Phillip G. Payne on Heather Cox Richardson’s *Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America*

Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakens is not a conventional academic history, nor does it neatly fall within what we normally think of as popular history.  Richardson builds upon “Letters from an American,” her popular Substack newsletter, in which she offers a combination of news and historical context.  She has stated the inspiration for the book is her newsletter audience, who most days receive a combination of news summary, analysis, and historical comparisons.

Richardson is a Harvard educated professor of history at Boston College and the author of several academic books, although she is better known for “Letters from an American.” She started the newsletter on Facebook to provide context for President Trump’s 2019 impeachment. Since then, Richardson’s social media empire has grown.  Today, her newsletter is one of the most successful on Substack. She has also hosted or co-hosted several podcasts and appears regularly on various social media platforms.  In short, more than a few people turn to Heather Cox Richardson for historically informed news.

The book is divided into three parts.  Part 1, “Undermining Democracy,” is a history of American politics focusing on the conservative movement emphasizing its opposition to the New Deal and the “liberal consensus” that the New Deal created.  The opponents of the New Deal, and the idea that the government should serve ordinary people, dubbed themselves conservatives. Richardson disputes this writing that “This was not an accurate description of conservatism: it was a political position.”?  Thus, she establishes one of the major themes of the book, a contest between the liberal consensus, and progressive politics, that had its roots in the Declaration of Independence and conservative oligarchs who favored the property clause in the Constitution and fought to preserve power for elites.  This coalition has a history tracing from the slave south and the Confederacy through Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.  mudsills” speech justifying slavery as an example of this strain of American politics.James Henry Hammond’s “mudsills” speech justifying slavery as an example of this strain of American politics.

Richardson emphasizes the role of popular culture in indoctrinating Americans into conservative ideals as movies lionized lone men acting as a savior and projector. In particular, she points to the genre of westerns, which were widely popular during the Cold War. She notes the connection between The Little House on the Prairie, books and later TV show, as examples of promoting libertarian ideology.  Essentially, Richardson flips the traditional conservative complaint about Hollywood liberalism.

Part 2, “The Authoritarian Experiment,” is a history of Donald Trump’s first term as President.  She continues her discussion of popular culture by introducing Trump through his reality TV show The Apprentice.  Richardson positions the Trump administration as the culmination of conservative efforts against the liberal order and as a threat to American democracy.  She writes: “Establishment Republicans who wanted an end to government regulation of business and taxes had courted racists, sexists, and religious zealots to stay in power but had no plans actually to give in to extremist demands, which would turn off mainstream voters. Trump stripped the cover off this sleight of hand, offering to give the extremist base a hierarchical world in which they dominated women as well as their Black and Brown neighbors.” According to her, “Trump married Republican politics to authoritarianism.”[1]

Part 3, “Reclaiming America,” she looks at American identity issuing a call to action.  The Declaration of Independence was a radically democratic document written by flawed men in their views on race, sex, and slavery. She writes, “Equality, then, depended on inequality. So was the whole concept of American democracy a sham from the start?”  Her answer is no. The debate can be summed up in the differences between the The 1619 Project and The 1776 Report. The Trump Administration issued the report to counter the claim that slavery stood at the center of the American experience.  She writes, “The 1776 Report demonstrated in real time how leaders seeking to undermine democracy have tied American history to their cause. The historical inequality embedded in our founding—that “all men are created equal”—depends on the subordination of minorities and women. Whenever members of marginalized groups seem to approach[2] can drum up supporters by insisting that they are attacking national principles and reducing white men to subservience. Those leaders reject the idea of equality, but, paradoxically, they root that rejection in our founding.”?  Richardson does not leave readers on that note.

Richardson then gives readers a tour of American political history focusing on the expansion of democracy. Similar to Part I, she traces the history of liberal or progressive movements that championed the average person.  The 1980s proved a turning point.  She writes, “Since the 1980s, political figures eager to get rid of that liberal consensus have gained power by denigrating it. Ignoring the fact that expanding equality was entirely consistent with the principles the Founders had put in the Declaration of Independence, they have suggested that doing so rejected America’s historical ideals. And although the liberal consensus bolstered economic prosperity and shared it more widely than ever before, they claimed it stunted economic growth.”[3]  Much like Part 1 traced the conservative movement culminating in Trump’s authoritarian experiment, Richardson sees the progressive movement running through Lincoln culminating in the presidency of Joe Biden. As she writes, in a tone that approaches hagiography, “Biden’s domestic program expanded liberalism to meet the civil rights demands Carter had identified, just as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ had each expanded liberalism to meet the challenges of westward expansion, industrialization, globalization, and anti-colonialism.”[4]

The cliche’ that journalism is the first draft of history applies to Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, but also demonstrates the nuance that a seemingly simple truism papers over.  Richardson stands at several interesting intersections. Richardson’s blend of journalism and history represents trends that have been ongoing.

Academic historians might find Richardson’s Democracy Awakening frustrating; however academic historians are not the intended audience. Building on her newsletter, Richard’s book is aimed at Americans interested in historical context for today’s never-ending political upheavals. Richardson blends the roles of public intellectual, historical scholar, and journalist.  She is openly progressive although not necessarily partisan (depending on how you approach her writing on Biden, whom ?she is clearly a fan of) in that she praises both Republicans and Democrats who have championed the common person. She does not pull punches in arguing that Trump is an authoritarian.

Her tendency to fall into binaries brings a great deal of clarity to the book, but also papers over nuances that might have been worth exploring. While she is correct regarding the power of popular culture, her treatment sometimes lacks nuance. For example, although westerns certainly did emphasize a Cold War theme of the rugged individualist, the hero sometimes defended the community but sometimes stood in defiance of oppression and conformity.  We should remember that Cold Warriors like Eugene McCarthy and Richard Nixon considered Hollywood a bastion of communism and its products leftist propaganda. Similarly, while it is hard to argue that Reagan and his followers did not want to roll back the New Deal and that Republicans used the “southern strategy” to flip the once solidly Democratic south, going from that to fascism can be a leap.

Several years ago, I attended several sessions on the state of academic history at the annual conference of the American Historical Association (AHA).  Participants lamented the lack of influence historians have in the public sphere and discussed public facing work as a way to revitalize the field.  Liz Covart, of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, wrote about attending sessions at the 2020 AHA conference on historians using “different technologies to convey history” where she “noticed a recurring theme:  Historians who work beyond the professoriate are better placed to know the publics they want to write for and reach with their work.”  In 2023, the AHA hosted a webinar on “Op-Ed Writing for Historians:  How to Pitch, Write, Revise, and Get Your Ideas to the Public.” The current web page for the Organization of American Historians states that the “OAH seeks to be a public-facing, dynamic scholarly society.” The turbulence of the past decade has helped create a market for historians as explainers and the maturation of platforms like podcasts, newsletters, and social media has reduced the friction. A common complaint about internet culture is the demise of gatekeepers. Here we see Richardson taking advantage of this culture.  In this sense, history is having a moment.

Reading Democracy Awakens, and her newsletter, reminds one of the types of discussion that might come about in a history seminar where curious students ask about the background of something in the news (say tariffs for example).  These discussions are not always the best history, but they can be excellent teaching

[1] Richardson, 93.

[2] Richardson, 173-74.

[3] Richardson, 246.

[4] Richardson, 257.