CL Pauwels at Large

Alternatingly enlightening, infuriating, and discouraging, historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, should be required reading for anyone who wants to make sense of today’s social and political climate. She is a professor of history at Boston College

This book is like an AP American History class packed into one volume. From an original “American Conservatism” through the Southern Democrats, Lincoln’s Republican party – which bears very little resemblance to the current GOP, FDR’s New Deal, Nixon’s downfall, and all the way through the days of COVID, each twist and turn of American democracy is summarized in context.

Richardson writes in a clear, lucid voice with very little editorializing about national events and their place in US history – how we got where we are today. Unfortunately, history does repeat itself…over and over again, all while building to the current tipping point we face on the fate of US democracy itself. We’ve recovered from such crises in the past; can we do it again? Richardson thinks so.

I’m not as optimistic. But at least I now have the story of how and why we got here – from her perspective, fully grounded in historical facts (17 pages of sources at the end of this volume) – and it all makes a bit more sense.

Depressing as that may be.

If Democracy Awakening sounds interesting, and you’re not already following Richardson’s “Letters From an American” on Facebook or Substack, check out that daily sampling of her historically-based news. It’s my first read every morning.