Richardson’s dichotomization of Democrats and Republicans—a stance that is only viable if one willfully excludes reams of easily accessible historical evidence—is intellectually dishonest at best. While there is certainly truth to her depictions of Republican depravity and of Democratic opposition to flagrant conservative bigotry and exploitation, she underplays the fact that the latter opposition was often nominal at best. Moreover, along innumerable other valences of injustice as well—perhaps especially in the realms of foreign policy and criminal justice—liberals have been wholly complicit in sanctioning the violent power and the exploitations of capital, a historical reality that self-serving partisan triumphalist accounts necessarily obfuscate.
Indeed, historians have long held that assessing the content and material effects of U.S. policymaking through a “red-blue binary,” as Lassiter writes in Shaped by the State, produces dangerous “historical distortions.” Chiefly, it masks more consequential bipartisan alignments, including the shared ideological preconceptions of racial capitalism—a pernicious “common sense”—that consigns millions to various forms of premature death by social murder. A raft of scholarship has shown that both liberals and conservatives cheered on racialized law and order, celebrated settler colonial plunder, slashed and privatized social welfare benefits, passed policies that widened the wealth gap, cozied up to corporate elites, toughened border patrol and immigration restrictions, and sanctioned murderous imperial interventions.
This mountain of evidence belies Richardson’s party polarization thesis and points up its fundamental incoherence. Questions arise about whom this discourse ultimately serves: in truth, it’s an ideological outgrowth of a self-interested two-party system and pundit class eager to distract from shared investments in exploitation, dispossession, and criminalization. Even more troubling, Richardson’s project absolves liberals for their participation in defending ideologies and structures that in many ways enabled the Trumpian project they now fear. Trump is not merely a symptom of aberrant Republican derangement: he is fundamentally the creation of the warped prerogatives of capital. At their worst, Richardson’s histories are not liberatory guides for speaking truth to power. Rather, they function as propaganda for an imperial hegemon whose institutions and policies immiserate and kill millions across the globe—regardless of the party in office.
