| DEMOCRACY AWAKENING Notes on the State of America Heather Cox Richardson New York: Viking, October 2023 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13: 978-0-593-65296-1 | ||||
| ISBN-10: 0-593-65296-7 | 286pp. | HC | $30.00 | |
In this book, historian Heather Cox Richardson lays out the tangled web of changes that led us to this current crisis for our democracy and offers the measures by which we might reclaim the soul of America. The book is divided into three sections, each containing ten chapters. The first section covers roughly the past ninety years, explaining what led up to Trump's ascendancy in politics. The second enumerates Trump's multitude of shortcomings: his ties to Russia and organized crime; his disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law; his mismanagement of the pandemic and the national interests of the country he swore an oath to protect. The third section points to recovery.
The tale begins with successive attacks on the liberal consensus — the idea that all people deserve equal rights and a say in how their government runs, and that the government exists to solve problems: to "insure domestic Tranquility"; to "provide for the general Welfare"; to do all the things that the Preamble to the United States' Constitution promises.
Arguably, these attacks began at the grassroots level, with segregationists including the Ku Klux Klan determined to keep refighting what many of them called the "War of Northern Aggression" and keep "the coloreds" in their place. Business interests also played a part, opposing Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and demanding a business sector totally free of government regulation. But the campaign of this "Movement Conservatism" reached the national stage with men like Goldwater and Nixon, who took up the cudgels for what they perceived as a beleaguered white Christian America and resolved to defend it, which meant achieving political power by any means necessary.1
The Democrats' swing behind Black voting orphaned the southern white supremacists like [Strom] Thurmond who had organized as the Dixiecrats in 1948 and backed [Barry] Goldwater in 1964. After the Voting Rights Act passed, the most extreme among them organized their own political party behind Alabama governor George Wallace, who in 1963 had called for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." But others from the old solid South were open to switching parties. And when he ran for president in 1968, Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon recognized that he needed to win some of those disaffected Democrats in order to have a fighting chance. Embracing what later became known as the "southern strategy," Nixon traveled to South Carolina personally to ask Thurmond to make his switch to the Republican Party permanent. In exchange, he promised to stop using the federal government to enforce desegregation in the states, and to look the other way as southern whites established segregation academies, which were so successful that, in 1974, 3,500 academies in the South enrolled 750,000 white children. As white children left the public schools, funds followed them. The schools educating the remaining students, mostly Black but including a few white children, were left with very few resources. The southern strategy marked the switch of the parties' positions over the issue of race. Johnson knew what that meant: that the nation's move toward equality would provide a weapon for a certain kind of politician to rise to power. In a hotel in Tennessee after a day spent seeing racial slurs scrawled on signs and an evening of bourbon, Johnson explained the signs to his young aide Bill Moyers: "I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "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." The stage was set, with rhetoric and policy, for the rise of authoritarianism. – Pages 38-39 |
Goldwater's defeat at the polls and Nixon's removal from power after his Watergate conspiracy was exposed were notable defeats for Movement Conservatism. But Ronald Reagan renewed its campaign in 1980.
The short answer is: America is imperfect. America is a work in progress. America is caught in a struggle between truth and lies, always trying to live up to its ideals but never quite succeeding.
A history that looks back to a mythologized past as the country's perfect time is a key tool of authoritarians. It allows them to characterize anyone who opposes them as an enemy of the country's great destiny. – Page 251 |
The rhetoric of Trump and his allies demonstrates this vividly. It is all about how they will restore America, make it great again, defeat the enemies who are out to destroy it, and save the forgotten people who are the true patriots, now beleaguered by hordes of undeserving inferiors.
None of this is true, and all of it is straight out of the fascist playbook. Trump's goal is purely selfish: he means to return to power and thereby escape accountability for past crimes. If he does return to power, he will behave exactly as he did before. But this time there will be few to restrain him.
If he does regain power, chances are that the America we know and love will be gone.
In 1974, most Americans thought they had put Nixon and his crimes behind them, but six years after Nixon resigned, Ronald Reagan would travel the road to the White House that Goldwater and Nixon had paved. This would include sabotaging the previous administration's efforts at diplomacy, in this case delaying the release of fifty-two American diplomats and private citizens being held hostage in Iran. He would also use Nixon's rhetorical strategy to continue the process of rolling back the liberal consensus and re-creating a nation based on the idea that some people are better than others. – Page 49 |
Section 3 begins with a challenge. It asks us to define the nature of America, this nation that's been called exceptional, the home of the brave and land of the free, a shining city on a hill; a golden door marked by a beacon to liberty and prosperity for the downtrodden peoples of the world. It contrasts two reports offering starkly different visions of America: The 1619 Project, organized by Nikole Hannah-Jones for The New York Times Magazine, and the 1776 Commission organized by Trump for Trump. The former emphasized the mercantile origins of the country in chattel slavery and unbridled commercialism; the latter, in response, presented a picture of a nation that instantly arose free and just upon the Founders' signing of the Declaration of Independence, like Athena springing from the brow of Zeus.
Understanding the true nature of America requires navigating between these two extremes. The remainder of Section Three gets us there by conducting a short course in United States history and civics: why and how the Thirteen Colonies threw off Britain's yoke; how the Articles of Confederation failed, and how the Constitution and its various Amendments (mostly) corrected those failures over time. It is the story of a continuing back-and-forth battle between two visions of government: The Founders' vision of a government that holds all people to be of equal worth and entitled to have a say in how they are governed; and the Movement Conservative vision of a government that holds one group of people to be superior, and thus entitled to rule the masses of their inferiors without restraint.
World history shows with crystal clarity where the latter vision of government leads: to power and wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of an elite minority; to minimal regulation of businesses; to inadequate education, employment, health care, and opportunity for redress of grievances to the majority of the population; and ultimately to revolution. This latter vision is the path Trump and his backers want America to follow. They have a chance of getting there. They must not be allowed to get there.
Heather Cox Richardson gives us a clear and comprehensive narrative that accurately explains the crisis our democracy faces. It is well organized, well written, and reads quickly. I noticed only one significant omission: in describing the 6 January insurrection, she does not mention the 147 members of Congress who voted against certifying President Biden's election. I saw no grammatical errors and only a few cases of clumsy phrasing. The book has extensive endnotes and an excellent index. I give it top marks and rate it a must-read and a keeper.
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