Author: Heather Cox Richardson

Since right-wing insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6 with the vague but violent idea of taking over the government, observers are paying renewed attention to the threat of right-wing violence in our midst. For all our focus on fighting socialism and communism, right-wing authoritarianism is actually quite an old threat in our country. The nation’s focus on fighting “socialism” began in 1871, but what its opponents stood against was not government control of the means of production—an idea that never took hold in America—but the popular public policies which cost tax dollars and thus made wealthier people pay...

The Senate acquitted former president Donald Trump on February 13 of the charge of inciting an insurrection. Fifty-seven senators said he was guilty; 43 said he was not guilty. An impeachment conviction requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate, so he was acquitted, but not before seven members of his own party voted to convict him. The only real surprise was when five Republicans joined 50 Democrats to vote in favor of calling witnesses. That vote came after Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) last night released a statement recounting an angry conversation between House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)...

“This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater. It’s more like a case where the town fire chief, who’s paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire.” This was how lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-MD) explained Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection to the senators trying the former president Trump for inciting that insurrection. Over the course of February 10, the House impeachment managers laid out a devastating timeline of the former president’s...

On February 3, the House impeachment managers filed their trial brief for the upcoming Senate impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump. The charge is that he incited the insurrection attempt of January 6, 2021, in which a mob stormed the Capitol to stop the counting of the certified electoral ballots for the 2020 election. Led by Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a former professor of constitutional law, the managers laid out Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and his incitement of a violent mob to stop Congress from confirming the victory of Joseph Biden in...

Pundits are saying that the Senate will vote to acquit former president Donald Trump at the end of his second impeachment trial, set to start on February 9. I’m not so sure. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the House of Representatives passed an article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” The article accuses the former president of engaging in high crimes and misdemeanors “by inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” It charges him with lying about voter fraud, trying to get the Georgia secretary of state to falsify election results, and...

We are now twenty years into this century. In America, the twenty years since 2000 have seen the end game of the Reagan Revolution, begun in 1980. In that era, political leaders on the right turned against the principles that had guided the country since the 1930s, when Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt guided the nation out of the Great Depression by using the government to stabilize the economy. During the Depression and World War Two, Americans of all parties had come to believe the government had a role to play in regulating the economy, providing a basic social...