Heather Cox Richardson Quotes

Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.

A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind—the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy,” Robinson said. He added that he now knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”40

The search for majorities always results in either greater disfranchisement or wider suffrage, and in this case, leaders reached out to poor white men for their victories.

A history that looks back to a mythologized past as the country’s perfect time is a key tool of authoritarians. It allows them to characterize anyone who opposes them as an enemy of the country’s great destiny.

Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world.

The key to the rise of authoritarians, they explained, is their use of language and false history.[3]

As a strongman becomes more and more destructive, followers’ loyalty only increases. Having begun to treat their perceived enemies badly, they need to believe their victims deserve it. Turning against the leader who inspired such behavior would mean admitting they had been wrong and that they, not their enemies, are evil. This, they cannot do.

From its founding, America has stood at the nexus of democracy and oligarchy. And as soon as the nation was established, its history of conflating class and race gave an elite the language to take over the government and undermine democracy.

By the 1880s, it was common knowledge that industrialists controlled Congress.

Enlightenment thinkers had rejected leadership based on religion or birth, arguing instead that society moved forward when people made good choices after hearing arguments based on fact.

How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.”[1]

Leaders don’t try to persuade people to support real solutions, but instead reinforce their followers’ fantasy self-image and organize them into a mass movement. Once people internalize their leader’s propaganda, it doesn’t matter when pieces of it are proven to be lies, because it has become central to their identity.

One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability. But it is never too late to change the future.

As Lincoln wrote, “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”[10]

America is at a crossroads. A country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism. How did this happen? Is the fall of democracy in the United States inevitable? And if not, how can we reclaim our democratic principles? This crisis in American democracy crept up on many of us. For generations of Americans, grainy news footage from World War II showing row upon row of Nazi soldiers goose-stepping in military parades tricked us into thinking that the Adolf Hitlers of the world arrive at the head of giant armies. So long as we didn’t see tanks in our streets, we imagined that democracy was secure. But in fact, Hitler’s rise to absolute power began with his consolidation of political influence to win 36.8 percent of the vote in 1932, which he parlayed into a deal to become German chancellor. The absolute dictatorship came afterward.

The key to the rise of authoritarians, they explained, is their use of language and false history.[3] Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political, or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they have been left behind. Their frustration makes

Schiff begged the Republicans to say “enough.” “If right doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how good the Constitution is. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the Framers were. . . . If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost. If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. The Framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves if right and truth don’t matter.

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. It gave the federal government power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. It said: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, had murdered them.[8]

On the reservation, the agents tried to induce the Sioux to accept the American economy and adopt white ways. Each left to act as he thought best, the agents

the principles of equality and government by consent even

The key to the rise of authoritarians, they explained, is their use of language and false history.[3

Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, northern lawmakers were not about to let it regrow in peacetime.

2013, the Roberts Supreme Court handed down the Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

To turn their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

The protests gave Trump the excuse he needed to use troops against Americans. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Trump tweeted on May 29.

Democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,

In 2006, dark money made up less than $5 million of spending in federal elections. By 2012 it was more than $300 million.[5]

Movement Conservatives described the U.S. as if it were in dire economic straits, but that image was rooted in racial and cultural complaints rather than in reality.

Today’s crisis in democracy has brought us back to the same question that haunted the Founders: Are the principles on which this nation was founded viable? Is it really possible to create a country in which everyone is equal before the law and entitled to have a say in their government, or are some people better than others and thus have the right—and the duty—to rule?

The word conservative began to take on specific political meaning in the U.S. when antislavery northerners refused to honor the Fugitive Slave Act that was part of the Compromise of 1850.

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. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”[

And he talked of how Republicans were determined to protect health care and coverage for preexisting conditions, even while his administration was, at that very moment, in court trying to destroy that access.

replace white men with minorities and women. To stay in control, politicians ramped up attacks on their perceived enemies and began to skew the machinery of government to favor their interests. Wealth surged upward.

The southern strategy marked the switch of the parties’ positions over the issue of race. Johnson knew what that meant: that the nation’s move toward equality would provide a weapon for a certain kind of politician to rise to power. In a hotel in Tennessee after a day spent seeing racial slurs scrawled on signs and an evening of bourbon, Johnson explained the signs to his young aide Bill Moyers: “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he 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. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”[15]

In 1990, GOPAC, the Republican state and local political training organization under the direction of Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, distributed a memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” to elected Republicans. The paper urged them to refer to Democrats with words like corrupt, cheat, disgrace, endanger, failure, hypocrisy, intolerant, liberal, lie, pathetic, sick, steal, traitors, waste, welfare, and abuse of power.[14]

Even though 85 percent of Americans polled in summer 2024 thought abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances, while only 12 percent thought it should be banned entirely, Republicans continued to promise a total ban.

The election and then the presidency of Donald Trump hastened that decline. When the nation’s rising oligarchy met a budding authoritarian, the Republican Party embraced the opportunity to abandon democracy with surprising ease.

Whenever it looked as if marginalized people might get an equal voice, designing political leaders told white men that their own rights were under attack. Soon, they warned, minorities and women would take over and push them aside.[6

In the end, thirty-four people and three companies were indicted or pleaded guilty in the attack on the 2016 election or its cover-up, including Papadopoulos, Manafort, Manafort’s partner Rick Gates, Flynn, Kilimnik, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, twelve Russian intelligence operatives, thirteen Russian nationals, and three Russian companies. Before he left office, Trump pardoned those who had refused to cooperate with the Department of Justice: Flynn, Stone, Manafort, and Papadopoulos.

When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he claimed that Germany was the successor to the Holy Roman Empire that had dominated Central Europe for a thousand years. These leaders believed that their new system would reclaim the past with the ideology of the future, welding pure men into a military and social machine that moved all as one, while pure women supported society as mothers. They set out to eliminate those who didn’t fit their model and to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

As it gathered those angry at the modern world, Reagan’s campaign invited voters to remember a time before Black and Brown voices and women began to claim equal rights. His campaign passed out buttons and posters urging voters to “make America great again.”[

Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said.[5] Reporters were shocked at a political candidate openly calling for a foreign country to attack the U.S., but Trump doubled down, repeating the request.[6]

While Republicans since the 1980s have insisted the symbol of the United States is the whitewashed American cowboy who dominated the West with manly individualism, in fact the key to survival in the American West was family and friends: kinship networks, trading partners, neighbors who would show up for a barn raising. Working together, across racial lines, ethnic lines, gender lines, and age lines, was what enabled people to defend their rights against a small group of elites determined to keep control of the country.

They controlled government simply by refusing to compromise on their principles, enacting policies designed to destroy the liberal consensus, and refusing to consider any measure advanced by their opponents. Thanks to gerrymandering, they didn't have to. Grover Norquist said triumphantly: "We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We just need a president to sign this stuff. . . . Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.

Trump’s preference for acting advisors meant that he put into office those who would not be able to withstand scrutiny. At least two of them were in office illegally: the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, and his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinelli.

There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth,” he said, but he disagreed. “We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.

but he did nothing for more than three hours. After 5:40 p.m., when the National Guard had been deployed without his orders, thus making it clear the rioters would be overpowered before either taking over the government themselves or giving him an excuse to declare martial law, Trump

Black veteran James Meredith of Mississippi was a careful observer. He was also “firmly convinced that only a power struggle between the state and the federal government could make it possible for me or anyone else to successfully” enroll, and complete a course of study, at a state university,

That openness meant those opposing the liberal consensus seemed out of step, people who would be left behind. The Archie Bunker types seemed to be a dying breed, and modern Americans could afford to be charitable toward them, just as they had been toward the Confederates whose ideology the modern Archie Bunkers shared.

Corporations and billionaires promptly formed super PACs, political action committees that were allowed to take funds from “dark money” groups—nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. In 2006, dark money made up less than $5 million of spending in federal elections. By 2012 it was more than $300 million.[5]

To manage the crisis, the administration sidestepped professionals from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and gave Kushner yet more responsibility, putting him in charge of a coronavirus response team to create a so-called public-private partnership that would get the private sector on board to fight the pandemic.

In July, Trump operative George Papadopoulos told an Australian official that the Russians were giving the campaign dirt on Clinton, and the Australian government shared the information with the U.S. By the end of July, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Lincoln’s vision gave the fledgling Republican Party a set of principles to reorganize the government into one that actively worked for ordinary men. Rather than simply protecting the property of wealthy slaveholders, the government would allow all men equal access to resources, including education, so they could be economically secure.

Over three centuries, Americans who believed in the principles of democracy, those ideals articulated by the Founders, however imperfectly they lived them, have asserted the principles of equality and government by consent even in the face of such repression, even as they died for their beliefs. More often than not, those articulating the nation’s true principles have been marginalized Americans who demanded the nation honor its founding promises. Their struggles have constantly renewed the country’s dedication to the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Their fight for equality reveals the true nature of American democracy: it is, and has always been, a work in progress.

Bush’s campaign manager, former Nixon operative Lee Atwater, and media advisor Roger Ailes, who had promoted Nixon in 1968, produced the infamous Willie Horton ad, laying the groundwork for a new kind of right-wing television in which ideological propaganda would be filmed as if it were a news story, making it hard for viewers to tell the difference.

the American cowboy was born of Reconstruction and carried all the hallmarks of the strife of the immediate postwar years: he was a hardworking white man who started from nothing, asked for nothing, and could rise on his own. The reality was that about a third of all cowboys were men of color—black or Mexican, and sometimes Indian—and that few rose to prosperity.

income tax rates from 70 percent to 30 percent, cut estate taxes, and cut windfall profit taxes. At the same time, the administration slashed spending on public welfare programs while pouring money into defense spending, raising it from $267.1 billion in 1980 to $393.1 billion in 1988, from 22.7 percent of public expenditure to 27.3 percent. The national debt tripled from $738 billion

But in March the U.S. outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic threw a monkey wrench into Trump’s plans. The administration had ignored the pandemic-preparedness measures the Obama administration had put in place, and when a wave of desperately ill coronavirus patients hit U.S. hospitals, a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) had medical personnel wearing garbage bags to care for them.

the Founders had enshrined the nation’s principles in the Declaration of Independence. Where in that document was the discussion of “free white men,” the editor asked. In it, he continued, “Is there an intimation about ‘the subject races,’ whether Indian or African? . . . Their ‘one guiding thought,’ as they themselves proclaimed it, was the inalienable right of ALL men to Freedom, as a principle.”[7]

When, in the absence of federal policy, governors shut down their states to combat the spread of the deadly virus, Trump made an extraordinary announcement. He had “absolute authority” to force states to reopen, he said: “When somebody is President of the United States, the authority is total…. The federal government has absolute power,” and he had the “absolute right” to use that power if he wanted to.[4]

stole. Reagan launched his presidential candidacy at Philadelphia, Mississippi, sixteen years and three miles from where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been found murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. “I believe in states’ rights,” Reagan said, and the Republican platform promised to protect the private segregation academies organized to prevent desegregation.[

In 1791, Black mathematician and naturalist Benjamin Banneker directly called out then–secretary of state Thomas Jefferson for praising the “proper ideas of the great valuation of liberty, and the free possession of those blessings to which you were entitled by nature,” while at the same time “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression. . . .”[4]

The merging of Republicanism, Americanism, and religion was clearly expressed in an extraordinary quotation recorded by journalist Ron Suskind in a New York Times Magazine article in 2004. A senior adviser to Bush told Suskind that people like him—Suskind—were in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”77

declaring, “America is One Nation, One People. The welfare, progress, security and survival of each of us reside in the common good…[and] democracy…rests on the confidence that people can be trusted with freedom.” They dismissed “those who traffic in fear, hate, falsehood, and violence” and invited all Americans “who believe that narrow partisanship takes too small account of the size of our task,” to vote for Johnson.[

Cleveland, moving out of the White House despite having won the popular vote, warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor. . . . Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”[5

In 1774, the year after her enslavers relinquished their claim on her, Boston poet Phillis Wheatley wrote to Mohegan cleric Samson Occom about the hypocrisy of leaders who rallied for freedom while practicing enslavement. “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance,” she wrote, adding, “I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us.

In 1971, lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warning that corporate America needed to work harder to counter the liberal consensus and defend what he called “free enterprise.” Angry that activists like Ralph Nader had forced safety regulations onto automobile manufacturers and the tobacco industry, he believed that businessmen were losing their right to run their businesses however they wished.

Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political, or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they have been left behind. Their frustration makes them vulnerable to leaders who promise to make them dominant again. A strongman downplays the real conditions that have created their problems and tells them that the only reason they have been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power. Such leaders undermine existing power structures, and as they collapse, people previously apathetic about politics turn into activists, not necessarily expecting a better life, but seeing themselves as heroes reclaiming the country. Leaders don’t try to persuade people to support real solutions, but instead reinforce their followers’ fantasy self-image and organize them into a mass movement. Once people internalize their leader’s propaganda, it doesn’t matter when pieces of it are proven to be lies, because it has become central to their identity. As a strongman becomes more and more destructive, followers’ loyalty only increases. Having begun to treat their perceived enemies badly, they need to believe their victims deserve it. Turning against the leader who inspired such behavior would mean admitting they had been wrong and that they, not their enemies, are evil. This, they cannot do.

That day was a turning point. The Black Lives Matter movement was a popular protest against rising authoritarianism, and two thirds of adult Americans supported it. But while Republican lawmakers remained silent, the events of June 1 made former political leaders (including all four living presidents), more than 1,250 former members of the Department of Justice, Democratic lawmakers, and, crucially, military leaders take a stand against Trump.

In the years of the early republic, liberalism had meant government restraint to keep from intruding on a man’s liberty. The Civil War Republicans had expanded that definition to mean a government that protected individuals by defending equality before the law and equal access to resources. Progressive Era reformers expanded that concept yet again, understanding that the federal government must restrain the excesses of big business that were crushing individuals.

In the years after President Ronald Reagan took over the White House (where he promptly removed the solar panels), a radical minority once again used the power of language and the power of their own historical myth to tear apart the concept of the common good. Their dismantling of the liberal consensus revived a dangerous trend toward authoritarianism. First, wealth concentrated upward, leaving a large group of Americans dispossessed and angry over their downward mobility. At the same time, popular culture emphasized that those dispossessed Americans were at fault for their failure in a system they increasingly recognized was rigged. Then Republican politicians flooded the media system with propaganda insisting that tax cuts and pro-business government policies were not to blame for the dispossession of white lower- and middle-class Americans. The culprits, they insisted, were lazy, grasping, and immoral minorities and women.

When the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans for the first time, the House in 1929 capped its numbers at 438 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, whom lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today, the average congressional district is 761,169 individuals, which both makes representation less effective and reduces the power of states with more people.[9]

Reagan also married the Republican Party and Movement Conservatism to right-wing religious groups. By 1979 the fundamentalists had successfully taken over the Southern Baptist Convention, electing their candidate to be its president. Under him, the Southern Baptists abandoned their previous willingness to include women and minorities and to support reproductive rights. They became active in politics, staunchly supporting the Republican Party, and in the 1980s numbered about fifteen million people.

On January 3, all ten living former defense secretaries signed an op-ed in The Washington Post warning that any “efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.” They also seemed to put colleagues on notice: “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”[5]

Furious, Trump took to the airwaves at about two-thirty the next morning and declared he had won, although ballots were still being counted and several battleground states had no clear winner. “We won’t stand for this,” he told supporters, assuring them he had won. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”[2] But it didn’t, and by the time all the ballots were counted, the election was not close: Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College,

Roosevelt had inspired Americans to return to honest public men, and after decades of shirking and evasion of their civic duty, Americans had begun “to look at themselves and their institutions straight; to perceive that Firecrackers and Orations once a year, and selling your vote or casting it for unknown nobodies, are not enough attention to pay to the Republic.’’ To celebrate this new, principled America, Wister had written The Virginian. “If this book be anything more than an American story, it is an expression of American faith.

In 1776, the Founders threw off the European tradition dictating that some men were better than others. They declared as “self-evident” the truths that “all men are created equal” and that governments are legitimate only if they rely not on dynasty or religion, but on the consent of the governed. The Founders were so sure of these propositions that they gave them the form of a mathematical constant. They were rebelling against not just one king, but against all kings, and standing firm on the idea that men had a right to determine their own fates.

The first thing to go was fair representation. By 1796, political leaders had divided into two camps, and Jefferson saw that he would have won the presidency if only Virginia’s electors had all voted as a bloc in the Electoral College rather than splitting their votes between him and John Adams of Massachusetts. Jefferson urged Virginia to adopt a winner-take-all system that would give all of the state’s electoral votes to whichever candidate got a simple majority. It was a stunning change and one that appalled Madison, who wanted to amend the Constitution to prevent

The First Congress of the United States passed the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—to put fences around the federal government, saying it could not establish any specific religion, silence the press, police speech, stop the people from assembling peacefully, take away the right of the people to bear arms, deny trials by jury, arbitrarily seize property, and so on. These rights were not rights given to individuals, as the modern Supreme Court has interpreted them, but rather were designed to hold back the government if it began to overreach.

Later that day, a massive police presence, including officers from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), cleared peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square, across from the White House, using tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang explosives to prepare for an appearance by the president. Then, accompanied by senior officials representing the Department of Justice, the National Security Council, the military, and family members—including Kushner and Ivanka—Trump crossed the square and walked to historic St. John’s Episcopal Church. Surrounded by cameras, he held up a Bible

Finally, Republicans illustrated their refusal to accept Democratic governance with a dramatic rejection of the traditional U.S. principle, established in 1799 when Congress passed the Logan Act prohibiting private citizens from negotiating with foreign powers, that partisanship stops at the water’s edge. In 2015, forty-seven lawmakers, including quite senior senators, signed a letter written by freshman extremist Arkansas senator Tom Cotton warning Iranian officials that they would overturn any agreement Iran made with the Obama administration as soon as they could, presumably

Lincoln made it clear that those who wanted the right to self-determination had always had to struggle—and would always have to struggle—against those who wanted power. “The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself,” he said. “No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”[5]

At the July Republican Convention, “never-Trump” delegates fought his nomination, only to be outraged at rules changes that gave Trump far more delegates than he had earned. Still, some could be comforted by the 2016 Republican platform, which offered Movement Conservative Republicans everything they had ever dreamed of. The platform chastised President Barack Obama for “regulating to death a free market economy that he does not like and does not understand” (which was manifestly untrue), called for originalist judges who would stop abortion and gay marriage, and insisted on returning federal power to the states.

Elections in America were also becoming less free and fair. In 2010, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, a plan to take control of statehouses across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census. Through the process of what is called gerrymandering, after Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it), political parties could gain control of extra seats in a state by drawing districts to either “pack” or “crack” their opponents.

In his Farewell Address on January 4, 1981, President Jimmy Carter noted that the undermining of faith in the government’s ability to deal with problems meant that Americans were turning increasingly to “single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens, our own personal views and our own private interests are protected.” This, he warned, distorts the nation’s purpose because “the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.

When Pence refused to participate in the plan—likely knowing that if the coup failed, he’d be the one left holding the bag—Trump fell back on the old tactic of spreading a false narrative through an investigation. He plotted to name Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer for the environmental division of the Justice Department, as attorney general. Clark planned to announce to the battleground state legislatures that the Department of Justice was “investigating various irregularities” in the election—this was a lie—and that they should choose a new set of electors. Only the threat that the entire leadership of the Department of Justice would resign made Trump back down.

The idealized image of American citizenship pleased people like Roosevelt, but there was a negative side to the image of a pure American government of individualistic citizens. Those who seemed to support special interests were often purged from government, even if they had won elections fair and square. Their success in winning office simply proved to mainstream Americans that they were corrupting society and strengthened the resolve to get rid of them. In November 1898, for example, the “best citizens” of Wilmington, North Carolina, launched a race riot to purify the city government of the Populist/African American coalition that had won election in 1896.

Their concerns seemed realized just a week later, when Trump continued the process of destabilizing the government to push an authoritarian agenda. At 4:42 p.m. on January 27, the administration announced a travel ban on people coming from primarily Muslim countries. Executive Order 13769 stopped travel from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for 90 days. The list of countries appeared random—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, countries from which terrorists have sometimes come directly to the U.S., weren’t on the list—and appeared to fulfill a campaign promise and assert a new view of executive power. It also stopped the admission of refugees for 120 days and suspended the Syrian refugee program.

The southern strategy marked the switch of the parties’ positions over the issue of race. Johnson knew what that meant: that the nation’s move toward equality would provide a weapon for a certain kind of politician to rise to power. In a hotel in Tennessee after a day spent seeing racial slurs scrawled on signs and an evening of bourbon, Johnson explained the signs to his young aide Bill Moyers: “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he 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. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”[15] The stage was set, with rhetoric and policy, for the rise of authoritarianism.

Echoing Lincoln, Larson explained, “Our underlying philosophy . . . is this: if a job has to be done to meet the needs of people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government.” Americans had, “for the first time in our history, discovered and established the Authentic American Center in politics. This is not a Center in the European sense of an uneasy and precarious mid-point between large and powerful left-wing and right-wing elements of varying degrees of radicalism. It is a Center in the American sense of a common meeting-ground of the great majority of our people on our own issues, against a backdrop of our own history, our own current setting and our own responsibilities for the future.”[6]

But for all of Whitman’s celebration of the many peoples in the United States, the demand of poorer white men for inclusion in the government was based on the idea of keeping other marginalized people out. States’ rights democracy kept white men in charge, for they were the voters who determined the shape of the state governments. Those white men advanced their own interests at the expense of their Brown and Black neighbors, declaring it the nation’s “Manifest Destiny” to push Indigenous Americans off their lands and take over parts of Mexico to establish plantations and plantation slavery there. Above all, they protected and extended the practice of human enslavement that people like Elizabeth Freeman had successfully challenged seventy years before.

Those who stormed this Capitol and those who instigated and incited and those who called on them to do so” acted “not in service of America, but rather in service of one man” who “has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election…because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interests as more important than his country’s interests and America’s interests, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution,” Biden told the American people. He urged Americans not to succumb to autocracy, but to come together to defend our democracy, “to keep the promise of America alive,” and to protect what we stand for: “the right to vote, the right to govern ourselves, the right to determine our own destiny.”[

The same men who put their lives on the line to establish that all men are created equal literally owned other human beings. They considered Indigenous people “savages” and women subordinate to men by definition. Neither Black men nor Indians nor women fell into their definition of people who were “equal” or who needed to consent to the government under which they lived. Indeed, it was by removing those people from their definition of the body politic that the Founders were able to imagine political equality. If all but a small number of white men were excluded from participating in government, then it wasn’t much of a stretch to see “all men” as having similar interests and as being able to work together to govern themselves. Equality, then, depended on inequality.

The Great Society programs changed America. Forty million Americans were poor in 1960, but by 1969 that number had fallen to twenty-four million. That prosperity was shared by white and nonwhite people more fully than ever before. Black school attendance increased by four years; twice as many Black people found work in professional, technical, and clerical occupations; the Black unemployment rate fell 34 percent, and median Black family income rose 53 percent. In 1960, 55 percent of Black Americans lived below the poverty line; by 1968, the number was 27 percent. In the decade after 1965, infant mortality fell by one third thanks to new medical and nutritional programs. In 1960, 20 percent of Americans had no indoor plumbing; by 1970, that number had fallen to 11 percent.

Thus, the court imposed on the nation a so-called originalism that returned power to the states, leaving the door open for state lawmakers to get rid of business regulation and gut civil rights, but its originalism also left the door open for the federal government to impose laws on the states that are popular only with an extremist minority, exactly contrary to what the Framers tried to write into our Constitution. In its imposition of minority rule first by insisting on states’ rights and then by demanding federal protection of laws it wanted, the Republican Party echoed the southern Democrats before the Civil War. Like today’s Republicans, as southern enslavers lost support, they entrenched themselves in the states, then took over the machinery of the federal government and then the Supreme Court.

In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr., a devout Catholic fresh out of Yale, the son of an oilman, suggested a new approach to destroying the liberal consensus. In God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” Buckley suggested that the whole idea that people would make good decisions through argument based on evidence—the Enlightenment idea that had shaped America since its founding—was wrong. Had that been true, Americans would not have kept supporting the government activism launched by the New Deal. Americans’ faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition,” he said, than the superstitions the Enlightenment had set out to replace.15 Rather than continuing to try to change people’s beliefs through evidence-based arguments, he said, those opposed to the New Deal should stand firm on an “orthodoxy” of religion and individualism and refuse to accept any questioning of those two fundamental p

Declaration of Sentiments. Following the format of the Declaration of Independence, they asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”[5] As proof they listed the facts that men refused to let women vote and compelled their obedience to laws they had no say in creating, including ones that took all their property and gave all power—including that of owning their children—to husbands. Men limited the educational opportunities available to women, shut them out of most professions, and worked to destroy women’s confidence in their own strength to trick them into dependency. The reformers at Seneca Falls demanded “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.

But voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass eighty-four new laws to put the Great Society into place. They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community-development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students. The Social Security Amendments of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over age sixty-five, and Medicaid, which helped cover health care costs for those with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.

In 1934, they sent Wall Street broker Gerald MacGuire to Europe to see how fascist leaders had mobilized veterans to enable them to seize power. When MacGuire returned, he tried to recruit retired U.S. Marine major general Smedley Butler to lead a similar paramilitary coup against FDR. MacGuire claimed to represent U.S. financial interests and to have $6 million to put behind the effort. Butler alerted the authorities and the attempt failed, but fascism had shown anti–New Dealers a way to marry their ideology to popular political activism. Get people fighting first and they can be led toward right-wing politics next. In America the hallmark of budding fascism was not intellectuals discussing how to take power; it was populist violence.[1] There was a straight line from the anti–New Deal violence of the 1930s to the street brawlers at Charlottesville. Since the 1950s, opponents of the liberal consensus had urged supporters to think of themselves as heroic, individualistic cowboys who had not only the right but also the duty to protect their families from the alleged socialism of the government. That