive Democrats. For Rana, the plebiscitary president is the logical extension of the ever-ascending dominance of the presidency at the expense of the other two branches of the federal government. As he notes, the powers of the presidency in foreign affairs roughly corresponds to the end of the settlement of the Western Frontier, and the escalation of the president’s authority in domestic affairs is traceable to the federal government’s response to the economic emergency of the Great Depression. Rana’s conventional history of America maps the path to presidential preeminence and even locates its precedent with the 18^th century Hanover kings who reigned over the British Empire.

So far, there does not appear to be anything particularly novel in Rana’s account. Nevertheless, he does acknowledge that his is “not a work of traditional historical scholarship . . . [but] a form of social criticism. In other words, he is partisan, fearing that what Arthur Schlesinger labeled the imperial presidency—the accretion of near absolute presidential authority in foreign policy and in particular in waging war, as, for example, in Vietnam from the 1950s through the early 1970s. What is relatively new and rather more controversial as historiography is his advocacy for a return to the types of inclusive direct democracy that have faded away into America’s past. The populist, progressive and socialist alternatives largely disappeared in the early part of the 20^th century. As Rana maintains, in its early years, “the civil rights movement has embodied the most sustained effort to revive both the vision of liberty as self-rule and to connect this vision with a critique of empire,” but that “legacy is almost entirely forgotten” as emphasis has shifted to the “social mobility for middle-class blacks and inclusion for some into arenas of corporate, professional, and political power.”

In view of the increasing interest in postcolonial studies, an important contribution that Rana adds to the traditional historiography of America is his analytical treatment of America as a settler society of principally Anglo Caucasians. He rejects the American claims to uniqueness and millennialism, and instead links the qualities of white settler colonialism in American to the “French in Algeria, the English in Northern Ireland, the European Jewish community in Israel/Palestine, and the Chinese in Taiwan” He argues that these characteristics include

[G]reater equality within the settler colony than in the imperial metropole or home country; a cultural sense of being "chosen" as an ethnic or religious community for a historical mission; a greater emphasis on militarism due to perceived threats from indigenous and foreign populations; and, finally, a wariness of metropolitan social and political customs, which are depicted at times as corrupt or decadent.

Two Faces does not fully encompass American history to date. It begins with the British colonies on the Eastern Seaboard and concludes with the FDR presidency. That, for him, is sufficient to argue his case that there are two faces to American freedom—those being “our long-standing difficulty in imagining liberty without suppression and free citizenship without the control of subject communities.” This, too, is hardly ground-breaking for readers familiar with American history. It is an updated reference to America’s double standard of freedom vis-à-vis internal minorities (native and slave populations) and people of foreign lands (non-whites and Southern Europeans.) What is clearly controversial though is the claim that America has essentially transformed itself into one of those European rivals from whose deadly embrace it desperately struggled. President Washington’s admonition in his 1796 farewell address to avoid permanent (‘entangling’) alliances with European nations, which appears to have been sound advice in light of the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s.

Stopping the historical record with the FDR presidency is significant and peculiar given the number of examples of external and internal threats that have since promoted a public desire for a greater sense of safety in a strong, centralized executive. For example, America’s post-9/11 failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its selective abridgement of wartime civil liberties (e.g., habeas corpus, protection from carceral torture, presumption of innocence) and xenophobic immigration policies, especially with regards to Mexican immigrants—all of these demonstrate America’s fears of internal and external weakness and support Rana’s thesis.

This book is not nearly as long as The Constitutional Bind, but it is dense. Rana’s archival research is of the highest quality, and in Two Faces, he makes excellent use of extended quotes for a number of historical figures—letting them speak for themselves at just the right moment in his narrative. However, another noticeable limitation of this work is that neither interest group politics nor social media are discussed. This is unfortunate because both can be analyzed and critiqued as important yet imperfect variants of the sort of direct democracy he favours. Perhaps what makes this an enjoyable yet informative read is that it synthesizes a number of currents and crosscurrents in American history and links them up to the present, where the author, as he admits, presents a prescriptive history that was as relevant during Barack Obama’s presidency, when the book was written, as it is now in the time of Trump. In his concluding words, Rana writes

[O]ne cannot expect that legal reforms aimed at curbing executive authority will succeed as long as Americans accept judgments that view security and the protection from external and internal threat as society's guiding commitments.

According to Rana, throughout its history, from its colonial beginnings to its emergence as a Great Power, America has been morally challenged by its two standards of freedom. Domestically, there is one standard for the entitled majority, who have race, religion and cultural history in common and one for non-white minorities whose cultures and aspirations are regarded as antithetical to the American way. Internationally, there is one standard for Americans (in general) and one for all other foreign peoples. America is indeed Janus-faced with respect to freedom.

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Endnotes