Heather Cox Richardson teaches history at Boston College and writes a popular Substack newsletter with 1.6 million subscribers. The author of well-received books on the Republican Party and on Reconstruction, her latest, Democracy Awakening, is a dishonest diatribe against Donald Trump and the MAGA movement disguised as a thumbnail history of the United States, primarily from the 1930s to the present.

The book’s stated thesis is that there is a “liberal consensus” in America that favors freedom and equality, and that American history can be understood as a continuous battle between the supporters and the opponents of that consensus. Support can be traced from America’s founders through Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Joe Biden, and opposition can be traced from America’s founders through pro-slavery Confederates, anti-New Dealers, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Trump. An immediately evident flaw in this thesis is that the liberal consensus evolves over time, and so its champion one day can become its target the next if he doesn’t hustle to keep up. Richardson doesn’t seem to notice, but her narrative suffers as a result.

Note, for example, that she traces both support for, and opposition to, the liberal consensus to the American Founders. She embraces the Declaration of Independence as the Ur-document of the liberal consensus, but at the same time condemns the founders, making no exceptions even for men like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, as “enslavers”—the politically correct but factually inaccurate term for slaveholders these days—and falsely asserts that they intended the Declaration to mean simply that they were “equal to other white men in England.”

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The central narrative of Democracy Awakening begins in 1937, when anti-New Dealers published a “Conservative Manifesto” that “rejected the idea of public spending and called private investment the bedrock of the economic health of the nation.” The crisis we face today—by which Richardson means Trump—is said to be rooted in this pro-free enterprise, anti-bureaucracy reaction against FDR’s policies, a reaction she describes as radical (elsewhere she calls it fascist) rather than conservative. Richardson imagines herself a conservator of the Lincolnian tradition of championing the Declaration, but she can do so only by misrepresenting Lincoln as a proto-New Dealer and twisting the meaning of the Declaration in order to justify the evolving demands of progress, whatever they may be. Whereas Lincoln saw the Declaration and the Constitution as essentially connected—the former an “apple of gold” in the latter’s “picture of silver”—Richardson sees them in conflict. She expresses this most bluntly when she writes that “turn[ing] the ideas of the Declaration…into reality” requires a federal government that is not “held back by the Framers through the Bill of Rights.”

To continue her tale, the gathering forces of darkness that threatened our democracy in the years leading up to World War II receded in the postwar years, with the liberal consensus reaching its apogee between 1946 and 1964. But developments in the 1950s spelled trouble for the future.

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First, an unfounded “fear of socialism” arose in reaction to tax and welfare policies; anti-socialists “resurrected a false history of the nation, written by white supremacists after the Civil War”—specifically, they believed that letting black citizens vote “amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing.”

Second, William F. Buckley, Jr. turned his guns on the Enlightenment in God and Man at Yale, insisting, Richardson imagines, that “the nation’s universities must stop using the fact-based arguments that…led to ‘secularism and collectivism’ and instead teach the values of Christianity and individualism.” What’s more, in McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), written with L. Brent Bozell, Jr., Buckley “divided the world into Christians and communists—the latter aided by Jews, according to the antisemites who embraced this theory.”

Third,

the 1954 Brown v. Board decision resurrected the mythological cowboy, now backed by the extraordinary power of television, as a brilliant vehicle for Movement Conservatism. By 1959, there were twenty-six Westerns on TV…. [They depicted] a male world of hardworking cowboys protecting their land from evildoers. The cowboys didn’t need help from their government…. They even helped keep order in nearby towns that had a government.

Out of this “cowboy mythology” of rugged individualism emerged Arizonan Barry Goldwater, in whom “Movement Conservatism and the racist mythology of the post-Civil War years came together.” “In 1960,” Richardson writes, “unlike in 1937”—the halcyon days when fascist free marketers stood alone—“those determined to destroy the liberal consensus had racism on their side.”

Rather than strain the reader’s patience, here’s an abridged version of the ensuing story from 1960 to 2015: John F. Kennedy was murdered in “nut country” (i.e., right-wing Dallas; never mind that Oswald was a Commie), Nixon hatched his racist “southern strategy” and polarized our politics for political gain, Reagan launched his presidential campaign three miles from where three civil rights workers had been murdered to signify his white supremacist bona fides, the end of the Fairness Doctrine for broadcast networks allowed the dangerous rise of Rush Limbaugh, and Republicans after the Cold War made our elections “less free and fair” and began cozying up to the Russians.

Enter Trump promising to “Make America Great Again”—a slogan, Richardson huffs, that “dovetailed with rising authoritarianism around the world” and suggested a “worldview that fit neatly into the thread of American history articulated by American enslavers in the years before the Civil War.” The remainder of Democracy Awakening—well over half—deals with the past eight years: Trump’s so-called authoritarian presidency, the January 6 so-called insurrection, and the presidency of Joe Biden, who has “expanded liberalism”—presumably by championing transgenderism—“just as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ had earlier each expanded liberalism.”

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As I wrote in these pages four years ago about a pair of anti-Trump books by establishment Republicans (“Are We Going to Fist City?,” Fall 2020), too much of the second half of Richardson’s book reads like a catalog of the talking points spewed over the past eight years on MSNBC. A more curious writer might wonder why she finds herself in the company of such strange bedfellows. George W. Bush, for example, whose presidency her book portrays as antagonistic to the liberal consensus, is quoted approvingly in describing Trump’s Inaugural Address as “weird shit.” Did the liberal consensus evolve so violently after Trump’s 2016 victory that it opened a wormhole in political space-time?

Speaking of space-time, Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek and no John Bircher, wrote many of the scripts for the TV western Have Gun–Will Travel, which ran from 1957 to 1963 and which the late Shakespeare scholar and libertarian pop culture critic Paul Cantor criticized (along with other early TV westerns) for being overly infused with the liberalism of its time. So, what explains Richardson’s fierce antipathy to these shows? In a separate passage concerning TV westerns from the one quoted above, she excoriates the late 1970s western Little House on the Prairie for promoting “the image of the traditionalist family” and sparking a rage for “prairie dresses”—the wearing of which, we learn from a footnoted article in Jezebel, “[sets] a claim…to a racialized and gendered history.” As for “racialized,” I can personally attest that it wasn’t unusual for fans of these shows to see Sammy Davis, Jr. ride onto the screen twirling a six-shooter, as he did twice on The Rifleman in 1962. As for “gendered,” Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley was no shrinking violet. But the early progressive ethic reflected in these westerns—to which, yes, individualism, independence, strong families, and the middle-class virtues were as central as the idea of equality—no longer cuts the mustard from the perspective of progressivism as it has evolved today. For Richardson, America’s past can never be truly praiseworthy.

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Apropos of this, liberal journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon—author of the recent book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women—concluded from her travels through flyover country that what Trump and his supporters in fact mean by “Make America Great Again” is something like a return to the earlier progressivism of FDR and JFK—the confident, patriotic progressivism that stands in sharp contrast to both the anti-American variety that arose after 1968 and the globalist version of today. This explains, she says, the political realignment we see happening. Working-class Americans who once formed the Democratic base—not only white and Hispanic but increasingly black as well—are rallying to Trump, while the core of his opposition consists of the moneyed and information-class elites—including the media, academics, and establishment Republicans and conservatives—whose comfortable lives are walled off from the devastation caused by both parties’ economic and foreign policies over the past three decades. From this perspective, our current political divide is over conflicting views of justice and of who should rule. The idea that it is about support or opposition to an age-old liberal consensus, with Trump as a dangerous authoritarian and his supporters as racist deplorables, is partisan bunkum aimed at preserving the status quo.

In an early footnote, Richardson attributes her understanding of authoritarianism to Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. But her only mention of Arendt in the text occurs while she is devoting three pages (over 1% of her book!) to Trump’s exaggeration of the size of the crowd at his 2017 inauguration, which she ludicrously compares to the lies employed by Hitler and Stalin to gain or hold power. Has Richardson even read Arendt? Yale professor Samuel Moyn—no Trump admirer himself—pointed out recently in Britain’s Prospect magazine that Arendt’s name has become ubiquitous in citations by anti-Trump scholars who have no real interest in Arendt herself, giving “many a think piece the patina of a famous name and pseudo-profundity. [Arendt’s] words opportunistically provided revulsion toward Trump with the imprimatur of a supposed philosopher of fascism.”

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An Arendt essay that is actually relevant to Richardson’s book is “Truth and Politics,” published in 1967. In it, Arendt distinguishes “rational truth”—which includes “mathematical, scientific, and philosophical truths”—from “factual truth,” such as “the role during the Russian Revolution of a man by the name of Trotsky.” Stalin’s success in scrubbing Leon Trotsky from Soviet history books leads Arendt to argue that factual truth is the more vulnerable of the two. She recounts an exchange involving Georges Clemenceau in the 1920s regarding whom historians would blame for World War I. “This I don’t know,” Clemenceau said. “But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.” Arendt was less sanguine. Erasing the facts about this from the record “would require no less than a power monopoly over the entire civilized world”—something “far from being inconceivable.”

In “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” George Orwell recounted witnessing this phenomenon:

I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but…according to various “party lines.”

Americans capable of seeing past their personal and partisan interests have witnessed the same with the Russian collusion hoax and the fictitious claim that what occurred in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, was an insurrection. Richardson’s book, a product of the “power monopoly” in today’s America, perpetuates these lies, which—unlike Trump’s exaggerated crowd size seven years ago—are sufficiently monumental to be reasonably compared to lies such as those surrounding the 1933 Reichstag fire.

In a chapter called “Rewriting American History,” Richardson has the gall to criticize the 1776 Commission established by President Trump in September 2020 for suggesting—“without evidence,” she says!—that American students are too often “taught in school to hate their own country.” But less than 20 pages later, she provides ample evidence herself by asserting that “Hitler looked to America’s indigenous reservations as a way to rid a country of ‘unwanted’ people.” Not even the author of the tendentious 2020 law review article Richardson cites as the authority for this lie draws so heady a conclusion—in fact, the article’s final sentence admits uncertainty as to whether American “laws and policies played a major role, some role, or any role at all” in Nazi policy.

In a healthy country, no respectable publisher would touch a book so profoundly dishonest. Ours is not a healthy country. In the absence of factual truth, political discourse and civic harmony are impossible. Historians like Heather Cox Richardson use partisan narratives as blunt instruments, the academic equivalent of the lawfare being waged by our politicized justice system. The national sickness this reflects cannot and will not last. But that is hardly to predict a happy future.