Portside

Ben Tumin: To begin, you connect the modern rise of fascism in the U.S. to the New Deal. Can you explain more, please?

Heather Cox Richardson: I argue that the problem that we face today — where a very small group of Americans have taken over our society and are trying to legislate in ways that benefit them while forcing the rest of us to put up with it — started as a backlash to the New Deal.

The New Deal made it clear that a government only serving big business wasn’t going to work. It also quickly drew the wrath of the obvious people: businessmen who didn't like regulation. Allying with racist Southern Democrats, in 1937, they drafted a document called the Conservative Manifesto, outlining opposition to any form of regulation and to a safety net that would cost them tax dollars. They argued infrastructure was better managed by private business and, of course, that the government should stay the heck out of protecting civil rights, as it was beginning to do.

BT: Regarding that last, very important point, you summarize, “The expansion of rights to women and Black and Brown Americans, as well as to other minorities, set in motion the undermining of democracy that is still underway.”

HCR: Yes. How did we get here? Well, when our government tried to expand democracy to include people of color, there was a backlash from racists and businessmen who, in a sense, made an unholy alliance as early as 1937. We are still grappling with that alliance today.

BT: On the flip side, you argue that more often than not, “those articulating the nation’s true principles have been marginalized Americans who demanded the nation honor its founding promises.” What do you mean by that?

HCR: I started the book with a question: why didn’t the U.S. succumb to fascism? After all, we had a very active neo-Nazi movement before World War II, and many countries around the world gave in to similar movements.

In the 1950s, scholars theorized that Americans were just... different — that they were more middle-of-the-road and just didn’t fall for the things fascist dictators said — which is a lovely idea, but also clearly false.

BT: Saying we’re inherently more immune to fascism is like saying we have larger cracks in bathroom stalls because we're inherently more generous.

HCR: Ha! Right. And what I came to believe is that marginalized Americans who were excluded from the principles enumerated in the Declaration of Independence — the idea that everybody has a right to be treated equally before the law and that everybody has a right to a say in their government — well, from the beginning, they said hey, those are great ideas. What about us? By continually pointing out that people were being excluded from those principles, they kept those principles alive.

The radical right, especially under former President Trump, imagined American history as preserved perfectly in the past, almost as if we had sprung fully formed from the head of George Washington. But there's never been a perfect moment in any society, let alone in the United States. I mean, the Europeans who later formed the U.S. were concerned about how much they'd fallen from perfection even before they ever set foot on the North American continent. They sat off the coast in a boat at one point and went, oh boy, we're in trouble —

BT: — and does anyone know how to get off of a boat?

HCR: Ha, but actually.

So it’s not a question of going back to a perfect past, or of ignoring the extraordinary oppression under which so many Americans have lived. It’s a question of reclaiming our agency. Marginalized Americans’ fight for equality steered us away from fascism. It also revealed that American democracy is, and has always been, a work in progress.

BT: Toward the end of the book you conclude that “in Lincoln’s era, democracy seemed to have won.” And yet, “Americans did not root out the hierarchical strand of our history, leaving it there for other rising autocrats in the future to exploit with their rhetoric and the fears of their followers.”

What message do you give to readers who, understandably, feel like that hierarchical strand of our history — the idea that some people are inherently more deserving of power than others — continues to gain ground, no matter what we do?

HCR: Historically, at these moments when it looks as if the hierarchical strand of our history is going to win out, the answer for young people has been to get creative. For example, the period after the Civil War gave us new forms of literature. We still have around us the buildings, the murals, the sculptures, and the art of the 1930s and the New Deal. There are examples of extraordinary creativity from every inflection point in our history.

You can see similar dynamics unfolding today. I think I gave somebody a coronary the other day when I called out Taylor Swift for launching a multi-generational female cultural experience. That’s a big deal! There are new voices in new forms of media; new ways of thinking about politics; new combinations of ideas that young people are pioneering that I could never dream of.

So I get being discouraged, but you can’t focus on the terror to the exclusion of the creation. We are living in another time of testing, and the bottom line is if we don’t create the future, somebody else will.

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Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of U.S. history at Boston College. She’s the author of Letters from an American, a nightly Substack newsletter that chronicles current events in the larger context of American history. Heather has also written seven books on history and politics, including most recently, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, the subject of our conversation today.

This article is a condensed transcript edited for clarity. You can also listen to the audio of the conversation, which includes further discussion on the roots of conservatism, how lies came to define the media landscape in the late 1980s, why history is essentially just gossiping about dead people, and more at Skipped History, a newsletter focused on overlooked and underexamined events, movements, and people that have shaped American history.