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Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
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35/99
Critics
94/99
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Volume
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About This Book
"Engaging and highly accessible." —Boston Globe "A vibrant, and essential history of America's unending, enraging and utterly compelling struggle since its founding to live up to its own best ideals… It's both a cause for hope, and a call to arms."--Jane Mayer, author Dark Money From historian and author of the popular daily newsletter LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN, a vital narrative that explains how America, once a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy -- and how we can turn back. In the midst of the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. It soon turned into a newsletter and its readership ballooned to more than 2 million dedicated readers who rely on her plainspoken and informed take on the present and past in America. In Democracy Awakening , Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism -- creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation's true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a roadmap for the nation's future. Richardson's talent is to wrangle our giant, meandering, and confusing news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to, what the precedents are, and what possible paths lie ahead. In her trademark calm prose, she is realistic and optimistic about the future of democracy. Her command of history allows her to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Reconstruction to Goldwater to Mitch McConnell, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus and birth of "movement conservatism." Many books tell us what has happened over the last five years. Democracy Awakening explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history really tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.
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Reviews
"It's an unusual but effective structure, allowing Richardson to do what she does best: show her readers how history and the present are in constant conversation."
"An engaging and highly accessible history of how small groups of Americans have occasionally provoked major crises by working to deny or obscure the principles of the Declaration ..."
"The second two-thirds of Democracy Awakening contains material that is simultaneously too familiar and too fresh to submit entirely to a historian's dispassionate analysis ..."
"It is not manifestly false, or simpleminded, just simplified ..."
"The resulting book is odd and unfocused."
"She never convincingly justifies the use of the term 'authoritarianism' to refer to, for example, political opponents of civil rights for African Americans."
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