One day last week, I went to a coffee shop downtown to meet a friend. I had a hardback book tucked under my arm to give to the friend, a historian who shares my interest in the twisting and sometimes tortured arc of American democracy. I was early, so I ordered a lemonade — it was approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside — and as I waited for the iced drink, a young woman who worked there noticed the book beneath my arm and tilted her head sideways to better see the title.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

The question was asked with a certain curiosity, an earnest thirst for knowledge, I hadn’t heard in some time. The woman was in her 20s and explained that she’d been looking for books about democracy and fascism to share with her family and friends and the title of the book had caught her eye: “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.”

“Wow,” she said, “Have you read it?”

I hesitated for a moment, fearing that I might launch into a lecture on history and culture that was sure to bore, if not alienate, a stranger. Then I was moved that a young person would ask my advice on what she should read — because, let’s face it, I’m not the most approachable of people — so I tamped down my urge to hold forth and said yes, my wife and I had read it several times.

I asked the woman if she had heard of the author, Rachel Maddow, and she was unsure. She said she was interested in learning about fascism but didn’t know where to start.

“This is one of perhaps two books I would start with,” I said.

“Prequel” is about the largely forgotten rise of fascism in America in the years before World War II and how the movement was defeated, in order to better understand the threats we face today. My wife, Kim, and I had heard Maddow speak in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the final stop of her book tour last year. Some of the historical characters in the book — the Rev. Gerald Winrod, the “Jayhawk Nazi,” for example — have been subjects of this column. But I didn’t tell her any of that. I just said if she wanted to learn about fascism in America, she should read the Maddow book.

The young woman took a cellphone photo of the book cover and said she’d check it out.

“Thanks,” she said.

Standing there, I had an epiphany about how important it is to connect with others in person. We spend so much of our time by ourselves, even in a crowd, blinkered by screens. But here I had made a connection with someone who was searching simply be being receptive to a question about what I was reading.

I thanked the woman for her courage.

“It wasn’t easy to ask a stranger,” I said. “But this is important, this sharing hand to hand. Find the book and give it to your friends when you’re finished. Discuss it and keep investigating. This may be the only sure way things change for the better.”

Before I had even left the coffee shop, I was thinking of lists I would make for those who wanted to learn more about democracy, fascism, and the tortured arc. “Prequel” was near the top of the list. But there were many others.

Kim and I live in a house filled with books, so much so that there aren’t shelves to contain them all. We don’t have an accurate count, but a reliable estimate — when all are counted, including the titles in storage — ranges above 6,000. Kim writes in her books, using a fine-point ink pen, underlining things she finds important or sometimes arguing with the author in the margins. I could never bring myself to write in books, because it always seemed somehow wrong, but I make notes about what I read on index cards, legal pads, and even the backs of envelopes if nothing else is handy.

During the last eight years, we have done heavy reading about American democracy, and it is from that reading I’ve pulled a few books which might help get us through the summer of 2024. It isn’t beach reading, but it isn’t all doom and gloom, either. Lately Kim has pursued her serious and longstanding obsession about Nixon — you have to understand the enemy, she says — but has added Lincoln and Gettysburg to her list. My reading tends to the broad if not shallow themes in American culture and embraces fiction as well as popular histories.

The titles tend to look back rather than forward, sort of like how T.H. White’s Merlin lived his life in reverse, because that’s the nature of knowledge: the past unspools like a ribbon of steel behind us while the future is as changeable as next week’s weather forecast.

This is a list of seven books to save democracy, one reader at a time (along with a sidebar of Kim’s top picks).

Joan Didion. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” 1968.

This collection of essays takes its title from a W.B. Yeats poem and is a firsthand account by a wickedly good essayist who didn’t just write about the ’60s, but who was the decade.

“Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything,” Didion writes in an essay about morality. “They are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. … Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.”

Allen C. Guelzo. “Our Ancient Faith,” 2024.

Guelzo’s book is about Abraham Lincoln, and the faith referred to in the title is Lincoln’s faith in democracy. Guelzo, who has written 17 other books, mostly about Lincoln or the Civil War, is the most centrist of observers, turning away from the extremes of both right and left, but nursing a hope for America based on his deep understanding of our greatest president.

“This is a brief essay, in a time of shadows,” he begins in an author’s note. “My long life has been a hurdle race of public agonies, from the Vietnam War, through repeated and destabilizing economic convulsions and a ‘clash of civilizations,’ to a crazed and inhumane technological environment in which no reality seems stable, bullhorns trample debate, and the smiling threat of power is too ominously real.”

To all those who despair for the future, Guelzo offers Lincoln’s example.

“And just as we, as a nation, were once rescued at the last gasp by an intervention so unlooked-for as to defy hope,” he writes, limning the Gettysburg Address, “I take up principles with the yearning that once again, this last, best hope of earth may yet have a rebirth of freedom.”

Dorianne Laux. “Facts About the Moon,” 2006.

In a previous column, I wrote about Walt Whitman’s influence and the power of poetry to guide us. For this list, I’ve chosen a book by an award-winning poet from Eugene, Oregon, whose poem titled “Democracy” includes the homeless in Hefty bags and a young bus rider with a swastika carved into his shaven head.

There is much more in this volume, and Laux’s authority and humanity comes through on every page, as well as an enduring hope for the future. But writing about poetry is like describing a movie to someone. To really understand it, you just have to sit in the theater and watch. Laux’s vision is worth the ticket.

Tim O’Brien. “The Things They Carried,” 1990.

I’ve included this one, in part, for my historian friend who is also a Vietnam vet. A collection of linked short stories, O’Brien — also a vet — gives us the story of one platoon and the interior lives of the men in combat. It ranks with the “Red Bad of Courage” and “The Killer Angels” as the most powerful literature about Americans at war. It is one thing for politicians to talk about war, for ordinary people to wave the flag, for kids to shoot fireworks on the Fourth of July.

It is quite another for soldiers to put themselves bodily in service — and perhaps sacrifice — for their country.

“For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity,” O’Brien writes. “Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn’t, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers hoping not to die.”

Heather Cox Richardson. “Democracy Awakening,” 2023.

The title comes from Walt Whitman, who wrote in 1871: “We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, unawaken’d.” In this book, Richardson reminds us that democracy has persisted throughout our history, despite many attempts to undermine it. And like other authors on this list, she quotes Lincoln often.

“Men like Abraham Lincoln recognized that such a struggle was not just about who got elected to the White House,” she writes. “It was the story of humanity, ‘the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world.’”

Philip Roth. “The Plot Against America,” 2004.

In this alternative history, Charles Lindbergh of the America First Party is elected president by a wave of popular support from the south and Midwest. Jewish-American families like the Roths are driven to the fringes of American society by Lucky Lindy’s Nazi-influenced antisemitic policies. Roth, who was 8 when World War II began, tells the story from his own imagined childhood point of a view.

As I write, I have before me Kim’s copy of “Plot,” and it bristles with multi-colored flags. Its pages are thick with highlighting and marginalia. It is her reasoned response to the tale Roth has written, a dialogue with a cautionary tale, notes from someone who reads like a hunter tracking prey.

In one passage, after Lindbergh has been nominated on the last day of the Democratic Convention in 1940 at Chicago, the candidate embarks on a flying tour and, still in leather helmet, tells an adoring crowd: “Your choice is simple. It’s not between Charles A. Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s between Lindbergh and war.”

In the margin Kim has written two words.

“Daisy Girl.”

T.H. White. “The Once and Future King,” 1958.

A collection of fantasy novels originally published between 1938 and 1940, White’s whimsical and anachronistic retelling of the Arthurian myth has the desire for good, as represented by the ideal of the Round Table, pitted against the wickedness of human nature, including black-clad fascists led by Mordred, Arthur’s illegitimate son. The cycle ends with an aging Arthur contemplating the coming apocalyptic battle with Mordred.

“The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea,” Arthur reflects before the battle. The outcome was not as important as the ideal which guided him, because there would surely come another time when the promise of the table with no corners would be fulfilled and the nations would feast there.

“The hope of making it would lie in culture,” Arthur thinks. “If people could be persuaded to read and write, not just to eat and make love, there was still a chance that they might come to reason.”

Miscellany

Many other titles could have been included here, but allow me to mention just three more: Ned Blackhawk’s “The Rediscovery of America,” a reappraisal of American history and First Peoples; Kevin Young’s “Bunk,” on the rise of hoaxes and lies; and Elaine Weiss’ “The Woman’s Hour,” about the fight for female suffrage. Oh, and let me add one title for Kim: Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” about Nixon’s presidency of resentment.

If you’re interested in owning any of these titles, visit your nearest independent bookstore. If you don’t have a bookstore near you, consider going to bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores. Here’s a Wired story about how Bookshop supports independents. Also check your local public library, and if they don’t have these titles — ask for them.

Finally, let me add this.

The day after the young woman stopped me in the coffee shop asking me what I was reading, I returned and gave her a copy of “Prelude,” along with the graphic edition of Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.”

Read them, I urged. Then pass them on.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

by Max McCoy, Kansas Reflector
July 7, 2024

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: [email protected].

Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.

Header image: Wikimedia Commons