Summary of the book "Wildland" - By Evan Osnos

Key Concepts in this book:

1. Greenwich, Connecticut, became the centre of a new view of capitalism.
2. From the mid-1960s forward, the Republican Party's moderate flank began to disintegrate.
3. Clarksburg, West Virginia, has deteriorated into a husk of its former self.
4. The city of Chicago, Illinois, serves as a harsh reminder of the condition of African-Americans.
5. Donald Trump and the Republican Party exploited the deepest concerns of white and working-class people.
6. As the establishment failed, American fury grew.
7. Trump has pursued a destructive agenda throughout his term.
8. The COVID-19 outbreak and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations exposed a broken system.
9. The January 6 insurgency was the culmination of twenty years of growing inequity, discontent, and cynicism.

Who can benefit the most from this book:

• Americans trying to make sense of the changes in their country.
• Students of American politics and culture.
• Activists looking for a holistic picture of the grievances of average Americans.

What am I getting out of it? A look at the political scene in the United States that led to the insurgency on January 6, 2021.

In 2018, a California farmer crossed his fields on a hot summer day. He came to a halt as he came upon the mouth of a wasp nest. He drove a stake into the ground and began striking it with a hammer to seal it. This caused a spark, which ignited the fields.

The fire had spread across 20 acres in less than half an hour. The parched woodlands and dispersed homes created what firemen refer to as "wildland" — a region so dry that it's almost tinder.

The twentieth-century American political landscape was also a wilderness, and the January 6, 2021 insurgency was the match that eventually set it ablaze.

This summary traces the country's political disintegration over the course of seven years, based on interviews done by the author in three distinct cities.

• You'll learn how Greenwich became a haven for the ultra-wealthy.
• Why West Virginians are fleeing their state.
• And how historic racism keeps Black Chicagoans trapped in a terrible loop in this summary.

1. Greenwich, Connecticut, became the centre of a new view of capitalism.

Greenwich, Connecticut, has a long and illustrious history in the American wealthy world. Until 1848, when the freshly built railroad made it train accessible, it was an agricultural, fishing, and quarry town. Developers began marketing it as a haven where tired people could get away from the hustle and bustle of New York City. Greenwich quickly became a haven for the wealthy, with Wall Street financiers erecting sumptuous Gilded Age houses.

Conspicuous consumption, on the other hand, fell out of favour in both Greenwich and the United States in the early 1900s. Putting on a show of wealth has become a thing of the past. Greenwich adopted a coat of arms with a simple motto during this time: fortitudine et frugalitate, meaning "courage and thrift."

However, this pattern did not last. Greenwich's wealthiest residents returned to Gilded Age grandeur in the early 2000s — and then far beyond it.

Here's the main point: Greenwich, Connecticut, became the centre of a new view of capitalism.

Around the 1980s, financiers and economists devised a slew of new strategies for making large gains on the US stock market, largely through high-risk hedge funds high-reward investment pools. These new advantages multiplied, and by 2017, Wall Streeters were responsible for 23% of all business profits in the United States.

Greenwich, of course, was home to many of those Wall Streeters. The amount of personal wealth amassed in the area was so large that tax officials began scrutinizing the quarterly payments of the area's top half-dozen taxpayers. Their personal earnings had an impact on the state's finances.

Greenwich's changes mirrored greater economic upheavals in the United States. In a variety of ways, the top earners had begun to distance themselves from the rest of the country's population. Their riches was the most evident factor. By 2007, the top.01 per cent of earnings in America — over 16,000 households – owned $1 of every $17 earned in the country, the greatest amount since data collection began in 1913. Then there were the benefits of money, such as improved health care, tax counsel, and educational opportunities for their children.

Less overtly, the wealthy's ethical beliefs began to diverge from the culture as a whole. Short-term profits were favoured over long-term gains, and restraint was abandoned in favour of seizing as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. The only thing that seemed too important was monetary gain.

2. From the mid-1960s forward, the Republican Party's moderate flank began to disintegrate.

Prescott Bush, the father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush, was the political poster child for Greenwich, Connecticut. He served as the municipal council's moderator and as a US senator for eleven years.

He was also ridiculously aristocratic, having won eight club golf championships and insisting on his boys wearing coats and ties to supper every night. Despite this, Prescott was a politically moderate figure. Many of his Republican colleagues held more progressive views on civil rights, birth control, and welfare than he did. He also chastised fellow Republican Joseph McCarthy for fostering political schisms in the United States.

Prescott Bush's mentality may have been the one that propelled the Republican Party into the twenty-first century. But it wasn't the case.

The main point is this: From the mid-1960s forward, the Republican Party's moderate flank began to disintegrate.

Despite Prescott's elevated position in Greenwich, some locals had begun to shift to the right. J. William Middendorf II, an investment banker who sat on the town council alongside Prescott, was one example. Middendorf had become a "disciple" of libertarianism, condemning moderates and railing against the government's growing power.

Middendorf collaborated with Barry Goldwater, an Arizona senator with libertarian views on civil rights and government programs, to push his principles. The Republican Party's continuous march rightward became clear during the 1964 Republican National Convention, where Goldwater received the presidential nomination. There, centrist Republican Nelson Rockefeller attacked what he perceived as the party's extremist right-wing fringe. Instead of cheers, the hall was filled with boos.

Even so, until the rise of talk radio host Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s, libertarianism remained primarily on the outside. On his show, Limbaugh vilified government programs, environmental activism, and education as ways for liberals to exert control over society.

After Mitt Romney, a moderate lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama, the floodgates opened wide. The party was at a fork in the road.

Established Republican leaders desired to swing to the left in order to gain support from minorities. Other notable conservatives, on the other hand, disagreed. They claimed that unenthusiastic, "missing" white voters who were no longer convinced by the mainstream pro-business, low-tax agenda were the ones they needed to win over. They needed a populist disruptor to do it, someone who would rage against the entire idea of government.

3. Clarksburg, West Virginia, has deteriorated into a husk of its former self.

The "Athens of Allegheny" – now known as Clarksburg, West Virginia – is a 16,000-person city hidden in the green upland between mountain and river.

Clarksburg used to be a burgeoning centre of activity. The city, which straddled the North-South divide, was home to both Union and Confederate Civil War generals. Clarksburg prospered and grew throughout the twentieth century as a result of its coal, natural gas, and sand resources. Politicians such as Lyndon B. Johnson and three Kennedys paid it a visit in 1960.

Clarksburg, on the other hand, now appears to be a hollowed-out shell. It has among the highest rates of smoking, obesity, diabetes, and prescription drug misuse in the country, and its population is dwindling. What went wrong?

What is the main point here? Clarksburg, West Virginia, has deteriorated into a husk of its former self.

The author arrived in Clarksburg in 1998, just as mountaintop removal, a new mining revolution, was gaining traction. It entailed removing the tops of mountains in order to gain access to the minerals; this approach produced more than twice as much coal per hour as underground mining. Companies began purchasing the rights to remove neighbouring mountaintops, forever changing the landscape and giving rise to the notion that coal would save the city.

Meanwhile, young people were abandoning the state in search of work, leaving the city with a smaller revenue base to fund. Because there were fewer taxes, there were fewer resources, which led even more individuals to flee. West Virginia lost 18,000 residents between 2007 and 2017, the greatest per-capita departure rate in the country.

This was accompanied by other changes, particularly in the way West Virginians – and the rest of the country – consumed news. West Virginia used to have a strong local news scene. However, print advertisements began to migrate to the internet, and between 2000 and 2012, print advertising in American newspapers decreased by a staggering 71 per cent. People began getting their news in bits and pieces from television, the internet, and social media, and newspapers across the country began crumbling. Because that's what attracted people in, headlines and sound bites developed to prioritize emotive, provocative hooks — clickbait.

The news grew less local and more national as a result of these tendencies. The number of Americans who could name their governor fell dramatically between 1949 and 2007. Americans lost a major source of social cohesion and connection with their neighbours when local news was no longer available. All of this contributed to an increasing sense of loneliness – and approaching catastrophe.

4. The city of Chicago, Illinois, serves as a harsh reminder of the condition of African-Americans.

Black Americans began fleeing the old Confederate states in quest of more freedom and opportunity in the early twentieth century. During this period, known as the Great Migration, Chicago, Illinois, became known as the "Promised Land." Before the Great Migration, Chicago's Black population was about 2%; afterwards, it grew to 33%.

The city's white population, on the other hand, did not exactly welcome Black newcomers with open arms.

Instead, white communities began to adopt covenants prohibiting homeowners from renting or selling to potential Black inhabitants. As a result, Black migrants were pushed into a small area on Chicago's South Side, where they were forced to navigate overcrowded schools and apartments. Other racist housing policies exacerbated the issue, and by 1940, Chicago had become more racially segregated than Richmond, Virginia, the Confederacy's old capital.

This is the most important message: The city of Chicago, Illinois, serves as a harsh reminder of the condition of African-Americans.

The city's racial heritage has resurfaced. Take it from Preston Maurice Clark, also known as Reese, a Black South Sider interviewed by the author.

Reese had the opportunity to attend an excellent primary school in a largely white neighbourhood as a child. Reese's parents were informed, however, that the school bus he had been taking was only available through eighth grade. His parents couldn't afford public transportation, so he went to the local high school. Football and violence were two things that Fenger High was known for.

By the time Reese joined, though, even football was on the decline. In the preceding twelve years, six of its current and past players had been killed. The sports budget was set to be slashed to only $750 each year. When Reese was 16, the United States Secretary of Education pronounced Chicago schools to be the worst in the country, with a 40% dropout rate.

Reese's world narrowed without the prospect of a solid education. He spiralled into a path of drugs, violence, and finally incarceration.

Reese's tale isn't the only one. Almost one-third of all Black men in the United States are incarcerated at some point in their lives. When they are released, their convictions force employers to refuse to hire them. All too often, the only option for them is to return to the streets.

5. Donald Trump and the Republican Party exploited the deepest concerns of white and working-class people.

The years following September 11, 2001, marked the beginning of a new era in American society. Twilight warfare, which represents a fight with no clearly defined geography, winner, or loser, was a popular metaphor at the time.

The wars in the Middle East were abstractions for most Americans, far distant from their daily lives. For example, less than a quarter of Americans with some college education could identify Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran on a map three years into the Iraq War.

Despite this, Americans began to operate from a fearful mindset, seeing "enemy" everywhere. Immigrants were the prime focus of their wrath.

Here's the main point: Donald Trump and the Republican Party exploited the deepest concerns of white and working-class people.

Undocumented immigrants were "coming here to kill you and to kill me and our family," according to Tom Tancredo, a populist right-wing lawmaker. His argument was based on a demographic fact: in the 1970s, only 5% of Americans were born outside of the United States; by 2018, that number had risen to 14%. This was one of the fastest demographic diversifications in history, and it made some white people fearful of becoming a minority in a country where they had long ruled. Tancredo seized on those anxieties and exaggerated them.

If Tancredo's remarks were a taste of what was to come, Donald Trump's were the genuine deal. When he launched his candidacy in June 2015, he only said two phrases about immigration in his prepared speech. But then he strayed from the script and improvised: "They're carrying narcotics." They're rapists, to be sure. And I'm sure some of them are nice individuals."

Trump's facts were incorrect: first-generation immigrants had a lower crime rate than native-born Americans. That didn't matter, though. Trump had tapped into and amplified his audience's deepest concerns; their emotional response was based on perception rather than reality.

Similar lies resounded throughout the party's firearms policy. As is often assumed, modern gun culture does not originate in the days of the Wild West. In fact, it was only in the 1970s that the National Rifle Association realized they needed a new marketing plan because their sales were declining.

They created a new aesthetic focused on camouflage and tactical clothing, framing gun ownership as a critical form of self-defence. Trump took it all and ran with it. He turned down Syrian immigration because "they could be ISIS," preying on worries that terrorists were lurking around every corner and that people needed guns to protect themselves. It didn't matter that violent crime had decreased during the previous two decades. It was all about how people saw things.

6. As the establishment failed, American fury grew.

The way the working class has been portrayed has changed considerably over time. Working-class men were depicted in heroic positions on posters and murals in the 1930s. In the 1970s, the poster version of the character was Archie Bunker, a fictional blue-collar worker with a racist bent. It had evolved into Homer Simpson, an inept, doughnut-eating alcoholic, by the 1990s.

While American elites are gradually becoming conscious of systemic discrimination based on race and gender, class is frequently overlooked. The working classes have been more degraded and mocked over the last many decades, all while big money has kept them imprisoned.

The main point here is that when the system failed, American fury grew.

Much of the establishment's failure in Clarksburg, West Virginia, revolved around coal - notably mountaintop mining, which was destroying the terrain. Debris and elements such as lead and arsenic were spilt into the air and water supplies, wreaking havoc on people's health.

However, the health care that West Virginians relied on to alleviate these problems was also in jeopardy. Wall Street has made bets on coal companies, betting that China's economic expansion would rekindle interest in the fuel. However, their prediction was incorrect, and investors were forced to slash expenditures as a result.

Former employees were denied health insurance, which was one of the measures they implemented. Patriot Coal, for example, petitioned the bankruptcy court to dismiss a union contract that covered 23,000 retired miners and their dependents. The court agreed as well. Thousands of people who required health care were suddenly left without it.

Of fact, the commercial and political establishments were failing people all over the country, not just in Appalachia. It was also failing the Black people of the country.

Laquan McDonald, a Black adolescent, was shot by police in the fall of 2014. McDonald allegedly lunged at an officer with a knife, according to the official police report. So why was Democrat Mayor Rahm Emanuel fighting to keep a dashcam video of the incident from being released?

Critics said he was attempting to safeguard his election chances. When the footage was ultimately released – after Emanuel had won reelection – it revealed that McDonald was walking away from the cops when he was shot 16 times.

Following the distribution of the video, protests ensued. There was a strong impression that the system Rahm Emanuel and others inhabited was broken.

7. Trump has pursued a destructive agenda throughout his term.

Trump's election triumph in 2016 was the result of a confluence of events in Greenwich, Clarksburg, and Chicago.

Trump lost the county of Greenwich overall; the final result was 57 to 39 per cent – but it wasn't the catastrophic defeat that many had predicted. Trump won West Virginia by 42 points in a state that had previously been a Democratic bastion. Only one precinct in Chicago voted for Trump. However, for the first time in 20 years, Black voter turnout in a presidential election was lower across the country.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists updated the Doomsday Clock, a measure of how near society is to collapse, to a terrifying 2 minutes and 30 seconds before midnight less than a week after his inauguration. It marked the Clock's closest approach to Doomsday since the United States exploded its first thermonuclear bomb in 1952.

Here's the main point: Trump has pursued a destructive agenda throughout his term.

Trump immediately started on decreasing federal government function to an all-time low. He purposefully left hundreds of job openings unfilled, and much more staff left on their own. In the first nine months of his presidency, more than 79,000 full-time workers quit or retired, which is 42% more than during Obama's first nine months.

The media was another target of Trump's wrath. Trump declared news outlets the "enemy of the people" after only a month in office. "Just remember: what you're seeing and reading is not what's happening," he warned an audience the next year. He continuously shattered the concept of truth.

Meanwhile, the federal government was bolstering the interests of corporations and investors. In 2017, Trump signed a $1.5 trillion tax cut for the working and middle classes, which he portrayed as a gift to them. That was clearly untrue. A household in the poorest 20% of income experienced a $120 cut on average, while a household in the top 1% received $48,000.

Cultural schisms arose as a result of these changes. A local government employee in Greenwich claimed that a member of the town council had caressed her groin and remarked, "I adore this new world," a few weeks after Trump's win. I don't have to be politically correct anymore." Why couldn't others follow Trump's lead and brag about attacking women and getting away with it?

The level of social cohesion has plummeted. According to a survey published in 2018 by two political scientists, 15% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats thought the US would be better off if substantial numbers in the opposite party "simply died." The country was dangerously split.

8. The COVID-19 outbreak and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations exposed a broken system.

On February 28, 2020, Trump declared during a rally, "This is their new hoax." He was chastising Democrats for being concerned about his COVID-19 response. "So far, no one has died from coronavirus," he noted. Over a thousand Americans died every day a month after the speech.

Trump had weakened the civil service, which was now contributing to avoidable disease and death. Despite being the richest and most powerful country on the planet, America was unable to find masks to protect its population or diagnostic tests to diagnose them. The economy was also in freefall, with the country's unemployment rate at its lowest level since 1975.

This is the most important message: The COVID-19 outbreak and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations exposed a broken system.

The virus wreaked havoc in low-income areas, where increasing rents and stagnating salaries had forced many Americans into smaller, more crowded apartments, making social isolation difficult. Worse, more than two million Americans had lost their health insurance in the three years leading up to the pandemic. "It is what it is," Trump shrugged when questioned about the terrible killings.

COVID-19 had a particularly negative impact on the Black community. In late spring 2020, black Chicago residents were dying at four times the rate of white inhabitants from the illness. This was partly due to economic and social differences, which meant they had a higher rate of preexisting conditions when the epidemic began.

The epidemic wasn't the only tragedy that rocked the Black community that summer; the assassination of George Floyd did as well. Floyd pleaded with a white police officer to halt for nearly nine minutes as he knelt on his neck. Protests erupted across the country and around the world in response to the killing. People had to deal with a racist system in which black people were 50 per cent more likely than white people to die at the hands of police.

Regrettably, the protests enabled Trump to intensify his demonization of the left. According to studies, looting and violence happened in about 7% of Black Lives Matter events. Images of burned houses and looted stores, on the other hand, were widely shared, and Trump used them to paint a picture of a country under siege. In June 2020, more guns were purchased in the United States than in any other month in history.

9. The January 6 insurgency was the culmination of twenty years of growing inequity, discontent, and cynicism.

As the election of 2020 drew nearer, gun sales continued to set new highs. Right-wing militants began issuing calls to arms on social media. In an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump said that "people you've never heard of" were "in the dark shadows" influencing his opponent, Joe Biden.

The election, which took place in November 2020, was not especially close. In the Electoral College, Biden won by a margin of more than seven million votes, 306 to 232. Trump, on the other hand, immediately began a frantic effort to overturn the results. He tweeted nonstop about his landslide victory and advanced crazy and absurd voter fraud accusations.

But none of his deception techniques was successful. On January 6, when Vice President Pence was scheduled to oversee the official certification of the vote by Congress, Trump would have one more chance to intercede.

What is the main point here? The January 6 insurgency was the culmination of twenty years of growing inequity, discontent, and cynicism.

Crowds began to form south of the White House about 10:00 a.m. that day. Few wore masks, and a group of people worked together to build wooden gallows with a rope. Trump ordered them to march to the Capitol "peacefully and patriotically," but he also used the word "battle" more than 20 times in his speech.

Protesters began tussling with police about 1:10 p.m., and things quickly escalated. The throng rushed toward the Capitol, snatching metal barricades to use as ladders to climb the structure. Window-breaking tools included flagpoles and fire extinguishers. As a result of the events and their aftermath, seven Americans died.

It was the culmination of more than two decades of anguish, negligence, cynicism, and lies, all of which served as fuel for a fire that threatened to consume democracy.

Twitter and Facebook both blocked Trump from their services in the hours following the unrest. "Count me out," said Lindsey Graham, a staunch Trump supporter, telling the Senate, "Enough is enough." But it was short-lived. He rejoined the Republican establishment within days, declaring that if Republicans wanted to win, they couldn't do it without Trump.

Biden's inaugural speech delivered a few weeks later called for togetherness. But there was a plea for caution underneath it. Democracy, he said, is both valuable and vulnerable. That was the lesson Americans learned on January 6th.

The fundamental message in this summary is that America became a wilderness in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, with its political landscape prepared to burn. The growing divide between the haves and have-nots failed institutions, and structural racism all contributed to Donald Trump's success in the 2016 presidential election. Once in the White House, Trump proceeded about further weakening federal institutions and the public's trust in information, a mistake that only became apparent during the COVID-19 outbreak and the BLM protests. Cynicism, unhappiness, and rage increased until a violent insurgency rocked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, forcing the nation to confront itself.