Democracy Awakening is the latest book by the well-known American history professor and author, Heather Cox Richardson. Richardson has made a big name for herself of late by virtue of her online newsletter “Letters from an American” – the most popular site on the Substack site. I’ve been a subscriber for over six months and always look forward to Ms. Richardson’s cogent analyses of contemporary events in American politics. She always provides an accurate historical background for current events and is able to contextualize even the most convoluted political events of our time.

As this year’s presidential election season approached, I decided to take a deeper dive into Ms. Richardson’s world view by reading her latest book, a New York Times bestseller for many months. The previous work of history I’d read was Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America, published in the aftermath of the right-wing assault on Charlottesville in 2017. (My review is available on my blog entry of January 8, 2023). That book covered some of the same territory as Democracy Awakening, though Richardson’s focuses more attention on our more recent history.

Meacham’s main thesis was that “the soul of America” is embodied in our Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The realization of that bold assertion had periods of advancement and retrenchment in the course of American history. Meacham argues that the responsibility for continuing to advance this ethos of human equality lies with us as citizens. In dark periods like 2017-2020, it became even more essential for citizens to rise up to protect and defend the democracy that our founding fathers had initiated as a compelling idea.

Richardson begins her book with an epitaph from the great American poet, Walt Whitman:

“We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened.” Democratic Vistas, 1871

In her Foreword, she says: “America is at a crossroads. A country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.” She announces her intention to explain how this has happened, and also to describe “how we can reclaim our democratic principles.”

Her book has three parts:  Part 1: Undermining Democracy, Part 2: The Authoritarian Experiment, and Part 3: Reclaiming America.

Undermining Democracy

Part 1 traces the origins of a “conservative” movement in the United States over the last century that laid the groundwork to the ascendancy of Donald Trump’s MAGA phenomenon. It began with a backlash to Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs and policies of the 1930’s, programs that helped lift millions of ordinary Americans from the throes of a prolonged economic depression.

Business interests in the U.S. had held strong political influence since the late 1800’s. Their heyday was the 1920’s when unfettered capitalism led to the 1929 stock market crash. FDR was from a wealthy family himself, but he saw that the business interests of his peers had been poison for the nation as a whole. His implementation of dozens of federal programs to help feed, house and employ indigent Americans took much of the sting out of the depression and made him a popular hero. Business interests recoiled at FDR as a traitor to their self-serving interests and began working behind the scenes to upend him politically. Many of them were friendly to the 1930’s fascist experiments occurring in Germany, Italy and Japan. It took the U.S. entry into World War II in December 1941 to finally quiet the loud fascist movements that had arisen here.

Emerging victorious from the war and with one of the only intact industrial infrastructures in the world, the U.S. prospered in the post-war era. Many of the federal programs instituted during the depression, like Social Security and strong union protections, were highly popular. During the war, FDR helped establish very high income taxes on the richest Americans. These high taxes (up to 70% on incomes over $1 million) were also popular and resulted in full government coffers to fund the many infrastructure investments of that era. Even Republican President Eisenhower approved the high tax rates for the wealthy.  The majority of Democrats and Republicans alike ascribed to what has become known as the “liberal consensus”.

The liberal consensus continued through most of the 1960’s and culminated in the “Great Society” anti-poverty programs implemented by President Lyndon Johnson. After that pinnacle, however, the forces of backlash and retrenchment re-established themselves. It began with the election of President Nixon in 1968 and continued through much of the 1970’s, except for the single term of President Jimmy Carter (1976-1980). President Ronald Reagan is the one who brought the forces of economic “conservatism” to the fore during his two terms (1981-1988). Reagan’s mantra was that government was the enemy of the rightful expansion of business interests. His administration significantly lowered income and corporate taxes for the richest Americans while cutting back on the programs that created a “safety net” for ordinary citizens. Reagan established a “new normal” for American public policy in which business interests were given priority over the needs of ordinary people. The “Reagan Revolution” went mostly unchecked into the 21^st century, including during the two terms of the neo-liberal Democratic President Bill Clinton (1992-2000).

The undermining of the liberal consensus occurred as much for “cultural” as for political reasons. The success of the 1960’s civil rights movement led to a racial backlash epitomized in the rise of George Wallace as a presidential candidate. Similarly, the vociferous, student-led movements against the Vietnam War resulted in many people of the World War Two generation to turn against the values of the 1960’s “counterculture”. Even though many labor union protections were being eviscerated, many working people voted against their interest in favor of the white, “patriotic” voices of men like Nixon and Reagen. And a rising tide of politically directed fundamentalist Christians more and more gravitated to the “family values” that the Republican party exploited.

Richardson does a good job of demonstrating that MAGA did not begin with Donald Trump. In fact, “Make America Great Again” was Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogan forty years earlier. After the surprising Presidential victories of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Republicans formed a “Tea Party” movement to prevent the return of any semblance of the liberal consensus embodied in programs like Obama’s modest reforms in his Affordable Health Care Act. Meanwhile, Republican leaders in Congress refused to support a single Obama initiative and succeeded in blocking Obama’s second named justice to the Supreme Court. The stage was set for a giant step away from democracy as we know it.

The Authoritarian Experiment

The second section of the book documents a painful litany of undemocratic political and economic retrenchments engineered by Donald Trump and his lackeys during his term as President, 2017-2020. It begins with a brilliant chapter that documents Trump’s political rise from business mogul to reality TV star to an overbearing and boorish presidential candidate who reduced his Republican rivals to impotence. It also describes how some major mishaps in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, including James Comey’s infamous breach of established FBI practice in mistakenly resurrecting Clinton’s email lapses, led to Trump’s victory.

Richardson calls Trump’s presidential victory a “shocking event” in the eyes of many Republicans as well as the millions of Democrats living in their “blue bubble”. Former Republican president George W. Bush expressed his surprise and his dismay by saying: “that was some weird shit!”

Trump failed to support the traditional Republican oligarchy, instead jumping into full-scale authoritarianism. Richardson calls on significant scholarship about the fascists’ rise to power in Germany and Italy to help explain how Trump got away with it all. One of fascism’s first principles is that of “the big lie”. It rests on the principle that a blatant falsehood repeated loudly and often enough will soon be accepted. Trump’s first big lie had to do with the size of the crowd at his inauguration. He could not stomach the reality that attendance at a spontaneous “women’s march” in Washington the following week would far exceed the crowd at his inauguration. So he lied, and forced his subordinates to lie. That would set the pattern for the next four years.

Another key ingredient to Trump’s use of propaganda was his insistence on “alternative facts”. This term was used by Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway as a justification for Trump’s refusal to accept reality as reported in established media.

Other classic fascist techniques used by Trump included “gaslighting” and blackmail. In gaslighting, a perpetrator overwhelms his victim by loudly asserting offensive falsehoods loudly and repeatedly until the victim is too worn down to fight back.  Trump aide Steve Bannon described it as “flooding the zone with shit” so that the public feels unable to make sense of the world. Trump used blackmail by first enticing his associates to do something slightly illegal, and then threatening them with exposure if they refused to do something much more egregious. Richardson observes that one of Trump’s most important advisers in his early career was Roy Cohn, the same person who advised Sen. Joe McCarthy in his use of propaganda during his decades of bogus “communist” witch-hunts.

Trump’s authoritarian nature also dominated his actions. One of his first official acts was to order a travel ban on visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. This so-called Muslim travel ban provoked an immediate response from his opponents, who flooded major airports with their demonstrations. Trump had to fire a Justice Department official who recognized the illegality of the ban. But eventually the ban was overruled in court.

By all reports, Trump didn’t take the daily work of President seriously, ignoring daily intelligence reports, and spending many hours each day watching Fox News. When the Covid pandemic occurred, his administration was caught completely flatfooted, despite well laid contingency plans for pandemics that the Obama administration had readied. Trump was ambivalent at best about masking and school closures and the U.S. suffered one of the highest rates of contagion in the world. The economy tanked and Trump’s response was to allow businesses and schools to reopen far earlier than his public health advisors specified.

Trump was impeached twice by the House of Representatives during his term of office. In addition, the Mueller investigation revealed that Trump and his aides had substantial contacts with Russian operatives who were actively maligning Hillary Clinton’s campaign. His Attorney General William Barr whitewashed the many egregious Russian connections made by Trump and his campaign officials, even though many of those officials were eventually tried and convicted.

In 2019, a story broke about a government informer’s claim that Trump had tried to bully the Ukrainian president into initiating a bogus case against Trump’s feared presidential rival, Joe Biden. The story was well documented, and a number of high-level State Department officials testified as to the illegality of Trump’s phone call, and its troublesome implications. The House of Representatives voted for impeachment but Trump’s Republican cronies in the Senate failed to convict him, and Trump emerged from the impeachment more intent than ever on punishing his political opponents.

The most egregious crime of Trump’s presidency was his refusal to accept the results of the presidential election of 2020 in which he lost his race against Joe Biden in both the popular and the Electoral College vote. He made completely unfounded accusations that the election had been rigged against him. When over 60 court cases resulted in no evidence of an unfair election, Trump devolved into an illegal scheme to have his VP, Mike Pence, sidestep the normal procedures for certifying the election and instead throw the result into the hands of the House of Representatives. To aid his scheme, he invited thousands of his most avid, right-wing followers to assault the U.S. Capitol while both houses of Congress were convening to certify the election.

This brazen affront to American democracy was on another level – that of unadulterated treason. At his second impeachment after the January 6 debacle, his friends in the Senate, led by a duplicitous Mitch McConnell, again refused to approve the articles of impeachment that the House of Representatives had again pursued.

Once again, Trump had perpetrated a frontal attack on American democracy by using a “Big Lie”. He had so bamboozled his millions of followers that many of them believed this outrageous lie was true. In this way, his authoritarian threat to U.S. democracy remained alive.

Reclaiming America

In the last section, Richardson steps back to take a more macro look at what the American experiment is all about. Going back to our nation’s origins, she too, like Jon Meacham, singles out our Declaration of Independence’s statement that “all men are created equal” as our country’s most salient theme. She sees the U.S. Constitution as a flawed attempt to provide a governmental framework to further the underlying goal of achieving true equality for all.

The United States was a long way from true equality at its inception. Certainly, women and people of color, most of them enslaved, continued to be regarded as unworthy of full citizenship. In addition, most of the states required that voting be limited to male property owners. The compromises made in the Constitution to assuage southern slaveholders resulted in a political system that perpetuated gross inequalities that pervaded through to the Civil War and beyond. And yet, the impetus towards universal equality remained alive in the hearts and minds of many Americans throughout our history. This movement was carried on mostly by those who had yet to achieve the promised dream of democratic equality – women, people of color, and ongoing waves of immigrant people.

Even the authoritarian movement that Trump leads makes use of strong democratic urges for economic equality that is part of the American dream. The fact is that well-off oligarchies in both major political parties have pushed a “globalist” economy that mostly benefits their own wealth and well being, at the expense of the laboring people who built the country.

Richardson does a good job at showing how Trump and his MAGA movement have co-opted the legitimate economic grievances of working people and created a twisted populism that perverts those legitimate grievances in service to the well-being of Trump and the super-rich.

Like Jon Meacham before her, Richardson sees patterns of success and failure in the democratic experiment that is our nation’s history. Both historians remind us that even in our darkest hours, the seeds of regeneration are present. And that even in times of seemingly unlimited success, as in the halcyon decades after World War II, undemocratic elements based on wealth, racism and sexism remained ready to pounce.

Richardson shows in detail how the deep vulnerabilities of our present social and economic realities mirror those of the 1930’s, when strong fascist movements emerged. The United States could easily have veered to fascist authoritarianism at that time. Similarly, the seeds of authoritarianism have been sprouting all around us for decades now in the likes of Nixon, Reagan and Trump. These significant threats to our democracy can only be met and overcome when a substantial number of our people awaken to the danger. This awakening is propelled by remembering the long history of democratic movements that have arisen when we’ve been on this brink before.

To conclude, I’d like to share the inspiring words of still another important American historian, Howard Zinn:

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.

“If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

“If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

“And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

(from You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times, 2018)

John Bayerl, 8/9/2024