Author: Heather Cox Richardson

The theme of the third day of the Democratic National Convention, held in the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, was “A Fight for Our Freedoms.” But the speeches were less about fighting than they were about recovering the roots of American democracy. In 1974, music writer Jon Landau saw a relatively unknown musician in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wrote for an alternative paper: “Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theater, I saw rock’n’roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when...

At Chicago’s United Center on August 20, the delegates at the Democratic National Convention reaffirmed the recent online nomination of Kamala Harris for president. The ceremonial roll-call vote featured all the usual good-natured boasting from the delegates about their own state’s virtues, a process that reinforces the incredible diversity and history of both this land and its people. The managers reserved the final slots for Minnesota and California—the home states of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, respectively—to put the ticket over the top. When the votes had been counted, Harris joined the crowd...

Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to be her running mate seems to cement the emergence of a new Democratic Party. When he took office in January 2021, President Joe Biden was clear that he intended to launch a new era in America, overturning the neoliberalism of the previous forty years and replacing it with a proven system in which the government would work to protect the ability of ordinary Americans to prosper. Neoliberalism relied on markets to shape society, and its supporters promised it would be so much more efficient than government regulation that...

It seems a new America began recently, and I have struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means. I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly. That is how scholars say fascism happens, too — first slowly and then all at once — and that is what has been keeping us up at night. But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then...