Summary of Democracy Awakening By Heather Cox Richardson: Notes on the State of America

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Democracy Awakening By Heather Cox Richardson: Notes on the State of America

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Democracy Awakening is a compelling narrative by Heather Cox Richardson, author of the popular daily newsletter LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN. Richardson explains how a small group of wealthy people have weaponized language and promoted false history, leading to authoritarianism and creating a disaffected population. She argues that taking the country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation's true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Richardson's calm prose is realistic and optimistic about the future of democracy, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, socialism fears, the death of the liberal consensus, and the birth of "movement conservatism." Democracy Awakening provides a roadmap for the nation's future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Sep 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215495599

Willie M. Joseph

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FOREWORD

America is at a crossroads, as the country once stood as a global symbol of democracy has been on the brink of authoritarianism. The rise of authoritarians in the United States began with Hitler's consolidation of political influence, which led to his absolute dictatorship in 1932. Social scientists and historians have explained how authoritarians like Hitler harnessed societal instability into their own service, using language and false history to gain power.

Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political, or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel left behind. They downplay the real conditions that have created their problems and tell them that the only reason they have been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power. As these leaders undermine existing power structures, people become activists, seeing themselves as heroes reclaiming the country.

Since the 1930s, the United States has managed to avoid destruction by sailing between fascism and communism. The country was rocked by economic trouble and the collapse of authority, and had its own strong fascist movement with prominent spokespeople. However, just two years later, Americans went to war against fascism and within six years, the United States was leading the defense of democracy around the world, rejecting authoritarianism in favor of the idea that all people are created equal.

Americans took a different course in the 1930s not because they were immune to authoritarianism but because they rallied around the language of human self-determination embodied in the Declaration of Independence. They chose to root the United States not in an imagined heroic past but in the country's real history, the constant struggle of all Americans to make the belief that they are all created equal and have a right to have a say in their democracy come true.

In the 1930s, the struggle between equality and inequality in the U.S. took shape as a fight between democracy and fascism. The Founders' embrace of equality depended on keeping women, people of color, and Black Americans unequal. This paradox had the potential for authoritarian rhetoric, and those determined to undermine democracy have gone down that road. In the past, politicians warned white men that their own rights were under attack, warning that minorities and women would take over and push them aside.

During the Civil War, the majority of Americans worked to defeat the enslavers' new definition of the United States, but the thinking behind the Confederacy continued. This thinking has led to a crisis in the 1950s, when business, religious, and political leaders insisted that the federal government's defense of civil rights was an attempt to replace white men with minorities and women. In the years after 1980, a political minority took over Congress, state legislatures, courts, and the Electoral College, and by 2016 the Economist Intelligence Unit had downgraded the U.S. from a full democracy to a flawed democracy.

The election and presidency of Donald Trump hastened the decline of democracy, with his followers embracing the false past of the Confederates and trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election to stay in power. Critics argue that liberal democracy's focus on individual rights undermines traditional values that hold societies together, such as religion and ethnic or racial similarities.

In today's increasingly connected global world, the concept of humans having the right to determine their own fate remains as true today as it was when the Founders put that statement into the Declaration of Independence.

PART 1

UNDERMINING DEMOCRACY

American Conservatism

In the 1930s, Republicans who opposed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal began to form an alliance with southern Democrats and westerners to stand against it. They argued that a government that answered to ordinary Americans' needs was a dangerous, radical experiment. However, conservatism was not an accurate description of conservatism; it was a political position. In the 1920s, Republicans had taken control of both Congress and the White House from Progressive Era Democrats, turning the government over to businessmen. They believed that the federal government would provide jobs for workers and exciting products for a new middle class.

The Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression revealed the poorly distributed nation's paper prosperity. FDR warned that the Republican system worked only for those at the top, and he told the American people they deserved a New Deal. To break out of the Depression, Americans embraced FDR's promise to use the federal government to protect ordinary Americans. In 1932, they elected FDR president and put Democrats in charge of Congress. Frances Perkins, a well-educated social worker, brought the idea of the federal government protecting workers, women, and children.

In 1937, members of the conservative southern Democrats and rump group of Republicans organized against the New Deal, agreeing that the growing power of the federal government threatened traditional values: individual hard work, private property, a balanced federal budget, and local control of politics. The Conservative Manifesto, leaked to the press, demanded tax cuts, cuts to social welfare spending, an end to government support for labor, states' rights, home rule, and local self-government.

The concept of conservatism in America originated during the French Revolution when Edmund Burke argued that government should promote stability by supporting traditional structures such as social hierarchies, the church, property, and the family. This idea meant that government could be a positive force in society rather than a negative one. However, the term rarely appeared in the political realm until the 1840s, when it referred to someone who rejected radical ideas like abolitionists or women's rights activists.

The term conservative gained specific political meaning in the U.S. when antislavery northerners