Heather Cox Richardson has become one of the most widely read historians in contemporary America, but her popularity comes at a cost: her narratives are comforting, not challenging. In her world, history is a morality play — one team good, one team bad — with the New Deal Order cast as the golden age of democracy and every subsequent deviation as a betrayal. It’s the kind of history that flatters its audience but rarely makes them think harder.
In Richardson’s telling, Lincoln becomes a proto-New Dealer, the 1860s a kind of preview of FDR’s America, and the Republican Party’s drift rightward after 1964 is a morality tale rather than a complex political evolution. Figures like Robert Taft are stripped of their nuance — reduced to caricatures of reaction — even though Taft supported Social Security, housing programs, and federal aid to education, something noted by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Geoffrey Kabaservice and Ralph Nader.
She, along with commentators like Robert Reich, Kevin Kruse, and Rick Perlstein, share a comforting narrative for liberal readers: that America’s problems began when the Reagan Revolution dismantled the benevolent state that FDR and LBJ built. But this story ignores the flaws and contradictions that existed long before 1981. The New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration favored large landowners over small farmers. The Interstate Commerce Commission, supposedly a guardian of fairness, became a gatekeeper for monopolies. The War on Poverty relied on top-down bureaucracy that both conservatives and the New Left criticized as technocratic and detached. For her, the more government, the better — and any skepticism toward federal power is treated as moral failure, not philosophical difference.
Heather Cox Richardson loves to talk about “true conservatism,” but she never quite says what that means. She insists she wants a conservatism of integrity and moderation, yet she can’t name a single conservative thinker or politician — old or modern — she respects. According to Adam Gopnik’s review of Democracy Awakening, she never even bothers to try. Instead, her idea of “true conservatism” seems to be just Elizabeth Warren with better PR.
Even when she invokes Edmund Burke, it’s more rhetorical decoration than substance. Whatever respect she has for Burke is diluted by her long association with Salon, a magazine that’s made its brand out of caricaturing conservatism as a love letter to hierarchy. Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind is practically their catechism — and Richardson’s tone often echoes it. She presents conservatives not as people with a different vision of society, but as cartoon villains scheming to restore aristocracy.
Her own "heroes" don’t escape contradiction either. She'll talk about how Margaret Chase Smith was a traditional Republican who opposed Joseph McCarthy, but according to Twitter user Owen Bawn, MCS was only "okay" to her. Presumably because Smith wasn’t a full blown supporter of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Never mind that Smith supported Medicare and Medicaid, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the Comprehensive Child Development Act that Nixon vetoed, and even repeal of the Right-to-Work provisions in Taft-Hartley. That last one she shared with liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits, Thomas Kuchel, Clifford Case, Hugh Scott, and John Sherman Cooper. Speaking of Taft-Hartley, she'll complain about it limiting union donations, which shows that her claims of wanting big money out of politics is BS as she wants unions to be exempted. I'm not even a fan of RTW, but union money can be just as corrupt as corporate money. Maybe Richardson should be hard on corrupt union bosses the same way she's as hard on corporations.
Her sense of history is just as distorted. In one Salon article, she claimed Robert F. Kennedy was just like Hubert Humphrey, supposedly an architect of bureaucratic liberalism. But that erases the record: Kennedy’s 1968 campaign centered on revenue sharing with the states, tax credits for employers, private housing incentives, welfare restructuring, and being tough on crime, as noted by liberal Republican Charles Goodell, who replaced Kennedy as Senator after his tragic assassination. Richardson’s approach to history, however, filters everything through a single lens: good guys want centralization, bad guys want limits.
And of course, according to her, Ron Paul’s favorite president, Grover Cleveland, somehow inspired Theodore Roosevelt — a very baffling claim. Cleveland was the last true Bourbon Democrat, a staunch believer in laissez-faire economics, the gold standard and limited government — and a man who in 1905 wrote that "sensible women do not want to vote" because they had "enduring frailties" and "impractical minds." Cleveland’s classical liberalism and Roosevelt’s progressivism weren’t cousins; they were opposites. But in Richardson’s world, everyone who governed before 1980 is on the “good” side of history, and everyone after Reagan is a villain unless they sound like Franklin Roosevelt.
This is where she diverges most sharply from older strains of populism. Fred Harris’s “New Populism” of the 1970s rejected both Wall Street and Washington, calling instead for decentralized democracy — skepticism of concentrated power anywhere. That kind of populism, shared by figures like Louis Brandeis, Robert La Follette, William Jennings Bryan, William Borah and Burton K. Wheeler, is alien to Richardson’s vision. She reduces American history to a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, leaving no room for those who distrust Big Government as much as Big Business.
Even her interpretation of race and power often collapses into moral symbolism. Cowboy hats, frontier myths, and southern identity all become shorthand for oppression. Structural analysis turns into cultural shorthand — easy to digest, hard to challenge.
She’ll also say that “reality has a liberal bias” and that she lives in a “reality-based community.” Sure — the person who thinks the liberal consensus was perfect and that history neatly divides into heroes and villains lives in reality. In truth, much like the MAGA Republicans she deplores, Richardson inhabits an alternate reality of her own: one where moral certainty replaces complexity, and nostalgia masquerades as truth.
Ultimately, Heather Cox Richardson’s version of history is less a study of the past than a reaffirmation of liberal identity. It’s history as comfort food for people who want to believe that all America needs is to “restore” what was lost: the New Deal, the Great Society, the liberal consensus. But restoration isn’t renewal, and nostalgia isn’t analysis.
America’s problems — from economic concentration to political alienation — won’t be solved by resurrecting the old order. The New Deal and Great Society both achieved great things, but they also entrenched bureaucracy and dependency on centralized authority. A truly democratic vision must do what Richardson’s narrative cannot: confront the failures of both Big Business and Big Government, and rebuild power from the ground up, not just the top down.
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