You’re right and we don’t have a difference of opinion on the historical facts, but we do disagree on why previous attempts to repair the foundation have failed to prevent future attacks, and who actually benefits most from burning it all down and stripping away the rights and protections oligarchs have been fighting against for hundreds of years.

How the south won the civil war: Democracy, Oligarchy, and the fight for the soul of America

As Edmund Morgan observes in American Slavery, American Freedom, the seeming paradox of American republicanism was the simultaneous emergence of slavery and freedom in the colonial world. From the outset, the American idea of freedom was exclusive: It was for property-owning men only and was based on the enslavement of people of African descent. The Virginian founding fathers solved the problem of inequality by simply enslaving a racially outcast working poor and at the same time elevating the status of all white men, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike.

For Richardson, the American paradox is a bit different: Slavery and democracy were opposing forces rather than constitutive of each other. She traces the birth of oligarchy, democracy’s enemy, to the ship that brought about 20 enslaved Africans to the British North American mainland in 1619. From then until today, she argues, the history of the United States has been a history of the conflict between democracy and oligarchy. For Morgan, American democracy was based on slavery; for Richardson, though she relies on Morgan’s book, American oligarchy has always rested on combining elite domination with racial and economic inequality. Ever since the arrival of that ship, she maintains, the American republic has allowed its elites to conflate “class and race,” thereby giving them “the language to take over the government and undermine democracy.”

At many points in American history, oligarchy—from the slaveholding elite to the robber barons of the Gilded Age—has had the upper hand. But repeatedly, ordinary Americans, especially those who were disenfranchised, like women and African Americans, have pushed back, leading to the triumph of democracy with slavery’s abolition, women’s suffrage, and the enactment of the New Deal and civil rights legislation. By offering an account of the forces of both democratic progress and oligarchic reaction, Richardson provides historical detail to Corey Robin’s argument in The Reactionary Mind, which traced the antidemocratic origins of American conservatism while offering insight into the democratic forces that resisted it. While Robin situates American conservatism in the longue durée of a Western reactionary philosophical tradition, Richardson locates it in a quintessentially Southern political tradition of oligarchy: anti-statism combined with virulent racism and misogyny. For Robin, too, the proslavery ideology exemplified American conservatism. But for Richardson, after the Civil War, the West and eventually the Republican Party helped reinvent the South’s language of oligarchy with an appeal to individualism that overlays a reactionary commitment to racial hierarchy and opposition to a welfare state.

I very much agree with Richardson, and believe the battle of oligarchy against democracy is easily traced to the origins of not just Trump, but also the national conservative movement and Project 2025.

Your enemies, the Trumpers and ICE and whatever, are not trying to destroy America. They are trying to reform it and bend it back to the foundations.

I think we partially agree here, but I think you’re ignoring the fact that there has always been pushback by Americans against oligarchy and hypocrisy in favor of democracy, and that by downplaying or pretending that pushback and rebellion against the hypocrisy didn’t exist, you’re ignoring very important social battles fought following the civil war and the civil rights movement, and you’re inadvertently accomplishing the goal of the New Right/Nat Cons, which is to argue that some fictional idealized past they seek to return to, was a past that ever existed.

The founding fathers signed their names to paper documenting their hypocrisy, but they didn’t build this country. This is not their country and it never will be. Slavery built this country, women built this country, marginalized people built this country and fought very hard for the rights they knew they deserved. Immigrants who came in different waves faced and continue to face backlash and discrimination, yet with each new wave they continue to build this country and make it great.

After the civil war and following the civil rights movement the Republican party embraced the southern strategy and a (failed) Goldwater campaign for presidency. From there the roots of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 begin to emerge, and although the origin of the new right movement is often associated with the pro life movement, this is incorrect. The Heritage foundation and the moral majority can be traced to Bob Jones University and anger over the fact that the federal government would not grant segregation academies tax exemption status.

The founder of heritage and the new right movement Paul Weyrich, literally stated in 1999, that he had accepted conservatives had lost the cultural war, but believed the failure of the movement was in trying to change American institutions rather than creating new conservative institutions. In 2001, his mentee at the Free Congress Foundation helped him compose the conservative manual The Integration of Theory and Practice

"Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity. All of our constructive energies will be dedicated to the creation of our own institutions…" "We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment’s rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American. We will offer constant reminders that there is an alternative, there is a better way. When people have had enough of the sickness and decay of today’s American culture, they will be embraced by and welcomed into the New Traditionalist movement. The rejection of the existing society by the people will thus be accomplished by pushing them and pulling them simultaneously." "We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime. We will take advantage of every available opportunity to spread the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the existing state of affairs. … contribute to a vague sense of uneasiness and dissatisfaction with existing society. … We need to break down before we can build up. We must first clear away the flotsam of a decayed culture."

2024 The Radical Mind: The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building

Rather than working to conserve the past, this book argues that the New Christian Right is fundamentally a forward-looking and proactive movement focused on remaking the political landscape in the United States.

The radical aims of the New Christian Right have been obscured by the way they cultivated a shared identity of victimhood and manipulated the discourse about backlash to create a nostalgic idea of the past that they then leveraged to justify their right-wing policy goals. The Catholic-Protestant alliance constructed an imagined past that they projected into the future as their ideal vision of society. Ebin calls this strategy “prefigurative traditionalism”—a paradoxical prefiguring of a manufactured past. Using this tactic, the New Christian Right coalition disguised the radicality of its politics by framing their aims as reactionary and defensive rather than proactive and offensive.