“Republicans tied equality before the law to the principles of the Founders. They emphasized the danger of giving up democracy to an elite that based its power on a white supremacist reading of U.S. history.” If these lines give you a bit of whiplash, they should, but renowned historian Heather Cox Richardson is not wrong. The Republican Party began in a struggle for democracy against the interests of the rich, the powerful, and the racist. Her book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, tells the story of democracy in America — of both the machinations of elites who used the state to increase their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else, and of the democratic and egalitarian movements who sought to expand civil rights and economic benefits to all. In this respect, it offers a celebration of the Republican Party of the 1860s and 1870s as well as the tragic story of how the party turned, first towards elite interests at the end of the 19th century before embracing the politics of white supremacy beginning in the mid-20th.
In the United States, a book about democracy is inherently also a book about race because anti-Blackness has been one of the defining ideological features of American democracy. Richardson leans into this dynamic, explaining the transformation of the Republican Party from one concerned with political and economic equality for Black and white Americans (as it waged a war of Indigenous genocide) into one stoking racism and white supremacy to cling to power. For Richardson, this evolution of the GOP is among the central causes of the current crisis, one in which the party is poised to nominate a twice-impeached insurrectionist and serial fraudster for another presidential term. She argues that “the Southern Strategy marked the switch over the parties’ positions over the issue of race,” one that would “provide a weapon for a certain kind of politician to rise to power” (39).
As President Lyndon Johnson observed, “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” (39). The eerie words of Johnson conjure images of a sea of adoring white faces wearing Trump paraphernalia as the former president spews Nazi-era slogans about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” Not that the Nazi imagery is anything new for this “America First” movement, its oblique references to a “Lügenpresse” disseminating “fake news,” or indeed its embrace of the symbolsand tactics of the putsch.
