"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
This quote by President Johnson during the Civil Rights era could just as well apply to the era of slavery in how it encapsulates the way in which wealthy and powerful white men manipulated poor white men into supporting and furthering their agenda by tapping into the very human sentiment that it is better to be above someone—anyone—rather than to be at the lowest rung of society. Even though indentured servants had more in common with Black slaves and free Blacks than they did with rich whites, they threw their lot in with the plantation owners. Even though poor whites in rural America had more in common with Blacks in urban areas in the mid-20th century, they threw their lot in with rich whites.
This polarization of voters led to a logical next step: keeping the government in safe hands meant winning elections, and to win elections it might be necessary to cheat.
Richardson uses simple prose and indisputable facts to make the case that the Republicans are craven and willing to stoop to any lawless means necessary to win elections. They may have started by offering up resistance to the liberal consensus from what may generously be considered as the position of "loyal opposition," but the fact that this did not seem to be yielding what they wanted meant that they had to try manuevers that skirted legality or, eventually, ignored it completely.
But Trump was a brilliant salesman who grasped what thirty-five years of Republican rhetoric and voting distortion had made the party's base far more accurately than the politicians in the Republican establishment who had created those voters.
Trump is easy to discount in that, among other things, he is not conventionally intelligent, he is not educated, he is not articulate, he is a failure of a businessman, he is emotionally immature and volatile, and he is petty, selfish, short-sighted, and prone to gaffes both minor and major. So how did this man manage to win the Republican nomination and then the actual presidency twice? Richardson's analysis is that Trump understood what the establishment Republicans did not about the American people—that capitalism had wreaked havoc on average American lives, and that finding someone to blame for this low standard of living and confusing new global world was a surefire way to elevate oneself to power.
Gaslighting forces subordinates to agree that the person in charge gets to determine what reality is.
Richardson provides the origins and the definition of the term "gaslighting" in order to explain how Trump and the Republicans were able to convince the American people that established facts were wrong, that what they saw and heard weren't actually what they saw and heard, that certain known truths had never been true and that what they wanted to be true was or could be true if they just listened to Trump, and that anything anyone they didn't like told them was wrong or part of a conspiracy. These politicians created a situation which reality was subverted and distorted—a situation intended to elevate themselves to office.
"This is not about this president. It's not about anything he's been accused of doing," McConnell told his colleagues. "It has always been about November 3, 2020. It's about flipping the Senate."
Once again, this quote demonstrates that Richardson does not have to go on a screed against the Republicans to make her point—she simply needs to quote them. Here Mitch McConnell openly admits that he does not care whether Trump is guilty of the things he's accused of, and in fact, it's likely that McConnell knew he was guilty, as most people did. The only thing that matters to Republicans is that they hold on to the Senate in 2020. It does not matter that the head of their party behaves in execrable, illegal ways, or that they're elevating party politics over the health of the nation.
It was reality TV: false, scripted, and effective.
One of the reasons why Trump is so successful is that he knows how to make politics like a reality television show. Most people don't want to, or cannot, spend a lot of time researching or reading or thinking deeply about political and economic and social matters; it is easier to have things simple and flashy and dramatic because it feels more like entertainment. This sort of politics is all spectacle, and it is a lot more fun and digestible than more traditional ways of approaching news, elections, and governance. Unfortunately, what this usually results in is a form of politics and governance that is diminished in quality at the very best and absolutely corrupt at the very worst.
Equality, then, depended on inequality.
This is a great paradox of the Founding—that while the Founding Fathers articulated that all men were created equal and they had certain unalienable rights of life, liberty, and property that they were justified in protecting from a tyrannical government, they also supported the right of some people to own other people. Richardson does not shy away from this paradox or try to mitigate its problematic nature; rather, she accounts for the tremendous accomplishment for democracy that the Declaration and the Constitution represented, but then says that the efforts of people, such as Black and Brown people, women, and LGBTQ+ people, extended democracy and gave it its real, full power.
...they repeatedly held up the nation's promise of equality to demonstrate its failings.
Those aforementioned people—people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people—were the ones who really showed what democracy meant. They were not interested in sugarcoating, obfuscating, or rewriting history. They wanted to show the unvarnished truth of history with all of its oppression and subjugation and cruelty and unfairness in order to hold the nation to account and ask it to be better.
"The gulf between the employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor... Corporations, which should be the carefully constrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."
In 1888, President Grover Cleveland, who'd been defeated for reelection by Benjamin Harrison (even though Cleveland won the popular vote), uttered this quote. What is so striking about what he identifies–the gulf between rich and poor and the unchecked power of corporations, which have sway over politics and the people—sounds very much like the situation today. Some historians have said the 2020s feel like a new Gilded Age because that gap between the rich and the poor is so excessive and that government and business are inappropriately enmeshed (at the time of writing Richardson did not know of the world's richest man, Elon Musk, and his unconstitutional role in the Trump administration, but this would have been excellent fodder for her comparison).
"Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history... The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation... We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth."
This is the last line of Richardson's afterword to the text, written just on the eve of the 2024 election. She quotes Abraham Lincoln's State of the Union address in December of 1862, which was delivered during the Civil War when it was far from clear the North would win and the Union be preserved. His powerful words called for the citizens to understand that what happened in this war would shape not just the present moment but every subsequent moment, that this democracy that came into being not much earlier than the time of the address was in real danger of being lost in a most dishonorable way. This is where we are now, Richardson implies—on the precipice of losing our precious democracy and dooming future generations.
