Book Review: "Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America"
Heather Cox Richardson's new book is an urgent and timely reminder of the unique power of America's enduring ideals.
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I’ve long been a subscriber of Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter here on Substack, because she’s one of those rare academic historians who happens to have the gift of making the past relevant to the present and doing so in such a way that it feels accessible to a general audience. Thus, when I saw her new book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, I knew I was going to have to read it. As with her newsletter, Richardson’s book is somehow both sweeping and scope and yet remarkably accessible and deeply insightful. It is, as one reviewer put it, almost like a Netflix binge, in that you find the chapters flying by at an extraordinary pace.
At the heart of her book is an important and vital thesis: since at least the 1940s there has been a liberal consensus, one which decreed that we are, in fact, a democracy and that the government has the power and the responsibility to make life better for all citizens. For a while it seemed as if Republicans were willing to go along with this idea but, starting in the 1980s, it decided to go all-in on the proposition that wealth, and power, really were better off with the few rather than the many. Thus began the quite rapid dismantling of such policy programs as the New Deal and the Great Society, leaving Democrats and their allies to pick up the mess left behind.
And then along came Trump, and things got infinitely worse.
There are times when it can be easy to either get overwhelmed by the manifold grievances and disruptions and misdeeds that Trump and his acolytes have wrought on the body politic or to simply tune them out altogether. While both are understandable impulses, the truth is that we cannot afford to simply turn a blind eye to what he has done, and it’s to Richardson’s credit that she is able to present his many misdeeds in a way that is both clear-eyed and rightly outraged. While some might be willing to just dismiss him as a buffoon and a con-man, Richardson rightly reminds us that to do so is to drastically misunderstand the unique threat that he poses to the democracy that we should all be doing our utmost to protect.
And make no mistake, Trump is an authoritarian in the making. However much he might lack the sort of ideological coherence of some earlier (and contemporary) despots, he still is exactly the kind of person who will gladly forge an entire political movement, and government, in his own image. And it’s not just Trump, either. As Richardson is at pains to remind us again and again, the reason that authoritarians are able to seize power is because they have the backing of a major segment of the population and because there are far too many politicians who are willing to stand up for what is right out of a craven belief that they will be spared the full consequences his rise to power entails. In Trump’s case it’s made all the more menacing and dangerous due to a conservative intelligentsia that has spent the last 70 years–since at least the time of William F. Buckley–honing their supposed intellectual arguments about why democracy is bad, actually (for more on that particular subject, The Washington Post ran a fascinating piece about it just last week).
Of course, Richardson’s book isn’t all doom and gloom. While she is clear-eyed and matter-of-fact about the grave nature of the threats facing our republic, she also maintains a profound hope in Americans’ ability to see brightness in the future and in our ever-present potential. Yes, there have always been inequalities in America, but there have also been the promises of a bright and better future. She is one of those historians who isn’t blind to the flaws that have always plagued the heart of our national experiment but, like some others (I’m thinking here of Jon Meacham, one of my other favorite public historians), she believes that there is more reason for hope than despair and cynicism. It’s for this reason that she returns again and again to figures like Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and LBG, all of whom, in their own ways, took the lead in bringing America and Americans into a brighter, better future.
Ultimately, though, Democracy Awakening throws the future of America right where it belongs: into the hands of the people. No matter how much today’s Republican Party and its supposed intelligentsia might like to think that they have the power to remake everything in their own, very limited, image. If American history has shown us anything, it’s that there will always be those who won’t be content to have power taken out of the hands of the many and concentrated in those of the few, that there will always be those–whether the Republicans of the Civil War era, the Democrats of the New Deal and afterward, or those fighting today to wrest control from the oligarchs and the would-be authoritarians.
The thing about America, as Richardson’s book reminds us again and again, is that it is a project that cannot be, and shouldn’t be, fully realized. As she notes at the very end of her book: “So far, the hopes of our Founders have never been proven fully right. And yet they have not been proven entirely wrong.” This is as much a call to action as it is a statement. It’s a reminder that it falls to each of us to do our part to make sure that America is a better, freer, more just society for everyone. It’s never going to be an easy task, and there are going to be many times when it will feel as if it is all pointless, as if the authoritarians will win. It’s at times like those, however, that we must gird our loins, take Richardson’s erudite history lesson as our guiding light, and make sure today’s Republican Party doesn’t set back the clock.