American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now

by Paul Starr, Mark Bramhall (Read by)

Overview

How did Americans come to elect Barack Obama—and then Donald Trump? Those choices capture what Paul Starr calls the American contradiction.

The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. Our nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.

Starr tells this history from the dual standpoints of the progressive movements that changed the American people and of the movements that emerged in response. Black Americans, he argues, served as a model minority, setting in motion America’s twentieth-century revolutions in gender as well as race and rights. With industry’s decline and the rise of economic inequality, millions of Americans have felt dispossessed and want the old America back. Trump is their revenge. American Contradiction tells the story of how 1950s America became the almost unrecognizable America of the 2020s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798228658196
Publisher:	Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:	12/13/2025
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paul Starr is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and founding coeditor of the American Prospect magazine. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and Bancroft Prize in American History for The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Over a half-century he has written essays and op‑eds for newspapers and magazines as well as books on America’s institutions, history, and politics.

Mark Bramhall has won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, more than thirty AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has repeatedly been named by AudioFile Magazine and Publishers Weekly among their “Best Voices of the Year.” He is also an award-winning actor whose acting credits include off-Broadway, regional, and many Los Angeles venues as well as television, animation, and feature films. He has taught and directed at the American Academy of Dramatic Art.

Editorial Reviews

American Contradiction is an extraordinarily instructive analysis of the perplexing character of the United States. Starr’s commentary on the journey from Eisenhower to Trump bristles with insight. As I read, I found myself constantly underlining his informative and accessible text.”

Randall Kennedy

A fascinating examination of the clash between changing family, gender, and sexual norms, racial justice struggles, rightwing political campaigns, and accelerating economic inequality that underlies our current political crises. Eye-opening.”

author of The Way We Never Were Stephanie Coontz

[A] thoughtful study of the push and pull from right to left and back again in the past 75 years. . . . A useful key to understanding how American politics and the American polity have become so intractably polarized.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Paul Starr, one of the great chroniclers of American institutions, provides a brilliant reinterpretation of the modern political era. His book unpacks the fundamental contradictions that have haunted the body politic since the 1960s. A country born in contraction between slavery and freedom has remained at odds with itself even as the issues changed. The bold attack by the progressive project on hierarchical institutions produced an equally fierce counterattack by those who wanted to restore an imagined earlier era. American Contradiction teaches us how, far from being an anomaly, the election of Donald Trump twice to the presidency was a result of deeply-rooted political forces that had been steadily gaining strength within the Republican Party for decades. This is a must-read book for sociologists, historians, political scientists, and any reader interested in our nation’s political history.”—Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University, and author of In Defense of Partisanship

“American Contradiction is an extraordinarily instructive analysis of the perplexing character of the United States. Starr’s commentary on the journey from Eisenhower to Trump bristles with insight. As I read, I found myself constantly underlining his informative and accessible text.”—Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, and author of Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture

“A fascinating examination of the clash between changing family, gender, and sexual norms, racial justice struggles, rightwing political campaigns, and accelerating economic inequality that underlies our current political crises. Eye-opening.”—Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

“Anything Paul Starr writes is important to read, and this book is no exception. American Contradiction is a highly sophisticated history of the United States since the 1950s emphasizing the interplay between social movements, politics, culture, law, and social policy.”—Nelson Lichtenstein, coauthor of A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism

From the Publisher

2025-08-01
Thoughtful study of the push and pull from right to left and back again in the past 75 years.

Ronald Reagan liked the Puritan notion of America being a shining city on a hill. But, writes Princeton sociologist and Pulitzer Prize–winner Starr, more correctly, “the American republic has been like a city built on a geological fault, shaken often by tremors and periodically by earthquakes.” In this lucid account, the author opens in the era when, united by the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats were often indistinguishable, with conservatives, moderates, and liberals in both parties and, in that “midcentury normal,” sharing a commitment to a fair social contract, prosperity, education, science, and other public goods. (It helped, as Starr notes, that “the top marginal rate during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s was 91 ­percent, inconceivable ­today.”) It’s worth considering, in that regard, that Richard Nixon proposed “a national guaranteed income,” a sharp break from conservative orthodoxy. That common front began to wobble under Reagan, cracked with Newt Gingrich, and is shattered today, likely irreparably. Starr points out that while rural white resentment has proved a powerful fuel for Trumpism, it was the loss of manufacturing jobs in cities and the subsequent decline of many urban areas that fed both the destructive impoverishment of minority communities and the sharp rise in incarceration rates. It’s ironic that corporations were the original champions of diversity programs, as the author notes, when in the 1980s “business leaders became convinced that they needed to prepare for a diverse workforce, diverse consumers, and diverse global markets.” It’s also ironic that both right and left hold that “Amer­i­ca broke its promises to working people,” though nothing much is being done about that in a time dominated by “political interests in keeping America’s social divisions at a high boil.”

A useful key to understanding how American politics and the American polity have become so intractably polarized.

Kirkus Reviews