Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Foreword-Part 1, Chapter 5

Part 1, Chapters 6-10

Part 2, Chapters 11-16

Part 2, Chapters 17-20

Part 3, Chapters 21-25

Part 3, Chapter 26-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Part 2, Chapters 17-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “The Authoritarian Experiment”

Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary: “Embracing Authoritarianism”

The Trump administration “ignored” the Obama administration’s preparations for pandemic illnesses, which backfired during the quick and deadly spread of COVID-19 in early 2020. The Trump administration blamed the World Health Organization for “working with China” and embraced a “strategy of mass infection” as it politicized the outbreak (129). Trump “openly rejected” the idea that the federal government should provide pandemic resources.

This new attempt to destroy the liberal consensus created problems that that very consensus “was designed to end” by ensuring that only private individuals with financial resources had the means to provide for public needs (129), which they sold at “fifteen times” their standard price. Despite Trump’s displacement of pandemic aid to states, when states shut down to curb infection rates, he declared he had the “absolute authority” to reopen them.

Trump told his followers that if he won in 2020, it would be because they were the rightful majority, and if he lost, the election was “rigged.” His allies compromised mail-in voting—a blow during the pandemic, which made in-person voting dangerous. He rallied “gangs waving Trump flags and flying Confederate flags” (131), leading followers to believe that pandemic lockdowns infringed upon their liberties.

Amid this climate, in May 2020, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin killed a Black man named George Floyd by kneeling on his neck. A couple months earlier, a Black woman named Breonna Taylor was killed by plainclothes police in her Louisville, Kentucky, home on false suspicions. Subsequent Black Lives Matter (BLM) rallies drew attention to the disproportionate number of Black people subjected to police murder and violence. Trump positioned these protesters as violent, “far-left,” “antifa-like” groups. After speaking on the phone to Putin, Trump said he needed to “arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again” (132). While Republicans continued to stay silent, this authoritarian directive caused all four living former presidents, Democratic lawmakers, over 1,250 former Department of Justice officials, and military leaders to both directly and indirectly condemn Trump.

Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary: “Rewriting American History”

The “American right,” with the help of right-wing media like FOX News, echoed fascist and authoritarian rhetoric from Russia and Hungary: Hungary’s leader Viktor Orbán wanted to replace multiculturalism with “Christian culture,” stop immigration, and restore “a traditional, patriarchal society dominated by white men” (136). Trump’s Attorney General William Barr attempted to argue that the framers didn’t mean that “self-government” meant the people should elect representatives, but that they should govern their individual morality with Christian ethics. In fact, Founders like James Madison were vehemently against instating a national religion.

At the August 2020 Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign invoked Nazi imagery in the First Lady’s dress, flags, and jumbotrons. Trump attacked The 1619 Project, which centers the role of enslavement in the creation of American society. Trump called this a “radicalized” view of history that taught “lies,” and he established the 1776 Commission in response, which was made up of “right-wing activists and politicians” who preached “patriotic education” (139). Trump’s other extreme behaviors in the 2020 campaign included “apparently [trying] to infect Biden with Covid-19” during a debate (140), and his supporters trying to “drive a Biden campaign bus off the road” (140).

Part 2, Chapter 19 Summary: “January 6”

White House strategist Steve Bannon said Trump was going to declare himself winner of the 2020 presidential race early, before majority-Democratic mail-in ballots were counted. When the votes came in, Biden defeated Trump handily and inarguably. Trump insisted he won, then claimed the election was “rigged.” Trump demanded recounts that all confirmed Biden’s victory, though right-wing media repeated the lie while Trump tried to convince legislators they could disregard the election results. He directly told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” more votes for him and asked Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election for Biden on January 6.

Pence refused this request, but other Republican officials contested the election results. Trump began to rally the “right-wing mobs” he’d openly courted for years, telling them to gather in Washington, DC, on January 6 for a “Stop the Steal” rally. At the rally, Trump told them to “fight like hell” (146), which prompted their armed march to take over the Capitol building. This attempted coup was a culmination of a centuries-long, propagandized “hierarchical version of American history” (146). Trump refused to call off the rioters for hours, and when he did, he affirmed his love for them, restated the lie that the election was stolen, and told them to “remember this day forever” (146).

Part 2, Chapter 20 Summary: “The Big Lie”

Immediately after the January 6 riots, it seemed like Republicans might disavow Trump. Every living president called out Trump and his supporters, Trump lost access to his social media accounts, citizens called for his impeachment, and cabinet members and staff quit.

Trump used the “Big Lie,” an authoritarian propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany that encouraged despots to tell a lie so big no one could believe it was false and repeat it so often people assume it has to be true. Hitler theorized the Big Lie in his autobiography Mein Kampf. Big Lies are “springboards” for authoritarians to rally support and purge members who oppose them. The belief in the Big Lie led many Republican-dominated states to change state laws to make it harder to vote or gave election certification powers to partisan boards. Through this, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell used the filibuster to make sure Democrats “couldn’t protect voting rights, end the partisan gerrymander, stop dark money from pouring into elections, or restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act” (148).

The Supreme Court was stacked with Republican appointees who broke with precedent and emphasized states’ rights decisions, such as when they overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision to legalize abortion. The new Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision set a precedent that had potential to jeopardize other civil rights, like marriage equality. Though a majority of Americans wanted to preserve such civil rights, the disproportionate number of Congressional Republicans refused to protect them.

Part 2, Chapters 17-20 Analysis

The first part of Part 2 follows the first three years of the Trump presidency and how these years contributed to what Richardson calls the “authoritarian experiment.” These last four chapters of Part 2 detail specific authoritarian strategies and attempts to overthrow the election by Trump and his team during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, and the 2020 presidential campaign and subsequent election of Joe Biden. These strategies gather many threads that contribute to The Throughline of Authoritarian Sentiment in US History that Richardson identifies in previous centuries of American history: The Use of False History to Manipulate Ideology; the conflation of civil rights with political movements like socialism, communism, or anarchy; the emphasis of so-called “traditional” family units; and dividing people into “good” and “bad” categories.

While early 20th-century authoritarians like Hitler used censorship and propaganda, 21st-century authoritarian methods account for modern technology. The rapid spread of information enabled by social media and widespread internet use contributes to the “digitization of old methods” such as “narrative laundering” and “boosterism” (Kalathil, Shanthi. “The Evolution of Authoritarian Digital Influence: Grappling with the New Normal.” Prism, vol 9. No. 1, pp. 33-50). Narrative laundering involves the “legitimization of created narratives through repetition citations across media” (Kalathil 37): Richardson explains how the Trump campaign invested in “flooding social media with disinformation” (103) and “saturated Twitter and the media” (106) across multiple social media and right-wing media platforms.

Boosterism is “repetitive content reinforcing the perception that a certain narrative represents a popular point of view” (Kalathil 37). Nixon used this strategy when he insisted that a “silent majority” of people supported his policy in the Vietnam War, though no such majority was evident (52). After Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, winning both the popular vote and Electoral College vote, one of the main ways Trump employed boosterism was to insist the election had been stolen despite a lack of evidence. He encouraged Republican allies not only to amplify these accusations, but to engage in targeted questioning of ballot totals in specific states. He wanted Republicans to present a united front in claiming that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost the 2020 election and that the votes cast for Joe Biden were fake and did not represent the will of Americans.

These attacks on voting and “ballot integrity” gained popularity in the Reagan era. In a democracy, voting is the main way citizens hold their government accountable; voting is therefore a key factor in How to Defend American Democracy. Undermining voting is an authoritarian strategy that attempts to sow “distrust in democracy and the rule of law generally” (Kalathil 36). The rhetoric Trump used convinced his followers to distrust both the usual processes of democracy and the ability of the system to enforce its own integrity. At the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, he told his followers “that Chinese-driven socialists were taking over the country” and they had to “take back” the country with “strength” (145). Like previous Republican leaders scapegoated civil rights, this quotation shows how Trump scapegoats non-white nationalities and conflates them with socialist or communist “threats” to the United States, echoing Richard Nixon. This rhetoric preceded an armed and violent attack on the US Capitol that Richardson says was the result of “decades of feeding hungry voters ideas and images straight out of the nation’s white supremacist past” (146). Rather than Trump’s being an anomaly in American history, Richardson argues that Trump’s presidency, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen are the logical conclusions of a century’s worth of inching toward authoritarianism.