Is It Too Early — or Too Late — to Assess ‘The Trump Effect’?

In 1935, during the Great Depression, the poet Langston Hughes prayed that “America be America again. The Land that never has been yet — And yet must be — the land where every man is free.” Making that “mighty dream” a reality, Hughes proclaimed, depended on the “sweat and blood, faith and pain,” of Americans who used their hands at the foundry and plowed their field in the rain.

In Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, Heather Cox Richardson — a professor of history at Boston College, author of books about the Civil War and the Republican Party, and immensely popular “then and now” blogger and podcaster — examines progress toward realizing the “mighty dream” during the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, New Deal, Civil Rights Movement, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. She also documents attempts by white supremacists, corporate capitalists, and their political allies to destroy the “liberal consensus” (in place from the 1930s to the ‘60s) on equal rights for Americans of all races, ethnicities, religions, genders, and economic circumstances; their right to vote in free and fair elections; and the role of the federal government in promoting and protecting those rights.

During the last 50 years, and accelerating since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Richardson demonstrates, authoritarians have leveraged social media platforms and hyper-partisan sources of “news” to spread misinformation, disinformation, “Big Lies,” myths about the nation’s past, as well as appeals to disaffected Americans to create a new, “alternative” reality. Using union-busting, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, they have moved to the mainstream of American politics.

Richardson’s account of the ways in which these developments have been made by history is informative and important. At times, however, her propensity to throw the kitchen sink, refrigerator, and oven at her adversaries undermines the credibility of the otherwise compelling case she makes about the danger those adversaries pose to the world’s oldest democracy.

Richard Nixon’s campaign of “positive polarization,” Richardson reminds us, featured initiatives to discredit the establishment media. “We are in a contest over the soul of the country,” Nixon’s advisor, Patrick Buchanan, declared, and “it will be their kind of society or ours.”

Nixon’s “southern strategy,” subsequently adopted by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, included anti-Black dog whistles. They also courted white workers in the Midwest who had been left behind by deindustrialization, arguing that Democrats were captives of special interests and minority groups.

And for decades, Richardson indicates, Republicans have alleged voter fraud to keep immigrants and Blacks from the polls. In 2010, they launched what would be an immensely successful initiative to take control of statehouses throughout the United States, and then used computer models to gerrymander congressional districts, “essentially hobbling representative democracy.” And corporate interests funded a protest movement called the Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party, whose members inveighed against “socialism” and the political influence of Black and Brown people.

Donald Trump, according to Richardson, went far beyond these machinations, “making the leap from oligarchy to authoritarianism.” She reads into the record Trump’s assertion that “I alone can fix it,” his gaslighting, his skill at turning “previously apathetic people into ferocious partisans,” and demonizing the predominantly peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors for using violent, “antifa-like tactics.” Trump told governors, “If you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time… You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years, and you’ll never see this stuff again.” And Richardson reminds us that Trump insisted, without evidence, that he won the 2020 presidential election, and has been charged with trying to overturn it.

Democracy Awakening, then, does not lack evidence about the roots of authoritarian ideology in the United States. Nonetheless, Richardson includes claims that invite criticism that she, too, is excessively partisan.

Appointing Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump as unpaid senior advisors, she maintains, “eroded a key pillar of democratic government: a bureaucracy loyal not to a leader but to the state itself.” Richardson doesn’t mention that President Kennedy named his brother attorney general or that President Clinton named his wife chair of the Task Force on National Health Reform. She chastises Republican presidents for “stacking” the Supreme Court but not Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to “pack” it.

The cathedral ceilings, impressive architecture, and wall of flags at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Richardson writes, had “the trappings of dictators.” Melania Trump’s outfit “evoked a Nazi uniform, almost certainly to provoke a response while appealing to the alt-right.” The convention spectacle concentrated power, she says, “not in our democratic government, but in one man.” And, at the presidential debate in October, Trump “spat, lied, bullied, badgered, and apparently tried to inflict Biden with COVID-19.”

Richardson is unable, of course, to tell whether it’s too early or too late to say something definitive about "the Trump effect," or about the fate of democracy in America — and so, she  concludes inconclusively: “So far, the hopes of our Founders have never been proven fully right. And yet, they’ve never been proven entirely wrong. Once again, we are at a time of testing. How it comes out rests, as it always has, in our own hands.”

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.