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In the foreword to Democracy Awakening, Heather Cox Richardson introduces her argument that the United States has avoided becoming an authoritarian state due to the continued renewal of its ideals of equality. During the middle of the 20th century, many European countries elected fascist leaders, including Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. Richardson argues that the United States was able to avoid doing the same because of the continuous struggle of marginalized groups to achieve the full equality promised by the Declaration of Independence. She believes that ongoing freedom movements have kept the nation focused on its founding principles of universal equality, an idea that stands in opposition to the hierarchies of fascism. Although the Founders themselves did not extend equality to women, to people of color, or to anyone who did not own property, their writings on freedom and equality nevertheless breathed life into freedom movements.

Read an explanation of a key quote in the book’s forward.

Part 1 of the book traces Richardson’s argument that movement conservatism, an American political philosophy of the 20th century, has sought to undermine the true values of the country’s founding. Richardson believes that efforts by modern conservatives have sought to concentrate power in the hands of a wealthy few and that their success at doing so has left the country on the brink of becoming an authoritarian regime under Donald Trump. In political science, the term conservative originally indicated a dedication to maintaining government stability and resisting ideology. By this definition, a stable government should only make changes slowly, after considering the actual conditions of the nation. This philosophy rejected political ideology as a driver of change because a government committed to an ideology struggles to make decisions based on social reality. According to Richardson, this was the definition of conservatism through the Civil War era, when the Republican Party declared that the anti-slavery movement supported the conservative principles of the nation’s Founders. She notes that, during his campaign for president, Republican Abraham Lincoln connected the U.S. ideal of equality with a stand against slavery and with the belief that the government’s purpose was to provide for the needs of its citizens.

Read about the background of the author, blogger, and podcaster Heather Cox Richardson.

Richardson believes that since the 1930s, conservatism in the United States has come to represent a specific political ideology, contradicting the term’s original definition. She traces this change back to the 1930s and the backlash to the New Deal, a set of social programs and financial regulations instituted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to pull the country out of the Great Depression. Politicians opposed to the New Deal formed a coalition and wrote the Conservative Manifesto, an open letter that called for tax cuts, the elimination of government-provided social services, and the rights of states to enforce discriminatory laws. The coalition, Richardson says, included anti-Black southern Democrats, Westerners who opposed federal control over land and water, and Republicans frustrated with federal business regulation. Calling themselves conservatives, these lawmakers believed that a federal government with too much power ran contrary to America’s traditional values, which they claimed included private enterprise, strong local politics, and self-reliance. Over the decades that followed, Richardson argues that movement conservatism promoted a mythologized version of American history to drive support for policies that were bad for most Americans.

Read about the book’s Main Idea #2: Movement conservatism can lead to authoritarianism.

Richardson describes how after World War II, federal social programs like those begun under the New Deal led to a prosperous and stable nation. Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, these programs were so popular that they were considered impossible to campaign against, resulting in a period known as the liberal consensus. This was the dominant ideology at the time, which promoted strong government in support of the general welfare. However, Richardson asserts that, as presidents began to use federal power not only to improve the financial lives of white people but also to expand civil rights to Black people, white voters became more suspicious of federal spending. Richardson argues that this led movement conservatives to use anti-Black bias to convince white people to stop supporting federal policies that were actually in their best interests, claiming that federally supported integration efforts were socialist wealth redistribution through taxation. Even when policies helped white people economically, Richardson asserts that conservatives suggested they represented unfair giveaways to undeserving people of color.

Richardson argues that Civil War-era politicians who opposed federal power and 20th-century movement conservatives used similar rhetoric to attract voters. She compares arguments against the expansion of civil rights in the 1960s with rhetoric that emerged after the Civil War. At that time, white supremacists argued that Black people should not be allowed to vote because they were too poor to pay taxes and would favor federal spending on programs they did not contribute to. Richardson finds that conservative campaign rhetoric in the late 20th century similarly suggested federal spending unfairly favored people of color. Richardson also describes the powerful myth of the cowboy, who was seen as entirely self-reliant despite the fact that westward expansion actually depended on federal support and strong communities. After the Civil War, southern Democrats first embraced their inaccurate ideal of cowboys as white, independent men who did not rely on the government. She contends that as movement conservatives sought to destroy the liberal consensus, the mythical cowboy became a symbol of the ideals of conservatism in the second half of the 20th century.

Read an explanation of an important Chapter 7 quote about Republicans using divisive rhetoric to gain votes.

In the late 20th century, according to Richardson, the rhetoric of movement conservatism became so powerful that it began to create its own reality. She recounts that, when computer analysis at the Office of Management and Budget indicated that President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts would cause a deficit, the administration had the computers reprogrammed, claiming it was impossible to put facts over “faith.” When President George W. Bush’s administration wanted to justify war in Iraq, it manufactured false evidence to support its ideology. What’s more, Richardson argues that the anti-Black response to President Barack Obama’s election enabled Republicans to openly reject the spirit of democracy. As an example, she cites Senate Republicans’ refusal to open a confirmation hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, ignoring the right of the president to nominate justices. She further describes how congressional Republicans defied Obama’s foreign policy by sending a letter to the leaders of Iran, promising to overturn any agreement reached with the Obama administration. Richardson also argues that Republicans adopted fascist strategies in their campaigns, which included defining the Democratic Party as an enemy of American values, limiting minority voting, and handing more political power to corporations and the wealthy. At the end of Part 1, Richardson states that by 2016 the Republican Party was poised for the arrival of Trump’s brand of autocracy.

Read more about Main Idea #3: Fear is an antidemocratic tool.

Next section Part 2: The Authoritarian Experiment

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