Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (Viking, 2023)
At the beginning of David Byrne’s wonderful movie True Stories, the filmaker/narrator asks his viewers, “Do you like music? I know…everybody says they do.” That also seems to me to be true of democracy. Everybody says they like it, and they also fear for its future. At least in the U.S., there is a tremendous amount of concern in the air about “losing our democracy,” as if that is something we’ve had here for a long time, but is about to either wither away or be stolen from us.
In a number of reviews here at 3:16 as well as in other writings, I have argued that, because of the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the absence of recall and referendum, and a bunch of other anti-democratic institutions or the absence of some mechanism needed to give all citizens the appropriate voice in their governance, we have never had much of a democracy in the United States. But I won’t beat that drum again here. Instead, I will here suppose for the sake of argument that whatever it is that we have had in the U.S., since women got a Constitutional right to vote in 1920, meets some minimum standard and is therefore entitled to be called a democratic system.
Well, is this democracy about to disappear or be stolen away from us? Among those who are mightily concerned about the likelihood of such an eventuality is Heather Cox Richardson, a prolific internet content provider (said to be the Queen of Substack) as well as a Boston College professor. But, while Richardson’s fear is reasonable and widespread, her take on the matter is nevertheless a bit unorthodox. I have argued recently that the terms “progressive” and “populist” have been pointlessly made into fighting words by numerous academics–not only as they are applied to current political positions, but with respect to their application to various early 20th Century agitators. In her book, Richardson takes up this same cudgel regarding the term “conservative.” Many of us have heard that the party of Trump should no longer be considered authentically conservative, since it clearly opposes such things as international hawkishness, free trade, law and order, and the view that no person should be above the law. But that’s not what Richardson is getting at. For her, to be conservative is no more or less than to be inspired by the opening words of The Declaration of Independence. That’s why, in her view, Lincoln was right to castigate those who wanted to retain slavery in America as the real radicals.
In fact, Richardson takes the view that the good guys are always the true conservatives. Even FDR’s New Deal, a batch of policies nearly always described as, well, “New,” is characterized by Richardson as the conservative position. That is certainly odd. Among the New Deal programs she lists are the following: a “Brain Trust” to replace business moguls in planning our economic future, stock market regulation, limitation on the ability of bankers to use depositors’ money for speculation, maximum daily hours and minimum wages for workers, prohibition of child labor, the right to join unions, higher tax rates on the rich, the WPA, a basic safety net, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and a female Secretary of Labor. But she nevertheless insists that we recognize FDR to be the conservative. Why? Because, for Richardson, the “traditional values” in America aren’t private property, a balanced budget, local control of politics, reward for “hard work,” and those sorts of things, but rather “the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal” and [she goes on] are provided with “equal access to resources to enable them to work hard and rise.” (One can almost hear echoes of George’s Single Tax “conservatism” here). She is quite categorical about this, insisting that “those taking a stand against business regulation and racial advances in the 1930s were not true American conservatives; they were the same dangerous radicals Lincoln and the Republicans of his era warned against.
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that this “what may seem reformist to the shallow is often seen to be the more conservative stance by deep thinkers” line is entirely new. For example, in the first volume of his 1911 treatise, “Modern Democracies,” Lord Bryce wrote that “The barons and prelates of England who extorted Magna Charta from the king complained of his tyrannical action [that it was] contrary to the old customs of the nation, and obtained from him a promise to abandon these and to abide by…the ancient and general customary law of the land.” Bryce claims, in fact, that the first struggle for Liberty in the sixth century B.C. was a battle against the sort of oppression in which an oligarchy or a tyrant could take one’s property or put one to death “in defiance of old usage and common justice.” So, much as a number of contemporary academics insist that “progressive” and “populist” only be used for positions that the left-leaning approve of, the same game can be played with “conservative.” And that’s just what Richardson does in her book.
Of course, the dreaded MAGA supporters also claim an affinity to sacred traditional values. And, as Richardson mentions herself, “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.” That’s not terribly different from what is being sought by the left-wing “conservatives” for whom Richardson has so much admiration. At any rate, somewhere in the first hundred pages, she starts calling those who pretty much everybody else would call “conservatives,” MOVEMENT CONSERVATIVES.
A lot of this book is devoted to disturbing stories about the horrendous treatment that has been afforded to African Americans over the last century in the U.S. Richardson shows particular indignation toward the ill-treatment of Black war heroes and other impressive patriots. While apparently anecdotal, such stories are relevant to democratic theory because there can’t be any real democracy without absolutely equal treatment and the protection democratic rights for all citizens. (Once again, my own view is that the moral she should have drawn here is that there has never been much in the way of authentic democracy in the U.S., and still isn’t, but as I have promised not to beat that horse in this review….)
No prospective reader should worry that all the stories here are upsetting, however. The elements of Richardson’s progressive pastiche are sometimes amusing. For example, one chapter goes into surprising detail about the characters depicted in the once popular television show, “Bonanza.” For her, the land-wealthy Cartwright family may have been the most dangerous of the many cowboy characters populating American TV screens during the late 50s and 60s. The rugged individualism, especially when thought of in connection with the growing popularity of William F. Buckley’s Catholic (movement) conservatism, is taken as symbolic not only of Goldwater-style anti-government libertarianism, but of racism (Hop-Sing or no Hop-Sing). It’s not clear whether Richardson is suggesting that Americans were provided cowboy content by network moguls with the intent of nudging viewers to the right, or that the average U.S. television owner had begun to prefer shoot ‘em ups to, say, “I Love Lucy” or “I Married Joan” as a result of arguments they’d heard Buckley make on “Firing Line.” The moral Richardson wants to push is quite clear though: cowboys and their homespun ideas of gun justice make bad models for the American citizenry because gunslingers were insufficiently “conservative” (in the heterodoxical sense of the word that is pushed in this book). I take it Richardson would claim that Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison would not have approved of Ben, Adam, Hoss, or even “Little Joe” Cartwright–to say nothing of Bret Maverick, but would have loved Dick Cavett. I can’t resist mentioning in this context that Richardson also has little use for Wilder’s Pa Ingalls character, a later Michael Landon TV role. He, too, chose independence over a “community” of folks he’d never met but apparently should have wanted to march with to the local polling place, hand-in-hand.
Naturally, the rise of Nixononian and Reaganesque “movement conservatism” is covered in some detail here. Brutal racism is tied together with hawkishness in Vietnam (and Cambodia), election interference and dirty tricks, welfare cheats, anti-choice agitation, vitriolic anti-communism, creation of foreign puppet polities, lower corporate taxes, deregulation, school vouchers, violence toward protestors, etc. Pretty much all the regularly checked-off bad-guy stuff. In this way, democracy itself is conflated with nearly every policy that both the old- and new-left approves of and anti-democracy is balled up with all the things that they hate. Unfortunately, that’s precisely the same sort of mischief that right-wingers enjoy engaging in. Democracy should be understood to be a matter of the majority getting what it wants (except when it wants to limit access to speech, ballots, association, etc. by some group it opposes). Certainly, the repellent attacks on minorities that Richardson focuses on: the racism, the intent to make voting difficult or impossible for certain cohorts, the gerrymandering, the suppressing of political speech, etc.--are all appropriate to discuss in a book focused on democratic theory. But throwing in every favorite economic, environmental, and social policy one likes is not. Readers may notice that there is no mention of unprecedented stagflation or “malaise” in connection with Jimmy Carter’s term in office, or of attempted wage-price controls or China diplomacy in connection with Nixon’s term. As Adam Gopnik remarks in his New Yorker review of this book, “The strength of our democracy, in Richardson’s view, evidently depends on the continuing electoral victories of the people we favor….Praising the people who agree with you is the easy part of democratic government. The hard part is building a superintending architecture that wins the consent even of those you hate.” To be fair to our author, however, when one has solid evidence, as we do in the U.S., that most of the positions with which Richardson agrees are also approved of by a substantial majority of voters, it can be much trickier to separate the process from the substance.
When we reach Donald Trump’s golden escalator, we are treated to all of the classics. The bullying of a disabled journalist, pussy-grabbing, Russia, Russia, Russia, bleach injection, good people on both sides, twenty thousand lies, pathological narcissism, January 6th hostages/heroes, all the best people, Roger Stone, theft of SCOTUS nominees, the whole repulsive magilla. It’s akin to reading a transcript of a dozen Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid episodes knitted together by chapter titles.
Now, I want to assure my readers that I intend no equivalencies to be drawn between MAGA Republicans and even those Democrats I don’t care for. While the latter group can be annoying and confused, I take the cult of Trump to be an existential threat to the U.S. republic, just as Richardson does. But while pointing out these well-known evils for the umpteenth time might make her book valuable if anybody but her substack subscribers would read it, it’s no more than the department of redundancy department for those who, like me, would vote for a random woodchuck if that would help keep Trump out of the White House (whether the little furry guy were appropriately nominated by his party or not–I mean even if she was only 3 years old and was born in Canada–she’d still have my vote!). But these once remarkable Trump hits are just oldies now, earworms even. Surely, CNN and MSNBC watchers have memorized their lyrics.
Democracy Awakening is divided into three parts, “Undermining Democracy,” “The Authoritarian Experiment,” and “Reclaiming Democracy.” Part 2 is just a depressing continuation of Part 1, but Part 3 goes back to the days of the sainted founders (though some of them are characterized repeatedly as “enslavers”) in an attempt to inspire readers to wake the hell up and try to put the country back on the track they track those enslaving sages planned for us. While Richardson recognizes that the U.S. Constitution, “hammered out by fifty-five young white men sweltering in Philadelphia in summer 1787” was not completely perfect in its 18th Century form, she clearly admires its many separation-of-power echoes of Montesquieu. And she is grateful that “They wrote into the Constitution that future generations could amend it.” She fails to mention that some of its most offensive characteristics, like the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the Senate, cannot be altered at all.
There are several chapters in this last Part devoted to the heroism of Lincoln and the Northerners who fought for justice in the Civil War. They’re followed by a brief history of Reconstruction and Jim Crow (where, surprisingly for a book of this ilk, Rutherford Hayes is made to be one of the good guys). But, before long we find ourselves back in Richardson’s comfort zone: the eras of the New Deal and Great Society. Carter and Biden are once again receiving praise and Trump gets another round of pounding. She’s right in nearly all of this history, of course, but, except for one or two stories I had not heard before, this seems to me a wholly uninteresting, indeed puerile work. It is a democracy book that says almost nothing about what democracy is or how it might be improved, except that (1) it requires the equal treatment of all voters; and (2) it is in grave danger in the U.S. at present. I suspect that at least 95% of her readers already know both of those things. As Byrne would say, “Things fall apart. It’s scientific.”
About the Author
Walter Horn is a philosopher of politics and epistemology.
His 3:16 interview is here.
Other Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews
His blog is here