Politics & Government
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The Cruelty Is the Point: Why Trump's America Endures
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, these searing essays make a powerful case that "real hope lies not in a sunny nostalgia for American greatness but in seeing this history plain-in all of its brutality, unadorned by euphemism" (The New York Times).
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • "No writer better demonstrates how American dreams are so often sabotaged by American history. Adam Serwer is essential."-Ta-Nehisi Coates
Featuring additional elements: essays on how the Supreme Court undermines justice, and a new epilogue that connects the post-reconstruction narrative with today's political discourse
To many, our most shocking political crises appear unprecedented-un-American, even. But they are not, writes The Atlantic's Adam Serwer in this prescient essay collection, which dissects the most devastating moments in recent memory to reveal deeply entrenched dynamics, patterns as old as the country itself. The January 6 insurrection, anti-immigrant sentiment, and American authoritarianism all have historic roots that explain their continued power with or without President Donald Trump-a fact borne out by what has happened since his departure from the White House.
Serwer argues that Trump is not the cause, he is a symptom. Serwer's phrase "the cruelty is the point" became among the most-used descriptions of Trump's era, but as this book demonstrates, it resonates across centuries. The essays here combine revelatory reporting, searing analysis, and a clarity that's bracing. In this new, expanded version of his bestselling debut, Serwer elegantly dissects white supremacy's profound influence on our political system, looking at the persistence of the Lost Cause, the past and present of police unions, the mythology of migration, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. In so doing, he offers abundant proof that our past is present and demonstrates the devastating costs of continuing to pretend it's not. The Cruelty Is the Point dares us, the reader, to not look away.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • "No writer better demonstrates how American dreams are so often sabotaged by American history. Adam Serwer is essential."-Ta-Nehisi Coates
Featuring additional elements: essays on how the Supreme Court undermines justice, and a new epilogue that connects the post-reconstruction narrative with today's political discourse
To many, our most shocking political crises appear unprecedented-un-American, even. But they are not, writes The Atlantic's Adam Serwer in this prescient essay collection, which dissects the most devastating moments in recent memory to reveal deeply entrenched dynamics, patterns as old as the country itself. The January 6 insurrection, anti-immigrant sentiment, and American authoritarianism all have historic roots that explain their continued power with or without President Donald Trump-a fact borne out by what has happened since his departure from the White House.
Serwer argues that Trump is not the cause, he is a symptom. Serwer's phrase "the cruelty is the point" became among the most-used descriptions of Trump's era, but as this book demonstrates, it resonates across centuries. The essays here combine revelatory reporting, searing analysis, and a clarity that's bracing. In this new, expanded version of his bestselling debut, Serwer elegantly dissects white supremacy's profound influence on our political system, looking at the persistence of the Lost Cause, the past and present of police unions, the mythology of migration, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. In so doing, he offers abundant proof that our past is present and demonstrates the devastating costs of continuing to pretend it's not. The Cruelty Is the Point dares us, the reader, to not look away.
Editorial Reviews
"Serwer's writing has been indispensable to understanding the chaotic world around us. Incisive, elegant, and deeply anchored in history, The Cruelty Is the Point is an essential guide to a perilous time in American life."-Jelani Cobb, New Yorker contributor and author of The Substance of Hope
"Adam Serwer is the most incisive political writer of our time."-Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"The essays in The Cruelty Is the Point combine an unsparing accounting of our history with an astute examination of our present."-Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of They Can't Kill Us All
"Serwer's powerful truth-telling grabs us, shakes us, and warns us that as long as we wishfully forget the history of American cruelty, we will fail to see it coming for all that we hold dear."-Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us
"No journalist has done more to advance our understanding of American power abuse in the age of Donald Trump than Adam Serwer."-Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad
"For those of us trying to find our way through the fog of the Trump era, Adam Serwer's essays served as a constant source of illumination and inspiration. The Cruelty Is the Point is an absolute must-read."-Kevin M. Kruse, professor of history, Princeton University
"Atlantic journalist Serwer reflects on the antecedents, methods, and legacies of Trumpism in his clear-eyed and incisive debut essay collection. . . . Serwer draws parallels [and] . . .[CE1] threads in snippets of his own biracial background and offers concise and illuminating history lessons on the Nation of Islam, the eugenics movement in America, and police unionization, among other topics. . . . This sober-minded inquiry into the Trump era provides essential perspective."-Publishers Weekly
"A cogent examination of the ch...
"Adam Serwer is the most incisive political writer of our time."-Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"The essays in The Cruelty Is the Point combine an unsparing accounting of our history with an astute examination of our present."-Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of They Can't Kill Us All
"Serwer's powerful truth-telling grabs us, shakes us, and warns us that as long as we wishfully forget the history of American cruelty, we will fail to see it coming for all that we hold dear."-Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us
"No journalist has done more to advance our understanding of American power abuse in the age of Donald Trump than Adam Serwer."-Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad
"For those of us trying to find our way through the fog of the Trump era, Adam Serwer's essays served as a constant source of illumination and inspiration. The Cruelty Is the Point is an absolute must-read."-Kevin M. Kruse, professor of history, Princeton University
"Atlantic journalist Serwer reflects on the antecedents, methods, and legacies of Trumpism in his clear-eyed and incisive debut essay collection. . . . Serwer draws parallels [and] . . .[CE1] threads in snippets of his own biracial background and offers concise and illuminating history lessons on the Nation of Islam, the eugenics movement in America, and police unionization, among other topics. . . . This sober-minded inquiry into the Trump era provides essential perspective."-Publishers Weekly
"A cogent examination of the ch...
Readers Top Reviews
Michael DonahoeBillg
Very interesting and informative. A book that is helpful in understanding the consequences of four years of an administration that has been a very negative experience for our country.
Weagle
Normally, a book of reprinted columns might come across as stale – especially in the realm of politics. Credit Serwer for choosing to write on topics that, sadly, remain relevant today: white nationalism, incivility, and confrontations over monuments or police or COVID response. Although most of these columns were written during the last administration, it’s less about Trump and more about the roiling undercurrent of racism that he tapped into and validated. Serwer’s lucid analysis and insightful deconstruction of these topics cut to the underlying attitudes that prop up so much of the bitterness and passion surrounding dialogue today – much of it a proxy for racial intolerence. Before each section, Serwer includes a few pages reflecting on the subject with a perspective benefitting from the elapsed time since he first wrote it. The Cruelty is the Point skillfully illuminates the things a multiracial society must confront before it can truly be united.
Michael Saltzman
TLDR: This collection of essays isn't really about Trump, it's about the forces that shape American politics and culture, and it exposes this not through simple opinion but through deep historical analysis. It's smart, poignant, surprisingly beautiful at moments, and absolutely necessary. I finished the book in a single day and honestly cannot praise it enough. This collection of essays (some of which you may have read in previous publication - but there is a TON of new material too) perfectly encapsulate and contextualize the last 5 years of American history. Serwer reserves waxing philosophy or personal opinion for only the most critical moments to drive home an idea; instead what you get here are a collection of essays analyzing history and drawing a clear line between the oft-forgotten, almost always blurred and polished, past to our present. Although the book is framed as being about "Trump's America" this book isn't really about Trump or his administration at its core or even his voters at its core. It's about understanding the primary currents that have directed American culture and politics since our country's founding. And he does so with impressive clarity and conciseness. There aren't a lot of people who can discuss the history and ideas that Serwer deals with while keeping their relevance obvious. It's a great read. Every essay, even the ones I had read previously in The Atlantic, led me to information I hadn't fully learned or absorbed before. I've been thinking about the essay on police unions pretty much nonstop since I read it, but everything in here is of immense value. We'd all be lucky to be able to see the world with as clear eyes as the author does.
Sue the Cat
A magnificent book, especially the chapter on General Lee. Melt the statues!
Short Excerpt Teaser
The Cruelty of Backlash
Many people woke up on November 9, 2016, feeling like their country hated them.
Donald Trump had run a campaign that, from its inception, sought to blame those he defined as foreigners for the failures of modern society. He announced his campaign by declaring that Mexican immigrants were "rapists" "bringing drugs" and "crime." He called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims" entering the United States and regaled campaign audiences with apocryphal tales of how dipping bullets in pigs' blood had helped Americans suppress a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines. He decried the "war on police," calling for "nationwide stop and frisk" and comparing black American neighborhoods unfavorably to "war zones." Every one of these problems, Trump assured his supporters, could be solved with the ruthless application of state force: arrest, execution, exclusion, or expulsion. And then just short of a majority of 2016 voters, more than 60 million people, decided to put him in charge of the country.
If you were part of, or related to, one of the groups Trump targeted so effectively, you woke up on November 9 with the knowledge that some, perhaps many, of your work colleagues, perhaps your friends and family members, chose a man who promised to use the violence of the state to keep people like you in your place.
My mother and uncle were born into the long shadow of Redemption, the white-supremacist backlash to Reconstruction, in Florida. During Reconstruction, Southern states like Florida briefly experimented with multiracial democracy, only to fall into the shadow of racial authoritarianism in the 1870s. In the 1940s, when my mother was born, Florida was a Jim Crow state. Black voters were disenfranchised by law, schools, public transportation, and restaurants were segregated, and interracial marriage was banned. All of these laws were backed by the threat of both state and vigilante violence, in a state where more than three hundred Americans would be lynched between 1877 and 1950.
Like many other black southerners in that era, my grandparents packed up and fled north, settling in New York State, where their children would not have to attend segregated schools. What they also brought with them was the memory of racial backlash-the knowledge that previously unimaginable progress like that of the South during Reconstruction could be attained and then quickly destroyed. If a black president seemed the stuff of fiction prior to Obama, the racial backlash that followed-the election of a president who rose to power on the slander that the first black president was not even an American citizen-was all too familiar.
I wrote "Is This the Second Redemption?" shortly after the 2016 election results, with the knowledge that this backlash would not be as complete as the one that followed Reconstruction. Unlike the backlash of the late 1870s, Trump had won because his support was ideally geographically distributed for the electoral college, not because he had commanded support from a majority of the electorate. Trumpism did not command anything close to the political consensus among white Americans that white supremacy did at the close of the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, he had been elected to destroy Obama's legacy, and for those Americans who were not as familiar with this chapter in America's past, I felt that Redemption was a useful analytical frame for what the future might hold. These family legacies are obviously not necessary to understand American history. But in a country where the typical education consciously elides the dark currents of our past, or portrays them as long vanquished, the living memories of your flesh and blood provide a potent counternarrative.
Unfortunately, much-though not all-of what I described in this essay was prescient. The Civil Rights Division under Trump filed a single voting-rights case in four years, and his Commerce Department tried and almost succeeded in deliberately using the census to increase white voting power at minority voters' expense. The Trump Justice Department abandoned systemic oversight of police departments, while the president himself vocally encouraged police brutality to audiences of officers who responded with applause. Migrant youth were deliberately separated from their parents and placed in squalid camps, for the express purpose of torturing such families into giving up their hope for a better life in America. The conservative-controlled Supreme Court blessed Trump's travel ban targeting Muslim countries once the administration removed explicit language referencing religion. In doing so, the right...
Many people woke up on November 9, 2016, feeling like their country hated them.
Donald Trump had run a campaign that, from its inception, sought to blame those he defined as foreigners for the failures of modern society. He announced his campaign by declaring that Mexican immigrants were "rapists" "bringing drugs" and "crime." He called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims" entering the United States and regaled campaign audiences with apocryphal tales of how dipping bullets in pigs' blood had helped Americans suppress a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines. He decried the "war on police," calling for "nationwide stop and frisk" and comparing black American neighborhoods unfavorably to "war zones." Every one of these problems, Trump assured his supporters, could be solved with the ruthless application of state force: arrest, execution, exclusion, or expulsion. And then just short of a majority of 2016 voters, more than 60 million people, decided to put him in charge of the country.
If you were part of, or related to, one of the groups Trump targeted so effectively, you woke up on November 9 with the knowledge that some, perhaps many, of your work colleagues, perhaps your friends and family members, chose a man who promised to use the violence of the state to keep people like you in your place.
My mother and uncle were born into the long shadow of Redemption, the white-supremacist backlash to Reconstruction, in Florida. During Reconstruction, Southern states like Florida briefly experimented with multiracial democracy, only to fall into the shadow of racial authoritarianism in the 1870s. In the 1940s, when my mother was born, Florida was a Jim Crow state. Black voters were disenfranchised by law, schools, public transportation, and restaurants were segregated, and interracial marriage was banned. All of these laws were backed by the threat of both state and vigilante violence, in a state where more than three hundred Americans would be lynched between 1877 and 1950.
Like many other black southerners in that era, my grandparents packed up and fled north, settling in New York State, where their children would not have to attend segregated schools. What they also brought with them was the memory of racial backlash-the knowledge that previously unimaginable progress like that of the South during Reconstruction could be attained and then quickly destroyed. If a black president seemed the stuff of fiction prior to Obama, the racial backlash that followed-the election of a president who rose to power on the slander that the first black president was not even an American citizen-was all too familiar.
I wrote "Is This the Second Redemption?" shortly after the 2016 election results, with the knowledge that this backlash would not be as complete as the one that followed Reconstruction. Unlike the backlash of the late 1870s, Trump had won because his support was ideally geographically distributed for the electoral college, not because he had commanded support from a majority of the electorate. Trumpism did not command anything close to the political consensus among white Americans that white supremacy did at the close of the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, he had been elected to destroy Obama's legacy, and for those Americans who were not as familiar with this chapter in America's past, I felt that Redemption was a useful analytical frame for what the future might hold. These family legacies are obviously not necessary to understand American history. But in a country where the typical education consciously elides the dark currents of our past, or portrays them as long vanquished, the living memories of your flesh and blood provide a potent counternarrative.
Unfortunately, much-though not all-of what I described in this essay was prescient. The Civil Rights Division under Trump filed a single voting-rights case in four years, and his Commerce Department tried and almost succeeded in deliberately using the census to increase white voting power at minority voters' expense. The Trump Justice Department abandoned systemic oversight of police departments, while the president himself vocally encouraged police brutality to audiences of officers who responded with applause. Migrant youth were deliberately separated from their parents and placed in squalid camps, for the express purpose of torturing such families into giving up their hope for a better life in America. The conservative-controlled Supreme Court blessed Trump's travel ban targeting Muslim countries once the administration removed explicit language referencing religion. In doing so, the right...
