Democracy Awakening

Hitler looked to America’s Indigenous reservations as a way to rid a country of “unwanted” people. He called the Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews whom he intended to massacre “Indians.”[4]

A history that looks back to a mythologized past as the country’s perfect time is a key tool of authoritarians. It allows them to characterize anyone who opposes them as an enemy of the country’s great destiny. But the true history of American democracy is that it is never finished. It is the story of people who have honored the idea that a nation

When the police captured McVeigh, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” The same words John Wilkes Booth shouted after he assassinated Lincoln, they mean “Thus always to tyrants” and are the words attributed to Brutus after he and his supporters murdered Caesar.

The next year, on September 29, 1987, Reagan attached a signing statement to a debt bill, declaring his right to interpret it as he wished, saying the president could not be forced “to follow the orders of a subordinate.” While few people paid attention to it, this statement was a shot across the bow of American democracy. It advanced the theory of

while Nixon paid a price for his attempt to cheat in an election, his division of the world into good and evil began to take hold, perverting American politics by convincing his loyalists that putting their people in office was imperative, no matter what it took. Watergate eventually backfired on them, but Nixon’s people had more luck when they exp

If Americans had not been totally sold on the New Deal government in the 1930s, its victory in World War II seemed to confirm that FDR’s approach to governance was right. By 1945, most Republicans joined with Democrats to embrace a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted investment in infrastructure.

With Yanukovych’s removal, Manafort was out of a job, and he owed about $17 million to allies of Yanukovych and Putin. His longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising the floundering presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and Manafort stepped in to help. He did not take a salary, but immediately after getting the job, he did reach

In 1858, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience: “I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form.

Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political, or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they have been left behind. Their frustration makes them vulnerable to leaders who promise to make them dominant again. A strongman downplays the real conditions that have created their problems and tells them that the onl