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Heather Cox Richardson
Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and author of the Internet newsletter Letters from an American, which has more than one million subscribers. She spoke with The Progressive on December 28, following a tour for her latest book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Excerpts from the interview, edited for clarity and length, follow.
Q: Democracy Awakening seeks to answer a question that baffles many Americans: How did we get here?
Heather Cox Richardson: What I realized, the day I came up with the book, was that the questions people ask me most often are, “How did we get here? What on Earth is going on? And how do we get democracy back? How do we get out of this moment?”
The first section [of the book] says we got where we are because there was a backlash against the New Deal government [of President Franklin D. Roosevelt]. And that takes you to the rise of former President Donald Trump, not simply because he was a continuation of that [reaction], but because he took the ideology that was articulated by those people who opposed the New Deal and turned it into a movement.
Viking Press
The last section goes back to the establishment of the United States and its history—a lot of people have missed that [the book] was intended to reclaim both American history and language about who we are, [and to argue that] authoritarians rise by perverting that language and that history. It’s also a how-to manual for promoting the expansion of liberal democracy.
I try to look at what’s happening in the world today that I think somebody in 150 years will need to understand or will look at and say, “Hey, what was important in 2023?”
Part of it is me trying to highlight, as a political historian, what the moving pieces are that matter, and part of it is trying to leave a record of this country for the future. Whether it’s a country reclaiming our democracy or [losing it] remains to be seen.
Q: Your book details how Republicans have endangered American democracy, but it also discusses progressive gains and reasons for hope. What should we be hopeful about?
Cox Richardson: There are a number of reasons why people should be hopeful. The first is that I believe the project of human self-determination is the ultimate goal of humanity. It is a profoundly human project, the idea that we get to control our destinies.
The problem is how much damage can be done when a strongman comes into place and stops the ability of people to do that. There’s always pushback. There will always be a crisis in which a strongman falls. But they can do an awful lot of damage before that happens.
In a much more immediate sense, the American people have tended to preserve their quest to expand liberal democracy, in part because marginalized peoples have kept those concepts in front of us all the time. Because [marginalized people] have been excluded, they’ve insisted on recognizing the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence—that we all have a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in our government.
People finally have woken up to what’s happened in this country over the last forty years. And one of the reasons they didn’t pay attention to the many steps that happened after World War II, or really after the 1930s, to try and tear apart this liberal consensus was because they thought it was so obvious that it would never be challenged.
You hear it nowadays, with people saying, “They will never touch Social Security and Medicare.” Well, those plans are literally on the table. The [U.S. Supreme Court’s] Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision of June 2022, which took away from the American people what had been recognized as a Constitutional right for fifty years, woke up an awful lot of people. All of the sudden, it really matters. And it really matters in a daily, visceral way to everybody.
Q: Why is it so important for Americans today to know about U.S. history and world political history?
Cox Richardson: My anecdotal observations are that when one tends to read the news today, it comes at you like birdshot. It’s scattered all over the place and you can’t see how one thing fits into another. There’s no framework. What history gives us is the framework to say, “Oh, I get why it’s important that there are struggles in the Black Sea. I get why it’s important that former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley refuses to say that slavery caused the Civil War.” You see the larger pictures as opposed to just sort of feeling like you’re inside a pinball machine. I find it very grounding to be able to say, “I get how this story fits. And I get why this story is important.”
Q: Looking to the 2024 presidential election, what concerns you about another Trump presidency? Do you think there are other similarly dangerous Republican candidates?
Cox Richardson: My concerns about a second Trump presidency are the same as everybody else’s: that he is putting in place all the tools to become a dictator. And that’s just not arguable . . . . [Another] Trump presidency will end American democracy.
But I am equally concerned at this point by any Republican candidate. If you look at Project 2025—or a similar project called Project 47—there are plans for any Trump-like character to do things that are very similar. Remember, Trump is seventy-seven . . . . There are many places where a character like Trump may not end up finishing this race.
The American people have tended to preserve their quest to expand liberal democracy, in part because marginalized peoples have kept those concepts in front of us all the time.
But any strongman could, and we could actually be worse off with a smarter strongman, because what’s happened in the Republican Party is that Reagan Republicanism . . . was the ideology that dominated the Republican Party from 1980 until about 2021. And those who wanted to get rid of business regulation, taxes, the social safety net, civil rights protections, all those sorts of things, knew they didn’t have the votes to do it, because Americans really liked those things.
So they teamed up with evangelical white Christians and traditionalists who didn’t like the idea of women’s rights, to bring them as voters into the party, and what’s happened over the course of the last year is that group, thanks to Donald Trump, has been the driving force in the Republican Party. They’ve pulled the party behind the idea not of getting rid of the government so that business people can do whatever they want, but rather of having a much stronger government that forces the majority of us to adhere to their religious beliefs.
If you look at somebody like Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, or Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, they’re not talking about a smaller government. They’re talking about a bigger government that can both get rid of abortion under all circumstances and the protection of minority rights. That gets rid of public schools, for example, and [they can] tell a business like Disney, for example, or the cruise ships in Florida, that they can’t make decisions based on market forces but rather they have to do what the theocrats want them to.
And any Republican today, because of the ways in which Trump MAGA Republicans have bled the party of any opponents, is beholden to that group of people and will take the Republican Party in that direction. So if they get into federal power at any level, that’s what we’re looking at.
Q: Some Democratic voters, particularly Muslim and Arab American leaders in swing states, have pledged to “Abandon Biden” and withdraw their support if he doesn’t call for a ceasefire in Gaza. How do you think this will impact the election? Is it an effective strategy?
Cox Richardson: It’s way too early to make a prediction about who’s going to vote and how in 2024. I’m watching the Middle East really closely, and it has been the Biden Administration that has managed to open up the humanitarian corridors into Gaza, [and] put pressure on [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to open a second gate into Gaza [for] humanitarian aid. And Trump was talking about a Muslim ban.
I will say that anybody who thinks a Trump Administration will be better for Palestinians—after Trump and Netanyahu have clearly forged a strong alliance, and Trump basically has said he’ll give Netanyahu an open hand to do whatever he wants, and the extremist members of Netanyahu’s cabinet have called for the flattening of Gaza—anybody who thinks it would be a better move to jump to the Republicans rather than Biden . . . maybe ought to think a little more deeply about a long-term game.
Q: What shifts do you see, moving forward, that will bring about positive change?
Cox Richardson: There’s such a demographic change at work in this country. People of my generation, at least somebody like me, have been fighting a holding action our whole lives. And the idea that we get to hand the world off to young people who have new ideas, new experiences, and new understandings about what they want government to do—protect the environment, get some freaking gun safety underway again, have a fair economy, protect civil rights, protect abortion rights—that’s actually an extraordinary reason for hope.
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic said in my presence a few months ago that by 2028, [young people are] going to be the deciding factor in votes. So by 2028, those of us who care about the preservation of democracy and progressive causes are going to be able to breathe really easily. But we’ve got to make sure there’s a 2028. 2024 is the moment for us to see that we get to hand the ball off to you to do something new and exciting with it.