Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Donald Trump was the 44th president of the United States. He ran as a Republican and served from 2016 to 2020. Through Part 1, Richardson discusses various points in American history to contextualize how the stage was set for authoritarianism through decades of “courting white supremacists” and “appealing to voters’ fears” (50). Part 2 focuses entirely on the Trump presidency, which Richardson calls the “authoritarian experiment.”

Richardson discusses how Trump’s television show, The Apprentice, raised his profile in the popular American consciousness. This show depicted Trump as a wealthy, shrewd business genius, but being orchestrated and semi-scripted reality television, this image obscured the fact that Trump “was unprepared and erratic on set and was in deep financial trouble at the time” (86). Richardson uses this juxtaposition of image and reality to frame how Trump conducted himself after becoming involved in politics, where his conduct and rhetoric was “more image than substance” (87). However, the previous decades of policy that set the stage for an authoritarian leader primed Americans for the vision he espoused, in which the “image” he crafted of himself “promised that he, and he alone, could lead the way” (87). Richardson explains how Trump used this type of authoritarian rhetoric, which centralized patriotism around an individual personality rather than a nation, to turn the Republican Party into “the Trump Party” (122).

In addition to describing the effects of Trump’s rhetoric, Richardson describes several key moments in the Trump presidency in which the “authoritarian experiment” was particularly evident in actions that affected the people he positioned as his enemies. These include Executive Order 13769, which banned people from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States; the communication between Trump’s campaign and Russia regarding interference in the 2016 election, which led to an FBI investigation and multiple indictments; the “racists, antisemites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, [and] neo-Nazis” (109) whom Trump called “very fine people” (114) after their violent “unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville; and Trump’s attempted quid-pro-quo of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden, which led to Trump’s first impeachment. In 2020, these actions continued in the way Trump “openly rejected” responsibility for helping states manage the COVID-19 pandemic, attempting to get government officials to overturn the election and encouraging a “violent attack on the United States government,” which led to his second impeachment (146), and undermining democratic processes by convincing his base of the “Big Lie” that the presidential election had been stolen.

These actions, combined with his continued rhetoric of an existential threat to the “heart” of America that only he could combat, carried the tradition of separating Americans into “good” and “bad” parties along exaggerated lines to its logical and sometimes violent conclusion. Richardson uses her Part 2 discussion of Trump and his appeal to “real Americans” to set up her Part 3 discussion of the actual (sometimes contradictory) ideologies that informed the founding of the country in the Revolutionary Era.

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States. He ran as a pro-abolition Republican. He became president in 1861 and served until his assassination by John Wilkes Booth in 1865, whereupon his Democratic vice president Andrew Johnson became president. Lincoln’s time in office was colored by the events of the Civil War. Before he took office, the Southern states seceded and declared themselves the Confederate States of America.

In Part 1, Richardson pairs her discussion of Lincoln with that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While FDR’s New Deal is the origin of the 20th and 21st centuries’ liberal consensus, she maps FDR’s ideas of the role of the government back to Lincoln, who laid the foundations for a liberal consensus through actions such as the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the legal status of enslaved peoples to free peoples. Due to the debt incurred by the Civil War, he also instituted national income taxation, which made the government accountable to the citizens it claimed to serve.

As a young man, Lincoln “watched his town of New Salem, Illinois, die” because the federal government did not invest in its economic growth (187). This informed Lincoln’s opinion that the government should “step in to do what individuals couldn’t” (188), which Richardson considers the “profound innovation” of Lincoln’s “liberalism.” This personal experience formed Lincoln’s investment in the liberal consensus.

In Richardson’s framework, one of Lincoln’s biggest contributions was how he “reworked the Founders’ initial national government […] to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white men and Black men alike” (191-92). Lincoln’s model demonstrates one strategy for defending American democracy. The de-emphasis on the power of a small elite, the empowerment of the large, “ordinary” majority, and re-distribution of national resources to those who need them made sure that more citizens could have a voice in their own government, which is one of the defining tenets of democracy. Richardson admits that the aspirations of Lincoln’s government, like those who supported liberal democracy after him, were “mostly aspirational,” as non-white, non-male citizens continued to struggle for equal rights long after the Civil War ended.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom Richardson refers to as FDR to distinguish him from his fifth cousin and the 26th US President Theodore Roosevelt, was the 32nd president of the United States. He ran as a Democrat and served between 1933 and his death in 1945, making him the longest-serving president in US history. Like Lincoln, FDR is one of the most prevailingly popular and well-known presidents, perhaps because of his adept governance amid immense domestic and international turmoil. He took office just three years into the Great Depression, proposing his New Deal to ferry the United States out of the Depression. He led the country through most of World War II, dying in April 1945, less than half a year before the war’s end.

In Part 1, Richardson traces the 20th- and 21st-century liberal consensus back to FDR’s New Deal, which follows in the vein of Lincoln’s approach to leadership and government. She writes that the move back to the Declaration’s claim of independence and equality that Lincoln appealed to “was the same position underpinning the New Deal” (22). Like Lincoln, FDR wanted to “use the federal government to protect ordinary Americans” (17). FDR was the first president to appoint a woman to his cabinet when he named Frances Perkins his secretary of labor; Perkins, who witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, promoted the welfare of workers, as well as women and children. FDR’s Congress regulated the stock market, set minimum wages and maximum weekly working hours, created job programs, guaranteed the right to unionize, prohibited child labor, instated a social safety net and the Social Security Act, and invested in infrastructure.

These programs earned FDR the ire of both Southern Democrats and some Republicans, who created a Conservative Manifesto that was then taken up by “whites-only citizens’ organizations” (19). However, after World War II broke out and Americans rallied against fascism and authoritarianism in Europe, this opposition died out. However, Richardson points out that this “national celebration of equality during the war had the effect of highlighting that all Americans were not actually treated equally” (26). Despite the success of FDR’s New Deal and its contribution to the liberal consensus, the Civil Rights Era did not begin for another 10 years.

Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States. He ran as a Republican and served from 1969 to his resignation in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal and coverup. Nixon is an important figure for Richardson’s discussion of both The Use of False History to Manipulate Ideology and authoritarian sentiment in US history, with the latter following from the former. Importantly, Nixon’s administration represented a turning point for the United States’ dominant political parties’ stances on race, which flipped as Dixiecrats and Republicans aligned with Movement Conservatives who saw civil rights as a threat to traditional family structures and social hierarchies.

Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, Black Americans and their allies “were determined to bring the voting rights provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to life” (47). The Democratic Party’s support for voting rights “orphaned” Southern Democratic “Dixiecrats”: the ideological descendants of Democratic secessionists who continued to support segregation and white supremacy. Nixon developed a “southern strategy” to win the votes of the Dixiecrats who “were open to switching parties” (49).

To explain the logic behind Nixon’s southern strategy, Richardson quotes former White House aide Bill Moyers, who 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” (49). Nixon’s administration created an “other” in Black activism and the New Left, “carefully curat[ing] images of traditional America under siege from ‘others’” (50). This is the first concerted instance Richardson identifies where purposeful and extended false histories were used as a strategy to shore up fear and anger as a political tactic. Nixon’s administration wanted people to vote with “emotion rather than reason” since “emotions are more easily roused […] more malleable” (50). Richardson thus proposes that by manipulating voters’ emotions rather than creating policy based on fact and reason, Nixon’s administration also manipulated peoples’ votes and ideologies. This deepened the political rifts between parties and ensured the “stage was set […] for the rise of authoritarianism” (49).

Nixon exercised some strategies of authoritarianism, but ultimately resigned from the presidency after the Watergate scandal broke. Nixon had become “convinced that he must win the election to save America” (55) and created the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). CREEP “planted fake letters in newspapers, hired vendors for Democratic rallies and then ran out on the unpaid bills, planted spies in opponents’ camps, and tapped opponents’ phones” (55). Five burglars were caught attempting to bug the Democratic National Committee. These attempts to influence the election and Nixon’s attempted cover-up led to bipartisan appall, and Nixon resigned. However, even though he was out of office, “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” (56). Thus, the ideologies created by the Nixon administration persevered after Nixon exited office, establishing the beginning of the throughline of authoritarianism in US politics.