The author’s starting point is found right in the first two sentences of her foreword to the book: “America is at a crossroads. A country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.” Of course, this danger has a name as well as a date: Donald Trump’s possible reelection as the US president in November 2024. At the time of writing this brief book description (8 January 2024), opinion polls indicate that Trump leads a handful of other Republicans by a large margin. However, the problem is not limited to Trump. Rather, it includes the Republican Party, which has changed from merely being conservative to being more of a radicalized right-wing political party (like populist right-wing parties in other countries, but with American characteristics). The reason seems to be that many voters—affected by economic, social, political, or religious changes—have become frustrated by the feeling left behind. This “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 only reason they have been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power” (p. xii). This leader’s propaganda becomes “central to their identity” (ibid.).
However, Richardson, being a historian, digs deeper. She goes back to the Declaration of Independence and its statement that all people are created equal, and that government must be based on the consent of the governed. Thus, her approach is broader: “This is a book about how a small group of people have tried to make us believe that our fundamental principles aren’t true” (p. xvii). Yet, for some reason, the author starts describing the ideational fundamentals of US representative democracy only with chapter 21 on p. 163. In this chapter, on. p. 164, she points to a problem that had led to a long list of struggles, including the US Civil War:
The same men who put their lives on the line to establish that all men are created equal literally owned other human beings. They considered Indigenous people ‘savages’ and women subordinate to men by definition. Neither Black men nor Indians nor women fell into their definition of people who were ‘equal’ or who needed to consent to the government under which they lived.
Much of this mindset has survived in the southern states of the USA, and much has been done to keep it alive and dominant. Richardson often refers to the importance of this “hierarchical theme” (p. 167) in the interpretation of US history and political practice. There seems to be a dichotomy of equality and hierarchy, where proponents of the latter insist that the “equality” of the Declaration of Independence was to be understood in hierarchical terms. The claim, then, is that when the Founders declared the value of “equality,” they in fact only referred to the equality of the white male population vis-à-vis their white male counterparts in the United Kingdom. They never intended, or could imagine, that “equality” should apply to all people living in the United States. From this perspective, people advocating a multiracial, multicultural, and multi-gendered America violated the Founders’ vision of this new country. In addition, when combining the values of liberty and the “pursuit of Happiness,” the consent of the governed could be given such a strong individualistic meaning that it included a rejection of active federal government and the location of the heart of American democracy in limited state governments.
The Declaration of Independence did not stipulate how government should be constructed in the newly formed USA. To fill this gap, a first attempt was made with the “Articles of Confederation” of 1777. They “centered power in the states rather than in national government” (p. 179). Since this construction did not work, the United States Constitution of 1789 turned the previous arrangement around by making the federal government “the heart of the new system. It asserted that the power to govern derived from the people of the nation…” (p. 180). From this time, given that there were no mass media that could reach the widely scattered population, the president was elected not by direct vote, but by an Electoral College comprising electors at the state level. Since there was a persistent worry about the emergence of governmental tyranny, the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. In theory, this document applied to all citizens, “although its practice was almost exclusively limited to white men” (p. 184). This situation provided the basis for narrating US political history as a persistent struggle for “Expanding Democracy” (the headline of chapter 24 on p. 187). This included the Civil War, which was not merely against slavery, but against an ideology of “populist democracy” and “popular sovereignty” that tried to replace the idea of equality with the idea of racial hierarchy and white supremacy. Abraham Lincoln was one of those who moved against those who tried to reinterpret the Declaration of Independence. Furthermore, “Lincoln’s Republicans had re-envisioned liberalism. They reworked the Founders’ initial national government, held back by the Framers through the Bill of Rights, into an active government designed to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white and Black men alike. They had enlisted the power of the federal government to turn the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality” (p. 205). Again, such a use of the federal government is not a self-evident mechanism to national government. Until today, Republicans are very sceptical when it comes to the policies and budget requirements of their national administration (at the time of writing this summary, Congress and the administration had reached yet another of their many agreements made in the past years concerning the funding of the central government).
Regarding the rights of Black Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) was fundamental because it declared that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” (p. 208). Thus, the federal government was tasked with enforcing equality, even if this went against the will of individual states. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed Black citizens the right to vote in elections. Regarding this right, resistance in the South was broken only much later, in 1965, with the passing of the Voting Rights Act.
Richardson often mentions a “liberal consensus.” This is said to have been brought about when Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s pursued his “New Deal” policies. Basically, the “New Deal” was about using the federal government “to regulate business; provide a basic social safety net, largely through work programs; and promote infrastructure” (p. 235). In other words, the “liberal consensus” was about an active role for the federal government in promoting the welfare of the American people. It stood against libertarian ideas that stressed the role of individuals, the rich, and their protection from government action, be it in terms of taxing their incomes or be it about regulating their businesses. The “liberal consensus” was expanded under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower (Civil Rights Act of 1957), and especially during Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” policy drive.
What has been summarized so far covers only pages 163 to 244. So, what are pages 1 to 160 about? These pages deal with the movement that tried to counter what has been characterized above. Accordingly, Richardson writes, “Today’s crisis began in the 1930s, when Republicans who detested the business regulation in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal” started looking for partners in creating an anti-“liberal consensus” alliance, partners who shared the opinion “that a government that answered to the needs of ordinary Americans was a dangerous, radical experiment” (p. 3) that bordered on the introduction of “socialism” (this is one of those people’s favorite accusations against an American government that would look like the governments that are commonly found in the European Union). Such people could not accept what had already been pointed out by Abraham Lincoln in a fragment written in 1854: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate and individual capacities” (p. 9).
The remaining pages, before the historical part begins on page 163, are filled with an historical overview about how the Republicans became what they are today, and how they moved against the “liberal consensus.” President Richard Nixon makes a brief appearance, while Chapter 7 is about “The Reagan Revolution.” In his inaugural address, mixing populism with neoliberalism, he promised to pay special attention to a supposedly neglected group, “‘We the people,’ this breed called Americans.” And he warned that, “in the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” (p. 52). President George W. Bush tried to regain the Republican Party from the radicals but failed. Through their policies, “Republicans had created an underclass of Americans increasingly falling behind economically. And crucially, they had given the underclass someone to hate” (p. 57), that is, all those who were opposed to the “false narrative” that the radically right-wing Republicans, who had managed to capture the party, had invented about what the true values of American culture were. These values included racial hierarchy versus a multiracial social and political order; elite leadership versus popular participation; individualism versus the common good; limited federal government versus an active, policy-oriented federal government; Christian fundamentalism versus secularism; women as mothers at home versus women participating in the public and economic spheres; tax cuts versus taxation; business freedom versus business regulation; economic inequality versus income distribution; individual fate versus government help (for example, Obamacare); traditional gender roles versus LGBTQ; natural conception versus birth control and abortion rights.
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, this was not accidental. Rather, it was the logical culmination of four decades of the Republicans undermining of the American constitutional and democratic order. Trump’s “Authoritarian Experiment” is detailed in Part 2 of this book, covering pages 79 to 160. This section ends with Richardson writing, “the MAGA Republicans appeared to be on track to accomplish what the Confederates could not: the rejection of the Declaration of Independence and its replacement with the hierarchical vision of the Confederates” (p. 160).
Readers who want to go deeper into the economic aspects of the US situation could turn to Angus Deaton. 2023. Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 271 pp. See the summary at
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