Open to the Public and the Princeton University Community; Livestream available on Media Central.
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.
Vanessa Williamson is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings and a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. She studies taxation and democracy in America. Her new book, “The Price of Democracy,” reveals the revolutionary power of taxation in American history (Basic Books, November 2025). She is also the author of “Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes,” and, with Harvard professor Theda Skocpol, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” She has written on school segregation, tax opinion, and tax politics in the Washington Post; about the Tea Party, anti-union legislation, and voter registration at income tax filing in the New York Times; about taxpayer citizenship in the Atlantic; about philanthropy and austerity and white supremacy in Dissent; and about democracy and organizing for Teen Vogue. She has discussed her research on NPR’s “Marketplace”, C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal”, CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS”, CNBC’s “Squawk Box”, and MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” She holds a PhD in social policy from Harvard University.
Co-sponsored by The Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies (GCEPS), Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance (JRCPPF), Economic History Workshop (EHW), Center for Collaborative History and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics.