Heather Cox Richardson

The Democratic political juggernaut that emerged from the Depression and the New Deal meant that Republicans had to scramble to figure out a way to recover their former dominance.

The Middle Way included the largest public works project in American history: the Interstate Highway system, which updated American roads for a driving generation with leisure time on their hands, but expanded the federal government's purview.

Men like Abraham Lincoln recognized that if the slaveholders were not stopped, it would only be a question of time until they spread their system of elite rule to the entire country. Poor men would be bound for life into menial labor, and American democracy would die.

The USPS is self-funding; it does not receive support from tax dollars, and it is required to serve the entire country.

Republicans are a shrinking minority ruling an increasingly angry majority that not only wants to change the Republican policies that are moving wealth upward, but also threatens to hold Republican leaders accountable to the law.

While crime is indeed up in some cities in the last month or so since the stay-at-home orders lifted, crime is nonetheless down overall for 2020. Indeed, violent crime has trended downward now for decades.

In fact, there is no law that says election results must come the same day as the election. Historically, they used to take days.

Since Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the New Deal in the 1930s, radical conservatives have railed against the idea that the government should intervene in the economy.

To make sure Republicans stayed in power, they suppressed voting by people likely to vote Democratic, and gerrymandered states so that even if Democrats won a majority of votes, they would have a minority of representatives.

Since 2012, the USPS has not been able to meet its prefunding requirement, but without it, the agency would have made a modest operating profit every year since 2013.

Producing 1,200 words every day, when you're already working a full-time job is a lot.

The roots of Nixon's political descent lay at least as far back as May 1970, when the shooting of four young Americans at Kent State University began to turn the president's moderate supporters against him.

Under Ronald Reagan, hatred of the liberal media took on a storybook quality. Reagan had honed his political skills as a spokesman for General Electric.

Since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives have fought the fair examination of their ideas. They embrace a worldview in which a few wealthy men control the economy and dominate society. This idea repels most Americans.

The only way to stop gaslighting is to shine the light of reality onto a situation. That makes it imperative for the perpetrator to keep victims in the dark.

By the 1870s, ex-Confederates had taken their support for Western individualism a step further. They insisted the federal government was actively persecuting Western individuals.

The Republican approach to handling the coronavirus and the economy is apparently not to turn to our government, but to put our heads down, go on as usual, and hope for a vaccine.

For a generation, Republicans have tried to unravel the activist government under which Americans have lived since the 1930s, when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and invested in infrastructure.

Voter suppression in Florida in 2000 helped put Republican George W Bush into office despite losing the popular vote and the targeting of state legislative elections in 2010 enabled Republicans to gerrymander states out of Democrat reach.

The government's job, according to modern Republicans, is not the protection of equal opportunity for all Americans, but rather the protection of male breadwinners.