In the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, it seems there is plenty for the population to disagree on. To help understand the differences of opinion, consider the following six books, which offer detailed analyses of the issues and their context. The books cover everything from the Declaration of Independence and shifts in conservative politics – beginning in the Reagan era – to the US’s cultural foundations. Also in the mix: the opioid drug epidemic, initiated in 1996 by the marketing of the prescription pain medication Oxycontin, and the economy, amid concerns about the cost of living. Will the US be able to achieve a sense of “We the people” despite disagreements? That’s the question to be answered by the 5 November election.
These Truths – A History of the United States by Jill Lepore (2018)
Harvard history professor and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore draws the title of her comprehensive and gripping US history from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Covering the 16th Century through to 2018, the book is “the story of a nation, multiracial at its founding, and those who sought to find ways to realise ‘these truths,'” writes John S Gardner in The Guardian. “No country before or since has been this convulsed with conflict and wealth,” writes Andrew Sullivan in The New York Times Book Review. “No country had ever been defined as one of strangers and travellers, where waves and waves of immigration constantly churned through society… No people were as passionate both for slavery and for freedom.” These Truths is the perfect civics book for these times. It is not a story of “relentless progress”, notes The New York Times Best Books of 2018, “but of conflict and contradiction, with crosscurrents of reason and faith, black and white, immigrant and native, industry and agriculture rippling through a narrative that is far from completion.”
Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein (2020)
The last of Pearlstein’s four-volume chronicle of the rise of conservatism in the US is a colourful narrative history. Perlstein begins with the Gerald Ford/Jimmy Carter presidential campaign. Reagan, a primary candidate who didn’t make the cut, refused to help Ford, setting the stage for his own successful run against Carter four years later. “It’s all here – the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, brother Billy, the Panama Canal Treaty, California’s Proposition 13 cutting property taxes, supply side economics, the ‘killer rabbit’, direct mail, the Ford Pinto, Ted Kennedy, Three Mile Island, malaise and a hundred other incidents and stories that defined these tumultuous years,” John S Gardner writes in The Guardian. Reaganland “is essentially sociopolitical history, focusing on the movements and causes that animated public debate so virulently and the impacts of major social changes, such as women’s rights, on American life”. Follow it with Max Boot’s new biography, Reagan, which focuses on the links between Reagan and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis by James Davison Hunter (2024)
In Culture Wars (1991), Hunter coined the term that describes the divide between two opposing forces in the US. “Democracy in America is in crisis,” he writes in Democracy and Solidarity, his new book. He examines US political culture over two-and-a-half centuries, identifies the cultural roots of the crisis – the promise that all are created equal, versus the practice of excluding wide swaths of humanity. “Hunter is the nation’s leading cultural historian,” writes David Brooks in The New York Times. “He reminds us that a nation’s political life rests upon cultural foundations. Each society has its own way of seeing the world, its own basic assumptions about what is right and wrong, its own vision of a better world that gives national life direction and purpose.” American culture, which often achieves solidarity through opposition to a common enemy or affirmation of a common goal, has “unravelled at its deepest levels,” Hunter writes.