Not Enough USAmericans Were Committed to Pluralistic Democracy

Anti-democratic forces took over the Republican Party. Thomas Zimmer gives a historical overview.

I took this photo on Earth. We share the same sky.

Some important U.S. history via Thomas Zimmer, whose blog, Democracy Americana, I’ve appreciated.

During the couple months I’ve been planning to share this with you, Zimmer moved his essays onto a new platform called Steady (and will soon delete them off Substack), so today it’s my pleasure to provide you with the new links.

How the United States got to this moment

In “What Is America, and for Whom?” (July 26), Zimmer explains that, in the U.S. history most people hear, “the civil rights breakthrough of 1964/65 is generally framed as the moment America got serious about enforcing its aspirational founding vision of freedom and equality.”

However, those “stories we tell about the past could not have plausibly led to the present we are experiencing” i.e., to Trumpism. If those standard narratives were to have explanatory value, we’d have to understand the decade we’ve just experienced “as an aberration, an accidental departure.”

The current moment in the United States makes more sense if we acknowledge that there never was a…