Democracy Awakening Quotes

“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“America is at a crossroads. A country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism. How did this happen? Is the fall of democracy in the United States inevitable? And if not, how can we reclaim our democratic principles? This crisis in American democracy crept up on many of us. For generations of Americans, grainy news footage from World War II showing row upon row of Nazi soldiers goose-stepping in military parades tricked us into thinking that the Adolf Hitlers of the world arrive at the head of giant armies. So long as we didn’t see tanks in our streets, we imagined that democracy was secure. But in fact, Hitler’s rise to absolute power began with his consolidation of political influence to win 36.8 percent of the vote in 1932, which he parlayed into a deal to become German chancellor. The absolute dictatorship came afterward.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“As a strongman becomes more and more destructive, followers’ loyalty only increases. Having begun to treat their perceived enemies badly, they need to believe their victims deserve it. Turning against the leader who inspired such behavior would mean admitting they had been wrong and that they, not their enemies, are evil. This, they cannot do.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“A history that looks back to a mythologized past as the country’s perfect time is a key tool of authoritarians. It allows them to characterize anyone who opposes them as an enemy of the country’s great destiny.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“Leaders don’t try to persuade people to support real solutions, but instead reinforce their followers’ fantasy self-image and organize them into a mass movement. Once people internalize their leader’s propaganda, it doesn’t matter when pieces of it are proven to be lies, because it has become central to their identity.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“Appointing unqualified figures is a key tactic of authoritarians, who turn to staffers who are fiercely loyal because they are not qualified or talented enough to rise to power in a nonpartisan system. They recognize that without the leader who elevated them, they will never again be in power—and sometimes will be in prison—so they will cleave to him to the end.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“Even though 85 percent of Americans polled in summer 2024 thought abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances, while only 12 percent thought it should be banned entirely, Republicans continued to promise a total ban.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“Today’s crisis in democracy has brought us back to the same question that haunted the Founders: Are the principles on which this nation was founded viable? Is it really possible to create a country in which everyone is equal before the law and entitled to have a say in their government, or are some people better than others and thus have the right—and the duty—to rule?”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political, or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they have been left behind. Their frustration makes them vulnerable to leaders who promise to make them dominant again. A strongman downplays the real conditions that have created their problems and tells them that the only reason they have been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power. Such leaders undermine existing power structures, and as they collapse, people previously apathetic about politics turn into activists, not necessarily expecting a better life, but seeing themselves as heroes reclaiming the country. Leaders don’t try to persuade people to support real solutions, but instead reinforce their followers’ fantasy self-image and organize them into a mass movement. Once people internalize their leader’s propaganda, it doesn’t matter when pieces of it are proven to be lies, because it has become central to their identity. As a strongman becomes more and more destructive, followers’ loyalty only increases. Having begun to treat their perceived enemies badly, they need to believe their victims deserve it. Turning against the leader who inspired such behavior would mean admitting they had been wrong and that they, not their enemies, are evil. This, they cannot do.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“Enlightenment thinkers had rejected leadership based on religion or birth, arguing instead that society moved forward when people made good choices after hearing arguments based on fact.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. It gave the federal government power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. It said: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“The key to the rise of authoritarians, they explained, is their use of language and false history.[3]”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“The southern strategy marked the switch of the parties’ positions over the issue of race. Johnson knew what that meant: that the nation’s move toward equality would provide a weapon for a certain kind of politician to rise to power. In a hotel in Tennessee after a day spent seeing racial slurs scrawled on signs and an evening of bourbon, Johnson explained the signs to his young aide Bill Moyers: “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”[15]”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“In the years after President Ronald Reagan took over the White House (where he promptly removed the solar panels), a radical minority once again used the power of language and the power of their own historical myth to tear apart the concept of the common good. Their dismantling of the liberal consensus revived a dangerous trend toward authoritarianism. First, wealth concentrated upward, leaving a large group of Americans dispossessed and angry over their downward mobility. At the same time, popular culture emphasized that those dispossessed Americans were at fault for their failure in a system they increasingly recognized was rigged. Then Republican politicians flooded the media system with propaganda insisting that tax cuts and pro-business government policies were not to blame for the dispossession of white lower- and middle-class Americans. The culprits, they insisted, were lazy, grasping, and immoral minorities and women.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“In the end, thirty-four people and three companies were indicted or pleaded guilty in the attack on the 2016 election or its cover-up, including Papadopoulos, Manafort, Manafort’s partner Rick Gates, Flynn, Kilimnik, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, twelve Russian intelligence operatives, thirteen Russian nationals, and three Russian companies. Before he left office, Trump pardoned those who had refused to cooperate with the Department of Justice: Flynn, Stone, Manafort, and Papadopoulos.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“By the 1880s, it was common knowledge that industrialists controlled Congress.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“The key to the rise of authoritarians, they explained, is their use of language and false history.[3] Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political, or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they have been left behind. Their frustration makes”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.”[1]”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“While Republicans since the 1980s have insisted the symbol of the United States is the whitewashed American cowboy who dominated the West with manly individualism, in fact the key to survival in the American West was family and friends: kinship networks, trading partners, neighbors who would show up for a barn raising. Working together, across racial lines, ethnic lines, gender lines, and age lines, was what enabled people to defend their rights against a small group of elites determined to keep control of the country.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“Over three centuries, Americans who believed in the principles of democracy, those ideals articulated by the Founders, however imperfectly they lived them, have asserted the principles of equality and government by consent even in the face of such repression, even as they died for their beliefs. More often than not, those articulating the nation’s true principles have been marginalized Americans who demanded the nation honor its founding promises. Their struggles have constantly renewed the country’s dedication to the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Their fight for equality reveals the true nature of American democracy: it is, and has always been, a work in progress.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“Schiff begged the Republicans to say “enough.” “If right doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how good the Constitution is. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the Framers were. . . . If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost. If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. The Framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves if right and truth don’t matter.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“In 1990, GOPAC, the Republican state and local political training organization under the direction of Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, distributed a memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” to elected Republicans. The paper urged them to refer to Democrats with words like corrupt, cheat, disgrace, endanger, failure, hypocrisy, intolerant, liberal, lie, pathetic, sick, steal, traitors, waste, welfare, and abuse of power.[14]”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“As Lincoln wrote, “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”[10]”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he claimed that Germany was the successor to the Holy Roman Empire that had dominated Central Europe for a thousand years. These leaders believed that their new system would reclaim the past with the ideology of the future, welding pure men into a military and social machine that moved all as one, while pure women supported society as mothers. They set out to eliminate those who didn’t fit their model and to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“That openness meant those opposing the liberal consensus seemed out of step, people who would be left behind. The Archie Bunker types seemed to be a dying breed, and modern Americans could afford to be charitable toward them, just as they had been toward the Confederates whose ideology the modern Archie Bunkers shared.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“But for all of Whitman’s celebration of the many peoples in the United States, the demand of poorer white men for inclusion in the government was based on the idea of keeping other marginalized people out. States’ rights democracy kept white men in charge, for they were the voters who determined the shape of the state governments. Those white men advanced their own interests at the expense of their Brown and Black neighbors, declaring it the nation’s “Manifest Destiny” to push Indigenous Americans off their lands and take over parts of Mexico to establish plantations and plantation slavery there. Above all, they protected and extended the practice of human enslavement that people like Elizabeth Freeman had successfully challenged seventy years before.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” Parroting the lie becomes a loyalty pledge, even if—especially if—you don’t actually believe it.[6]”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“The administration’s full-blown embrace of the long-standing attempt to destroy the active federal government of the liberal consensus did more than that. It re-created exactly the conditions the liberal consensus was designed to end: it enabled a few well-connected individuals to turn a public need into a private fortune. When other countries sent masks, gowns, and so on, they went not to the states or to FEMA but to the private sector to sell at up to fifteen times their usual cost. The official in charge of distributing the materials said this was because the private sector already had efficient distribution systems in place and, he told reporters, “I’m not here to disrupt a supply chain.”[2]”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

“In a hotel in Tennessee after a day spent seeing racial slurs scrawled on signs and an evening of bourbon, Johnson explained the signs to his young aide Bill Moyers: “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”[15]”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America