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A review by dsuttles
American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People by Jared Yates Sexton
4.0
A difficult must-read for my fellow Americans, especially those who care about our gasping, desiccated sham of a democracy. Jared Yates Sexton is a journalist who turns an eye to history in order to help us understand our current crises. American Rule is a rehash of our country's story so we can connect the dots.
Prior to reading, I was not ignorant to the brutal realities of American genocide, warmongering, colonialism, racist oppression, and slavery... and yet I was still surprised by what I learned. My high school textbooks definitely didn't teach me what a virulent eugenicist Woodrow Wilson was, for one example. The more you read American Rule, the more it becomes clear why some presidents' legacies get skimmed over as unremarkable or otherwise sanitized in our public education curriculum (because of how malignantly irredeemable they are -- I'm looking at you Andrew Jackson) and how others are lionized (in spite of policies and beliefs that range from tepid and insufficient to downright condemnable). I won't go into all the details in my review -- not because I'm ironically avoiding spoilers, but because it really is through Sexton's chronological brick-laying of facts and events that the reader comes to understand firsthand how we get from U to S to A. It is truly disgraceful how we have watered down, deleted, rewritten, and romanticized America's "days of yore."
Perhaps the most important accomplishment of this book is countering the myth we frequently hear today in response to the blatant ugliness of Trumpism: This isn't America. It usually comes in the form of, "This is not who we really are. We're better than this. This isn't what our Founding Fathers stood for. Think of our values." These statements sound hollow when looking at the evidence of history. They ignore the inherent contradiction that is America. We are a nation that was built on empty platitudes, which were manipulated and twisted to serve an elite and wealthy minority. Real people - particularly BIPOC -were slaughtered, tortured, and victimized every step of the way to achieve that end. This truth has shaped our society and made its mark on generations of Americans from its 18th century origins to the present. Indeed, the cries otherwise bear an uncanny resemblance to the mantra they seek to oppose, the one chanted by Trump supporters themselves: "Make America Great Again."
It may be hard to look truth in the face, especially when it is so gloomy and dark. A lighter, cleaner fantasy is so much more compelling. America has only been "great" insomuch as the gargantuan degree of global power it has wielded over the last couple centuries and how much it has abused that power to the harm of both its own citizens and the peoples of the world. To say otherwise is to write fiction. But as Sexton so movingly and passionately writes in the epilogue, if we can confront our reality, be honest with ourselves about our hypocrisies and our harms, then we can truly do the work of redressing the rot and creating a society that does function with our prized democratic ideals not just in mind, but in action.
Prior to reading, I was not ignorant to the brutal realities of American genocide, warmongering, colonialism, racist oppression, and slavery... and yet I was still surprised by what I learned. My high school textbooks definitely didn't teach me what a virulent eugenicist Woodrow Wilson was, for one example. The more you read American Rule, the more it becomes clear why some presidents' legacies get skimmed over as unremarkable or otherwise sanitized in our public education curriculum (because of how malignantly irredeemable they are -- I'm looking at you Andrew Jackson) and how others are lionized (in spite of policies and beliefs that range from tepid and insufficient to downright condemnable). I won't go into all the details in my review -- not because I'm ironically avoiding spoilers, but because it really is through Sexton's chronological brick-laying of facts and events that the reader comes to understand firsthand how we get from U to S to A. It is truly disgraceful how we have watered down, deleted, rewritten, and romanticized America's "days of yore."
Perhaps the most important accomplishment of this book is countering the myth we frequently hear today in response to the blatant ugliness of Trumpism: This isn't America. It usually comes in the form of, "This is not who we really are. We're better than this. This isn't what our Founding Fathers stood for. Think of our values." These statements sound hollow when looking at the evidence of history. They ignore the inherent contradiction that is America. We are a nation that was built on empty platitudes, which were manipulated and twisted to serve an elite and wealthy minority. Real people - particularly BIPOC -were slaughtered, tortured, and victimized every step of the way to achieve that end. This truth has shaped our society and made its mark on generations of Americans from its 18th century origins to the present. Indeed, the cries otherwise bear an uncanny resemblance to the mantra they seek to oppose, the one chanted by Trump supporters themselves: "Make America Great Again."
It may be hard to look truth in the face, especially when it is so gloomy and dark. A lighter, cleaner fantasy is so much more compelling. America has only been "great" insomuch as the gargantuan degree of global power it has wielded over the last couple centuries and how much it has abused that power to the harm of both its own citizens and the peoples of the world. To say otherwise is to write fiction. But as Sexton so movingly and passionately writes in the epilogue, if we can confront our reality, be honest with ourselves about our hypocrisies and our harms, then we can truly do the work of redressing the rot and creating a society that does function with our prized democratic ideals not just in mind, but in action.