Guerrilla Readers, January 2025
Notes on Democracy Awakening
So this is how it goes for now: we fall apart, we rise. We parse what we read and watch. We put arms around each other. We gather and say what is real. We listen and find paths forward. We take care of each other. We read.
—“Story Is a Map,” Christina Baldwin
Christina Baldwin wrote these lines as she woke to post-election reality, trying—as I was, as we all were—to grasp what had happened on November 5. Coping with it would be much harder and take far longer, and many of us aren’t there, even though it’s now 2025. With each day—each unsuitable, incredible Cabinet pick, each new threat to take over Panama or Greenland or disrupt peaceful families with deportation—we feel further from understanding. We are still asking ourselves, asking each other, What can we do? What can I do?
Not much, I have to say ruefully. I’m a woman in her mid-80s, living in a rural place, and I don’t drive unless I have to. But it was Christina’s words that reminded me that there is something I can do, that I need to do, and since we’re all here on Substack, I can do it with you. We can read more broadly—books we might not otherwise read—and deeply, with attention. We can listen and watch the “news” more carefully, so far as we can bear to do that. We can parse and discern what is real and what it means and how that reality—this new Trumpian reality—intrudes into our lives.
And we don’t have to do this alone. We can do it together, because—even though we live in 50 U.S. states and dozens of foreign countries—we’re all in the same place, here on Substack.
And we are all faced with the same difficult questions. How do we stay informed without becoming overwhelmed? What’s junk, and what are the important takeaways from the noisy barrage of stories aimed at us? Where is the line between truth and lie, between over-simplification and hype? Who can we trust on any of the dozen or so compelling issues that confront us?
So here we are. And herewith the first book for Guerrilla Readers, my 2025 reading project. I’m delighted, and excited, that you are here, too. We will be reading books that are full of inconvenient truths. We are reading together to remind ourselves that we are not alone. We are sharing our responses together to learn from each other.
Guerilla readers? A guerrilla usually exists outside mainstream society and has typically taken a position of active revolt or rebellion against the established ruling power. In social/cultural/artistic life, a guerrilla critic, writer, artist, or performer stands outside the mainstream, a paradigm-shattering dissenter who challenges and expands the boundaries of contemporary thought and practice.
Most of us are here because we are or want to be guerrilla readers. We are reading guerrilla writers, some of whom the current president-elect has called “the enemy of the people” who should “pay a big price” for being bold enough to raise their voices. Guerrilla writers write from the margins, as outsiders, looking in. Or as insiders, writing from painfully earned and deeply understood experience. Guerrilla readers read from a similar space.
I want to learn how to be a good guerrilla reader, to read from the margin, about the margin, for the margin. This feels more and more important as more and more libraries fall victim to the book banning craze that is sweeping the country, denying readers of all ages the right to choose what to read.
And when I thought about the books I want (and need) to put on my Guerrilla list for this year, Heather Cox Richardson’s work was at the top of my list. Like many of you, I first met her here on Substack in Letters from an American, where she describes herself as a “history professor interested in the contrast between image and reality in American politics.” The author of seven books, HCR teaches at Boston College. She has an apartment in Boston when she is teaching and lives the rest of the year in the small coastal town of Round Pond ME with her lobsterman husband.
Richardson began posting daily on Facebook in 2014, to promote her just-published book, To Make Men Free: a History of the Republican Party. Five years and 20,000 readers later, she moved to Substack. Letters from an American (also available as an Apple podcast) deals with the historical background of contemporary events, showing us how people and events of the past shape our current world and impact our American democracy. Her daily newsletter now has over 1.8 million readers.
Richardson’s Democracy Awakening—about the historical and contemporary forces that created Trump’s first presidency (January) and enabled his second (January—will be our January book. Here are the books for February and March.
Kristin Kobe Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, about the blossoming of the White Christian Nationalist movement and its takeover of the GOP (February). Check out Du Mez’s Substack, Connections.
Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, by Rachel Maddow, the little known story of how our rule of law was broken by fascist forces and political intimidation (March).
These aren’t easy books. They are linked by common concerns, related stories, and similar points of view, and the assessments they offer are pretty bleak. Except for Prequel, they are better read in print or pixel than in audio (IMO), and your reading will mean more to you if you keep a notebook (or computer file) handy, where you can make notes about points that are important to you and your personal story. Fair warning: this isn’t reading-for-entertainment. These books will often be difficult. Not everybody who begins the first one will finish the second or third, or stick around for the rest of the year.
But while you may not like what you read, I can promise that we’ll all be better informed and better prepared to understand and intelligently meet the many uncertainties that certainly lie in the next four years and the years beyond.
And for now, that’s probably the best we can do.
A few notes from my reading of Democracy Awakening
HCR has separated her book into three parts. The first two parts are told in roughly chronological order, from the New Deal to Trump 1.0 (and by extension, to 2.0). Part Three backs up to take a longer view.
“Undermining Democracy” argues that the pluralistic “liberal consensus” established by the New Deal and following Civil Rights legislation was undermined by the Movement Conservative ideologies of Nixon, Reagan and Bush 1 and 2. These promoted deliberately “false histories” of the past to support anti-democratic misuses of the law in the present—redistricting, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the judicial narrowing of rights—which were designed to stifle dissenting voices and restrict the participation of marginal groups.
In “The Authoritarian Experiment,” HCR shows how these practices led to the Trump 2016 victory and the authoritarian policies of his first presidency, culminating in his first and second impeachments. In his rewriting of history, Trump is turning the “liberal consensus” into an “illiberal democracy,” along the lines of the “Christian democracy” led by Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. In this country, the movement is known as White Christian Nationalism.
“Reclaiming America” broadens the picture, showing us the hazardous fragilities inherent in the American democratic government that was cobbled together some 250 years ago. While the Declaration of Independence promises equality for all, the Constitution excludes women and people of color. “Equality, then,” HCR writes (p. 164), “depended on inequality. So was the whole concept of American democracy a sham from the start?” Not exactly a sham, she concludes ruefully, but badly flawed, for the founders, men of their times who owned enslaved people, were unable to confront this fundamental contradiction. The inequities resulting from their failure have been resisted throughout American history, with marginalized people making determined efforts at reform, and holders of the status quo just as determinedly resisting. In this messy, up-and-down, back-and-forth process, there have been many promising successes and just as many painful failures. We are currently in a dark period, one of the darkest in our history. “How it comes out rests, as it always has,” HCR writes, “in our own hands.”
You can listen to her thoughts on her book here.
A few questions for our later discussion
I’m posting these now so you can think about them as you read (or reread). I’ll keep our comment space closed for now and open it for discussion on Monday, January 20, when we’ve all had a chance to read (or reread) the book. I’ll have a few additional questions for us then.
What surprised you about this book?
What pleased you?
What do you most agree with? Disagree with? Why?
What worries you about the book? What excites you?
What parts did you skip? Why?
What is your favorite quote?
What question would you most like to ask HCR ?
What question would you most like to ask other readers?
Additional Resources
If you have the time and the interest, here are two relevant related reads:
Fareed Zakaria focuses on the term “illiberal democracy” in this still-current 1997 essay: https://web.archive.org/web/20051015040527/http://fareedzakaria.com/articles/other/democracy.html
For NYT subscribers, Jeff Shesol compares HCR’s and Rachel Maddow’s books: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/books/review/prequel-rachel-maddow-democracy-awakening-heather-cox-richardson.html
A Reminder
The comments are closed on these free introductory posts (but I’m available via DM or email if you have ideas to share). Our discussion will open with a post from me for paid subscribers on January 20.
Also this month: I’ll be back next Monday with the January issue of All About Thyme, on January 13 with LifeScapes, and sometime in the third week of January with the Aquarius edition of Growing Green with the Zodiac. Thank you for reading!