Wildland Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Wildland

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Zusammenfassung von Wildland

Name: Wildland
Rating: 3.4 (33 reviews)
Author: Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos

The Making of America's Fury

3.4 (33 Bewertungen)

28 Min.

Worum geht es in Wildland?

Wildland (2021) recounts the story of how America became unraveled throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Drawing on stories from residents of three US cities –⁠ Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois –⁠ it examines the undercurrents of change that tie together the fates of these varied landscapes. Finally, it describes how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 laid the foundation for the violent insurrection on January 6, 2021.

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What’s in it for me? A tour of the American political landscape that led to the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

A farmer in California crossed his fields one sweltering summer day in 2018. He paused when he saw⁠ the mouth of a wasp nest. To seal it, he drove in a stake and began pounding it with a hammer. That produced a spark, which set the fields ablaze.

Within half an hour, the fire spread across 20 acres. The parched forests and scattered homes made the area what firefighters call wildland –⁠ so dry it’s practically tinder.

The American political landscape of the twentieth-century was a wildland, too –⁠ and the insurrection of January 6, 2021 was the match that finally set it ablaze.

These blinks follow the trajectory of the country’s political dissolution, drawing on seven years of interviews the author conducted in three very different cities.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how Greenwich became a hotbed for the ultra-rich;
why West Virginians are fleeing their state; and
how historic racism keeps Black Chicagoans locked in a vicious cycle.

Greenwich, Connecticut became the epicenter of a new capitalist vision.

Greenwich, Connecticut has a storied history in the world of American wealth. It was a farming, fishing, and quarry town until 1848, when the newly built railroad made it accessible by train. Developers began advertising it as a place for weary folks to retreat from the bustling metropolis of New York City. Soon, Greenwich became a hotbed for wealth where Wall Street financiers built opulent, Gilded Age mansions.

In the early 1900s, however, conspicuous consumption went out of fashion in both Greenwich and America as a whole. Displays of wealth became passé. During this period, Greenwich adopted a coat of arms bearing a simple motto: fortitudine et frugalitate, or “courage and thrift.”

But that trend didn’t endure. In the early 2000s, Greenwich’s wealthy residents returned to the world of Gilded Age opulence –⁠ and then far surpassed it.

Here’s the key message: Greenwich, Connecticut became the epicenter of a new capitalist vision.

Around the 1980s, financiers and economists began devising a whole host of new ways to make big gains on the US stock market – primarily through high-risk, high-reward investment pools known as hedge funds. Those new advantages compounded, and by 2017, Wall Streeters were making 23 percent of the entire country’s corporate profits.

Many of those Wall Streeters lived, of course, in Greenwich. The amount of individual wealth that accumulated in the area was so high that tax officials began monitoring the quarterly payments of the half-dozen richest taxpayers. Their personal earnings affected the budget of the entire state.

The changes in Greenwich reflected broader shifts in the American economic ecosystem. Top earners had begun to separate from the rest of the country’s population in numerous ways. The most obvious was their wealth. By 2007, the top .01 percent of earners –⁠ about 16,000 households –⁠ held $1 of every $17 earned in America: the highest share since data collection began in 1913. Then there were all the advantages that wealth afforded these families, like better health care, tax advice, and education for their children.

Less obviously, the ethical values of the wealthy also began to shift away from the culture as a whole. Business leaders prioritized short-term profits over long-term gains; restraint went out of fashion in favor of grabbing as much money as you could, as quickly as possible. Financial gain was the only value that seemed to matter.

The Republican Party’s moderate wing began disintegrating from the mid-1960s onward.

Prescott Bush –⁠ father of George H. W. and grandfather to George W. –⁠ was the poster child for Greenwich, Connecticut’s political scene. He was the moderator of the town council and spent eleven years as a US senator.

He was also ludicrously aristocratic – an eight-time club golf champion who required his sons to wear jackets and ties at dinner each night. Despite that, however, Prescott was politically moderate. He had more progressive opinions on civil rights, birth control, and welfare than many of his Republican compatriots. And he lambasted fellow Republican Joseph McCarthy for sowing political divisions within the country.

Clarksburg, West Virginia has become a shadow of its former self.

The “Athens of Allegheny” –⁠ now known as Clarksburg, West Virginia –⁠ is a city with a population some 16,000 strong, nestled in the green highland between mountain and river.

In years long gone, Clarksburg was a thriving hub of activity. Straddling the line between North and South, the city’s famed residents included both Union and Confederate Civil War generals. Later, in the twentieth century, Clarksburg prospered and grew thanks to its riches in coal, natural gas, and sand. In 1960, politicians – including Lyndon Johnson and three Kennedys – paid it a visit.

Chicago, Illinois is a stark reminder of the plight of Black Americans.

In the early twentieth century, Black Americans began leaving the former Confederate states in search of greater freedom and opportunity. Throughout this period, known as the Great Migration, the Illinois city of Chicago became the “Promised Land.” Chicago’s population was just 2 percent Black before the Great Migration; after, it was 33 percent.

However, Black migrants weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms by the city’s white residents.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party tapped into white and working class people’s deepest fears.

The years immediately following September 11, 2001 defined a new era in American culture. A central metaphor for the time was twilight warfare, which describes a conflict with no clearly defined geography, winner, or loser.

For most Americans, the wars in the Middle East were abstractions, far removed from their daily lives. Three years into the Iraq War, for instance, less than a quarter of Americans with some college education could point out Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran on a map.

American rage increased as the establishment failed.

Over the years, depictions of the working class have shifted dramatically. Back in the 1930s, working-class men were seen striking heroic poses on posters and murals. That depiction devolved; in the 1970s, the poster version was Archie Bunker – a fictional blue-collar worker with a racist bent. By the 1990s, it had transformed into Homer Simpson: an incompetent, donut-eating alcoholic.

While American elites have slowly become aware of systemic discrimination based on race and gender, the category of class is often ignored. Over the past several decades, the working classes have increasingly been degraded and sneered at, all while big money has kept them trapped.

Throughout his presidency, Trump implemented an agenda of destruction.

Trump’s victory in the 2016 election was the product of factors that converged around Greenwich, Clarksburg, and Chicago.

In Greenwich, Trump lost the county overall; the final tally was 57 to 39 percent – but that wasn’t the resounding rejection that many were expecting. In West Virginia, Trump won by a whopping 42 points in a state that had once been a Democratic stronghold. And in Chicago, just one precinct went for Trump. But across the country, Black voter turnout was down in a presidential election for the first time in 20 years.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests laid bare a dysfunctional system.

“This is their new hoax,” Trump said at a rally on February 28, 2020. He was criticizing Democrats for their concern over his response to COVID-19. “So far we have lost nobody to coronavirus,” he added. A month after the speech, over a thousand Americans were dying each day.

Trump had weakened the civil service, and now that weakness was contributing to unnecessary illness and death. America was the world’s richest and most powerful country, yet it couldn’t manage to find masks to protect its citizens or tests to diagnose them. The economy, too, was in freefall – the country was experiencing its lowest levels of employment since 1975.

Twenty years of mounting inequality, frustration, and cynicism culminated in the January 6 insurrection.

As the 2020 election approached, gun sales continued to break records. On social media, right-wing militants began issuing calls to arms. And in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump claimed that “People that you’ve never heard of” were controlling his opponent, Joe Biden, “in the dark shadows.”

When the election came in November 2020, it wasn’t particularly close. Biden won by more than seven million votes – 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. But immediately, Trump launched a fevered effort to contest the results. He tweeted incessantly about winning by a landslide and advanced wild and fantastical theories about voter fraud.

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Über den Autor

Evan Osnos is a journalist who has worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2008. Previously, he worked for the Chicago Tribune – first as a metro reporter and then as a national and foreign correspondent stationed in the Middle East and China. His book Age of Ambition won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Wer Wildland lesen sollte

Americans trying to make sense of the changes in their country
Students of American politics and culture
Activists looking for a holistic picture of the grievances of average Americans

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