AFT Book Club: Heather Cox Richardson on the future of democracy

Every day, one of the foremost contemporary authorities on American history, Heather Cox Richardson, writes one of her "Letters from an American." She writes about what is shaping the course of our history on that exact day, what's turning it in one direction or the other, and what it all means in the long run. Right now, it's the looming presidential election and what it means for democracy.

In this case, she said, it means we could lose it.

Richardson, who describes herself as a Lincoln Republican, said that if Donald Trump wins the presidency next month, "We will lose [democracy]. Not forever. We will recover it, but not in my lifetime-not in your lifetime." She defined a Lincoln Republican as someone who upholds the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and defends the principles of American democracy.

More than 200 AFT members participated in the AFT Book Club conversation Oct. 20, in which Richardson outlined centuries of our nation's struggles with democracy. She also discussed her new book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, a collection of those daily letters she has been writing since 2021.

A professor of history at Boston College, Richardson also has written about the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and the American West in award-winning books whose subjects stretch from the European settlement of North America to the history of the Republican Party through the Trump administration.

She is not, she said, being an alarmist about Trump dismantling democracy.

"I just worry that people don't recognize just how bad things could get and how quickly things can get that bad."

Richardson pointed to, as heralds of authoritarianism, Republican efforts to rewrite history and commandeer the way it is taught. A critical component of our history has already been successfully erased, she said, referencing statewide curriculum changes instituted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

"What really jumped out to me about that curriculum was that, for all that it erased different groups of people, what it really erased was agency," she said. "So, there was no way for people to look at our history and say that ordinary people had a say in it.

"And that idea of controlling our history, not just by who we erase, but also by creating a vision in which there was a perfect past and it could be perfect again … that's what I would call authoritarian history, because it was a perfect past that [Trump] is promising a strongman can take us back to, so long as those people who are standing in the way get wiped out," she added. "And that's very different than our true democratic history, which is all about regular people having agency."

This kind of historical revisionism "gaslights the public on a national scale," she said.

Removing agency from Americans is why Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for a second Trump administration put forward by a conservative think tank, proposes eliminating unions and the federal Department of Education, AFT President Randi Weingarten said.

"The labor movement is agency for workers. Public education and access to college is agency for young people," she said.

Richardson emphasized that in this election, our history and our democracy are not partisan issues.

"This is a place where everybody should be comfortable, as in protecting our democracy. And … speaking of history, this is our moment. This is our chance to protect the same things that our forebears did, to protect the right to have a say in our government and the right to be treated equally before the law, and to stand with Fannie Lou Hamer and Abraham Lincoln. And for all that we're scared-and I certainly am-it's also an extraordinary gift and an opportunity to be able to put our names into history alongside … those great heroes who put everything on the line to save the concept of human self-determination."

The whole point of democracy, she said, is that it's never finished.

The complete webinar is available on aft.org/bookclub.

[Melanie Boyer]

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