Summary
Foreword
Richardson begins by stating that America is at a crossroads, and it is something that has crept up on most of us. We assume democracies fall at gunpoint, not at the ballot box, but this is untrue. Historians have studied how and why this happened in Europe, concluding the main strategies are authoritarians’ use of language and false history.
It was possible that America could have slid into a similar fate in the 1930s, but it led the defense against democracy around the world in the 1940s, seemingly committed to the idea that all men are indeed created equal. Many thought America would never fall to fascism, but this is simply wrong. There have always been those who thought some were better than others, and they have deep roots in this country’s history. And in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, it was clear that there was a group of “previously apathetic citizens [who] turned into a movement based in heroic personal identity” (xx).
Richardson states that her goal in this book is to explain how a “small group of people have tried to make us believe that our fundamental principles aren’t true” and how “democracy has persisted throughout our history despite the many attempts to undermine it” (xxi). Richardson emphatically disputes the claims that democracy is obsolete, bad for society, or even dead.
Part 1: Undermining Democracy
Chapter 1: American Conservatism
In this chapter Richardson locates the beginning of the crisis in the 1930s when Republicans tried to bring together two disaffected wings of the Democratic Party to help oppose the New Deal. They put forth the idea that answering to the needs of the American people was dangerous and radical, but this was simply a political position, not a summation of conservatism.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal used the government to try and help regular Americans during the Great Depression. Regulations on the stock market and banks, protections for workers and farmers, opportunities provided for the unemployed, and taxes on the wealthy were the main provisions of the program. Racist Southern Democrats hated that Black people were often the beneficiaries of these things, and regular Republicans hated the demise of their party’s power. The two groups allied after Roosevelt was reelected, organizing to oppose the New Deal by claiming it was against traditional values of hard work, private property, a balanced budget, and local control of politics. This was the Conservative Manifesto, and it became what today’s conservatives claim as their history and platform.
But this is not the historical meaning of conservatism in America. Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke said it was literally to conserve traditional structures like the church, property, the family, and social hierarchy. Government should take small steps, be a positive force in society, and promote stability. This did not quite work in America, though, which was young and did not have much to conserve. Enslavers and Democrats began using the term “radical” to describe those who refused to follow the Fugitive Slave Law and who protested laws that tried to expand slavery. The new Republicans, though, used the word “conservative” to explain their support of the cause of equality, which stuck. They said they were fighting against slavery on original principles in the vein of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.
The party of Lincoln had put into practice their “conservative position that the nation must, at long last, embrace the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal and must have equal access to resources to enable them to work hard and rise” (10). This was the same in the New Deal, so the businessmen and racists coalescing against them were the true radicals.
Chapter 2: The Liberal Consensus
The New Deal did not end the Depression, and some Americans remained wary of “socialism,” but WWII soon took precedence, pitting democracy against fascism. In Germany and Italy, leaders like Hitler and Mussolini wanted to claim the past with the ideology of the future and “welding pure men into a military and social machine that moved all as one, while pure women supported society as mothers” (12). While some Americans embraced this before Pearl Harbor, it collapsed when the country entered the war.
Americans cheered on their fellow individual citizens for their sacrifices and tenacity and effort, and by the time the war ended, there almost seemed to be a consensus that this was the best way to view society–ordinary Americans were its backbone. Furthermore, business regulation, a basic social safety net, and investment in infrastructure were widely popular among Republicans and Democrats.
It was clear after WWII, though, that not all Americans were treated equally. Racism and white supremacy endured, and it was hard for Truman to push through civil rights legislation because of the Southern Democrats. Eisenhower had more success, especially with Earl Warren as his Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas desegregated public schools. This became an era of “Modern Republicanism,” when the view was that if there is a job to be done to meet the needs of the people and no one else can do it, it’s the government’s job.
Chapter 3: Bringing the Declaration of Independence to Life
It was difficult to get white lawmakers to protect the civil rights of Black people in the late 1940s, especially when white juries could acquit those who committed crimes against Black people at the local level. President Truman deceived to convene the President’s Committee on Civil Rights to figure out how to use the federal government to protect civil rights of racial and religious minorities. Their recommendations consisted of federal laws to address police brutality, end lynching, protect voting, and promote equal rights by ending segregation. Truman would not be able to get Congress to pass anything, so he worked around it to desegregate the military and end discrimination in civil service and defense contract jobs. The DNC approved a platform in favor of civil rights, and Truman was reelected.
But Truman and the Democrats couldn’t overcome their Southern wing, so it was left to Republican Eisenhower to figure it out when he came into office. He did so by appointing Warren to the Supreme Court. Lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley argued that segregation in public schools violated the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause, which, if the argument succeeded, would allow the federal government to rein in white juries at the state level.
The Brown case struck down school segregation, but white Southerners responded by setting up what became known as “segregation academies”—basically private schools for white kids only. The civil rights movement knew what was going on and began pushing more vociferously for civil rights in public transportation and integration in schools. The tide was turning, and eventually the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. This meant that the federal government going forward was protecting citizens’ rights “from states that refused to recognize the American principle that all people are created equal and have a right to a say in their government” (24).
Chapter 4: Race and Taxes
The liberal consensus was strong from 1946-1964, its opponents mocked as a cartoon character of Foghorn Leghorn, a Looney Tunes rooster with a Southern accent. However, the Brown case tied the federal government to civil rights, and opponents began constructing a different history.
They argued that when FDR took office, he took money from hardworking white Americans and gave it to undeserving Blacks. This was a redistribution of wealth and was thus socialism. It was also a resurrection of a false history of the nation put forth by the Lost Cause Southerners following the Civil War, which used the term “socialism” improperly. Americans hadn’t ever been that interested in socialism proper, but during Reconstruction, whites in the South claimed that Black voting was tied to a redistribution of wealth and it was essentially socialism. Many other Americans saw poor voters, and new immigrants in the late 19th century, as a danger to their wealth and also attacked them as socialist. Black voting declined and eventually disappeared.
In the 1870s, the cowboy was a popular symbol of freedom and masculinity and whiteness (falsely so, since ⅓ of cowboys were men of color). It was revived in the 1950s and 1960s as propaganda to stand against the liberal consensus, as nothing else could seem to dent it.
William F. Buckley, Jr. was an oilman’s son who was frustrated with the liberal leaders voters kept choosing, so he took a stand against Enlightenment principles, decrying American universities’ fact-based, secular arguments and culture and its lack of enforcement of Christianity and individualist ideology. He wanted to gather people together to vote against the orthodoxy of the liberal consensus and create a new orthodoxy of religion and free markets. He and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., wrote a book that labeled liberals as Communists, and explained how “conservatives” wanted the country back like it was in the 1920s, with businessmen making decisions free of regulation, traditional family structures and hierarchies in place, religion paramount, etc. This was a remaking of the shared belief system in the country and it was on the basis of ideology. It was against true conservatism and was actually radical. It soon got the name “Movement Conservatism” (31), but Americans weren’t that interested yet.
The symbol of the cowboy, then, came back in television and on the right. Barry Goldwater ran for the Republican ticket in 1964 against Johnson using pseudo-cowboy bona fides, and his book The Conscience of a Conservative was essentially a manifesto against the liberal consensus. It defended states’ rights against federal power, denied the equal protection clause when it came to civil rights, and denied the commerce clause’s ability to regulate business. This was similar to 1937 but now there was the power of racism to back it all up.
Chapter 5: Nixon and the Southern Strategy
Kennedy didn’t initially mention racial justice at home when he was elected, but eventually he was pushed to put the weight of the federal government behind civil rights. When Johnson came into office, he pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and advocated strongly for the federal government’s job as challenging the dangerous white supremacists of the South. He was reelected in a landslide, ably beating Goldwater.
Blacks marched and demanded voting protections, which they got with the 1965 Voting Rights act. The racist Southern Democrats were finally abandoned, many of them forming their own third party. Others in the South, though, decided they might switch parties, and Richard Nixon embraced a “southern strategy” to win them over to the Republicans. This was successful and marked the official switch of the parties’ policies on race. Johnson told an aide privately that “the nation’s move toward equality would provide a weapon for a sort of politician to rise to power” (39)—the kind who could convince even the lowest white man that he was better than people of color, and thus get him to give him money and support even when it didn’t really serve him to do so.
Analysis
Heather Cox Richardson is a well-regarded American historian whose specialty is the history of the Republican Party. Since Trump’s election, she has also written a popular daily Substack in which she connects current events to their historical precedents. She felt it was only natural, given the amount of questions she was receiving, to write a book about American democracy. It is structured in a rather unorthodox way, the first part being an overview of the “liberal consensus” of the New Deal that derived from the Declaration of Independence and then looking at the ways Republicans chipped away at that consensus in the years leading up to Trump; the second part covering Trump’s rise to power, his first term, and his attempts to overthrow the election and democracy itself; and the third part going back to the Founding and showing how people of color and women and other marginalized Americans authentically fought for, upheld, and critiqued democracy. When asked about the structure in an interview, Richardson explains that people have said it’s odd or atypical, but for her, “it honestly never occurred to me to do it any other way, because the book is how we got here, where here is, and how to get out. So how we got here is the construction of a language and a false history to destroy democracy. In the book, I started quite deliberately by saying that the people who did that were not the conservatives that they claimed to be, but were dangerous radicals. Then I followed that through the different stages of authoritarianism and how you break down the liberal consensus. Once you’ve got the rise of all of the pieces of authoritarianism, then the Trump years are about the construction of an authoritarian government.”
The first section of the text is particularly important because it identifies and expatiates upon the liberal consensus, which Richardson succinctly explains in an interview: “The liberal consensus is a mindset — an ideology, if you will — that Americans built in the period from 1933 until 1981. It is the idea that the government has a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. And that was widely shared across all political parties in America after World War II, because the liberal consensus had helped America get out of the Depression and had won World War II against fascism. In the aftermath of World War II, it began to take on the idea of civil rights, and that’s the story of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.”
This is widely popular except with a small group of people, mostly Republicans, who were antipathetic to certain elements. They did not want the government regulating business because it cut down on profit; they did not want to pay taxes to support social welfare programs; and they did not want to embrace multiculturalism and implement/enforce civil rights. The consensus held throughout the 20th century, but Nixon and Reagan represented important moments in the chipping away of that consensus, as did the rise of Christian nationalism, the cozying up to eastern European oligarchs, the focus on capitalism rather than democracy, the formation of the Tea Party in the Obama years, the wars in the Middle East, and more.
Some of the most effective strategies Republicans employed in order to attain power were the rewriting of history and the use of language. White supremacists had been using the word “socialism” since the 1870s Reconstruction period, in which they “seized on a word that had been a general term for utopian communities and gave it a political definition that was specific to the United States” (26). Then in the 1950s, the American fear of socialism “resurrected a false history of the nation, written by white supremacists after the Civil War” (26). In the 1930s Republicans had claimed they were “conservative,” even though that word didn’t really align with what being conservative in governance actually meant.
By the end of the 20th century, Republicans were gaining power and “maintained… control by advancing a false narrative for their supporters that cast their opponents as enemies of the country” (72). Richardson explained in an interview that “we have on the right, a political party that is trying to argue that there was a perfect past. Not that there was a past of struggle, in which minorities were the bad guys, which is really what Dunning is arguing. But, that the past was perfect and we need to get back to that… And on the occasions when there might have been something unpleasant happening--and that's not a quote, but that's certainly the feeling one gets from it--that was only because there were a few bad apples. And most Americans were really just ducky and they didn't want to cause any trouble for minorities… And the creation of a perfect past that rejects the idea of any struggle.” This “perfect past” will be central to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign strategy, which Richardson details in the next section of the book.
