“Look at me! I’m reading the Economist! Did you know Indonesia is ‘at a crossroads’?”
Ever since Homer Simpson developed a split-second interest in Indonesia in 2004, the “crossroads” conceit seems to have been banished from jet-set magazines. Just as well. The image, which suggests that a nation’s history is as legible and linear as a road map, has long lacked explanatory power. And yet the crossroads is back — and it’s where America, of all places, finds itself in Heather Cox Richardson’s “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.” Hey, Homer: “America is at a crossroads.”
Richardson is a professor of 19th-century history at Boston College and the author of five highly regarded academic books, many of them about the evolution of Republican ideology. She is also the writer of Substack’s most successful — by far — newsletter: By one estimate, Richardson’s daily newsletter, “Letters From an American,” rakes in $5 million per year. It could even be called cult-y, if cults had several million adherents who yearned for literate, principled and clearheaded analysis of the day’s news.
Advertisement
If anyone can be trusted with the crossroads cliché, then, it’s Richardson. And in “Democracy Awakening,” “the crossroads” serves less as a philosophical crux than as a crime in a detective novel, its discovery kicking off Richardson’s investigation. Her focus is the current anxious era, when, during a presidential campaign with a familiar cast of characters, we’re borne back ceaselessly into the past, assessing the disturbing period in American history that started with the presidential election on Nov. 8, 2016, and crescendoed with the violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. With any luck, we’re in the denouement now, when mysteries are cleared up — and arrests made. If so, Richardson is our ideal Miss Marple.
She has an intriguing origin point for today’s afflictions: the New Deal. The first third of the book, which hurtles toward Donald Trump’s election, is as bingeable as anything on Netflix. “Democracy Awakening” starts in the 1930s, when Americans who’d been wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash were not about to let the rich demolish the economy again. New Deal programs designed to benefit ordinary people and prevent future crises were so popular that by 1960 candidates of both parties were advised to simply “nail together” coalitions and promise them federal funding. From 1946 to 1964, the liberal consensus — with its commitments to equality, the separation of church and state, and the freedoms of speech, press and religion — held sway.
But Republican businessmen, who had caused the crash, despised the consensus. Richardson’s account of how right-wingers appropriated the word “socialism” from the unrelated international movement is astute. When invoked to malign all government investment, “socialism” served to recruit segregationist Democrats, who could be convinced that the word meant Black people would take their money, and Western Democrats, who resented government protections on land and water. This new Republican Party created an ideology that coalesced around White Christianity and free markets.
Advertisement
But winning voters without serving their interests is always a tall order. So in the early ’70s, in Richardson’s telling, Republicans began to harbor doubts about democracy itself. They developed nasty backup plans for when elections didn’t go their way, including gerrymandering, cheating and packing the judiciary with right-wing ideologues. The elections of Richard Nixon in 1972 and George W. Bush in 2000 exposed forms of electoral gameplay that didn’t require delivering anything of value to voters.
And then a boom-bust businessman famous for allegations of racial bias and sexual misconduct won the presidency as a Republican with no coherent policy platform at all. Some of Nixon’s marquee tricksters even rode sidecar in Trump’s victory. “In 2016,” Richardson writes, “the Republicans would ride the themes of the past forty years to their logical conclusion.”
This is the most lucid just-so story for Trump’s rise I’ve ever heard. It’s magisterial. In my experience hosting the podcast “Trumpcast,” Trumpologists are typically aberrationists or continuists. Aberrationists believe that Trump is a black swan. Continuists, whose numbers include intellectuals such as Ezra Klein and Max Boot, see Trump on a continuum with Republicans of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Richardson is in this second camp — and, for my money, she gives the continuity thesis its best hearing.
Advertisement
The second two-thirds of “Democracy Awakening” contains material that is simultaneously too familiar and too fresh to submit entirely to a historian’s dispassionate analysis. The slides come fast. “The Apprentice” turns washed-up Trump into an authority figure. He descends the escalator. There are social media dark arts, Russian coordination, racist shock-jock stuff, “lock her up.” American carnage. The stomach-churning tales of James Comey’s 2016 news conference reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton, and later Trump’s admonition to white-nationalist terrorists: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”
In Richardson’s telling, nearly every move Trump makes in his benighted term in office is anti-democratic — and documented. The Russia probe reveals interference in the 2016 election. The first impeachment reveals interference in the 2020 election. The second impeachment reveals efforts to overturn the 2020 election and incite an insurrection. It’s impossible to review all these attempts by a U.S. president to avoid doing actual public service and not ask, again, of Trump: Why didn’t you just try governing?
Having once described herself as a Lincoln Republican, Richardson never takes her eye off the party’s terrible metamorphosis. After the 2016 election, some Republicans had buyer’s remorse. Though “they wanted an end to business regulation and social services,” Richardson writes, “they did not want an apocalypse.” Later, as Trump was “delivering their wishlist,” the apocalypse became a risk they were willing to take. Finally, by August 2020, “the Republican Party, which had formed to stand against the enslavers … and restore democracy, was now on board with Trump’s dictatorship.” Ultimately, Trump’s “subversion of constitutional government made Watergate look quaint.”
Advertisement
But really, nothing in “Democracy Awakening” looks quaint. When Trump times get especially bleak, Richardson reaches for analogies past the New Deal, past the Gilded Age, to the Civil War period, her field of scholarship. Here Richardson unearths Southern arguments for slavery that include both white-supremacist dogma and a flat-out rejection (as “fundamentally wrong”) of the founders’ idea that all men are created equal. When Trump ran on what some heard as racist whoops and then executed policies like the Muslim ban, he openly set himself against America’s primary purpose. It was a small step to conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy against civil rights — just two of the 91 felonies Trump is now charged with.
Across her work, Richardson frequently cites a familiar quotation: “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” It would make sense for a poet to plug sonic association — rhyme — over repetition, reason or causality. But why would a historian? “Democracy Awakening” sometimes seems like a rhetorical exercise in making events from different periods illuminate one another by dint of mere juxtaposition. Richardson is deft, and often I can find the rhyme she hears, but just as often I wondered about historical and cultural contingencies that she might be leaving out in the effort to create such an aerodynamic story.
One of the reasons for the enormous appeal of Richardson’s journalism is her bedrock faith that the liberal consensus abides, whatever the attempts of the rich or bigoted minority to shatter it. I’m entirely convinced. It’s a hardy meme, that one about how we’re all created equal. Toward the end of the book, Richardson quotes Jimmy Carter: “We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.” For those to whom this is common sense, “Democracy Awakening” will be a homecoming.
Virginia Heffernan writes about tech, politics and culture for Wired Magazine.
Democracy Awakening
Notes on the State of America
By Heather Cox Richardson
Viking. 304 pp. $30
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK%2Bwu8qsZmtoYmh8cYWOa2xooJWWwamx0WaaqLBdp7aktMCrm6ynnmLAtq7SrZico12nsre1xLBm