America’s “most successful independent journalist” will tell us how the right went off the rails

The discontent that riles American politics was sown in the 1990s. The ascension of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly made much of talk radio, especially in rural areas, the domain of conservative viewpoints.

Heather Cox Richardson, an author and professor of 19th-century American history at Boston College, believes that, at the time, multiple factors contributed to the rise of American conservatism.

“And especially with the denigration of public education in those years, I think it’s been a lot harder to see beyond the rhetoric,” Richardson tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “It’s really interesting — if you get people off of right-wing media, they cease to be angry and they cease to vote for Republicans, which is something I think Republicans recognize. This is a group of extremists who have created a cult in our country.”
Richardson will elaborate more on this topic on Mon., Oct. 28 as a guest of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, where she will discuss her latest book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (Penguin). Described as a “call to action,” the book examines how “modern conservatism has preyed upon a disaffected population, weaponizing language and promoting false history to consolidate power.”

The book expands on Richardson’s work as the founder of Letters from an American, a Substack newsletter and podcast covering the history behind modern politics. In 2020, the New York Times called her the “most successful independent journalist in America.”

Richardson believes that this cultish extremism that now defines the Republican party started in the 1990s with libertarian-leaning businessmen who wanted fewer regulations and taxes. Because they needed allies, they enlisted sexists who were intent on making the U.S. a patriarchal nation and racists who were against civil rights.

“But they never expected those people to drive the party,” Richardson says. “They were only supposed to supply the votes. And then when Trump got in office, after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville[, Va.] in 2017, he put those people in charge.”

She adds, “So now you are looking at a situation where you have somebody like Mitch McConnell, for example, saying he does not have control of the party, which is a huge drop-out. And instead, the people running the party are those who are linked to Project 2025 and want to impose a very strong government with Christian nationalism at its helm. And that is actually something that the libertarian wing doesn’t like.”

With the election in a matter of days, Richardson thinks one thing the Democrats can do is vote on candidates up and down the ballot. Even the most obscure public office is one that can make a difference.

“That really matters, because it’s your state officials who are, at this point, the drivers of much of what happens in the United States, with things like the abortion bans, or with the deregulation in the States, or with the expenditures of public monies, or all of it,” Richardson says. “This is one thing we really have to do. Those of us who care about creating a fair system really need to stop the whole roll-off thing and vote the whole way down.”

This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2024.