When America Stopped Being Great
A History of the Present
-
- 12,99 €
-
- 12,99 €
Descripción editorial
'Nick Bryant is brilliant. He has a way of showing you what you've been missing from the whole story whilst never leaving you feeling stupid.' – Emily Maitlis
'Bryant is a genuine rarity, a Brit who understands America' – Washington Post
In When America Stopped Being Great, veteran reporter and BBC New York correspondent Nick Bryant reveals how America's decline paved the way for Donald Trump's rise, sowing division and leaving the country vulnerable to its greatest challenge of the modern era.
Deftly sifting through almost four decades of American history, from post-Cold War optimism, through the scandal-wracked nineties and into the new millennium, Bryant unpacks the mistakes of past administrations, from Ronald Reagan's 'celebrity presidency' to Barack Obama's failure to adequately address income and racial inequality. He explains how the historical clues, unseen by many (including the media) paved the way for an outsider to take power and a country to slide towards disaster. As Bryant writes, 'rather than being an aberration, Trump's presidency marked the culmination of so much of what had been going wrong in the United States for decades – economically, racially, politically, culturally, technologically and constitutionally.'
A personal elegy for an America lost, unafraid to criticise actors on both sides of the political divide, When America Stopped Being Great takes the long view, combining engaging storytelling with recent history to show how the country moved from the optimism of Reagan's 'Morning in America' to the darkness of Trump's 'American Carnage'. It concludes with some of the most dramatic events in recent memory, in an America torn apart by a bitterly polarised election, racial division, the national catastrophe of the coronavirus and the threat to US democracy evidenced by the storming of Capitol Hill.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
BBC foreign correspondent Bryant (Confessions from Correspondentland) delivers a revealing outsider's perspective on the roots of America's current state of "disunion." Recalling his first trip to the U.S. as a 16-year-old in 1984, Bryant describes falling in love with "the bigness, the boldness, and the brashness of this land of plenty," yet notes that the seeds for the Trump era were then being sown by President Ronald Reagan, "who elevated the stature of the presidency also ended up dumbing it down," and by the country's rampant consumerism and "winner-takes-all ethos." As a student at MIT during the 1988 presidential campaign, Bryant was shocked by the effectiveness of George H.W. Bush's negative campaign ads against Michael Dukakis, which accelerated the trend of "candidates deliberately to divide the country." Bryant also critiques President Obama for failing to push back forcefully against Republican obstructionism in Congress, and casts himself with other journalists who missed the clues—including increased racial divisions and lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton—to Trump's victory in 2016. Though he trods familiar ground, Bryant's pithy observations (" was a revivalist who did not specify precisely what he was trying to revive") offer fresh insight. This well-informed portrait of American dysfunction hits home.
