Informationen zum Autor Adam Serwer has been a staff writer for the Ideas section of The Atlantic since 2016, focusing on contemporary politics, often viewed through the lens of history. He is the recipient of the 2015 Sigma Delta Chi award for commentary, the 2019 Salute to Excellence award for commentary from the National Association of Black Journalists, and the 2019 Hillman Prize for opinion journalism. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his family. Klappentext "To many, our most shocking political crises appear unprecedented--un-American, even. But they are not, writes The Atlantic's Adam Serwer in this prescient essay collection, which dissects the most devastating moments in recent memory to reveal deeply entrenched dynamics, patterns as old as the country itself. The January 6 insurrection, anti-immigrant sentiment, and American authoritarianism all have historic roots that explain their continued power with or without President Donald Trump--a fact borne out by what has happened since his departure from the White House. Serwer argues that Trump is not the cause, he is a symptom. Serwer's phrase "the cruelty is the point" became among the most-used descriptions of Trump's era, but as this book demonstrates, it resonates across centuries. The essays here combine revelatory reporting, searing analysis, and a clarity that's bracing. In this new, expanded version of his bestselling debut, Serwer elegantly dissects white supremacy's profound influence on our political system, looking at the persistence of the Lost Cause, the past and present of police unions, the mythology of migration, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. In so doing, he offers abundant proof that our past is present and demonstrates the devastating costs of continuing to pretend it's not. The Cruelty Is the Point dares us, the reader, to not look away."-- Leseprobe The Cruelty of Backlash Many people woke up on November 9, 2016, feeling like their country hated them. Donald Trump had run a campaign that, from its inception, sought to blame those he defined as foreigners for the failures of modern society. He announced his campaign by declaring that Mexican immigrants were rapists bringing drugs and crime. He called for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States and regaled campaign audiences with apocryphal tales of how dipping bullets in pigs' blood had helped Americans suppress a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines. He decried the war on police, calling for nationwide stop and frisk and comparing black American neighborhoods unfavorably to war zones. Every one of these problems, Trump assured his supporters, could be solved with the ruthless application of state force: arrest, execution, exclusion, or expulsion. And then just short of a majority of 2016 voters, more than 60 million people, decided to put him in charge of the country. If you were part of, or related to, one of the groups Trump targeted so effectively, you woke up on November 9 with the knowledge that some, perhaps many, of your work colleagues, perhaps your friends and family members, chose a man who promised to use the violence of the state to keep people like you in your place. My mother and uncle were born into the long shadow of Redemption, the white-­supremacist backlash to Reconstruction, in Florida. During Reconstruction, Southern states like Florida briefly experimented with multiracial democracy, only to fall into the shadow of racial authoritarianism in the 1870s. In the 1940s, when my mother was born, Florida was a Jim Crow state. Black voters were disenfranchised by law, schools, public transportation, and restaurants were segregated, and interracial marriage was banned. All of these laws were backed by the threat of both state and vigilante violence, in a state where more than three hundred Americans would be lynched between 1877 and 1950. ...

Autorentext
Adam Serwer has been a staff writer for the Ideas section of The Atlantic since 2016, focusing on contemporary politics, often viewed through the lens of history. He is the recipient of the 2015 Sigma Delta Chi award for commentary, the 2019 Salute to Excellence award for commentary from the National Association of Black Journalists, and the 2019 Hillman Prize for opinion journalism. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his family.

Klappentext

"To many, our most shocking political crises appear unprecedented--un-American, even. But they are not, writes The Atlantic's Adam Serwer in this prescient essay collection, which dissects the most devastating moments in recent memory to reveal deeply entrenched dynamics, patterns as old as the country itself. The January 6 insurrection, anti-immigrant sentiment, and American authoritarianism all have historic roots that explain their continued power with or without President Donald Trump--a fact borne out by what has happened since his departure from the White House. Serwer argues that Trump is not the cause, he is a symptom. Serwer's phrase "the cruelty is the point" became among the most-used descriptions of Trump's era, but as this book demonstrates, it resonates across centuries. The essays here combine revelatory reporting, searing analysis, and a clarity that's bracing. In this new, expanded version of his bestselling debut, Serwer elegantly dissects white supremacy's profound influence on our political system, looking at the persistence of the Lost Cause, the past and present of police unions, the mythology of migration, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. In so doing, he offers abundant proof that our past is present and demonstrates the devastating costs of continuing to pretend it's not. The Cruelty Is the Point dares us, the reader, to not look away."--