Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Richardson discusses two types of conservatism. In its original form during the French Revolution, conservatism was a non-religious, anti-ideology approach to operating the federal government. The original conservatism valued governmental interventions based on “facts on the ground” (20) rather than belief-led governmental change. In the post–Civil War United States, conservatism took the form of “Movement Conservatism,” an ideology-based political alignment that valued “traditional family structures and social hierarchies that put men in charge of their families the same way that God oversaw the world” (41). Movement Conservatism was enshrined into the governmental structure through the Nixon and Reagan administrations, which both appealed to false histories and media manipulation to hierarchize Americans into “good” and “bad” categories. This binary thinking set the stage for what Richardson calls the “authoritarian experiment” that began with Trump’s election.

The Constitution of the United States is a legal document that was put into effect as the ruling framework for the new United States government on June 21, 1788. After the American Revolution, leaders’ first attempt at a document that outlined their new government was called the Articles of Confederation. This system put power entirely into states’ hands; it immediately went awry, as states refused to cooperate with one another. The Constitution thus centralized power in a federal government rather than states. It detailed a federal government made up of a bicameral legislature, a judiciary that ensured the right to a fair trial, and a single executive whose power was kept in check by the other branches. The Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791: These amendments checked the power of the federal government and enabled the government to amend the Constitution as needed.

Richardson explores the way in which partisans rhetorically style themselves as “true defenders of the Constitution” (174). Different people can interpret this single document differently. “Originalists,” for instance, argue that there can be no legislation or regulation passed that isn’t anticipated in the Constitution. However, Richardson argues that the intentions of the Framers should not be accepted without question. For instance, “the Framers counted enslaved Americans not as a full person but as three fifths of a person” (170). The 13th through 15th Amendments and events of the Civil Rights era demonstrate how that aspect of the Constitution did not serve equality in its original form. Rather, it was “designed to adapt to new circumstances” as society and culture changed (170).

The Declaration of Independence is an important document in American history. Passed by Congress on July 4, 1776, the Declaration stated the colonies’ intent to “dissolve their ties to Britain” and become an autonomous entity (168). One of the key tenets of the Declaration is “that all men are created equal and must have equal access to resources to enable them to work hard and rise” (22). This belief becomes the basis for the liberal consensus, which aims to use federal intervention to assure these rights and resources. Richardson points out that, like the Constitution, the white men who wrote the Declaration created a document whose contemporary meaning ultimately exceeds their intentions for it: “[B]ecause the white men who drafted the Declaration saw it primarily as an assertion of their own right to be equal to other white men in England, they did not immediately take on the larger implications of their principled stand” (169). Despite this, Part 3 details how marginalized people have historically returned to the principles of the Declaration to argue for their rights and make a case for how to defend American democracy.