Historian: GOP “Has Become an Extremist Faction”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, the Supreme Court is just one example of the eroding trust in America’s institutions. For decades, an elite majority has weaponized language and promoted false history, according to historian Heather Cox Richardson. She explores how this has led some Americans into authoritarianism in her new book. And she joins Michel Martin to discuss.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much for speaking with us.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON, AUTHOR, “DEMOCRACY AWAKENING” AND HISTORIAN AND PROFESSOR, BOSTON COLLEGE: Oh, it’s such a pleasure.

MARTIN: As you and I are speaking now, we’re in this really strange kind of moment where, you know, the speaker of the house, Kevin McCarthy, is losing his job because he compromised with the Democrats to keep the government open and, you know, all these other things. Looking at all the things that are going on in our politics at the moment, is there a way you could put this in the context for us?

RICHARDSON: Yes. But let’s start with what you just said, the idea that for the speaker of the house, who is a Republican, to work with Democrats who, of course, represent their constituents, to keep the government open is somehow something that makes him in his own conference be unpopular. That is completely antithetical to the way the government was always supposed to work. So, from the beginning, we’re in a really unusual moment. One of the things that I study, of course, is what’s happened to the Republican Party. And one of the things I like to emphasize is this is not your mother’s Republican Party. It has become an extremist faction that has within its goals to get rid of the kind of government under which we have lived since 1933. So, you have to start from the premise that you can’t both sides this issue. We have a national problem that is embodied by one hard right extremist party. That’s not to say the Democrats are right about everything, but that’s to say that this is a moment in which we have to take a step back and recognize a larger challenge to our democracy that happens to be embodied right now by a certain division — you know, a certain partisan division, but one that echoes other moments in our history that we got through by working together to isolate the extremists.

MARTIN: And I’m going to ask you to kind of walk us through your argument, that is the subject of your book, “Democracy Awakening.” But I kind of want to skip ahead to the point you make several times in the book. You make the point very persuasively and chillingly, I have to say, that sometimes people get to a point where they’re so invested in their belief system, they don’t care what’s true. OK. So, I’m just interested in if you believe that that’s where we are, how do you address that?

RICHARDSON: Well, yes. And that’s not original to me. That’s something that scholars of authoritarianism and totalitarianism have identified at least since World War II. And their question was this, why do we need to worry about the rise of dictators where when the real problem is the who follow the dictators? Because every generation has authoritarians and dictators, but only in some generations do they actually get enough traction to take over a government. And what they argued, and I think what we see nowadays, really clearly is the rise of a politics that erases reality in favor of a really attractive image or an attractive image for some people. And what that image says is that we can take you people who feel disaffected either economically or religiously or culturally, socially and we can make you feel as important as you used to. And the way that we’re going to do that is by going back to a series of laws that are either divine or set down by the universe that our enemies, and who those enemies are doesn’t really matter, are ignoring. And on that beautiful story, a number of people begin to rest their identities. And they don’t necessarily expect their lives are going to get better, they expect they’re defending this traditional vision of a country. And this is not, by the way, unique to the United States. The trick to this though is, I think that people begin to be attracted by that false reality and some people really do give it their identities. But most are more than willing to embrace a different identity. An identity that actually solves problems and identity that actually moves this country forward to expand our democracy as they have in the past. And those are the people we want to be talking to and emphasizing for you now, not that 20 so — 20 or so percent of Americans who are simply lost. And you will see that in any kind of rise of a totalitarian movement, and then later on its fall. Some people simply cannot let go of that identity. But most people can recognize either that they’ve been duped and they become apathetic again or that they’ve been duped and they need to fight back to take back a real country.

MARTIN: So, who was — who’s your book for? Who are you writing for?

RICHARDSON: So, this book is for the people who want to understand our country. Want to feel a part of it but feel like there’s too much coming at them to understand all the different pieces. When did the parties switch sides? What’s is the electoral college? What does the constitution say in the 14th Amendment? All those different things that seem to be in the news but aren’t there in such an orderly way that you can understand them. So, this is really a series of short essays that take you through how we got here from 1937 to 2015. What the rise of an authoritarian meant in the United States from 2015 until the present. And crucially that final section, how do we look at the people who came before us and see how they faced a similar moment and got out of it.

MARTIN: Let’s just start at — with the new deal, that’s the first section of the book. You said that FDR created what you call, a liberal consensus in government that kind of defined the years after World War II. And when authoritarianism in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world was defeated, what — how did that liberal consensus came about? Was it the people actually saw material improvement in their lives or was it the external threat of the war?

RICHARDSON: That’s a really important piece of what’s going on, and I’m glad you called that out. Because the liberal consensus comes not only from FDR who does, in fact, help people’s material lives during the depression by inventing a government that are — picking up a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, things like the TV — Tennessee Valley Authority, and begins to flirt with the idea of the government protecting civil rights in the States. But crucially it’s not really the Democrats who pushed that part of the liberal consensus in this period, although Truman does quite a lot. It’s really under Republican Dwight Eisenhower that the government begins to protect civil rights in the States. And those four pieces together make the liberal consensus which does, in fact, dramatically help people’s economic lives. That matters because when peoples’ economic lives are better, historically in the United States, they are also much more willing to accord rights to people of color, and women, minorities. When they’re not, when — they’re not so much when they’re not able to put food on table. So, those things do go hand-in-hand. And they are, at first, I think, a reaction to the fact that somebody’s got to do something about the depression. But crucially, what FDR begins to do is to articulate the principles of democracy that monitory populations had been holding high all along. So, he begins very articulately to defend democracy and defend the principles of democracy against fascism, for example, in a way that really inspires people to carry that torch forward. And you can see it really dramatically in moment that Rome falls, for example, and he gives a very powerful speech about how even though the fascists promised everything, look who’s feeding the starving people in Rome. It’s us, the democratic governments. So, that idea of helping people at a very basic economic level and also at the — soon to be at the level of civil rights in the States then becomes a profound defense of the concept of human self-determination as it’s embodied in democracy.

MARTIN: You draw a through line from FDR to Joe Biden. I mean, the Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and so forth. You also draw a through line between those counter veiling forces who you say, you know, continually try to marshal racial grievance in the service of authoritarianism and in the service of, basically, you know, an unbalanced economy that benefits the few at the expense of the many. And I’m just so curious of, like, when you, sort of, say, gosh, we’ve seen this movie over and over again. Why does it still work?

RICHARDSON: I’m making the point that that idea that some people are better than others certainly runs all the way through the United States, you know, through the 1890s and the Rise of the Robber Barons, and the elite enslavers in the 1850s all the way back to the founding fathers. And at the end of the day, I think what I’m really articulating is the ongoing struggle, at least in the United States, between the concepts that everybody is created equal and has an equal right to be treated equally before the laws and have a say in the government on the one hand. And on the other hand, the idea that some people really are better than others and have a duty and a right to rule over the rest of us. Those are two really fundamental ideas about the way that human society should be organized. Now, why we keep embracing the one, the expansion of liberal democracy and then abandoning it, I actually think it comes from the fact that because it works, people tend to think we’re always going to have it. And they stop paying attention and they stop defending it. So, in 1960, there was actually a political scientist who said, listen, we all agree on a liberal consensus. So, let’s stop talking about it and instead build political coalitions by hammering together different groups who want specific things from that liberal government. And when that happened, that left the room for a new narrative to come up from this small faction of people who wanted to overturn the liberal consensus, and they gave us that idea of the cowboy standing alone against the big government, the socialist government. And that, I think, is the problem that when things are — when things look like they’re stable, we back off and say, OK, we’re all set now. And that opens the way for people who are standing against that consensus to get a real foothold.

MARTIN: You know, on the one hand many people consider our democratic institutions to be at a time of, kind of, great peril. And — but then other people would look at this and say that they’ve survived before. They’ve survived, sort of, you know, grievous threats. I mean, the civil war, for example. Is there something fundamentally self-protective about the American experience that acts as a — I don’t know, bullwork against this?

RICHARDSON: What you’ve identified to me is the exciting part of this book. And that is — it’s the central question. Why — when all sorts of other countries fell to fascism, why didn’t America? And what I came to believe is that when I was writing this book and through my years as a historian is that the United States has, in a funny way, had an enucleation against fascism for the simple reason that it has always had such a complicated history with race and immigration. That is that marginalized Americans from the very beginning center the Declaration of Independence and the idea that they must be treated equally before the laws and they must have a right to a say in their government. So, while other countries could take that for granted or could say that this is — has already been established, we don’t have to think about it. Americans were out there every minute saying, hey, wait a minute, what about us? And because of that, that constant struggle to make that liberal democracy actually become real, Americans had it in front of them and still have it in front of us in a way that we might not. Were we not such a dramatically multi-cultural society.

MARTIN: Give us an example of how you say a group of people who represent historically marginalized people are really the ones who hold America to its ideals.

RICHARDSON: Well, so, one of the things that really jumped out in that final section is, in fact, the NAACP, the National Advance — Association for the Advancement of Colored People which is formed in 1909, sort of, technically around-ish Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, quite deliberately because it is a multiracial, multi-religious, multicultural group that says we simply must make the principles of the Declaration of Independence apply to everybody in this country. So, one of the things that really jumps out when you look at the NAACP as one of the founders of it, of course, is Ida B. Wells who’s a phenomenal journalist who’s known for bringing light to lynchings, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But one of the other people is W.E.B. Du Bois who’s just an absolutely brilliant sociologist. He could do anything he wanted. And what does he do? He decides that he wants to edit “The Crisis”, which is the NAACP’s magazine. Now, this is — he takes all his extraordinary talents to that magazine and constantly hammers on this is what it means in this country to have some people treated differently before the law than others. And if you go forward from that moment of 1909, the NAACP is constantly pulling together statistics, hanging out flags every time somebody is lynched. Making sure that popular figures in American culture are out there talking about what it means when, in fact, you know, a young woman walking home from church is gang raped. What it means when somebody comes home from fighting in World War II and has his eyes put out, and even though the perpetrator confesses to the crime ends up being acquitted of it. They keep that in front of people constantly. So, one of the things, when I think about the expansion of liberal democracy in my era, is that we tend to focus on heroes. We tend to focus on, for example, Rosa Parks and say, oh, she didn’t — you know, her feet were tired. Rosa Parks worked for the NAACP. She had been out there in the field collecting these statistics. Working with people. Making sure people knew what was going on. And at the end of the day, the NAACP becomes this extraordinarily powerful way to shine light on this fundamental contradiction in the United States. But some people were not treated equally before the law and had no right to have a say in their government. And they’re a great example, I think, of people saying, hey, wait a minute, this is not about an individual. It’s not about a certain group. It’s about the country and what this country is supposed to stand for.

MARTIN: How though do you address, based on sort of your historical knowledge and your deep reporting, this — the ongoing power of white grievance? And for whatever reason, as you’ve pointed out in your book, this kind of we’re not get outstanding fair share argument, or that these people, these other people, these minority people, these brown people are getting more than their fair share at the expense of us is a very powerful argument. How do well-meaning people who do believe in a government and in a country that includes all the people who live here and contribute to it should benefit from it? How does that — how does one address that?

RICHARDSON: Well, historically, that is worked by making the economic pie fairer. That is people are very susceptible to that language. White people are very susceptible to that language when their own tables are barer than they used to be. That is — it’s always important to remember that the rise of white grievance tracks very, very closely to the concentration of wealth at the top of the scale. You could see it in the 1890s, you can see it in the 1920s, you can certainly see it in present, you can see it in the 1850s. And the — at the 1850’s and the 18th — early 1860s in the American south where, in fact, wealth was dramatically concentrating in about one percent of the white population, leaving the rest of the white population much of it homeless. So, the — it’s always important to remember that those things track economically as well.

MARTIN: So, before we let you go, if — let’s say, I know you identify yourself as a conservative. You say in the same way that Lincoln did, which is that you adhere to first principles. These were the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence, our founding document. What about people who don’t see it that way? Who could say, well, you know what, no. I’m a conservative because I believe in small government. I believe that, you know, that traditional family structures are the best. I believe in a minimal federal footprint, it’s a — that’s what makes me a conservative. Do you have an argument for them?

RICHARDSON: Yes, and the answer is, of course, by reaching back to Lincoln and trying to reclaim the mantel of conservativism for, if you will, progressivism. I’m trying to make the point that today’s Republicans who talk about, for example, small government are simply not trying to do that at all. They’re in fact, talking about a large government that going to impose Christian nationalism on the rest of us. You know, we need to have working political parties that are functioning in the real world in this moment. And it’s a give and take between those things that will get us to a reasonable government that operates in the real world. But that’s not where we are right now. And where we are right now is that those people who believe those things need to work with people like me who have a different perspective on it to get rid of those who disagree with those principles altogether. Want to get rid of the American government that does things like protect civil rights. That does things like regulate business or has a basic social safety net or promotes infrastructure. Because those are things that the vast majority of Americans agree on. Those are the things that are traditional in this country. They’re the things under which we tend to have the most just society, both economically, culturally and religiously. And those are the true values of Americans, and those are the things on which we need to stand right now. Once we’ve done that, sure, let’s go fight tooth and nail about mortgage rates, or let’s go fight tooth and nail about what we should do in our public schools. But until we have the restoration of our democracy, the rest of it needs to be moved off the table.

MARTIN: Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much for talking with us.

RICHARDSON: Thank you for having me.