Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury, by Evan Osnos
Review by Dave Gamrath
Book Review:
The New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos spent eight years writing Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury, in attempt to capture the political, cultural and social dynamics in America since 9/11. The term wildland is what firefighters call a terrain of tinder, where a spark can ignite a raging fire. Osnos sees the American landscape as a wildland, already burning, seemingly posed to explode. Osnos focuses his story on three very different places he has lived: Clarksburg, West Virginia, Greenwich, Connecticut, and Chicago, Illinois. Throughout the book, Osnos makes multiple stops in each place, describing the driving forces behind how life, and attitudes, have evolved over the past two decades.
Clarksburg, West Virginia is a community once proud and reasonably successful, with much of its economic activity centered around coal mining. Over the past decades, coal mining jobs have steadily declined, less from environmental concerns than from new mining techniques, such as mountain top removal, which “yielded two and a half times as much coal per hour” while gutting mining jobs. This process involves dynamiting mountaintops, then dumping the debris into rivers and streams, causing tremendous pollution, and severely damaging the health of the local residents. As West Virginians lost control of their land to out-of-state mine owners, the population declined and rates of drug abuse, obesity, and other health issues soared. As private equity firms pulled value out of bankrupt coal mines at the expense of employees and retirees, West Virginia became the center for the opioid epidemic. Coal lobbyists and politicians were not only able to steal the public good for their own benefit, they also convinced most West Virginians that the real danger were environmentalists and government regulators, creating a false choice between health and safety vs jobs. Joe Manchin, who made a fortune in coal, “promised to protect the state from environmentalists” in his winning 2010 campaign for the US Senate. West Virginians pride themselves on self-reliance, but are “the most dependent state in America” from federal payments. Democrats lost West Virginia because they “were too slow to recognize the full scale of its despair”, and were overwhelmed by an effective Republican propaganda machine.
Osnos looks to Chicago “to understand the compounded effects of American segregation on health, wealth, and the prospect of individual redemption.” Chicago is one of America’s most segregated cities. Osnos describes the structural racism that caused the extraordinary wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, with Black households having “barely 10 percent of the wealth that white families had”, and how this disadvantage has worsened over time, leading to total economic disparity. Poverty, poor schools and lack of hope have resulted in violence and despair for many people of color in Chicago.
Osnos returned to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he grew up, to “learn how the gospel of economic liberty” had impacted leaders of American capitalism. Greenwich, the hedge fund capital of the World, includes the richest neighborhood in America. Wealthy people moved to Greenwich to avoid taxes, then used their wealth to lock in their advantages for generations. Osnos details how they did this, and how many of the architects and beneficiaries of the Great Recession came from Greenwich.
Osnos describes Donald Trump as a “symptom of American distress as much as any cause of it. He won by nationalizing politics as much as possible, turning explosive issues into existential showdowns that could unite his supporters across vast distances.” Instead of trying to widen the Republican’s tent, Trump focused on turning out the “missing” white voters. With income for non-college-educated men dropping by 21 percent in real terms from 1979 to 2013, Trump found supporters consumed by grievance, “less a constituency than a loose alliance of citizens who were breaking faith with the institutions of American politics and economics.” They carried three additional driving issues: abortion, guns, and immigrants.
The election of Barrack Obama exposed high levels of racial resentment in America. Trump made rank prejudice a central pillar of his campaign. Whites are projected to become a minority in America in two decades, and those facing economic insecurity are most likely to resist diversity and change. Trump supporters fear “that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country.” In addition, Trump fashioned himself as feverishly pro-gun, anti-abortion, and pro-Christianity, even though he rarely attended church. Trump is a master at how to “engineer an emotional impact for an audience” and keep his base alarmed. While telling over thirty thousand lies while in office, Trump was able to dismantle “not only the concept of a common truth but also the notion of a truly shared world.” He gave his supporters a new sense of solidarity defined by doubt.
In 2016, many Republicans dismissed Trump, but voted for him anyway. Then they began to like Trump, voicing approval for his policies and discounting his behavior. Osnos states they accept “the terms of Trumpism as the price of power.” After all they had seen of him, 74 million Americans cast their votes for Trump in 2020. After the January 6th insurrection, supporters stayed with him. As for the Republican party itself, Osnos describes their fundamental disdain of federal power, and their desire to win at all costs, becoming only “semi-loyal to democracy”. The wealthy understand how this has put America in a precarious position: it’s estimated that 50 percent of America’s billionaires now have “apocalypse insurance” in the “form of a hideaway in the United States or abroad.” A safe escape, just in case.
As Osnos tells the story of a fractured America, he covers many additional topics, including the Tea Party; the impact from the decline of local news and print media; the devastation of the War on Drugs; the NRA’s impact; widening inequality; the explosion of money in politics; the pursuit of power by Mitch McConnell, and much more. Osnos also explains how the Covid pandemic revealed “the full scope of America’s institutional disrepair,” and how “the virus expanded America’s economic chasms.” Covid accelerated Americans carving themselves into rival tribes.
American democracy is in peril. Trump has convinced 68 million Republicans that the election was stolen. Between 20 – 30 million Republican adults also believe that violence is justified to gain back control of our government. In Wildland, Evan Osnos explains how we got to this point. Unfortunately, Osnos does not address how we can peacefully move America to promoting democracy over winning, or how to heal the country. But maybe that’s asking for too much from one book.
Reviewer Opinion:
Osnos’s writing style makes this difficult topic very readable.
Reviewer Rating of Book:
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