Bloomsbury (2nd ed 2022) pp476 pages

This is a study of the origins and effects of the failure of the mythology of the United States.

The failure, as this book explains, lies more deeply than the grotesque political theatre of Washington but in the peripheries of the country, from the billionaire havens of Greenwich to the exploited towns, cities and rural communities of West Virginia.

This ‘Wildland’, Osnos explains, is less about Trump as the unique creator of the political  movement he exists in but is instead a symptom of the deeper movements in US politics and finance where the wealthy have been attempting, for the better part of a century, to create a state where the less government exists the better it would be for the super-rich. In Trump, they found the perfect mouthpiece for this vision, a man capable of convincing the poor, the marginalised and the uneducated that their best interests are the same as those interests of the traders the hedge fund managers.

The book is particularly good on the emptiness and cynicism of Mitch Mconnell (another key Trump enabler) who defies all attempts to uncover what he (Mconnell) truly believes to the point where it is ‘not always easy to remember which fiction he was supposed to expound’.

The heart of the book revolves around the state of West Virginia. Osnos worked here as a cub reporter in 1998 and clearly has strong feelings for the citizens of West Virginia.

In the chapter ‘Jewel in the Hills’ he offers a clear account of how the same forces working to de-regulate and roll back the influence of the state effectively laid waste to whole communities, first through a free-for all in mining licenses and then through later opioid epidemics. JD Vance gets no mention although surely later editions of this book will address this.

As the Democrats gather for their 2024 Convention in Chicago, Osnos is also very good on the racist and racial divides of the city.

In an afterword to this 2022 print, Osnos offers some comfort for a country that seems to be losing its collective mind.

He finds some redemption for this ‘Wildland’ in the grassroots of American politics. He hopes that future administrations may yet return to some notion of a national ‘organised service’ . This need not be purely military (interesting how a similar idea by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was laughed off the front pages during the 2024 general election) but a system of combined and shared experiences: think of JFK’s Peace Corps and Johnson’s Volunteers In Service to America. Reagan Clinton, Bush – all had their version of this shared experience, this shared service.

Only this ‘alchemy’ of incident and instinct can resist the national pressure to ‘conform to tribal constraints’ and would make a good debating point for a group of year 13 A Level Politics students who may well have shared the collective horror of Sunak’s foray into this ‘solution’.