Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America Paperback – October 22, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson is the intelligent, compassionate, knowledgeable voice we all need. She helps readers understand current politics within a historical context. I have utmost respect for all of her work and she is a historian and author of true integrity that is hard to find. Democracy Awakening is a must read for anyone seeking to be informed while fascism nips at our heels.

Spoiler: I am a huge fan of the author and read her Substack newsletter daily. If you want to know how our country got where we are today, you can look to Heather Cox Richardson for an insightful, reasoned study of the path that led us here. Historical events serve as a map which, when charted by Ms. Richardson, guide us from root problems, through ideas both great and awful, to actions taken by citizens and leaders that have shaped our country and our political landscape. Through the 20/20 lenses of hindsight, we see clearly why certain problems in our country (still) exist and what could and should happen to fix them. If you are looking for answers to, “How did this happen in America?” questions, look no further.

HCR is so on point providing historical context to current world events. It’s important to keep perspectives like the ones she provides available for that those who are truly interested in understanding what is happening with the state of the United States.

So, for those who have been listening to HCR for the past few years, this is more like a well organized summary of what she's been teaching than a completely new set of material. Instead, it puts everything in context, filling in some of the holes in her prior narrative. Specifically, she'd been a bit light on the American fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the anti-Eisenhower Republicans of the 1950s who started right wing talk radio (what has morphed into the toxic "BS Mountain" of Faux News and the more extreme ones that Jon Stewart describes).It is a good book, but if I had a criticism I would say that there isn't much about "democracy awakening" in the post-Trump era. There is very little prescriptive in this. Like Rachel Maddow, HCR points to times in American history when we beat back the authoritarians, e.g. the Civil War, the 1930s, the New Deal, WWII, the Civil Rights, Women's Rights, LGBTQ Rights (and other) movements. I was hoping for a little bit more evidence of the current awakening.

This book describes how a small group of people have tried to make us believe that our fundamental principles aren’t true, according to the author. We have a war on democracy, language is used that serves their interests, and we are led on a path toward authoritarianism. There is a promise to recreate some imagined past where people can feel important again. This book also shows how democracy has persisted throughout the history of this nation.The crisis we have today can be traced back to the 1930’s. Back then we had the New Deal. Some “insisted that a government that answered to the needs of ordinary Americans was a dangerous, radical experiment.” An interesting point made is when private power is elevated to a point that it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself, we have, in essence, Fascism, which is defined as “ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” Subsequent chapters discuss the Nixon period. An interesting term I learned was “positive polarization.” It was a Nixon strategy to stoke the anger of the voters to make them feel like they had to show up to vote – sounds familiar today. Various organizations, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and others argued that the economic dislocations of the 70’s were the result of regulation and taxation, and that the country needed “market-based” solutions. By chapter seven were into the Reagan revolution.Something interesting happened. From the New Deal in 1933 until 1980, we see a “great compression,” where the economy expanded for all. The gap between the rich and the poor actually narrowed. In the years after 1981, as the economy grew, wealth moved dramatically upward. This came to be known as the “great divergence.” We also see ideology move front and center with the removal of the Fairness Doctrine in media. By 1990, a paper came out at GOPAC that urged fellow Republicans to refer to Democrats with words, such as corrupt, cheat, intolerant, liberal, lie, traitors, etc. We still see this today. So basically, we see the creation of an underclass of Americans that are falling behind economically. And now that underclass has been given someone to hate. Today, we hear a lot about voter fraud. This is nothing new. Many Republican candidates who lost the 1994 midterms began to claim that Democrats had won through “voter fraud.” Remember the 2020 election? Another interesting point: in 2006, dark money made up less than $5 million of spending in federal elections. By 2012 it was over $300 million thanks to the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling.“Part two is entitled “The Authoritarian Experiment.” It covers the 2016 election period and the ensuing years. It’s funny how history connects disparate periods of time. The author notes, for example, that the antigovernment gangs that marched on Charlottesville “were the logical outcome of the right-wing militancy that the anti-New Dealers had tried to cultivate in 1934 to bring down FDR. The ensuing decades of violence were nurtured by bullies who justified their actions with a right-wing ideology.” We eventually get to the January 6 event and the development of the Big Lie, which “permitted the final destruction of the liberal consensus.” The inability to end gerrymandering had put extremists in control. We see the imposition of minority rule insisting on states’ rights and then demanding federal protection of laws it wanted. Thus, “the Republican Party echoed the southern Democrats before the Civil War.” A study of history reveals some interesting trends, does it not?Part three is about reclaiming America. The 1619 project pushes back the start of the story of America to 1619, when the first landing of several dozen enslaved Africans arrived. We then fast forward to the declaration of independence from England and the formation of a new country. What the framers didn’t foresee, was that politicians desperate to keep their party in power would add new, sparsely populated states to the Union. The Republican party added six new states between 1889 and 1890. When the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, the House in 1929 capped its number at 428 to keep power from the urban dwellers. This skewed the Electoral College in favor of rural America. When John Quincy Adams became president in 1824, some began to “characterize the federal government as a distant tyranny run by elites that was trampling the rights of ordinary white men,” according to the author.In the 1930’s we see that the New Deal coalition demonstrated that government could promote the welfare of the people; this established a liberal consensus. Unfortunately, “since the 1980’s, political figures eager to get rid of the liberal consensus have gained power by denigrating it.” So, it seems that that the true history of American democracy is never finished. “It is the story of people who have honored the idea that a nation can be based not in land or religion or race or hierarchies but rather in the concept of human equality.”

This is the most depressing book I have ever read. And for that reason, everyone who believes in democracy or who is concerned with the current political climate should read it now before it is too late for our country. The author does a fantastic job in recapping the history of our country that has brought us to this point. It is clear that the current Trump administration has been laying the groundwork for their destruction of government as we know it and Ms. Richardson has foretold it in this book. As I was reading the chapters on the post Carter presidency years, Ms. Richardson basically opened my eyes to what the Republican party has been attempting do, and unfortunately has done, for decades - destroying democracy.

Essential reading any time but especially now. I love HCR’s daily letters and this book really solidifies a lot of the themes she writes about. I must read the rest of her books. She is a national treasure.