Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Content Warning: The guide and source text discuss hate speech, racism, enslavement, racial and gender prejudice, genocide and displacement of Indigenous Americans, anti-Black violence, and systemic inequalities through American history. To refer to the collective of Americans who are not of European descent, Heather Cox Richardson uses the phrase “people of color,” which this guide preserves. Both the guide and the source text are specific about race and ethnicity where applicable.

Richardson introduces her central thesis by contextualizing Adolf Hitler’s rise to power as an elected individual. Hitler “harnessed societal instability into [his] own service” using “language and false history” (10). Authoritarianism rises when a “strongman” rallies support of people who feel disenfranchised by creating a fiction that “enemies have cheated them of power” (10). The resulting mistreatment of perceived enemies engrains their beliefs, as admitting this mistake and mistreatment would mean “that they, not their enemies, are evil” (10).

Richardson proposes that, in the global rise of fascist authoritarianism around the events of World War II, America didn’t succumb not because of any inherent resistance to fascism, but because of the historic “insistence” of “minorities and women” that all people should be created equal (12).