Since 1980, Republican shredding of the social safety net has disproportionately hit women, particularly women of colour.
In the 1820s, westerners and political outsiders worried that rich men in the east had commandeered the government for their own ends.
Traditional Republicanism grew up in the 1850s as opposed to the Democrats, who always saw the world kind of as a 'us vs. them' proposition. That the world was limited; the economy was limited.
Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.
In the individualist ideology, a man is responsible for his wife and children. This relegates women to domestic roles as wives and mothers protected by their menfolk, or silences them as special interest harpies demanding government benefits that will destroy individualist men.
Trump's alliance with Russia's Vladimir Putin, in defiance of America's own intelligence community, the Department of Justice, and the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, forces us to face that the fundamental principles of our nation are under attack.
Three times before, in the 1850s, the 1890s, and the 1920s, oligarchs took over the American government and threatened to destroy democracy. In each case, they overreached, and regular folks took back their government.
Democracy was always a gamble. In 1776, the founders rejected the old idea that government should be based on hierarchies according to wealth or birth or religion.
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.
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.
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.
The Trump administration is hammering again and again on the idea that Democrats will bring chaos and violence to American streets.
The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite.
When the 1929 crash wiped out disposable income, there were not enough consumers to fuel a recovery.
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.
Only a few years after building a federal system that cleared the way for equal opportunity, Republicans faced a racist and xenophobic backlash against an active government - and they folded. By the 1880s, the party's leaders had abandoned their message of opportunity and tied themselves to big business.
In 1860, the Republicans put Lincoln in the White House, and Southerners left the Union. Their absence opened the way for the new party to reshape the national government, from protecting the wealth of propertied men to promoting economic opportunity for everyone.
In the 1880s and 1890s, extremists in the Republican party also threatened the future of the US. Just when it seemed the extremists' control of the government was complete, their political machinations, propaganda, and demonization of their opposition fueled a dramatic backlash.
At the turn of the last century, extremists were forced back to the political fringes while younger politicians resurrected the vitality of the original Republican vision. They recognized that the nation could only develop and grow by protecting equality of opportunity for hardworking Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder.
The idea that the country should be led by white men goes back to antebellum slaveholders, who argued that the world was naturally divided between working drudges and elite leaders, who directed their workers and used the wealth the workers produced to promote progress.
