Boston College history professor
offers something hard to find in the maelstrom of today’s mainstream media world.While cable news and social media spit out rapid-fire, hair-on-fire hot takes to track our democracy in crisis, Heather, in her public appearances and popular newsletter, Letters from an American, does just the opposite. A recent Vanity Fair profile said her Substack stardom and fan base of nearly 2 million readers underscores “today’s need for someone to calmly situate the political news of the day into stories within the long arc of historical context.” Heather, in other words, uses her incredibly detailed knowledge of American history and conversational voice to both accurately synthesize and contextualize today’s political chaos into clarity. Using language one might deploy in a letter to a friend, she delivers just the facts to help us understand how we got here, and where we are going—and how people have handled similar challenges in the past, and why our political parties are handling them in certain ways now.
Often writing her daily dispatches into the wee hours, Richardson says her goal is “to help people understand that our history is replete with stories about how ordinary people have been able to say ‘enough’ and to turn things around to preserve democracy when it has been challenged the most by those who would destroy it.”
I recently caught up with Heather as she was wrapping up some public meetings in Dallas as part of her book tour for her latest tome, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. She said she’s seeing a rise in grassroots energy to block any further drift towards authoritarianism, and says she’s optimistic—despite Donald Trump’s steady rise in recent polls.
What follows are some short, edited excerpts from our conversation. Our full interview with Heather about what she calls “the Save Our Democracy movement that the media have missed”—and her take on the rise of disinformation—will be featured in its entirety, as an audio episode in our forthcoming #NewRules’ podcast, set to launch later this month.
MARCIA: Your national book tour is taking you all over America, from Cape Cod to Chicago; Little Rock to Dallas and beyond. Thousands of people have been attending your forums, book signings and interviews with local leaders and hundreds of ordinary citizens at each stop. What are you learning from them and how have they enhanced your understanding of what's happening in America today?
HEATHER: People had, for a while now, been saying to me there is a movement underway in this country. I get emails from people as I sit in my house in rural Maine. I tell them, ‘Yes, I know.’ I'm constantly watching the national and the international scene through my computer. But being on the road? What’s really jumping out at me now are the thousands of people turning up at my talks to talk about democracy and our need to protect it. I see the depth of their passion and profound interest in making sure this country continues as a democracy.
It’s really not something that has been reflected yet in the national media which most of us are consuming. It’s happening, for now, under the radar. At the grassroots level—the true grassroots level, not on Astro Turf.
And it’s not something exclusive to me. I’ve been talking with some friends who do similar work in different areas and settings, and they’re saying the exact same thing. Something big is happening.
MARCIA: Have we seen anything like this before?
HEATHER: What it reminds me of is the 1850s, the start of an extraordinary groundswell of people determined to reclaim their democracy. If you lived in 1853, you would think the elite slavery advocates had taken everything. They had the Supreme Court, they had the Presidency, they had the Senate and they were making inroads on the House of Representatives. And they were very articulate about the fact that they believed in a society in which a few rich guys should run society for everyone else and take all the wealth everybody was creating because they believed they were the only ones who knew how things should work. And they had all the nodes of power. They ran the Southern states, and in 1854, they managed to get through the House a law that said they would spread their system of enslavement over the West. They told people that when that was finished, the Westerners and Southerners would make slavery national, and then they’d clean out the North, as well, and then take the whole system global. They were very clear about all of this.
But Americans woke up in 1854 and they began to organize and look at each other and say we don’t agree about immigration, we don’t agree about financing, we don’t agree on internal improvements, but —by God—we agree that we don’t want to be an oligarchy. We want to be a democracy. And so by 1856, they created a new political party, the Republicans. By 1859, Abraham Lincoln articulated a new vision of government that would work for ordinary Americans rather than just for those very few people on top. By 1861, Lincoln has been elected to the White House. By 1863, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending human enslavement as an economic system in the United States. And by the end of 1863, he delivered the Gettysburg Address, calling for a government of the people, by the people and for the people — promising a new birth of freedom. It took less than 10 years.
And while we honor Lincoln for his role in that, and while people always talk about how brilliant Lincoln was, Lincoln did it because ordinary Americans got together and said ‘not on our watch.’ And I look around what’s happening in America today and at the millions of people in all sorts of organizations that are not being covered by the legacy press and I think we’re doing the exact same thing today.
MARCIA: Do you think it might be more difficult to organize today? Disinformation is on the rise, and this past year, some highly sophisticated forms of AI have been released, catalyzing bad actors to create ‘deepfakes’ to discourage people from voting for a certain candidate, or to convince people to not trust anything they read or see, so they will not vote at all.
HEATHER: Disinformation is actually an attempt to destabilize a society. And we're seeing that quite deliberately being promulgated across the country and also around the globe. And the first thing to remember about that, is that it is a deliberate psychological technique. Disinformation doesn’t happen by accident. The idea is to throw so much disinformation at somebody, so much wrong information, that they lose a grip on reality and there's too much coming at them and they get so overwhelmed that they either become apathetic and pull away from the political arena or they vote against their own interests.
This was happening in 2016, to help get Trump elected, and it is still going on. And we know, for example, that since October 7th to now, that the amount of disinformation coming out of Russia has gone up 400%. People spreading it are trying to create a reality that doesn't exist and the handbooks for doing this, a lot of them, have come out of Russia.
What matters is that we care about democracy and we speak up when we see it being undermined. Look at what former President Trump and what the people who support him have been talking about, like what they're saying on social media—that they're going to weaponize the Department of Justice and go after political figures and journalists if Trump wins. This is not democracy. We all know that, so it’s time to come together in support of a common goal: that democracy, its values, need to continue.
MARCIA: There’s been much talk and profiling of the generation of Americans who will be voting for the first time—if able—for 2028. Generational change has historically catalyzed changes, as well.
HEATHER: Yes, by 2028, the younger generations will significantly outnumber the Boomers as voters. They already outnumber Boomers as people but a lot of them aren’t voting yet. But as voters in 2028, they’re going to outnumber the Boomers and their priorities are going to be much different. Their top priority is gun safety, then climate change. Their third is civil rights. They’re very concerned about economic justice. Our job today is to make sure there is going to be a 2028 election.
MARCIA: What, in your view, do we most need as Americans to better navigate the challenges we share today?
HEATHER: This is easy. Take up oxygen.
I'm an idealist, which means I believe that ideas change society, and I think the reason that we're in this mess, these many messes, is because decent people have not voiced their opinions, have not spoken up for democracy, have not spoken up for each other. Have not spoken up for a fairer economy, have not spoken up for education, have not spoken up for the things that the vast majority of us care about.
Share how you care about things, speak to your neighbors, speak to your friends—because we know people take those interactions much more seriously than they take anything that somebody like me could say. Take up oxygen across the back fence, at a school board meeting, at the playground. In the supermarket.
If you really want to have a say in the American future and what it looks like, if you really want to change the ship of state, speak up. Mind you, we are not always going to agree, but we’re going to learn from each other.
Just do not let yourself be browbeaten into passivity, because I think that’s what we’ve seen for the last 40 years, and it’s time for Americans to take back their agency.
In our history, there have been many attempts to undermine democracy and many successful attempts to protect and expand it. Once again, we are at a time of testing, and how it comes out will rest, as it always has, in our own hands. I’m optimistic.
Fascinating interview! Thank you.