Scholars studying the U.S. suggested that Americans were somehow different from those who had fallen to authoritarianism. They were too practical, too moderate, to embrace political extremes. They liked life in the middle.
II.
The Two Warring Visions of Society
It was a lovely thought, but it wasn’t true.
America took a different course in the 1930s not because Americans were immune to authoritarianism, but because they rallied around the language of human self-determination embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
They chose to root the United States not in an imagined heroic past, but in the country’s real history: the constant struggle of all Americans, from all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities, to make the belief that we are all created equal and that we have a right to have a say in our democracy come true. People in the United States had never lost sight of the promise of democracy because marginalized people had kept it in the forefront of the national experience. From the very first days of the new nation, minorities and women had consistently, persistently, and bravely insisted on their right to equality before the law and to a say in their government.
In the 1930s their insistence translated into a defense of democracy around the world. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt clearly and repeatedly spelled out the difference between a society based on the idea that all people are equal and a society based on the idea that some people are better than others and have a right to rule.
Americans chose a free future by choosing a principled past. But they could have chosen differently.
In the 1930s the struggle between equality and inequality took shape as a fight between democracy and fascism. But while fascism was a newly articulated ideology in that era, the thinking on which it was based—that some people are better than others—had deep roots in the United States. From the nation’s beginning, the Founders’ embrace of equality depended on keeping women, Black Americans, and other people of color unequal.
That paradox had in it the potential for the rhetoric that authoritarians use, and in the past, those determined to undermine democracy have indeed gone down that road. Whenever it looked as if marginalized people might get an equal voice, designing political leaders told white men that their own rights were under attack. Soon, they warned, minorities and women would take over and push them aside.