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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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]

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]

Appointing unqualified figures is a key tactic of authoritarians, who turn to staffers who are fiercely loyal because they are not qualified or talented enough to rise to power in a nonpartisan system. They recognize that without the leader who elevated them, they will never again be in power—and sometimes will be in prison—so they will cleave to him to the end.

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 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.

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

By 1945, most Republicans joined with Democrats to embrace a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted investment in infrastructure.

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

Across the economy, incomes doubled from 1945 to 1970.

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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.

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research later found that in the last three months of the election, users shared false content on Facebook thirty-eight million times.

In America the hallmark of budding fascism was not intellectuals discussing how to take power; it was populist violence.[1]

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]

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.

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.

Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan echoed the divisive rhetoric Nixon had used and ran for the presidency by warning voters that government couldn’t provide solutions to the problems of the day. Instead, he said, government was the problem. He won with 50.7 percent of the vote.

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.

Chaney and white, Jewish New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. As rage over the three missing men grew, Johnson pressured the House to pass the bill.[5] It did. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2.

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.

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,

The fundamental story of America is the constant struggle of all Americans, from all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities, to make the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in our democracy come true. We are always in the process of creating “a more perfect union.

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.

Famously, in 1852, formerly enslaved maritime worker Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He honored the Founders as “great men” but asked: “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?”[3]

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]

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.

Regardless of who was in the White House, and with the help of the language of authoritarianism and the use of mythological history, the MAGA Republicans appeared to be on track to accomplish what the Confederates could not: the rejection of the Declaration of Independence and its replacement with the hierarchical vision of the Confederates

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.

Nixon began his presidential term by trying to appeal to Movement Conservatives without undermining the liberal consensus. But his vague promises of “peace with honor” in Vietnam caught up with him when instead of ending the war, he escalated it. Protesters called him out, and he responded by conflating loyalty to America with loyalty to the president.

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.

Republicans channeled groups of opposition into a movement that reinvented American history. By the end of February 2009, they were calling themselves the Tea Party, after the 1773 event in which Bostonians threw tea into Boston Harbor to protest their lack of a say in their government. The name had a second meaning as well: protesters said they were Taxed Enough Already.

Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and language of dominance heartened right-wing gangs that had previously operated on society’s margins. Six months into Trump’s presidency, they launched a coming-out party. On August 11, 2017, racists, antisemites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and members of other “alt-right” groups met in Charlottesville, Virginia, to “Unite the Right.

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]

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.

Leaders outlawed possession of books and pamphlets that questioned the slave system—those that urged solidarity among poor white men as well as those challenging enslavement—and they provoked violence against those they called agitators. By closing off access to factual information, enslavers could use the media, churches, society, and politics to spread their worldview first in the South and then nationally.

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

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

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

Bush was willing to raise taxes to address the $2.1 trillion debt Reagan had run up in his eight years in office. These tax hikes drew the fury of Movement Conservatives, who called him, and other traditional Republicans, “Republicans in name only,” or RINOs, who were helping to bring “socialism” to America. Republican lawmakers moved further right, and those openly supporting the liberal consensus disappeared from party leadership.

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.

By simply threatening a filibuster, Republicans could kill popular legislation, even a gun safety law for background checks before gun purchases that had been introduced after the massacre of twenty-six people, including twenty small children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Although 90 percent of Americans supported the bill, forty-five senators, representing just 38 percent of the American people, killed it.[10]

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.

The 1805 case of Martin v. Massachusetts explored whether women could make their own political decisions. The presiding judge concluded that the idea of liberty could not possibly mean the destruction of men’s patriarchal authority. Instead, men included women in the new order by redefining them as “Republican mothers,” whose role in the new society was not to vote and hold office, but rather to rear their sons to be good citizens and patriots.

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.

Courting white supremacists began the process of appealing to voters’ fears, effectively dividing the country between allegedly good Americans and those allegedly seeking to destroy it. Nixon’s media handlers vowed to reach voters by emotion rather than reason. “Voters are basically lazy,” one wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. . . . The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”[1]

In fact, Mueller’s report established that Russia had illegally intervened in the election to benefit Trump and that the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mueller publicly complained to Barr about the spin he had put on the report, but it was too late: Trump crowed that he was exonerated, and his supporters not only bought it, they accepted it as proof that the institutions of government were persecuting their president.

The next day, September 26, the House Intelligence Committee released the complaint to the public, and people could read for themselves the whistleblower’s concern that Trump was soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election and that both Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr were implicated in the scheme. The complaint laid out how Trump tried to strong-arm Zelensky into smearing the Bidens and how White House officials had buried the tape of the call on a secret server.[

Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, wanted to regain power over Ukraine by installing a puppet government under his ally Viktor Yanukovych. To do so, in 2004 the men turned to the American political consultant who had been managing Republican campaigns since Nixon: Paul Manafort. Using Manafort’s signature methods of demonizing opponents, Yanukovych won the Ukraine presidency in 2010, but his attempts to tie the country to Russia failed. In 2014, the Ukrainian people threw him out. Putin then invaded Ukraine and claimed Crimea.

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 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.

Within days, Trump admitted that on July 25 he had called the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to enlist his help against former vice president Joe Biden, who was beating Trump in most polls going into the 2020 election season. Zelensky was desperate for the money Congress had approved to help his country fight Russian-backed separatists in the regions Russia had occupied after the 2014 invasion, but Trump indicated he would release the money only after Zelensky announced an investigation into the actions of Biden’s son Hunter during his time on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

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.

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.

With Yanukovych’s removal, Manafort was out of a job, and he owed about $17 million to allies of Yanukovych and Putin. His longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising the floundering presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and Manafort stepped in to help. He did not take a salary, but immediately after getting the job, he did reach out to a Russian oligarch to whom he owed millions, asking him: “How do we use [this] to get whole?”[2] Manafort began to advise the Trump campaign in March 2016, and by April, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Putin had launched an effort to hurt the Clinton campaign in order to boost Trump’s chances.

Obamacare, he claimed, was “about capitalism versus socialism.” Republicans opposed socialism, O’Reilly said, “but Republicans have not been able to convince the majority of Americans that income redistribution is harmful.”[4] There was another solution to that dilemma, though: flooding the zone with propaganda. In January 2010, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, whose professional career had been spent opposing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. It ruled that corporations could spend unlimited money in campaign advertising so long as they were not formally working with a candidate or a party.

The administration’s full-blown embrace of the long-standing attempt to destroy the active federal government of the liberal consensus did more than that. It re-created exactly the conditions the liberal consensus was designed to end: it enabled a few well-connected individuals to turn a public need into a private fortune. When other countries sent masks, gowns, and so on, they went not to the states or to FEMA but to the private sector to sell at up to fifteen times their usual cost. The official in charge of distributing the materials said this was because the private sector already had efficient distribution systems in place and, he told reporters, “I’m not here to disrupt a supply chain.”[2]

But not everyone agreed. In 1858, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience: “I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments . . . are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. . . . Whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”[14]

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.

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.

Nixon pulled together a coalition of pro-business Republicans, southern racists, traditionalists, and “law and order” voters to win the White House despite the fact that more Americans voted for other candidates than voted for him. Time magazine said Nixon’s “Middle Americans” prayed, loved America, and hated protesters and the “angry minorities” who got the government’s attention while all they got was condescension and tax bills. They worried they were losing their country to liberals, intellectuals, radicals, and defiant youngsters helped by a lying communications industry. They liked traditional family structures and worried about women working outside the home. They liked Goldwater and politicians like Reagan, who promised to end protests even “if it takes a bloodbath.”[4]

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. But this Enlightenment idea must be replaced, Buckley argued in God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” because Americans kept choosing the liberal consensus, which, to his mind, was obviously wrong. He concluded that the nation’s universities must stop using the fact-based arguments that he insisted led to “secularism and collectivism,” and instead teach the values of Christianity and individualism. His traditional ideology would create citizens who would vote against the “orthodoxy” of the liberal consensus, he said. Instead, they would create a new orthodoxy of religion and the ideology of free markets.[5

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

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.

That was a triumph, but “those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning…. Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.” Johnson celebrated that the bill had bipartisan support of more than two thirds of the lawmakers in Congress and that it enjoyed the support of “the great majority of the American people.” He emphasized that the law “does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others.” He took on the old trope that Black Americans wanted “special treatment” and said that the law simply made sure those people the Founders had declared were created equal would now “also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.” “Its purpose is not to punish. Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions—divisions which have lasted all too long. Its purpose is national, not regional. Its purpose is to promote a more abiding commitment to freedom, a more constant pursuit of justice, and a deeper respect for human dignity.