Democracy Awakening

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.

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

From the beginning of the New Deal in 1933 until the election of Reagan in 1980, while the economy expanded dramatically for all, the gap between rich and poor in America got smaller. Economists call this “the great compression.” In the years after 1981, the economy continued to grow, but wealth moved dramatically upward in what’s known as “the gre

The southern strategy marked the switch of the parties’ positions over the issue of race. Johnson knew what that meant: that the nation’s move toward equality would provide a weapon for a certain kind of politician to rise to power. In a hotel in Tennessee after a day spent seeing racial slurs scrawled on signs and an evening of bourbon, Johnson ex

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

Reversing reality, Trump and his allies insisted that he was an innocent victim and that the investigators were the ones who had broken the law. They claimed the investigation was a Democratic “witch hunt,” despite the fact that Comey, Rosenstein, and Mueller were all Republicans and Trump had appointed Rosenstein himself. They began to attack the

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

Days after the first major leak from WikiLeaks, Trump openly invited Russia to hack the U.S. secretary of state’s computer system, which he insisted had important information on it: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said.[5] Reporters were shocked at a political candidate openly calling

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

In 1791, Black mathematician and naturalist Benjamin Banneker directly called out then–secretary of state Thomas Jefferson for praising the “proper ideas of the great valuation of liberty, and the free possession of those blessings to which you were entitled by nature,” while at the same time “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of m