Heather Cox Richardson on How We Got Here and What History Tells Us About Saving Our Democracy

Like millions of us, I love me some Heather Cox Richardson, so when she appears as a guest on a podcast or is on the TV, I tune in. This week she was on Nicolle Wallace’s Best People podcast. I was struck by several things that she had to say about how we got to this sorry state and how we might could very well survive it. Here are the three most important take aways from their discussion.

Rediscovering Our Agency

In the 1850’s and the Republican Party

Heather Cox Richardson (can you refer to her in any other way?) compared our current national political moment to that in the 1850s as the Republican Party emerged. People then were discovering their agency, that they could affect the debate about slavery and the direction of the country. In the run up to the Civil War, tensions were building to a head. The Southern slave-owning oligarchs were seeking to cement their hold on the federal government and install their brand of single-party pseudo-democratic minority rule on the entire country. The Whigs were failing. They had no answer to the push for expanding slavery into the western territories and the blatant violations of the previous agreements like the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850.

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE occurred in 1820 and allowed that slavery would only be possible in Missouri and the states and territories located south of its border.

THE COMPROMISE of 1850 stated that the white people in the territories acquired in the Mexican-American War could vote on whether they would allow slavery. Of course, much of the arid agriculture of the SouthWest would not require slavery, but that wouldn’t necessarily impede those whites from wanting to have slaves anyway.

It all fell apart with THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT of 1854 which allowed all territories that had been guaranteed to be slave-free up until that point to hold popular referendums to allow slavery. This led directly to a violent confrontation between the slavers and abolitionists in Kansas which we fondly refer to as Bloody Kansas. And, of course the dread Dred Scott SCOTUS decision in 1857 that ruled the US government had no authority to prohibit slavery because it violated the right to own private property guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment — How long before the Roberts Court reaffirms Dred Scott?

The US was coming apart at its seams not just because of slavery but because the only way to preserve it in the Union was for the slave lords of the American South to limit democracy to themselves.

Abolition became the central issue in the politics of the day, and average American citizens realized that they had to act — to find their agency and use it — if the franchise was not going to be limited once again to only wealthy property-owning white men (most states limited voting to white men regardless of property ownership status but a few allowed Black men to vote).

Getting Involved Today

Heather Cox Richardson says that she frequently hears from people who preface their remarks with, “I’m not usually political” before asking her about a political issue. She goes on to talk about how many average Americans have stepped up to run for something. Amanda Litman, president and co-founder of Run for Something, reports on Pod Save America that they have recruited over 4,000 candidates. Their website states that 80,000 people have explored the possibility of running for something since the Orange Caricature’s Inauguration in 2025.

She goes on to say that one of the ways we can resuscitate our democracy is getting people involved in public institutions and agencies. Participating in real concrete ways in our society. We need to create ways for people to access our democracy beyond just voting. Campaigns, political parties, civic organizations. There are a plethora of ways to do so, and we’re seeing an increase in that grass roots rank and file involvement.

Popular Populist Policies are Considered Far Lefts

HCR notes that we hear some issues with widespread support like Medicare for All (80% support) or gun safety measures (75%) are far left when that much support should make them centrist. However, as noted on Ye Older Blogge many times, politicians supporting those measures aren’t elected. She hints at the reasons they are not.

First, the media represents the conservative interpretation of America is the correct one. I will add a few examples: the Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility and national defense, the welfare state is inherently bad, wrong, and corrosive, government is inefficient, wasteful, and fraudulent, and politicians are corrupt and self-serving.

One of the most interesting things she does, though, is trace how they did it. Starting with William F. Buckley’s book “McCarthy and His Enemies” — (a) William Fucking Buckley?!? the so-called conservative intellectual and (b) a book suggesting McCarthy was right? Holy shit — who labeled capital C conservatives as the only right and true Americans and everything else, including Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller, as capital L liberals, equating liberals with Socialists and Communists. Any of this sound familiar? History doesn’t repeat, it regurgitates.

The next stop on the conservatizing of America is the 1971 Powell Memo written by none other than the Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell back when he was just a lowly corporate lawyer hack. He was writing to the American Chamber of Commerce to help them figure out how to spend their money. He made five points in the memo: (a) control college campuses, (b) influencing the media, (c) weaponizing the courts, and (d) maximizing political power. Sound familiar?

Another stop on this illustrious highway to our current hellscape is the Fairness Doctrine, which has been widely misinterpreted and its role misunderstood, but ending it eroded our conception of what the media should be doing — providing the agreed upon facts for political discourse. It paved the way for our very biased media outlets of today via Fox News.

The genesis of our failing media was the instance that reporting has a left leaning bias and that both sides had to represented. It was a way of pushing the lies of the right and watering down any of the well-supported accusations brought forth by the left. The emergence of “independent” media, read that as the Substacks of the fired, dismissed, and otherwise unemployed professional reporters, is an important counterbalance to the propagandizing of the legacy media.

The Origins of the Progressive Era and the New Deal

The politics of the nation are changing in ways that parallel those in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

First, is the effect that the very real changes that the Corrupt Pretender has made to the federal government and the services it delivers to the American people has become very clear, unmistakeable, and undeniable for the average American, by which I mean the meh voter. The outbreak of explosive diarrhea is hilarious fodder for your social media feed, but it is also deeply concerning. The increase in infant mortality because of the decline in vitamin K shots is shocking. The unaffordability of health insurance even with the ACA, the high price of gas, the lack of housing, all these and more are affecting ninety-nine percent of Americans directly.

There very undeniability and cognitive dissonance busting nature is changing our politics.

And second is the untrustworthiness of the government. You can’t believe that Schrödinger’s McConnell is alive or that Schrödinger’s Iran War is over. You can’t believe evidence that they present in federal courts. You can’t believe that the economy is fine, no matter what they tell you.

Just like during the Great Depression. The stock market crashed in 1929. It wasn’t until 1932 that FDR was elected. There were three hard years of misery under the misgovernment of Hoover. Hoover repeatedly told the country that the economy was fine as people literally starved to death, and eventually people tuned them out. They ceased to matter. By squandering their relevance, they ushered in forty years of Democratic rule.

We are at a similar inflection point, but there are some differences.

As the edifice of life crumbled in the Gilded Age, and the average person was plunged into abject misery drinking blue milk and eating contaminated meat — sound familiar? — the American people were able to elect politicians who would rein in the robber barons, bust up their monopolies, and regulate their industries. The industrialists themselves realized that they had to soften their image and ease the strain on the populace, so they became philanthropic giving millions to libraries, healthcare, and research. Sound familiar?

This is where the parallel lines diverge. The Progressive Era began because muckraker reporters exposed the excesses and abuses of the industrialists. They were able to link the misery that people were suffering directly to practices by industries. The upwelling of electoral revolt was so strong that it resulted in the passage Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, allowing for the direct election of senators.

Do you think that such mighty sweeping changes as a ending the Constitution and the passage of the Sherman Anti-trust Act are possible now? Sure, they are possible, but are they likely?

What’s different now than it was then? For one thing, there is a lot more money in our politics now than then. Like thousands and millions times more money. A billion is a thousand times bigger than a million. A trillion is a million times bigger than a million.

While you and I work our whole lives trying to scrape together a million dollars in assets in order to retire with some scrap of dignity, we are watching the “Who Wants to be a Trillionaire” game show with the contestants limited to Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg.

Sure at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, the captains of industry were centi-millionaires while the average person was barely a thousand-aire, that’s only a difference of a hundred thousand times, not the million times that separates the middle from the top nowadays.

The point is that the modern captains of industry can swamp our politics with money. Dropping a million or even several hundred million is nothing when you have hundreds of billions. That’s the first significant difference. The rich of today can put a thousand times more money into our politics than they could then. Sure political corruption was rife, but the patronage system that existed then — think Tammany Hall — had some benefits for the average citizen. Those political machines provided something of a social safety net where they were active.

Now, we have all the corruption and none of the benefits. The Republican Party has yanked your healthcare away from you, and you don’t even have a political boss to turn to if you need help. Nowadays, you have to start a GoFundMe and compete with all of the other millions of requests out there.

The biggest difference is that we have an unprecedented effort by a political party and administration to control the outcome of local, state, and federal elections. Not even during the Jim Crow era has this amount of coordination and resources been put into ensuring the outcome of elections across the country.

While our democracy has faced many challenges over the past two hundred fifty years and has had to adapted to changing circumstances, we may not have faced a challenge this severe or an alteration in our circumstances this extreme before. However, the solution now is just like the solution has been throughout our history. We need for everyday Americans to engage with our politics. Participate in our civic organizations. Create community. Reach out to our neighbors. Find ways to be involved and make sure you vote in every election.

Image Attribution

This image was found on NHPR and has a Creative Commons license.