Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

Richardson proposes that the political question animating the 2020s is the same one that animated the nation’s founding: Is a democracy made of equal members possible? One of the country’s founding principles was a radical deviation from the hierarchies of European dynasties in favor of the idea that a country should operate on the “consent of the governed” (154). This brings to the fore the contradiction of how the Founders said “all men are created equal” (155) yet enslaved Black people and considered Indigenous people “savages.” Those qualifications made it easier for them to consider “all men” as equal; their equality “depended on inequality” (155).

In 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones originated The 1619 Project, which centers the date when the first enslaved African people arrived in Virginia under the system of chattel enslavement that subsequently shaped the country’s economy, industry, elections, diet and music, health and education inequalities, racial violence, income inequality, slang, legal systems, and ideological racism and anti-Blackness. Trump’s responding 1776 Commission rejects this view and celebrates the Founders as having the perfect vision of democracy.

Richardson points out that the inequality perpetuated by the Founders that led to enslavement, Jim Crow, Juan Crow, Indigenous genocide and displacement, and laws like the 1924 Immigration Act explicitly inspired authoritarians like Hitler, who named these policies as inspirations.