Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Content Warning: The guide and source text discuss hate speech, racism, enslavement, racial and gender prejudice, genocide and displacement of Indigenous Americans, anti-Black violence, and systemic inequalities through American history. To refer to the collective of Americans who are not of European descent, Heather Cox Richardson uses the phrase “people of color,” which this guide preserves. Both the guide and the source text are specific about race and ethnicity where applicable.

Using a false or mythological history to influence people’s ideologies or perceptions of the country is a key strategy Richardson identifies in The Throughline of Authoritarian Sentiment in US History. In her foreword, Richardson says that after World War II, social scientists, historians, and philosophers rallied to explain how authoritarians in that era “harnessed societal instability into their own service” (10). These professionals identified that the “key to the rise of authoritarians […] is their use of language and false history” (10). These two strategies work in concert to convince people of the validity of an image of a mythological past free from the social struggles of their present. Especially in Parts 1 and 2, Richardson discusses how American politicians have manipulated this strategy to maintain power, leading to a trend toward authoritarianism.

One strategy of creating false histories is using media to popularize ideas of symbolic figures that are different from those figures’ real-life correlatives. Richardson uses the symbol of the cowboy to make this point. Immediately after the Civil War, Southern Democrats “mythologized these cowboys as white men […] who worked hard for a day’s pay independent of the government” (39), defending women and children from “warriors, Mexicans, and rustlers” without government support (39). Richardson debunks everything about this myth: For instance, one third of cowboys were people of color, the government provided resources and money for western settlements, and women and children were integral to the survival of western communities, not helpless people to be protected. Regardless, the image of the cowboy became an “effective propagandist” of false history for over a century. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the Civil Rights Movement gained steam, “there were twenty-six Westerns on TV” (41), pumping images of “a male world of hardworking cowboys protecting their land from evildoers” (42). This appealed to right-wing politicians, who began to use rhetoric that used rights for Black Americans as “scapegoats” for the disenfranchisement felt by “poor white men” (179) through the Nixon administration and onward.

Reagan’s administration appealed to a fictional “time before Black and Brown voices and women began to claim equal rights” (60), pairing this idea with the slogan “make America great again” (60). This pairing explicitly paints a false history in which Black and Brown Americans are directly to blame for America’s veering from its “greatness.” This slogan was resurrected by Donald Trump in 2016, where he positioned himself as “the all-powerful fictional hero” resurrecting “the American mythology of the cowboy who saves the villagers from destruction” (126), which he used to convince people that he alone could bring “real Americans” to a mythological past that was fictionalized from the outset.

In this way, the use of false history convinces people of a version of American history that never existed, in which strict hierarchies of people lead to social and economic prosperity, and to which only selected leaders can return the country. This convinces people that they must support that single leader at all costs, even if they undermine key tenets of democracy.