Over at U.S. Intellectual History Blog, Ajay K. Mehrotra reviews Vanessa Williamson’s The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History (Basic, 2025). First, from the publisher:
Americans have always fought over the meaning of freedom and equality. What is not commonly recognized is that the battles most pivotal in defining our democracy, from the framing of the Constitution to the decades-long backlash to the civil rights movement, hinged on one issue—taxes.
In The Price of Democracy, Vanessa S. Williamson challenges the myth that Americans are instinctively anti-tax, revealing that fights over taxes have always been proxies for deeper conflicts over who is included in “We the People.” Poorer people have repeatedly built movements that sought to tax all Americans to create a more equal and democratic nation. Wealthy people have responded by constraining the power to tax and stifling democracy through voting restrictions, gerrymandering, and violence. Yet as hard as anti-tax crusaders have fought to create an America that redistributes not from rich to poor, but from non-white people to rich white people, the battle rages on.
The Price of Democracy uncovers how fights for fiscal fairness have defined American history, delivering a powerful message to the present: that taxes are the public’s most powerful weapon in the fight for a real democracy.
And from Professor Mehrotra's review:
In her brilliant and timely new book, Vanessa S. Williamson interrogates the changing historical relationship between taxation and American democracy. Chronicling the connection from the Revolutionary War Era to today, she contends that “taxes are a key ingredient in the recipe for successful representative government; leave them out and democracy struggles to rise.” While she acknowledges that voting is a pillar of democracy, holding free and fair elections is not enough. “A government also needs the resources and the organization to fill the demands of the voters. Thus, it is taxes that make democracy consequential,” she writes. Little wonder that opponents of American democracy, as Williamson persuasively shows, have historically sought to undermine – often simultaneously – both the franchise and robust tax systems.
--Dan Ernst
