Democracy Awakening

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

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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

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More often than not, those articulating the nation’s true principles have been marginalized Americans who demanded the nation honor its founding promises. Their struggles have constantly renewed the country’s dedication to the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Their fight for equality reveals the true nature of American dem

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Once people internalize their leader’s propaganda, it doesn’t matter when pieces of it are proven to be lies, because it has become central to their identity. As a strongman becomes more and more destructive, followers’ loyalty only increases. Having begun to treat their perceived enemies badly, they need to believe their victims deserve it. Turnin

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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