American Rule
How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People
Dutton, September 2020
From writer and political analyst Jared Yates Sexton comes a journey through the history of the United States, from the nation’s founding to the twenty-first century, which examines and debunks the American myths we’ve always told ourselves.
In recent years, Americans have faced a deluge of horrifying developments in politics and culture: stolen elections, fascist rallies, families torn apart and locked away. A common refrain erupts at each new atrocity: This isn’t who we are.
In American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton upends those convenient fictions by laying bare the foundational myths at the heart of our collective American imagination. From the very origins of this nation, Americans in power have abused and subjugated others; enabling that corruption are the many myths of American exceptionalism and steadfast values, which are fed to the public and repeated across generations. Working through each era of American growth and change, Sexton weaves together the origins and perpetuation of these narratives still in the public memory, and the acts we have chosen to forget.
Stirring, deeply researched, and disturbingly familiar, American Rule is a call to examine our own misconceptions of what it means, and has always meant, to be an American.
“Sexton, a professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University, exposes the myth of American exceptionalism in this searing account… Sexton’s survey of American political history is taut and tart…An unflinching and well-crafted takedown of the nationalist rhetoric that fueled Trump’s rise.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Jared Yates Sexton unmasks the horrors of the Trump era—and the fictions that have been created to whitewash them—by rooting them in the stories we have told ourselves for two centuries to hide away the white supremacy, violent conquest and subjugation, xenophobia, nativist nationalism and plutocracy that have periodically darkened our history. A historical strip-mining that’s as brutal as the past it uncovers—and the present political moment it lays bare.”
—Greg Sargent, author of An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics