In a stirring and informative presentation Tuesday evening, Sept. 17, Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, gave the audience at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall an understanding of the history of American politics from 1937 to the 2024 presidential election.  Richardson’s lecture was the first in the Oregon Historical Society’s Mark O. Hatfield Lecture Series for the 2024-25 season, and was very timely considering the close proximity of the November 6 presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Richardson, who also writes the daily “Letters from an American” news and politics newsletter on Substack, gave the Schnitzer audience an excellent overview of presidential elections beginning in 1937. After Franklin Delano Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936, a coalition was formed against him. Beginning in 1937, this new coalition included the business community, Southern Democrats (who were racist), and religious traditionalists against FDR. Roosevelt had not been expected to win the 1936 election. When he did win, this coalition decided to try to rescind the New Deal to get their taxes reduced and limit business regulation. 

This same Republican coalition, Richardson said, continued to plot against Democrats to try to rescind the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), and to limit business regulation.

The Republicans finally got their chance for the national stage when they ran as their candidate Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. According to Richardson, Goldwater and the Republicans “weaponized racism.” After Goldwater’s defeat in the 1964 election, the coalition focused on Richard Nixon as their candidate in the 1968 presidential election. Nixon, Richardson told her audience, concocted a deal with Senator Strom Thurmond from South Carolina that if the South agreed to support him in the election, he would not use the federal government to enforce civil rights legislation (the “Southern Strategy”). Nixon won the 1968 election. 

After 1968, the old Democratic Party squared off against the new one (“New Left”). The new system was designed to have the primary system replace the “back room” system in which you were told how to vote. The new system reduced the rules for the nominating process and required representatives in the party to be composed of racial minorities, women and young people. By 1972, these new rules were in place in time for the presidential election. George McGovern, the Democratic Party nominee, was trounced by Republican Nixon in the presidential election.

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan was elected president. Richardson maintained that Reagan welcomed Southern Baptists into the Republican Party and established “states’ rights” as well as an oligarchy of wealth and racism. During his first term, according to Richardson, the “Reagan Revolution” was responsible for getting Congress to pass legislation limiting federal regulation and lowering taxes on the wealthy.

Reagan was also instrumental in forming a hierarchy in the Republican Party along with the Southern Baptists that promoted the belief that women should not work outside the home, and Black and Brown people should not have equal rights. In addition, in 1986 Reagan was able to stack the Supreme Court with people who thought the same way he did on partisan issues, and pushed an effort to “institutionalize the Reagan Revolution.” 

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Richardson maintained that Reagan’s view was to make sure that the “Reagan Revolution” would not be set aside no matter what happened in future presidential elections. Richardson indicated that in 1986 the Republicans doubled down the extremist rhetoric and essentially said “elect us or it’s the apocalypse.” 

In 1986 the Fox News Channel began, and “shock jocks” started to broadcast on AM radio to persuade the American people that Republican issues were noble ones. In 1987, she recounted, the Fairness Doctrine that required media outlets to present both sides of an argument on important issues was rescinded during the Reagan administration.     

In 2016 Donald Trump was elected president, and according to Richardson, hammered home the view that Democrats were evil. During the Trump administration, she said, businessmen drove the narrative of racism and sexism from the base of the Republican Party. The Trump administration identified immigrants as criminals and rapists and the source of problems in the United States.

In 2017, Richardson said, Trump moved forward on several fronts touting the oligarchical model and “stacking the courts” with radical judges who supported his political philosophy. During his administration, Trump resisted efforts to allow Black, Brown, LGBTQ+ and women equal rights before the law. Richardson mentioned that Trump left office in 2020 deeply unpopular and with the lowest approval ratings of any president in the history of the United States. Later, he was convicted of 34 felonies, and he currently has several criminal cases against him that are still pending. According to Richardson, Trump’s party is a white, male, heteronormative Christian party whose roots that began in 1937.

Richardson also discussed the attempts by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Republican-controlled legislatures in some states have been successful in initiating voter suppression efforts. Trump has cemented his control over the Republican Party, and the Republican National Committee is run by his daughter-in-law and loyalists. Richardson conjectures that Trump has purged the Republican Party of its business wing that has always been its source of support, and that he has swung to Christian Nationalism to get rid of American democracy. Trump has also said that letting immigrants into the United States weakens the country.

Richardson gave a good summary of some of the notable recent Supreme Court decisions that affect Americans today. One example was the Dobbs Decision that overturned Roe v. Wade on abortion. A second was the overturning of the Chevron Doctrine, under which courts had to defer to reasonable regulations by agencies in the executive branch of government (e.g. the Environmental Protection Agency). Richardson said that the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Chevron Doctrine meant that cases against polluters and other cases are backed up, and that hand-picked, right-wing judges have been trying to overturn regulations they don’t like.

Richardson ended her presentation by mentioning Kamala Harris and Tim Walz vs. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and the 2024 presidential election. She believed that President Joe Biden had not received enough credit for passing important legislation, such as Build Back Better, childcare, and elder care.

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Richardson believed that the electorate in the United States is changing rapidly, and that by 2028 voters will be tired of “politics as usual” and will rebel against the white, male, patriarchal view of American politics and will want something different. She maintained that the demographic will be “Browner, younger, and tired of the past 40-50 years.” 

Richardson suggested that if Harris and Walz are elected in 2024 it will be the same as when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932 — a whole new era in American politics. She believed the United States political climate today is like that in 1860, before the Civil War, and that if Harris and Walz are elected in 2024 new issues and new people will be involved and new ways of doing things and new alignments will emerge that we cannot see yet.  A new era in American and world history, she said, will begin.