Dear readers,
I need your help: As an independent, full-time writer, I rely on your support to make this work possible. You honor me with your trust and I am truly grateful for your generosity.
My journey: I was trained as a historian and have spent almost my entire adult life studying, researching, and teaching political history in Germany, England, and the United States. Before I decided to take the leap and become a full-time independent writer in the summer of 2025, I taught international history as a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC for almost five years; before that, I was Assistant Professor for contemporary history at Freiburg University in Germany. I received my PhD from Freiburg University in 2015 and my MPhil from Cambridge University in England in 2007. When I left academia, I had been teaching for 18 years, the last 11 of which as a full-time professor.
My academic work focused on anti-democratic tendencies and impulses on the American Right as well as the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the Far Right since the 1930s. As you might imagine, when Trump first took over the Republican Party and then rose to the presidency, I had thoughts… or rather questions that I believed were of more than purely academic interest: Where did Trumpism come from? How can we situate it in the longer-term context of U.S. history? Where does our moment sit in the contested history over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America? And how is the situation in the United States connected to the inter- and transnational struggle between authoritarian ethno-nationalism and democratic pluralism?
Democracy Americana: About halfway through the first Trump administration, I decided it was time for me to intervene publicly and offer whatever I could to help us all make sense of what was happening around us. I became very active on social media, wrote op-eds, gave public talks, started a podcast that I still co-host with political scientist Lilliana Mason: Is This Democracy.
In November 2022, I launched Democracy Americana as a way to provide regular long-form commentary and offer historically informed deep dives into our current political and societal conflict. Writing the newsletter is sometimes a grind, sometimes it feels cathartic. I believe it is more valuable now than ever: So much is happening, on so many levels – it often feels overwhelming, almost disorienting. We need to find ways to gain perspective, a sense of the big picture. Democracy Americana seeks to combine historical context and political analysis, with a focus on the United States, but situated within the transnational struggle over the fate of democracy.
Your help makes it possible for me to do this work.
Where you can reach me:
Email me: newsletter@democracyamericana.com (Opens in a new window)
Find me on social media:
Bluesky - @thomaszimmer.bsky.social (Opens in a new window)
Mastdon - @tzimmer_history@mastodon.social (Opens in a new window)
My Podcast – Is This Democracy (Opens in a new window)
