Millions of readers know Heather Cox Richardson from her Substack, Letters from an American, in which the Boston College historian analyzes news and political developments and offers historical background that might otherwise get lost. She hopes that these letters will serve as a record to future generations cataloging how news was received in the moment. Her newest book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, is a sort of long-form version of her newsletter: it traces the history of American conservatism and its evolution into the political movement we know today. The book also aims to reassure those who are concerned about the future of American democracy. Democracy Awakening offers a new and interesting framework for understanding American political ideology, but it ultimately sacrifices too much nuance to be persuasive.
Richardson’s thesis is succinct: “There have always been two Americas. One based in religious zeal, mythology, and inequality; and one grounded in rule of the people and the pursuit of equality.” These two Americas, she writes, were most pronounced in the antebellum period, during which the South embraced Christianity and an aristocratic, hierarchical mythology, and the North rejected hierarchy in favor of liberal democracy. Throughout the 1840s and ’50s, antebellum Southerners took advantage of a weak federal government and weaponized both Christianity and their immense wealth to craft a hierarchical society, and then attempted to export this vision to other parts of the United States. In contrast, an emerging group of Northern conservatives, among them Abraham Lincoln, argued that the federal government had an obligation to guarantee equality of opportunity for all Americans. It was their vision of conservatism that formed the core of the new Republican Party. Richardson argues that this firm belief in individual rights guided early Republicans’ actions during the American Civil War and after, when they abolished slavery and advanced the original principles of equality envisioned in the Declaration of Independence. With their military and ideological victory in the Civil War, Lincoln and Republicans’ vision of an active federal government responsible for protecting the individual became more accepted in American culture. Over the next seventy years, Republicans and Democrats fought over just how active the federal government should be as the United States industrialized and businesses and wealth grew exponentially.
The next flashpoint between the “two Americas” that Richardson identifies is in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Republicans like Herbert Hoover had by then turned against the idea of government intervention and toward free-market principles. By contrast, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal envisioned a federal government that actively provided safety nets to allow working-class Americans to advocate for themselves in the face of increasingly large corporations—and this belief, Richardson argues, positions Roosevelt as an inheritor of Lincoln’s philosophy. Though she does not provide many details to prove the claim, Richardson credits the New Deal with laying the foundation for American success in the Second World War as well as the country’s postwar prosperity, even if it did bar women and people of color from many of its benefits. The turbulent decades following the war, Richardson writes, were characterized by minorities calling for the promises made in Lincoln’s and FDR’s visions to be fulfilled for them as well.
But the societal upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s caused the traditional party allegiances to shift and a new kind of conservatism—championed by figures like Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan—to emerge. Goldwater rejected FDR’s vision of a strong and active federal government and instead called for a return to pre–New Deal ideas about the relationship between the federal government and the individual. He mythologized the “rugged American cowboy” as self-sufficient, not bound to or reliant upon the federal government, and that vision appealed to Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond who were reeling from the federal government’s support for civil-rights legislation. Thurmond led other Southern pro-segregation senators to defect from the Democrats to the Republicans, and Richard Nixon effectively united these actors into a new political coalition for his victorious 1968 White House run. Ronald Reagan expanded this coalition by courting Evangelicals to oppose government intervention. Reagan boiled his pitch down in his infamous quip, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.'” Richardson concludes that this generation of Republicans pushed conservatism to its logical extreme: prioritizing the individual over community and equality. Today, Republican politicians often reject calls for more checks on corporations or a stronger social-safety net and have become increasingly comfortable with illiberal means of retaining power.
The second section of Democracy Awakening is the most interesting. Richardson provides a historian’s viewpoint on the Trump presidency, which she argues should be understood as the first authoritarian experiment in the history of American democracy. In the aftermath of his shocking victory, Trump’s administration built support and suppressed critics using tactics mastered by illiberal leaders like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Viktor Orbán. Trump gaslit and lied to Americans about big and small things to avoid accountability, claiming that he twice won the popular vote and that his inauguration was the best-attended in history. He built a devoted following among voters and Republican politicians, and they rushed to his defense when critics challenged his policies or narratives. Ironically, the more Trump crafted his own narrative, the more likely his voters were to double down with him for fear of the embarrassment of being wrong or of losing political momentum.
Richardson argues that during his term, Trump was a master at spinning narratives and obfuscating the seriousness of any scandal by creating a new narrative within hours. For example, Trump managed to sidestep the ramifications of the Mueller investigation, which found that Trump had extensive connections with Russian oligarchs. Normally, this would have been a scandal big enough to doom any previous president, yet Trump spun the lack of charges brought against him as proof that he was exonerated. He was aided by his attorney general, William Barr, who defended Trump and withheld parts of the report while Trump muddied the waters for Americans trying to understand the report’s ramifications.
Trump dodged other scandals, too: equating white-nationalist protestors with anti-racist counter-protesters after the 2017 Charlottesville protests, the Ukraine-aid scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment, and the numerous mistakes during the COVID pandemic, to name just a few. Richardson argues that with each scandal, the Republican Party and its voters became increasingly tied to defending Trump as an individual and rejected traditional party norms such as respect for institutions or the impartiality of legal procedures. Their loyalty to him directly clashed with the political reality that he had lost the 2020 presidential election and led to the effort to overturn the results of a free and fair election on January 6, 2021. Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party was now complete.
In the final section of the book, Richardson discusses how to preserve American democratic institutions in the aftermath of a Trump presidency. She argues that the situation is far from hopeless but the time for inaction is over. To preserve democracy, we should look to the past for guidance and not lose sight of the incomplete but immense progress that has been made since 1776. American history, in her view, has been a long struggle towards realizing the promise of inalienable rights for all laid out by the Founding Fathers, who sought to create a “more perfect union.” While many of the founders held racist and hierarchical views, the documents and institutions that they created gave future generations the tools to argue for their rights. Progress rarely happened in a single instant but was instead a process that required action, patience, and lots of energy. While Trump’s rise and takeover of the Republican Party strengthened many illiberal actors, it also unified millions of Americans who were concerned about their democracy. With this book, Richardson aims to provide historical guidance to these Americans to keep the faith while democracy’s prospects appear uncertain.
Democracy Awakening raises an important question: In a moment of crisis, should we prioritize historical accuracy, or a narrative to rally around? Richardson discusses the 1619 Project, which roots the identity of the United States in its history of slavery, and Trump’s 1776 Commission, which called for “patriotic education” emphasizing what makes America “great.” She contends that both approaches can be destructive and miss what makes American history unique. While the 1619 Project shed light on previously silenced voices, its narrative at times lost sight of the revolutionary vision of the Founding Fathers to a liberal democratic system and the rule of law at its core rather than a monarchical system that upheld social or racial hierarchies, as was prominent in Europe. Richardson also lambasts the 1776 Commission for presenting a quasi-white-nationalist narrative of American history. In Democracy Awakening, Richardson hopes to provide a new path with her own narrative that recognizes the reactionary thinking that was built into America’s founding but also acknowledges the possibilities offered within its foundational documents and institutions.
But in creating her own historical narrative, Richardson relies on oversimplification. She sharply defines the two Americas, one built on equality for all and the other on hierarchy. But historical actors and their motivations are far more complex than this. For example, Richardson emphasizes the role that Christian theology played in Southern Democratic oligarchic society in propping up slavery as an institution. But she fails to mention that many of the earliest abolitionists in the United States were also Christians, some of whom advocated armed violence, such as John Brown. Similarly, Richardson portrays FDR in a positive light as a dynamic figure who revolutionized the way Americans understood the role of the federal government. But she omits the fact that many of the methods he used to enact his legislation were highly controversial, arguably illiberal. Famously, FDR proposed to expand the Supreme Court to gain more justices to rule in favor of his New Deal legislation. Had Trump proposed something similar during his term, one could only imagine the pushback he would have received. Richardson says she wants to provide a nuanced view of American history that emphasizes the uniqueness of its origins while also offering a critical take on actors and their stories, but she neglects counterexamples that would complicate her narrative. One is left wondering whether she, too, is trying to create a galvanizing story with clear heroes and villains to get Americans to vote Democrat in November.
Even so, Richardson’s concluding call to action is stirring: while democracy has been under siege in the United States before, it has been saved by average Americans. What followed times of turmoil was “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln stated in Gettysburg in 1863. The future of American democracy is again in question, and it is the job of its citizens to protect it.
Democracy Awakening
Notes on the State of America
Heather Cox Richardson
Penguin Books
$30 | 304 pp.
