Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
- May 30, 2024
- 3 min read
★★★★★
I was turned on to Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter Letters from an American a year ago, maybe two, by a friend. Every morning, she filters what’s happening in today’s politics through the lens of history. Thoughtful, measured, and insightful, it starkly contrasts the reactionary, reactive, bitter, and divisive discourse that permeates what passes for political discourse these days. If you’re not familiar with it, I highly recommend it. In any event, I received this book for Christmas from another friend who was also turned on to Richardson by that same friend, and, in advance of this summer’s conventions, I thought now was the right time to dig into Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.
At less than 300 pages, Democracy Awakening is comparatively short for a non-fiction book. It’s also highly readable, as subscribers to her newsletter will immediately recognize, and a far cry from the dry academia that often plagues the genre. I devoured it in just eight days, which is certainly not speedy for many, but I often have just 10-30 minutes to read in a given day. Broken down into three sections— “Undermining Democracy,” “The Authoritarian Experiment,” and “Reclaiming America”—Richardson takes us to key moments in our country’s history to show us that our democracy has ever been a struggle between those who would fight for the principles on which our nation was founded those who would seek to undermine them.
History is not doomed to repeat itself, but when hierarchical structures flatten out too much, when those at the bottom and the middle and the margins find their lot improving, when the gap between the haves and the have-nots starts shrinking—as happened during The New Deal of the 1930s, the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, and as they are again during Biden’s presidency for the first time in two generations—those who feel threatened by their loss of power will, often by any means necessary, work to undermine the ground gained by the many to restore power to the few. To wit: Southern elites after Reconstruction, McCarthy’s “Red Scare,” Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again,” and Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”
Time and again, it’s white men, usually wealthy white men, hell-bent on creating (or recreating) a society based in their image, one that heralds back to the days before equality before the law; before the poor, minorities, women, and anyone who wasn’t a landholding white man was allowed to vote; before we, as a country, finally began, however imperfectly, to live up to our Declaration’s line, “that all men are created equal.” Their modus operandi? Grievance. Fear. Hate. Divisiveness. If they can’t scare enough people to get the votes, they’ll gerrymander, engage in voter suppression, undermine the rule of law, discount the integrity of elections, stack the courts to change laws while they gridlock Congress, and, shockingly, embrace authoritarianism. When Republicans hold up Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Victor Orbán as role models, it’s clear how fragile our democracy is.
Ours has never been a perfect union, and though our democracy has been tested before as it is being tested now, we have always managed to uphold the principles on which our nation was founded. It hasn’t always been pretty. It could almost always have been better. But it has survived. As Richardson points out, even in what appears to be very dark times, with a convicted felon the leader of one of our two main political parties and its presumptive presidential nominee, whose platform would undermine, if not destroy democracy, at least as we have known it, there is reason for hope. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And as Heather Cox Richardson concludes, “So far, the hopes of our Founders have never been proven fully right. And yet they have not been proven entirely wrong. Once again, we are at a time of testing. How it comes out rests, as it always has, in our own hands.” Democracy Awakening is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how we, as a country, arrived at the present moment, how we overcame comparable moments in our history, and how we can apply those lessons to our current challenges.
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