Is There Hope for America? Heather Cox Richardson Thinks So

Since 2019, American historian and author Heather Cox Richardson has written almost daily essays about the state of the U.S. Her newsletter, Letters from an American, has grown into a grassroots phenomenon. More than 1.5 million readers are turning to Richardson to make sense of an increasingly chaotic, uncertain world.

Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and the author of the acclaimed October 2024 book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian. As part of the Phil Lind Initiative, a multidisciplinary lecture series presented by UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Richardson will draw from her deep understanding of American history to deliver a highly anticipated public lecture in Vancouver next week.

Ahead of her talk at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on April 10, Cox Richardson spoke with The Tyee about the street fight for American democracy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: You are the very first person I read every morning where I get up. It must be so strange to be a historian by profession, and then to be also an actor in history as it’s unfolding.

Heather Cox Richardson: I’ve always thought of myself as a back-of-the-room lurker. I hated to be anywhere further up than that, because I wanted to watch what’s going on and see how people were reacting, but now because my audience is so big, I’m a little bit hesitant to do that.

I can’t imagine the pressure of having people look to you for that degree of clarity and connecting all the dots in a given news day. I’m curious about what the process is for you. What are your go-to sources of information when you’re writing Letters from an American?

I wake up in the morning and read social media for a couple of hours just to see what people are talking about and what the stories are. I’m trained as a historian and historians look at how and why societies change. That’s why we care about theories. I’m an idealist, which means that I believe ideas change society.

I think it’s also very important that I have been a teacher for 30 years. That impacts not just the way I write, but also what you said about responsibility. I am extraordinarily aware of power dynamics. For example, in a classroom, I never try to be dismissive of somebody. I’m very aware of trying not to amplify things that are not solid. And you’ll notice on my social media that I never, ever punch down, ever. I’m always trying to be supportive, because if you have power, that’s what you should do.

Once I figure out what the stories are, I research them. For example, let’s take the Alien Enemies Act. I had to read the law again to see how it had been used, then I read [Judge] Boasberg’s comments on it, then I set up a timeline of what had happened. That’s all just research.

I did a recent piece about bringing back Curtis Yarvin, about whom I’d written before, but I was really struggling with why anybody would deliberately crash an economy. We’ve never really had a president before who was deliberately trying to dismantle a booming economy. Why would you do that?

One of the things that I've always been impressed by is the calmness of your approach. Sometimes reading the comments on your Facebook page are revelatory, because people come up with stuff I never in a million years would have thought of.

I always think of myself as the coffee pot that other people are gathering around. One of the things that amuses me to no end is I’m getting a ton of requests to run for senator against Susan Collins. I’m really good at what I do, but I have literally never run for anything, even sixth-grade president.

But there’s a couple of things that I’ve done that I’m very proud of. One is the deliberate construction of a community. I have always called out the journalists who are producing the stories, and that’s really deliberate. This is not an individualistic game, we are all creating a body of knowledge, and we are all working together.

My mission is to teach in this moment, but also to leave a record for someone in 150 years. In creating this concept of a broader community, people are more willing to come to me with information.

That sense of transparency creates trust. Your integrity in giving other people credit is so important.

It’s a lot like teaching. The trick to a really good classroom is not to garner all the power for yourself and try to fill people’s heads. Great classes are the ones where you trust the students to carry it themselves. It’s something that you could never create as an individual. I’d never intended to write these letters. They’ve always been an experiment, and that’s a luxury that other people didn't have.

Even as legacy media is fumbling the ball, there are other people who are picking it up. In an interview you did last week, you were talking about this period in time being a major re-ordering of American society. I’m curious how you feel about this moment, and the potential for something great to come out of it.

If you and I sit here and try to make a list of authoritarians who leave office to go on to spend the rest of their lives drinking and golfing. [A moment of pointed silence]. Do these people never read history?

We know how the Nazis ended up. The question is, how many people will they hurt before they fall? You always get a correction, but is it a week, or 45 years? I’m really aiming for a month now, as opposed to 45 years, because the damage that these people do will be extraordinary.

Americans are widely in agreement on things like common-sense gun safety legislation, abortion rights, the rich paying higher taxes, education, clean air and water. The thing I keep saying to people who are wondering how they should get involved is, you’re not alone. More than 80 per cent of Americans want these things. It’s literally getting your friends together and saying, “Damn it, it’s time.”

It is interesting to see the Trump administration put the arts in their crosshairs, whether it’s the Kennedy Center, the National Endowment for the Arts or Sesame Street.

I do think that there is real hope for the future. I see it in the art. I’m always fascinated by the Armory Show of 1913 that introduced the concept of modern art to Americans. There were riots against it. I look around at the influx of different people coming together with the new technologies, new voices, new ways to look at the world. I see new writing and new forms of literature and art, and that seems to me to be a harbinger of the future.

Sometimes, when I’m reading international publications and then I look at American news, I think they’re not living in the same world as everyone else.

This was absolutely the project of right-wing media. If you watch Fox News, it is not operating in reality. That’s exactly what Hannah Arendt talked about in destabilizing a population for totalitarianism. But the real question is, is it going to work?

Over 54 per cent of Americans are functionally illiterate. The spread between the income and wealth of those at the top and those at the bottom is completely unsustainable. We’ve got a whole generation of young people who feel like they can’t get jobs and can’t have housing. The problems are myriad.

In looking at different countries around the world, whether it’s Brazil, France, Poland, Romania or Korea that have been forced to deal with their own version of oppressive governments, it’s a very different approach than the American one. I’m wondering why.

I believe in ideas and that means that I believe in rhetoric, because the way we talk about things matters. And I will point out that the right has been all over this now for literally generations.

I always come back to the fact that [far-right broadcaster and conspiracy theorist] Alex Jones is a media empire. The tagline for his show was “There’s a war on for your mind,” and there is! It coincided with a right-wing attack on public education, which comes quite deliberately out of the Supreme Court decisions against segregation, for example Brown v. Board of Education, but also a couple of decisions in 1962 and 1963 that outlawed prayer in the schools, which is really what’s behind the push to privatize schools and push homeschooling.

People don’t actually know what is in the constitution. There is much less emphasis on American civics and American government. I certainly saw this with my own kids, who didn’t really get American history until they were in eighth grade.

I think those two things came together so that people didn’t really understand what America stood for. One of the reasons I think I’m popular is that I’m explaining things like the Declaration of Independence. I got that stuff in at least third grade.

The radical right, a faction that took over the Republican Party, insists that anyone who is trying to promote the public good, the way the governments have tried to do since 1948, were somehow communists or socialists, which is just complete crap.

The stat that you’ve cited in your work is four per cent of the American population actually supports Project 2025.

This comes back again to the media and whether people are aware of it. Lots of people have still not heard of Project 2025. And that’s one of the things that we’re seeing in this moment is a lot of people who really weren’t paying attention are suddenly going “Shit, I better pay attention!” That’s when you get real change.

In historical movements in the past, it seems to take direct contact in your daily life, when people couldn't afford basic groceries, you have this huge kind of explosion. At what point does that happen in the U.S.?

I think it’s close. It always feels to me like we’re in a race to see whether the Trump administration is going to crack down with violence before the people rise up and demand a new government. I don’t know which side is going to win.

I will say that they would not be behaving the way they are if they felt like they were in control. That’s always important to remember: our real issue right now is voter suppression.

In a free and fair vote, I have no doubt that there would be a Democratic government across the board. This is why this Supreme Court race in Wisconsin is such a huge deal [Editor's note: Judge Susan Crawford won her seat the day after this interview took place, securing a 4-3 liberal majority in Wisconsin's Supreme Court], because it really could determine whether or not the Republicans can continue to hold the House of Representatives through gerrymandering, which is the only way they’re holding it now, even with everything else going on.

Donald Trump is mentally gone. I think he’s a figurehead for different factions in the White House, including Stephen Miller, who’s completely anti-immigrant and a deeply problematic character.

Also, Russell Vought, who is Project 2025, and wants to establish a theocracy. Elon Musk is just desperate for government contracts, but also has this fantasy of rebuilding American society along his technocratic lines.

The real issue with him, to my mind, is that they’ve got access to everything. They’ve gotten all the computer systems. If they wanted to erase my existence today, I have no doubt they could do it.

It gets so frightening so quickly, because [the Department of Government Efficiency has] information about the most important aspects of people’s lives, like how much money they make per year, how many kids they have, where they live. That kind of information can have direct personal impact and can be used to basically control people.

I think that’s what Musk is up to, but they’re also up to something else. The whole point of this project wasn’t just to break the law, but to ignore that the law even exists, which means that, essentially, they've burned their boats. The Department of Government Efficiency team has broken into servers that have top-secret stuff on them. That’s espionage law. You’re in deep doodoo when you’ve done that.

But 334 million people, 50 states? To exert the kind of power over the American people will prove a challenge. What Vought wants to do is what Iran did in the 1970s: take America back to the 1920s. Do you really see Americans doing that? I’m just not sure it’s going to work on a larger scale.

I will also add that I was heartened by the elections in Germany and in Canada, I think the people who were sort of playing footsie with the radical right, who were saying “No, no, [Elon Musk] doesn't really mean it when he does the Nazi salute,” are watching what Trump is doing in the United States and all of a sudden they’re not playing any longer.

When Putin tried to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Europe, he expected that NATO would collapse, and maybe it will. But [French President] Emmanuel Macron is certainly putting his weight behind the idea of pulling everybody together.

There is huge new investment in Ukraine. Canada is working more effectively with the E.U. than with the U.S. I think that that will help dampen the radical right, because I don’t think any country, other than Hungary, is looking at what’s happening at the U.S. and saying, “Whoopee!”

It’s interesting to see it take place on an ordinary basis in Canada, where people are going to the grocery store and looking at every single lemon to see where it came from. Tourism is also collapsing in the U.S., because Canadians are refusing to travel there anymore. And I mean, the economic repercussions of that are huge.

Tourism is a $200-billion industry.

If you’re running a little inn and it’s a mom-and-pop establishment, you’re hosed. The financial decisions taking place in the White House have real-life implications on ordinary people.

If you look at what Republicans have done in states like Arkansas or Missouri for a generation, they’ve completely hollowed out rural areas, the hospitals, the schools.

The state of Missouri only has school four days a week because they can’t afford teachers. And instead of saying,” You people suck!” they keep electing Republicans.

It's one of the reasons people like me are doing as much media as we are. Until people really feel it, they’re just not going to leave their cult.

Heather Cox Richardson will be in Vancouver to deliver a lecture on what it means to be American as part of the 2025 Phil Lind Initiative series at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on April 10 at 6:30 p.m.