AMERICAN RULE

A contrarian history of the U.S. dismissing notions of exceptionalism and triumphalism.

Sexton, author of the rousing political chronicle The People Are Going To Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore (2017), turns to the same problem that inspired his first book: the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the White House. “I could explain Trump’s victory politically, demographically, and socially,” he writes, “but historically, I was at a loss.” His explorations of the American past provide him milestones. The framing of the Declaration of Independence and, later, of the Constitution is an important one: Congress’ rejection of Thomas Jefferson’s language that considered enslaved people to enjoy the same inalienable rights as their owners did not sit well with representatives of the Southern Colonies, and the Federalist Papers helped introduce a system that traded an overthrown king for a new class of aristocrats. “Exiting the British Empire,” writes Sexton, “meant a new sovereignty, but it wouldn’t mean an entirely new society, as past hierarchies predicated on race and wealth remained firmly in place.” As the narrative progresses, the author delivers ample evidence to support that thesis: The Whiskey Rebellion was not about illegally distilling, per se, but rather about taxation and the power of the federal government (and that government alone) to issue money; Woodrow Wilson’s conception of a “league of nations” was built on “the Noble Lie of democracy” in conjunction with “the social control of a hidden aristocracy.” Today, that aristocracy is gladly served by the dispossessed middle class, betrayed by a leadership that is nominally both pious and racist, having been reduced for the sake of sheer numbers to forging alliances with the nationalists who would just as soon destroy democracy as guard it. And let’s not forget that “the Electoral College, engineered by the Founders to advantage slaveholding states against fears of majority rule in the eighteenth century, gave Trump the election.”

A “chronicle of oppression” that makes a rousing counter to the usual celebratory narratives of the American past.