The best books on a divided America that can help us understand the challenge to our democracy

The roots of our national divisions run through our 250-year history and Nick Bryant, a talented British journalist and Ph.D.  historian in American history has brought together the strands of that story in a readable narrative: demagoguery, the “constant curse” of slavery and its aftermath, the embrace of violence and a gun culture unmatched among democracies, the divisive nature of religion, cultural conflicts over change attitudes toward sexuality, the ongoing tension over immigration and America’s sense of “exceptionalism”...It is a painful story and not a book for  Americans likely to resent an “outsider’s” critical view of America.

Bryant, who spent years in the United States as a BBC correspondent is frank to admit that he has “said goodbye to the American I had fallen in love with as a teenager,” but “my love affair with the United States has not ended.”

Written forty years ago at the dawn of the personal computer age and well before the internet and the rise of social media, Postman’s book is a gripping read, a 20th-century warning for 21st-century readers about the dark consequences of the replacement of print media by visual forms of entertainment masquerading as information, a transformation that has had a devastating impact upon the ability of a citizenry to make informed decisions. 

In his relatively brief account, Postman described the way in which visual media overshadowed print in the 20th century. In that process, the “information” transmitted on a flickering screen became shaped by the need for brevity and, above all, the values of entertainment designed to “sell” products that cater to the emotional needs of the paying audience. While the printed words could be read and re-read for a more complex understanding of deeper meanings, electronic images were fleeting and, by their nature, superficial.

Written during the heyday of television, Postman’s insights are equally  relevant in our current media culture in which profit-based multi-billion-dollar corporations have used algorithms and increasingly Artificial Intelligence to promote emotional snippets of information and ideas without regard to their truthfulness and with no concern for effects on our civic life  (or their harmfulness to young people.)

As someone who might be described as a  “social Democrat,” I haven’t always agreed with Anne Appelbaum, a neo-conservative of the old school. Nor do I  agree with every argument in Autocracy, Inc. But, at a time when dozens of books are being written about the rise of authoritarianism and illiberalism at home and abroad, this book takes a different approach, brilliantly describing the rise of a new international autocracy of kleptocrats linked together by greed and the accumulation of political power that will protect their fortunes. 

Originally a fan of globalization, Applebaum has come to believe that this new world of economic interdependence and unrestricted international capitalism has offered opportunities for these global business and political kleptocrats to transfer vast (and often illicit) wealth to untaxed havens and to use their growing power over social and traditional media to promote attacks on liberal democracies as “weak,” and decadent. 

For this new plutocracy, the crises we face can only be solved by the leadership of autocratic leaders freed from the restraints of democratic institutions and the rule of law. I read it straight through in one sitting.

In 2004 I gave a presentation to a University of Adelaide faculty seminar on the need for historians to reclaim the “narrative” as a way of reaching a larger reading audience without resorting to “flourishes of the imagination.” Several sociologists and historians strongly disagreed, but a soft-spoken participant eloquently came to my defense.

At the reception that followed, my defender introduced himself as “John Coetzee.” Awestruck, I realized this was the 2003 Nobel Prize Winner, J.M. Coetzee, and I felt a bit like a starstruck fan of a rockstar as I told him that, for years, I had assigned this book to my class in African American history. 

Set in an unnamed colonial outpost, the story is an allegory narrated by an unnamed “magistrate” who task is to control the darker skinned “barbarians” beyond the gates. Its very mythical nature allows Coetzee to explore the universal: the way in which individuals in societies that ignore decency and justice constantly face choices of complicity or resistance.

At a time when it is easy to assume that things can only get worse, my late friend John Lewis’s memoir is a reminder that earlier generations—particularly Black Americans—have continued to struggle for a more just and humane society. 

When I first met John Lewis at a civil rights conference at Highlander Folk School in 1961, he seemed overshadowed by more charismatic figures present like Julian Bond, Diane Nash, and James Bevel. But, in a memoir that is modest and remarkably candid, we can see the extraordinary strength and staying power of his deep philosophical commitment to non-violence and to what he would call “good trouble,” even if that good trouble resulted in several beatings at the hands of mobs and white authorities. 

Much has been written about the civil rights movement, but in his book, John gave us an intimate view of the struggles. Beneath the mythology surrounding the history of the freedom struggle he reveals a messy tapestry of anger, fear, frustration and internal struggles among individuals with strong egos and strong convictions.

Above all, he shows us that these young Black men and women helped change America for the better, not because they were flawless, but because their larger vision helped them to rise above their flaws.