Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“The idea of a ‘conservative’ stance in politics emerged during the French Revolution, when Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke recoiled from what was happening on the other side of the English Channel. As revolutionaries in France abolished the traditional hierarchies of government and the church, Burke took a stand against radical change driven by people trying to make the government enforce a specific ideology.”

Richardson explains the origin of the word “conservative,” which is often used as a synonym for “Republican” in the 21st-century United States. Her definition establishes conservatism as a method of governmental change supported by slow changes made after observing real life. This type of conservatism was opposed to ideologies taking precedence over observable reality. Richardson details the original definition of conservative to highlight how this word changed after entering US politics: first, how both abolitionists and anti-abolitionists believed they were espousing conservative values, and then how the movement became conflated with the ideologically driven Movement Conservatism that animated the Republican Party from the 1950s onward.

“In the first years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision recognizing racial segregation as unconstitutional, that faith in American equality was mostly aspirational. But Black Americans and people of color who had fought for the nation all over the world during World War II were not content with promises; they demanded actual equality.”

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court unanimously declared that segregation of public schools violated the 14th Amendment. This ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, which had established segregation under the framework of “separate but equal” 60 years prior. Brown v. Board declared that separate facilities were not provided equal resources, therefore were not legal. This example supports one of Richardson’s main points, which is that Black Americans, other people of color, and women often lead the way when it comes to How to Defend American Democracy.

“The next year, in 1871, unreconstructed white southerners began to argue that they objected to Black rights not on racial grounds—which was now unconstitutional and ran the risk of jail time from a Department of Justice prosecution—but rather on economic grounds. They did not want Black men voting, they said, because formerly enslaved people were poor and were voting for leaders who promised to build things like roads and hospitals. Those public investments could be paid for only with tax levies, and the only people in the South with property after the war were white.”

Richardson describes how rhetoric and scapegoating is used to disenfranchise certain demographics of their democratic rights. Former enslavers in the South found alternate ways to disenfranchise Black voters by using economic arguments rather than racial ones: This trend crops back up in The Throughline of Authoritarian Sentiment in US History later in Part 1, as Nixon and Reagan recycle these economic arguments to hierarchize Americans into “good” and “bad” categories.

“The southern strategy marked the switch of the parties’ position over the issue of race. Johnson knew that that meant: that the nation’s move toward equality would provide a weapon for a certain kind of politician to rise to power.”

In the Civil War era, pro-abolition, pro-civil rights voters were often Republicans, while pro-enslavement voters were often Democrats. As more Democrats began to support civil rights in the 1950s, Nixon’s “southern strategy” involved courting pro-segregation Southern Democrats, or “Dixiecrats,” into his Republican Party, shoring up his voting base. After the previous centuries of conflation between economic and racial issues, and the expanding Democratic interest in the liberal consensus through programs like the New Deal, Richardson identifies this as the apex of the “switch” between party ideologies.

“But while Nixon paid the price for his attempt to cheat in an election, his division of the world into good and evil began to take hold, perverting American politics by convincing his loyalists that putting their people in office was imperative, no matter what it took.”

Richardson identifies one of the most important features of the throughline of authoritarian sentiment in US history: the hierarchization of people into categories. This is important because it has subtly animated United States history since the country’s inception, when the Founders enslaved people. This hierarchization became a purposeful political strategy, wrought with rhetoric, during the Nixon administration. It trends toward authoritarianism because this thinking convinces people that undermining democracy might be justified if their own leaders stay in power.

“As it gathered those angry at the modern world, Reagan’s campaign invited voters to remember a time before Black and Brown voices and women began to claim equal rights. His campaign passed out buttons and posters urging voters to ‘make America great again.’”

Richardson describes how the Reagan administration appealed to The Use of False History to Manipulate Ideology. Reagan used “Black and Brown voices and women” as scapegoats for the country’s struggles, creating a false history in which these marginalized folks were to blame for Americans’ apparent fall from greatness. This quotation also emphasizes the throughline of authoritarianism in US history, as Donald Trump would resurrect the same slogan in 2016.

“Increasingly, Republican politicians seemed to be operating on the old hierarchical idea that some people were better than others and should direct the economy, society, and politics, and they maintained that control by advancing a false narrative for their supporters that case their opponents as enemies of the country. In 2004, having manufactured information meant to justify the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was deeply entrenched in that ideology, no matter what the facts showed.”

Richardson uses many historical facts and anecdotes to describe the thoroughness with which the Republican Party integrated false history with their political machinations to influence the thoughts of their supporters even before Trump’s presidency. Here, she alludes to how former President George W. Bush fabricated a lie about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, though multiple international intelligence agencies like MI6 and the CIA knew this was false (Norton-Taylor, Richard. “MI6 and CIA were told before invasion that Iraq had no active WMD.” The Guardian, 2013).

“Through the process of what is called gerrymandering, after Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it), political parties could gain control of extra seats in a state by drawing districts to either ‘pack’ or ‘crack’ their opponents. Packing means stuffing the opposition party’s voters into districts so their votes are not distributed more widely; cracking means dividing opponents’ voters into multiple districts so there are too few of them in any district to have a chance of winning.”

Richardson defines and describes the purpose of several strategies used to disenfranchise certain demographics of people from voting. Corrupting and undermining elections is one of the key hallmarks of rising authoritarianism. Richardson discusses how governments do not necessarily forcefully stop certain demographics from voting—as Southern states did with Black Codes and voter intimidation in the Jim Crow era—but instead develop methods of enshrining voter disenfranchisement into the political structure. These methods ensure that their party will stay in power, even if they do not have popular support.

“Trump married Republican politics to authoritarianism. Speaking simply and with words that packed an emotional punch, he offered those left behind by the Republican revolution a way to recover a mythological lost world in which they called the shots. And he promised that he, and he alone, could lead the way.”

Richardson describes how the Trump presidency turned rising trends toward authoritarianism in the Republican Party from Nixon onward into a full “authoritarian experiment” using rhetoric and false history. This shows the power of rhetoric, or the use of language, in influencing peoples’ beliefs.

“On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd asked Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, ‘What was the motive to have this ridiculous litigation of crowd size?’ She answered, ‘Your job is not to call things ridiculous that are said by our press secretary and our president. That’s not your job.’ When Todd pressed her to answer, she finally said, ‘I’ll answer it this way: Think about what you just said to your viewers. That’s why we feel compelled to go out and clear the air and put alternative facts out there.’”

Richardson introduces how the Trump administration used what they called “alternative facts” to enact a manipulation strategy called “gaslighting.” Gaslighting is when an abuser uses rhetoric to make a victim question their conception of reality and create self-doubt. While the job of journalists is to report on and help viewers understand current events and leadership decisions, Conway insisted that such behavior is “not your job” and that people should accept her party’s “alternative facts.”

“There was a straight line from the anti-New Deal violence of the 1930s to the street brawlers at Charlottesville. Since the 1950s, opponents of the liberal consensus had urged supporters to think of themselves as heroic, individualistic cowboys who had not only the right but also the duty to protect their families from the alleged socialism of the government.”

Richardson uses this sentence to show how the rise of authoritarian sentiment in America in the 2010s and 2020s is related to legacies of violence, false history, and authoritarianism in American history. She describes how the symbol of the cowboy was used to propagandize false history and convince people of the “alleged” socialism, anarchy, or communism of their political opponents.

“No longer a candidate, Trump was now president of the United States, and he was using the power of the government to force a foreign government to take part in a campaign to hurt his political enemies. Like the autocrats he admired, Trump was not simply breaking a law: he was rejecting the idea that ordinary people had a right to govern themselves. By ignoring the rule of law, he was trying to establish that powerful men can—and should—stack the deck to hold on to power.”

One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is undermining free and fair elections. In a democracy, people theoretically have an equal say in the leadership of their government and can hold officials accountable for their actions by not re-electing them. Resisting this process and attempting to stay in power regardless is therefore undemocratic. Richardson explains how Trump “rejected” these democratic principles by attempting to get foreign governments like Russia in 2016 and Ukraine in 2020 to interfere in the election.

“Replacing career professionals with family members and friends eroded one of the key pillars of democratic government: a bureaucracy loyal not to a leader but to the state itself. Trump also cut swaths through nonpartisan career officials.”

One of the Founders’ central concerns was avoiding the same concentration of power in a single executive individual that they had escaped in the Revolution. They created election terms, a system of checks and balances, branches of government, and nonpartisan positions to avoid this fate. Beginning in the Nixon administration and Vietnam War era, Republicans began to conflate loyalty to the country with loyalty to a single president. Trump advanced that agenda by firing non-partisan officials and critics, instead surrounding himself with people who were personally related or indebted to him. This shored up power within a single individual, as the Founders feared.

“That day was a turning point. The Black Lives Matter movement was a popular protest against rising authoritarianism, and two thirds of adult Americans supported it. But while Republican lawmakers remained silent, the events of June 1 made former political leaders (including all four living presidents), more than 1,250 former members of the Department of Justice, Democratic lawmakers, and, crucially, military leaders take a stand against Trump.”

Richardson describes how Trump ordered used military and police force against American citizens in 2020. He forcibly cleared Black Lives Matter protestors from Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, using flash bang explosives, rubber bullets, and tear gas, quashing dissent—which is another authoritarian strategy. Richardson comments on which officials stayed silent about these authoritarian actions and which spoke out.

“In 2019, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, attempted to use the Framers’ words to justify this radical reworking of the nation’s founding principles. He told an audience that by ‘self-government,’ the Framers did not mean the ability of people to vote for representatives of their choice. Rather, he said, they meant individual morality: the ability to govern oneself. And because people are inherently wicked, that self-government requires the authority of a religion: Christianity.”

Richardson describes how Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, used rhetoric based in false history to manipulate ideology. Despite clear evidence to the contrary in historical documents and commentaries that Richardson discusses, Barr used his rhetoric to craft an ahistorical reading of the Founders—a name for the group of men who were prominent in the Revolutionary War and framing of the Constitution. This false history claims that they did not mean “self-government” as a literal, human right, but as a metaphorical, moral trait people should have. Richardson points out the fallacies in this statement and goes on to describe the Founders’ negative opinion on integrating religious ideology with government.

“The violent attack on the United States government that followed brought to life the mythological history that the Republicans had come to celebrate, tying Trump’s authoritarianism to the Republicans’ embrace of America’s unequal past. Trading ‘1776’ slogans, the Trump Republicans who attacked the Capitol believed they were writing a new history of the United States, one that finally embraced the hierarchical version of American history claimed by the Confederates before them. After decades of feeding hungry voters ideas and images straight out of the nation’s white supremacist past, Republican politicians and pundits had created a mob determined to end American democracy.”

Using the example of the January 6 Capitol riots, Richardson describes how false history can manipulate ideology to the point of violent extremism. She identifies peoples’ commitment to propagate such a worldview with the throughline of authoritarian sentiment in US history, and a significant threat to democracy. With this example, she shows just how powerful decades of extreme rhetoric can be.

“Far from retreating, Trump had moved to the stage that scholars of authoritarianism call a ‘Big Lie,’ a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. This is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.

In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one […] ‘Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.’”

Richardson points out the parallelism between Trump’s rhetoric and the rhetoric of one of the most infamous 20th-century fascist authoritarians, Adolf Hitler. Throughout Part 2, Richardson details the falsities perpetuated by Trump and his White House staff, which build up to the “Big Lie” in which Trump insisted that he won the 2020 US presidential election over Joe Biden. Richardson points out that using “giant lies” as a rhetorical and ideological strategy was initially theorized by Hitler. In Mein Kampf, Hitler’s theorization of the political uses of big lies makes it clear that they are a purposeful manipulation strategy rather than an earnest misunderstanding.

“Indeed, it was by removing those people from their definition of the body politic that the Founders were able to imagine political equality. If all but a small number of white men were excluded from participating in government, then it wasn’t much of a stretch to see ‘all men’ as having similar interests and as being able to work together to govern themselves. Equality, then, depended on inequality. So was the whole concept of American democracy a sham from the start?”

While Richardson devotes much of Part 3 to discussing how to defend the American democratic principles theorized by the Founders—and who has historically defended it in the past—she does not glamorize the Founders or gloss over the racial injustices they believed in and perpetuated. She explains how the Founders believed in the racial and gender hierarchies of their time, and their system of democracy depended on the perpetuation of these systems at its outset.

“‘What do We mean by the Revolution?’ Adams mused. ‘The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, over fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.’”

As a professional historian, Richardson is well-versed in primary historical documents and often includes excerpts from the documents that illuminate her arguments. Here, she quotes John Adams, who argues that the real “wars” that led to freedom aren’t fought physically but are fought in people’s minds by changing the way they think. Richardson describes how people were used to living under Britain’s rule and the taxation scheme the Founders revolted against. The Founders had to use rhetoric to convince people that rebelling from Britain was in their interest.

“In 1774, the year after her enslavers relinquished their claim on her, Boston poet Phillis Wheatley wrote to Mohegan cleric Samson Occom about the hypocrisy of leaders who rallied for freedom while practicing enslavement. ‘In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance,’ she wrote, adding, ‘I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us.’”

From the moment the Founders met at the first Continental Congress, people whom the Founders considered less than equal saw the hypocrisy in their rally for freedom while enslaving people and dispossessing Indigenous Americans of their land. Richardson describes Phillis Wheatley’s—a Black woman—insistence to Samson Occom—a Mohegan man—that freedom and equality should and would be a fundamental human right rather than a right reserved for white men. This example contributes to Richardson’s argument that the real people keeping the dream of democracy alive were women and people of color.

“In their eyes, anyone questioning this definition of democracy was trying to destroy the country by starting a race war. White men must stick together, or Black Americans would take over their region and, once freed from oversight, would steal white men’s property and rape white women and children (the mirror of what enslavers themselves were doing to Black people). Leaders outlawed possession of books and pamphlets that questioned the slave system—those that urged solidarity among poor white men as well as those challenging enslavement—and they provoked violence against those they called agitators.”

Richardson describes how enslavers conceptualized the abolition movement. This quotation shows how people are manipulated using fear tactics to preserve racist hierarchies and create false narratives about peoples’ characteristics or intentions to justify unjust social systems like enslavement. Pro-enslavement leaders used the authoritarian tactic of outlawing educational media like books and pamphlets that spoke out against their worldview. Hitler also used this tactic, as did conservative lawmakers in the United States in the 2010s and 2020s.

“In November of that year, Lincoln spoke at the dedication of a national cemetery for the soldiers killed in the July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. He urged Americans to uphold their history. Dating the establishment of the country from the Declaration of Independence, which protected equality, rather than from the Constitution, which protected property, he warned them that the principles the Founders had declared self-evident were now at risk.”

Lincoln also appealed to American history to create certain ideological sentiments, but Richardson explains how his method was based in observable history, like the words used in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln used this appeal to the principles of the Declaration as a method of defending democracy and presenting people with a viable history of their country that supported emancipation.

“Visibly disproving white supremacists’ racist and sexist characterizations of them, people who were unable to vote claimed their place in American society by publicly celebrating the characteristics of the American dream. But they never celebrated the individualism white politicians preached. Instead, they repeatedly held up the nation’s promise of equality to demonstrate its failings.”

Richardson juxtaposes how women and people of color participate in democracy with how white politicians participate in democracy. Paternalistic politicians used images like the cowboy, which valorized a lone, justice-oriented, usually white man operating outside the law to protect his family, relying on a false history to justify his cause. People who never had the right to vote, like women and people of color, needed to build communities and coalitions to organize their activism and amplify their voices. By pointing out the undemocratic aspects of American society, these groups of people were in fact holding up democratic principles, using their criticism of the country to demand that it fulfill its promise.