American Rule
How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From writer and political analyst Jared Yates Sexton comes an eye-opening journey through American history that unearths and debunks the myths we've always told ourselves.
Recent years have brought a reckoning in America. As rampant political corruption, stark inequality, and violent bigotry have come to the fore, many have faced two vital questions: How did we get here? And how do we move forward?
An honest look at the past—and how it’s been covered up—is the only way to find the answers. Americans in power have abused and subjugated others since the nation’s very beginning, and myths of America’s unique goodness have both enabled that injustice and buried the truth for generations. In American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton blends deep research with stunning storytelling, digging into each era of growth and change that led us here—and laying bare the foundational myths at the heart of the American imagination.
Stirring, unequivocal, and impossible to put down, American Rule tells the truth about what this nation has always been—and challenges us to forge a new path.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sexton (The Man They Wanted Me to Be), a professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University, exposes the myth of American exceptionalism in this searing account. He unravels how slavery enabled America's growth as a world power while creating fault lines in a country founded on the notion that all men are created equal. By stoking pride in America's frontier spirit and unique contributions to the world, Sexton contends, 18th- and 19th-century thinkers, politicians, and business leaders provided a rationale for the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans, and cemented the nation's racialized hierarchy, which took on new, more insidious forms after the Civil War and emancipation. WWI and WWII raised America's reputation around the globe, Sexton writes, even as the country was slowly being consumed from within by racial, economic, and political divisions that have found their fullest expression in President Trump's racist populism. Sexton's survey of American political history is taut and tart, but his prescriptions for recapturing the better angels of the American spirit and renewing faith in science and reason gloss over the heavy lifting involved. Still, this is an unflinching and well-crafted takedown of the nationalist rhetoric that fueled Trump's rise.
