by Mary Fahnestock-Thomas, Hamilton
Do you read Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American”? She is a political historian who lives in Maine with her lobsterman husband, teaches at Boston College, has written several very readable books, and started publishing her almost daily letters about current political events on Substack and Facebook in 2019.
I value her especially for her thorough knowledge of American history, which had always seemed dry as dust to me, and for her ability to look back and show quite concisely how patterns have recurred since our founding.
Perhaps the dominant pattern is traced in her book “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America” (2020), which shows how the ideals of wealth and equality have continuously conflicted for the upper hand here.
In this land of “unlimited opportunity,” increasingly wealthy plantation owners and then mostly white businessmen and politicians have repeatedly felt threatened by growing power among racial minorities, women, and workers below the middle class, and have struck back with political cunning, lies, and violence – specifically in the Civil War, rejection of the postwar Reconstruction which became Jim Crow, between the World Wars, and most recently beginning in the 1980s when President Reagan famously condemned government as not the solution to the problem, but the problem itself.
In this still-young country, founded on the equality of all men (which today means all human beings), the government ideally tries to level the playing field so that all Americans have the same opportunities and access to both what we need and what we want in our lives.
Once again, traditionally dominant groups in our society – men, white people, Christians, straight people, the wealthy – are feeling threatened and found a voice in former President Trump, the MAGA crowd, and conspiracy theories.
So the midterm elections on November 8th represent another opportunity to demonstrate whether we want to be a country based on wealth and power or on equality and supported, free opportunity and creativity.
What do you think really makes America great?