Heather Cox Richardson Feels that the Great Hegelian Struggle Is Back
- john raymond
- Aug 22
- 3 min read
Heather Cox Richardson has recently described America as standing between two deep storylines. On the one hand, she says, lies the long shadow of white slaver-supremacy—the belief that some men are inherently superior and have a natural right to rule.
On the other hand, there stands the radical promise of the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal, that all share equal claim to law, resources, and voice in government.
For Richardson, this is not simply a matter of partisan dispute. It is the collision of two visions of what the United States is and must be.
What she is describing, though in American terms, is nothing less than the return of the perennial human struggle. Across millennia the contest has repeated itself: hierarchy versus equality, autocracy versus democracy, alpha dominance versus distributed agreement.
She is not simply noticing a new mood in the body politic; she is registering the resurgence of what Hegel would have recognized as the storm of contradiction—the eternal clash between thesis and antithesis that periodically shakes societies until synthesis is forced.
The alpha leadership concept—rule by dominance, justified by fear or divine sanction—has always marked itself with inequality. It is the pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of Rome, the kings who claimed the Mandate of Heaven or divine right of rule.
In American history, it took the form of slavery and segregation, justified by the claim that some races were fit to command and others only to obey.
In the present, Richardson sees it carried forward by the MAGA movement under President Trump: a politics of hierarchy, of the right to rule regardless of democratic consent.
The beta distributed agreement—rule by mutual recognition and law—is the fragile counter-principle. It appeared in Athens, in the Roman Republic, in the English common law tradition, and in the revolutions of the Enlightenment.
It surfaces in America whenever the country has pushed closer to its own founding promise: abolition, Reconstruction, suffrage, civil rights. It is what Richardson calls the throughline of equality: the claim that all are equal before law and have an equal say in their governance.
This is the deeper meaning of her intuition that “it feels to me like we are in the process of developing two storylines about what the United States of America is.” She is feeling not just a national choice but the larger storm returning.
The twentieth century convinced many that the democratic storyline had won: fascism defeated, liberal democracy triumphant. But this was illusion. The dialectic never ended.
Alpha power—Putin, Xi, Orban, Modi, Trump—has reasserted itself globally, drawing strength from fear and economic dislocation. Democratic legitimacy, weakened by inequality and complacency, has faltered.
Thus the storm is back with vengeance.
The implication is stark.
Richardson is right to feel that the stakes are higher than partisan politics. America now stands once again in the center of the Hegelian struggle. If the authoritarian storyline prevails, democracy itself could collapse not only in the United States but across the world, yielding to a new era of hierarchy enforced by force and propaganda.
If the egalitarian storyline can regain its strength, then America may yet continue the slow and painful work of proving that distributed agreement, not dominance, is the true basis of civilization.
The storm has come again. That Richardson feels it so keenly is not a sign of pessimism but of clarity. The great Hegelian struggle—the eternal war between rule by fear and rule by law—is upon us once more.
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