Reflections on American Politics and Culture
Book Review Essay
Books Cited
Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, Viking, 2023.
James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis, Yale University Press, 2024.
Steven Livitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, The Tyranny of the Minority, Penguin, 2024.
Brook Manville and Josiah Ober, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives, Princeton University Press, 2023.
Michael Tomasky, If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might be Saved, Norton, 2019.
The political-cultural crisis of the past fifteen years in the United States is the subject of a slew of recent books by thoughtful Americans seeking to understand what exactly the problem is, how we got to this impasse and, in some cases, what we can do about it.
The image of our most recent former President refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election, attempting to persuade an official in Georgia to “find” 11,780 votes to assure victory in that state, tolerating if not inciting a storming of the Capitol building that terrorized elected members, injured 174 police officers, and caused the death of five people, hangs over us. Now former President Trump says if he is found to lose the election on November 5, he will not accept the result. This might seem enough to draw the nation together in common agreement that such behavior gives a lie to the values that make America and such a person must never be allowed into the White House again. But that has not happened. Indeed, relatively few in the Republican Party have questioned Donald Trump’s behavior.
Nothing important in history happens for only one reason. Recent events – the collapse of communism, the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic, the immediacy of smart phones’ record of police brutality, the change in the nature of work, as well as the sheer passage of time since the end of World War II that has allowed the demise of a post-World War II consensus – undoubtedly are contributors to our present social malaise.
Constitution and ‘civic friendship’
Interacting with all this, in the view of Steven Livitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (The Tyranny of the Minority, Penguin, 2024), is a series of ways our outdated Constitution makes it possible for a minority to thwart democracy. Our Upper House – the Senate – gives over-representation to small states (because every state gets the same number of Senators), and on top of that our Electoral College, whose numbers are based on a state’s representation in the House of Representatives plus the Senate, does the same. Because Republicans cluster in the center of the country and in rural areas where the population is sparse, the over-representation of small states tends to favor Republicans. But in addition, Republicans have pursued a series of strategies to influence American institutions, by challenging norms and using the appointment of judges to create conservative rulings in the courts. Levitsky and Ziblatt see the current situation as dangerous and propose a number of constitutional reforms. The fault, in other words, is not in ourselves but in our constitution.
Other writers focus more on the matter of how we the people actually relate to each other. The two parties were, up until the 1980s, unstable coalitions of a range of interest groups, which enabled bargaining and led to fruitful ways to handle disagreements. Republicans then consolidated around a series of conservative goals that would not brook compromise, which has led to a polarization of our politics and society. Michael Tomasky (If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might be Saved, Norton, 2019) looks for ways polarization could be overcome through more civic education and history taught in schools, sending people overseas for experiences that broaden their outlook, and encouraging corporate social responsibility. Above all, he calls upon Democrats to abandon what Republicans regard as “extreme” positions, for example, “defunding the police,” Medicare for all, forgiving student loans, leniency for illegal immigrants.
The underlying bargain that enlivens all democracies is examined by Brook Manville and Josiah Ober (The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives, Princeton, 2023) by citing cases where democracy in crisis has survived. The “civic bargain,” they say, arises from a common aim to make an inclusive system work. It assumes a recognition of the necessity for compromise and the evolving nature of a democracy. They propose Aristotle’s concept of “civic friendship” as essential to the civic bargain. This type of friendship, said Aristotle, is not about people liking each other, but rather about recognizing we are together in a common enterprise where we must respect each person even if we disagree.
In both these latter books, the proposed solutions for increased public trust are approaches that civil society groups have been attempting for some time. We know that pockets of dialogue and trust have developed, but it is hard to see that doing more of what we have been doing is enough for today’s divisions. There is a circularity to these authors’ arguments – if we could only get back to the point where we could talk respectfully with each other, we would solve our problem. But the definition of the problem is that we have ceased to be able to talk respectfully with each other.
Can we say more about the two mindsets that have developed that rule out mutual respect and the possibility of compromise? What has allowed the emergence of two cultural outlooks that are profoundly different, and are both built in large part on a dismissal of the other?
Demise of ideals
James Davison Hunter (Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis,Yale, 2024) opines that while political polarization is the most obvious sign of our crisis, the true problem is not in our politics per se but in the absence of cultural resources to work through what divides us.
Hunter has specific cultural resources in mind. He argues that the creative tension between Enlightenment values of liberty and reason on the one hand, and religiously based moral authority on the other, created the oxygen in which the central debates of US national life proceeded. He calls this the “hybrid-Enlightenment.” Each generation found its position in this tension, precisely because the opacity of this combination of ideals allowed “solidarity” or cohesion. Enlightenment values promoted debate and neutral institutions, while our religious heritage held the torch for an objective moral order and the passion for justice that energized causes like abolition of slavery.
We began losing this cultural solidarity, Hunter argues, in the 1960s, when the religious pole began to be undermined. Religiously observant Americans gradually recognized that references to religious values were becoming less accepted in public discussion. American culture became largely secular, especially among the educated classes.
Simultaneously, the collapse of communism left Americans without a common enemy to mobilize against. Meantime the American Left had shifted from trade union and social welfare preoccupations to a focus on identity, concentrating on racial, ethnic, gender and sexual inclusion, making “diversity” a core value. This evolving American “identitarian Left,” based more in universities and less in the world of labor, embraced a bourgeois standard of living, and coined its own language – Latinx, LGBTQ, microaggression, etc. This vocabulary supplied markers that divided upper class whites from lower class whites. “Purity fetishes” condemned anyone who was not on board. The white working class felt disparaged.
Hunter cites philosopher Alistair McIntyre whose book After Virtue highlights the fragmentation of morality in this new world we live in. In the absence of a concerted moral order, moral reasoning has been reduced to what McIntyre calls “emotivism,” in other words, if it feels right do it.
Space here is insufficient to do justice to Hunter’s full argument. Over-simply put, with the disappearance of Christian values in public life and the Left’s insensitivity to the working class, the emerging alienation has questioned core Enlightenment premises. In the process, argues Hunter, two different realities have emerged. One of these realities upholds the religious pole, supporting an objective moral order, the other sees its origins in the Enlightenment pole. Now identity politics infect the two groups themselves, and both derive the greater part of their energy from a distrust of the other. Hunter is pessimistic about our ability to overcome these divisions anytime soon but discusses what it means to live in hope in a difficult time.
Ongoing struggle for equality
The above-mentioned elements of the national conversation create some context for Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of History at Boston College, who, since 2019, has been writing a daily newsletter – “Letters from an American” - about current events in the context of American history. Within a year of launching, she had over a million subscribers and had become the most successful individual paid author on Substack.
Richardson’s seventh book, (Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, Viking, 2023), calls us to recognize and reclaim the core principles of the Declaration of Independence, namely that governments get their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, that all people are created equal, and all American citizens have a right to determine their own fate. The subordination of African Americans, other minorities, and women was a contradiction at the outset in 1789 that negated the aspiration towards equality, and ever since, says Richardson, an exclusionary vision has maintained itself by “defining the powerless as inferiors, either criminals or weak-minded people unable to think or act for themselves.” (166) Richardson interprets the evolution of American politics through this lens, underlining that the most successful strategy of those who insist that some people are better and more deserving than others is through the use (or misuse) of language and history.
For Richardson, American history is the story of those who have asserted the principles of equality and government by consent – most often the marginalized – against the elites who have tried to hold onto power. Efforts to hold the country to its founding principles demonstrate that American democracy has been an evolving process of creating what the Constitution calls “a more perfect union,” rather than a system that was born whole and unimpeachable. The key question, therefore, is whether it is possible to continue this evolution towards a country where we have equality before the law and equal entitlement to have a voice in government? For Richardson, our current crisis is a phase, and indeed a culmination, of a struggle that goes back to our founding.
During the formation of the Constitution in the 1780s, an essential element of disagreement was over the powers of the Federal government in relation to the powers of the individual states. This issue has always been intertwined with attitudes about race. Back then, it was the Southern states who pushed for greater powers for states, because they wanted to control slavery policy. As we all know, the decision not to dismantle slavery at that time was taken to keep the South on board. The same issue was at the heart of the debates leading to the Civil War. The states that seceded in 1861 did so in the name of “states’ rights,” a euphemism for their determination to assert their right to keep slavery.
The power of states in relation to the powers of the Federal government then lent itself to another debate, namely, how much power should the Federal government have to spend money to improve the lives of the disadvantaged? Those opposed to allowing this, began to mobilize soon after the Civil War with a racist motivation, fearing that African Americans would use their new voting power to push for resource redistribution. To kill that possibility, conservatives used the pejorative word “socialism” to attack it. To this day, as we see in condemnations of Kamala Harris from the right, “socialism” or “Marxism” remain code words for opposition to resource redistribution.
Richardson sees the high point of American politics in the “liberal consensus” that prevailed during the period between 1945 and 1965. This had been triggered by Franklin Roosevelt’s "New Deal" addressing social needs in the Depression. Roosevelt had refrained from bringing agricultural workers and domestic servants (work generally done by Blacks) into his program precisely to keep white Southerners on board. During the “liberal consensus” period, the two parties both accepted an activist federal government that improved the lives of the disadvantaged and in addition maximized possibilities for business expansion. The “liberal consensus” broke down with the passage of Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, his Voting Rights Act of 1965, and his Great Society program. In that context, reactionary groups, particularly Southern whites, became determined to limit Federal government assistance to African Americans. The political campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon demonstrated determined efforts to limit the influence and participation of American blacks.
Since the pre-Civil War era, Southern whites had been members of the Democratic Party. Indeed, the Republican party was founded in 1854 with the express purpose of eradicating slavery, so it was never considered by Southern whites to be a party sympathetic to their outlook. But following Johnson’s legislation in the 1960s, Southern Democrats, seeing their party backing civil rights, shifted to the Republican Party, bringing an element into the Republican Party that was unsympathetic to the needs of African Americans. They now aligned with Christians who were concerned about the legalization of abortion, and westerners who were opposed to federal government interference in their lives. All three groups responded to the goal to minimize the role of the federal government. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan came to the Presidency, the Republican Party had constellated around a series of mutually reinforcing conservative goals that did not invite compromise.
The ‘Big Lie’
Fast forward to Donald Trump. In Part Two of her book, “The Authoritarian Experiment,” Richardson lays out in considerable detail the way the Republican party has advanced authoritarian government. This catalogue is perhaps the most useful aspect of the book. First, Donald Trump found common cause with the extremist elements in the Republican party, Richardson claims, offering them a framework in which they could dominate, appealing to a mythical lost world of white domination.
Trump then made lies central to his governing strategy. When he declared his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s, this was not merely a way to get media attention, but rather, to assert dominance. “Trump straight-up lied, and he demanded that his loyalists parrot his lies.” (95) In this form of gaslighting, whereby the person in authority gets to decide what reality is the truth, “victims must surrender either their integrity or their ownership of their own perceptions; in either case, having once agreed to a deliberate lie, it becomes harder to challenge later ones because that means the other times they caved.” (95). Trump’s blatant untruths filled the airwaves. He took over the public conversation, forcing people to spend time trying to defend what was real from what was not. The result of such behavior is that it exhausts people, forcing them to feel in the end that the only recourse available is to give up.
Scholars of authoritarianism, Richardson tells us, highlight the “Big Lie,” a propaganda tool that appeared frequently in Nazi Germany: If you repeat a very big lie, no one can believe it could possibly be false. Aping the lie then becomes a pledge of loyalty. Trump and his supporters used the Big Lie about the election having been stolen to force supporters to take a stand or else to purge them from the inner ranks of Republicanism. The Big Lie enabled the further claim that the election system was broken and that new restrictions must be introduced – restrictions that would make it more difficult for blacks to vote. In 2021, nineteen state legislatures dominated by Republicans changed their election laws to make it harder to vote. Trump supporters then went further, pushing the idea that state legislatures could choose Electors for the Electoral College without reference to state constitutions.
In parallel, the Supreme Court handed down a series of rulings, among them Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that asserted the federal government did not have the power to protect some civil rights, such as abortion. The Supreme Court has lately demonstrated its consistent determination to reduce the Federal government’s power by giving greater power to states and undermining systems of Federal government regulation. This, Richardson argues, is an imposition of minority rule.
Articulating the danger
Nothing in Richardson’s book suggests she is trying to see things from the perspective of the “other side.” She puts forward a single-minded argument that the Republican party is determined to restrict the lives of black people, women, and other minorities and is willing to adopt authoritarian practices to do so.
Her treatment of religion is limited to pointing out that Trump’s Attorney General William Barr and others were apparently moving in the direction of adopting Protestant Christianity as a national religion that would be an arbiter of moral behavior for the nation, though she is unable to show that this plan advanced very far. The mindset of the Right that would support such a move is at some level addressed in James Davison Hunter’s book, namely a belief that Protestant Christianity was traditionally at the heart of the founding of this country, that it stood for human dignity and for responsibility towards other human beings that arises because every person is made in the image of God. Hunter explains this well, but does not advocate the imposition of a national church. Richardson implies that Barr and Trump did.
As such, the book is therefore not particularly interested in capturing nuance. It cannot sympathize with American Christians who find the secularization of American society a matter of concern not only because their own faith traditions are being ridiculed or disappearing, but because they sincerely believe that Christianity has been, and could be again, a leaven in a society where moral reference points and people’s capacity to care unselfishly for one another are disappearing.
Of the books cited here, Hunter’s comes closest to presenting the views of traditional Republicans who today feel they have lost their party, but because many sincere Republicans having given away their allegiance to Trump, all commentators are in a bind when it comes to being evenhanded. We will capture both sides of the question up to the point when one side crosses a line in terms of threatening the institutions that could guarantee our civil discourse in the future. At that point we must decide whether we are able to be the observer who expresses both sides of the question, or whether the time has come to articulate the danger.
Richardson is in the latter camp. She expresses a vision of an evolving America where all can join in the task of broadening our commitment to equality and participation. She is an advocate, not a bridgebuilder. She implies that the new moral order of justice and inclusion will come once Americans wake up to the present jeopardy of Donald Trump and his extremist advocates, whose cultlike behavior will otherwise hijack our consensus-building institutions.
