Major Richardson

“The search for majorities always results in either greater disfranchisement or wider suffrage, and in this case, leaders reached out to poor white men for their victories.””

“In 1934, they sent Wall Street broker Gerald MacGuire to Europe to see how fascist leaders had mobilized veterans to enable them to seize power. When MacGuire returned, he tried to recruit retired U.S. Marine major general Smedley Butler to lead a similar paramilitary coup against FDR. MacGuire claimed to represent U.S. financial interests and to have $6 million to put behind the effort. Butler alerted the authorities and the attempt failed, but fascism had shown anti–New Dealers a way to marry their ideology to popular political activism. Get people fighting first and they can be led toward right-wing politics next. In America the hallmark of budding fascism was not intellectuals discussing how to take power; it was populist violence.[1] There was a straight line from the anti–New Deal violence of the 1930s to the street brawlers at Charlottesville. Since the 1950s, opponents of the liberal consensus had urged supporters to think of themselves as heroic, individualistic cowboys who had not only the right but also the duty to protect their families from the alleged socialism of the government. That””

“In his first two years in office, with a slender majority in the House of Representatives and a Senate split fifty-fifty, the Democrats managed to pass historic legislation that echoed that of FDR and LBJ, shoring up the economy, rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, and investing in the future, trying to bring the disaffected Americans who had given up on democracy back into the fold. In March 2021, Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic and stimulate the economy that it had hobbled. In November 2021, some Republicans were persuaded to get on board to pass the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to rebuild the country’s roads and bridges and to install broadband in rural areas across the nation. A few Republicans also backed the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which invested $52 billion in the domestic manufacture of semiconductors and boosted scientific research in the U.S. And in August 2022, the Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic investments in addressing climate change, expanded health coverage, reduced the deficit, and raised taxes on corporations and the very wealthy.””