In light of the currently ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip and on the heels of a Great Power confrontation in Ukraine which wiped out 493,000 Ukrainians thanks to the collective West's idiotic strategy of confronting Russia head-on, we have a rather prominent marketing attempt in our midst -- Vote Blue No Matter Who history.

Leading the present-day charge is Heather Cox Richardson, who has a book out titled Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. This sort of stuff, one has to imagine, builds upon the histories of Rick Perlstein, whose discussion of the world from Nixon to Reagan suffices to tell the readers in so many words that Republicans are bad. We knew that already -- I'll get to him later. At any rate, the Big Event in Richardson's history was Russia's ostensive interference in the 2016 US election.

Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election began in the decades when Republican politicians who believed that fighting socialism meant spreading free-market capitalism found common cause with global authoritarians who leveraged their anti-communism to attract U.S. funding.

Uh-huh. (At any rate, the quote is from the first page of Chapter 13.)

The most obvious flaw of this sort of history is that it doesn't have anything to say Democratic Party organizing around wealthy "liberal" elites in, firstly, Massachusetts, culminating in the 1988 Presidential run of Michael Dukakis, thus in the same time period in which Richardson is laser-focused upon Republicans. Nor does it have anything to say about Democratic Party capitulation, the most notable event of which has to be the forfeiture of 900+ state legislative seats to Republicans during Obama's tenure as President while Obama proxies bankrupted the DNC. Its posture is ultimately one of blaming "authoritarians" for showing up to vote. (Let's skip, here, past the rigging of the 2016 primaries for Hillary Rodham Clinton, shall we?)

Today, while we are held captive by the wandering eye of the mass media, we are to believe that the real enemy of democracy is Donald Trump. As the extremes of wealth and poverty have grown over the past fifty years of neoliberalism, everything is kewl and bitchen for Vote Blue No Matter Who historians except, of course, for Donald Trump.

At any rate, for those who wish to read mere summaries, we have Heather Cox Richardson's piece in the most recent issue of the New Republic. Yes, I know, this piece is dated September 26th. Let's continue.

The first big appeal of the New Republic essay is this:

America is at a crossroads.

A country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.

How did this happen? Is the fall of democracy in the United States inevitable? And if not, how can we reclaim our democratic principles?

One has to wonder, for starters, what Heather Cox Richardson's big concern is. Don't the Democrats control the White House and the Senate? Isn't it true that the Republicans have only a razor-thin majority in the House? Certainly these noble Democrats will protect us from "authoritarianism." But maybe the problem is really us, that we need to "reclaim our democratic principles." As with Ibram X. Kendi, the point of examining history is so that we, the audience members, can worry about our own identities instead of about the outcomes of history.

Richardson's history of authoritarianism begins with Hitler.

Hitler’s rise to absolute power began with his consolidation of political influence to win 36.8 percent of the vote in 1932, which he parlayed into a deal to become German chancellor.

Hitler was initially APPOINTED to power, on January 30 of 1933. And he was appointed by the same guy who was the "lesser evil" candidate in that same 1932 election (as referenced above) in which Hitler gained 36.77 percent of the vote. Hitler didn't "parlay" that defeat. The primary agent of history in that regard was Franz von Papen, a well-placed fool who persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler. "Democracy" cannot ultimately be blamed for Hitler.

From there Richardson maneuvers through a glossy history of the Roosevelt administration to a mention of the heroes of that history:

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.

And here we are, it's 2023, and we still don't have a say in our government. Oligarchy still seems pretty firmly cemented in place. Perhaps the history of democratic heroes would benefit from some rethinking? I'm not saying that small-d democrats are bad people. They aren't. But their gains appear to have been quite limited, no?

Richardson's history then maneuvers through a discussion of "religious extremists." The argument made in the New Republic article is basically true. Religious extremists are bad. Are they the main problem today? Richardson's hero Joe Biden thinks they're kewl and bitchen if they live in Israel, I suppose. Or maybe they're "moderate rebels" against the Asad regime in Syria. So they must be fine with the Vote Blue No Matter Who historians.

We then proceed in Richardson's historical accounting to that dark day in history, January 6th, 2021, when in fact not a whole lot happened except that some wingnut cops let a bunch of idiotic protesters into the Capitol building, where they did idiotic things. But for Richardson a glancing discussion of this ridiculous theater is a pretext for Biden hagiography. The "Inflation Reduction Act" is praised for being the historic legislation it wasn't. And then we get to this fun tidbit:

Biden knew that defending democracy at home meant strengthening it internationally. In his first speech to the State Department, on February 4, 2021, he emphasized that once again, “America’s most cherished democratic values” would be at the center of American diplomacy: “defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.”

The power of that defense became clear in February 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched a new invasion of Ukraine. Putin was stymied by Ukraine’s soldiers, who had trained hard in the eight years since the first Russian invasion, and by an international community that refused to recognize Russia’s land grab, imposed strict and coordinated sanctions, and provided Ukraine with money, intelligence, and weapons. This community stood together in no small part thanks to Biden and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, and the strength in that cooperation discredited the argument that autocracy was more efficient and powerful than democracy.

Ukraine has lost that war, largely because of the collective West's opposition to peace, its insistence upon Great Power confrontations in Ukraine, and its refusal to set up a no-fly zone in Ukraine. But, you see, this is where we complete the circle, and the Vote Blue No Matter Who historians endorse the very same people they pretend to denounce: neoconservatives of the same flavor as those found in the first Reagan administration.

And we might concede that Russia might not be a democracy, while recognizing that Ukraine is also not a democracy.

Ultimately Vote Blue No Matter Who history is problematic because of its inability to recognize democracy. Democracy means that the people rule, from the Greek roots of the word; Demos = the people, and kratein = rule. The people don't rule through Joe Biden.