Is There Fascist DNA in the U.S. Body Politic?

Jeff Shesol reviews Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel” and Heather Cox Richardson’s “Democracy Awakening,” two new books about plots against America hatched by homegrown autocrats.

“Our contemporaries,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840, in the second volume of “Democracy in America,” “are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free.” The result was a peculiarly American compromise, an abiding tension between state power and popular sovereignty.

Tocqueville had faith that Americans could keep the two in balance. At the same time, he warned against a slide into “democratic despotism.” The people, he wrote, might someday vote to cede their power and place the government “in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons.” Having witnessed the rise of American democracy, Tocqueville also, it seems, foretold its decline.

Authoritarianism in America so far lacks its Tocqueville, its defining chronicler, but a number of recent books have shed light on what is called, euphemistically, “democratic backsliding.” Some authors, like the historian Anne Applebaum, look to Europe’s fascist resurgence for analogies and influences. Others, among them the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, see the Constitution and the counter-majoritarians on the Supreme Court as the key enablers of unrepresentative government. Now, a pair of new books — one by the longtime TV news host Rachel Maddow, the other by Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College historian and the writer of a popular Substack newsletter — trace different paths to our present state of peril.