“A vibrant, and essential history of America's
unending, enraging and utterly compelling struggle since its
founding to live up to its own best ideals… It's both
a cause for hope, and a call to arms.”--Jane Mayer,
author Dark Money
From historian and author
of the popular daily newsletter LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN, a
vital narrative that explains how America, once a
beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy -
- and how we can turn back.
In the midst of the
impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched
a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background
of the daily torrent of news. It soon turned into a
newsletter and its readership ballooned to more than 2
million dedicated readers who rely on her plainspoken and
informed take on the present and past in America.
In Democracy Awakening, Richardson crafts a
compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the
decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on
American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false
history they have led us into authoritarianism -- creating a
disaffected population and then promising to recreate an
imagined past where those people could feel important again.
She argues that taking our country back starts by
remembering the elements of the nation’s true history
that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their
dedication to the principles on which this nation was
founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to
democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a
roadmap for the nation’s future.
Richardson’s talent is to wrangle our giant,
meandering, and confusing news feed into a coherent story
that singles out what we should pay attention to, what the
precedents are, and what possible paths lie ahead. In her
trademark calm prose, she is realistic and optimistic about
the future of democracy. Her command of history allows her
to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists
to Reconstruction to Goldwater to Mitch McConnell,
highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the
lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal
consensus and birth of “movement
conservatism.”
Many books tell
us what has happened over the last five
years. Democracy Awakening explains how we got to
this perilous point, what our history really tells us about
ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.
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