Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

The 14th and 15th Amendments created only the “possibility” of multicultural equality, but marginalized folks nonetheless kept “a dream of human equality alive” (196). Suffragettes claimed the 14th Amendment made them citizens; in 1872, Susan B. Anthony successfully cast a vote, though she was later convicted. In 1875’s Minor v. Happersett, the Supreme Court ruled that women were citizens, but citizenship did not guarantee the right to vote. This ruling enabled anti-Black anti-voting movements, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from citizenship, and other discriminatory acts. 

Black Americans, for whom education had been illegal under enslavement, understood the white supremacist strategy of keeping Black Americans “uneducated” and began to invest in education. Women also increasingly attended school, opening women’s colleges. There was a new influx of histories, memoirs, newspapers, fine art, and scientific thought from Black Americans, women, and immigrants from Mexico and Asian countries. 

These marginalized folks “held up the nation’s promise of equality to demonstrate its failings” (200). In opposition to the individualism of white American men, they “leveraged their networks and communities to change society” (201), collectively gathering information with which to address lawmakers, keeping the idea of equality alive.

After the amendments and laws that attempted to move the country toward equality in the late 1800s, white Southerners turned from racial arguments that limited Black rights to economic ones, as Richardson details in Chapter 4. Republicans, who supported increased industrialization, were sympathetic to this argument. Increasing industrialization led to wealth disparity. Even by the 1880s, newspapers noted how the “outlines” of corporations could be seen influencing legislation. Republicans like Andrew Carnegie accused those who asked the government to address the needs of laborers, workers, and farmers as socialists or anarchists.

In the 1890s, westerners began forming coalitions against “monopolies” forming in the east. These coalitions supported community over individualism and sometimes accepted women and Black farmers. In the late 1890s, a younger set of Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt were anti-commercialism and industrialism. Through the Spanish–American War, they rebranded the “American cowboy” to be a figure of brotherhood and equal fairness. When Roosevelt became president in 1901, liberalism was redefined yet again to regulate business, add public works, promote education, call for universal health care, and ratify the 16th and 17th Amendments.

Progressives in the late 1800s and early 1900s were able to “protect the rights of individuals […] largely because Black Americans and immigrants had been cut out of the vote” (212), making them harder to attack. In the 1880s, “New Democrats” emerged under Grover Cleveland; they were against a strong federal government but “cared less about white supremacy” than their Confederate predecessors (214). They included Black Americans in their government offices, had ties to the NAACP, and paid attention to women’s and workers’ rights: This “urban Democratic experiment of the 1920s” led to FDR’s New Deal (215). Though these changes mostly benefited white men, they “suggested” that marginalized folks “should have a say in their government and its benefits” (217).

Lyndon B. Johnson said people had spent plenty of time discussing civil rights without enacting them. The Civil Rights Act was signed on July 2, 1964. Johnson said the Founders knew “freedom would only be secure if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning” (222). He said the Act wasn’t meant to punish or take away anyone’s rights but promote human dignity. Johnson’s Congress also passed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the Food Stamp Act, helped protect voting rights, helped fund elementary and secondary schools as well as universities, created Medicare and Medicaid, added warning and ingredient labels to goods, passed environmental protections, and invested in arts, humanities, and news media. These changes reduced poverty, expanded Black school attendance and cut unemployment, added infrastructure, cut infant mortality, added women to the workforce, and protected contraception and abortion.

Despite this, some politicians like Nixon and Reagan weaponized “divisive rhetoric” to argue that the government wasn’t solving problems but was itself the problem.

In his 1981 Farewell Address, Jimmy Carter warned Americans to think of the national interest as a collective interest rather than “single or special interests” (225). After Reagan, a “radical minority” used “historical myth” to destroy these concepts, moving the United States from liberal consensus to authoritarianism. This rhetoric paralleled political machinations like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the Electoral College, which disenfranchised liberal and progressive voters: This in turn culminated in Trump’s 2016 open call for Putin to interfere in the election.

In Joe Biden’s first two years as president, his administration invested in infrastructure and the economy and re-entered NATO and the World Health Organization. However, “Trumpism did not die” (229): Trump’s supporters were elected to Congress, and the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in 1973. Maintaining this ideology relied on “right-wing myth” and “manufactured outrage.”

The founding idea that a system could be created in which all people are equal always had opponents who often claimed to be conservatives but were really “dangerous radicals” who threatened freedom. Richardson concludes by stating that, like the Americans of Lincoln’s time, Americans today are at a “time of testing” whose outcome is in their hands (232).