American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now

How did Americans come to elect Barack Obama twice--and then elect Donald Trump twice? Those choices capture what Paul Starr calls the American contradiction.

The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values. Our nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and an old nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.

Starr tells this history from the dual standpoints of the progressive movements that changed the American people and of the movements reacting to them. Black Americans, he argues, served as a model minority, setting in motion America's twentieth-century revolutions in gender as well as race and rights. With industry's decline and the rise of economic inequality, millions of Americans have felt dispossessed and seek to bring the old America back. Trump is their revenge. American Contradiction explains how 1950s America became the almost unrecognizable America of the 2020s.