Wildland by Evan Osnos
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Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury
By Evan Osnos
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021
The Make America Great Again merchandise wearing crowd at Donald Trump’s latest rally in Alabama cheered his marathon speech like Dead Heads during an interminable rendition of “Truckin’” at a Grateful Dead concert. They cheered right up until the moment Trump encouraged them to take the COVID-19 vaccines developed during his administration. Then the cheers turned into angry boos and jeers, forcing Trump to back down. The crowd’s anger exemplified a truth that is at the heart of New Yorker staff writer and National Book Award winner Evan Osnos’s new book Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury. Trump may be the foremost exploiter of America’s social and political divisions, but our problems predate his rise to power and continue even after his defeat in 2020.
In Wildland, Osnos seeks to “tie together the disparate experiences of being an American'' in a “search for connections” that explain the state of rage and division the US finds itself in today. Osnos searches for these connections among the people of three communities to which he has some personal connection, Chicago, Clarksburg, West Virginia, and Greenwich, Connecticut. Among the individuals readers are introduced to are a former drug dealer and gang member and a respected educator and matriarch from the South Side of Chicago, a weary but dogged newspaper man and a veteran turned drug addicted murderer from Clarksburg, and an activist Republican fundraiser and a hedge fund manager convicted of insider trading from Greenwich.
Through their stories and the stories of others, Osnos attempts to explain how the socioeconomics of the US and the failures of government from the national to the local level over the last forty years have created resentment by exploiting some, depriving others of opportunities, and creating seemingly unlimited wealth and advantages for a lucky few. Alongside their stories, Osnos explains how things like corporate greed, the Internet, wealth disparity, the rise of hedge funds, the decline of manufacturing in small cities, the death of small town newspapers, campaign finance abuses, fears following 9/11, changing demographics, and hyperindividualism have destroyed our sense of community and created the deep divisions that Trump made deeper by stoking fears and fueling hatred.
Osnos writes clear prose that expertly summons images from our political past. About then candidate Barack Obama he writes, ”Obama was no ordinary contender. He was making a case against cynicism, an argument for a new generation of politics that would be a rebuke to the jowly old wise guys in City Hall, and their creaking racist machine.” Osnos also displays a wry sense of humor and a willingness to weave pop culture into his writing. Describing Trump during the 2016 campaign he writes, “In his television phase he had cultivated a lordly persona and a squint that combined Clint Eastwood on the high plains and Derek Zoolander on the runway.” Passages like that add some levity to an otherwise sobering though occasionally hopeful read.
Wildland is a very ambitious book. In addition to the stories of individuals and the exploration of social issues, Osnos offers cameos of well known people and groups that have contributed to the rifts in our society including Mitch McConnell, Kellyanne Conway, Ayn Rand, Rush Limbaugh, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, the National Rifle Association, and of course Donald Trump. Many of these subjects receive only surface level analysis and some, like Fox News and other right wing media outlets, seem largely absent. Other than the interviews with the people of Chicago, Clarkesburg, and Greenwich there is not a great deal that is new here, and even the individuals Osnos interviews fit familiar patterns.
At times, Osnos’s efforts to tie together the people from his chosen three communities seem forced. For example, a young African American man demanding police reform after a shooting in Chicago is different in motivation and impact from a wealthy man from Greenwich giving money to Trump in the hopes that he will reduce government regulation. Finally, Osnos’s decision to center his book in three communities in the Northeast undermines his intent to “tie together the disparate experiences of being an American '' today. By largely ignoring the South, Southwest, and West where economic and demographic changes are often most pronounced, Wildland offers a mostly regional view of the experience of being an American in the 21st Century. Together these issues give Wildland a random and incomplete feel that can be frustrating.
For readers who follow politics closely, Osnos offers little fresh information. For others Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury can serve as a well written, wide ranging, if unfocused and shambling, introduction to the sources of our current divisions and the threat they pose to the future of the United States.
Brian Bruce is an author and retired teacher who talks about books at Bookish: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrrFo3tDRDVbX7PZjWx1qYA