The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

by Jared Yates Sexton

Overview

"Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate's presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election." --The Washington Post

The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into the White House. Includes an all new afterword that details the first year of the Trump presidency.

"With a novelist's flair for the dramatic scene and evocative detail, Sexton expertly marries the quotidian tedium of the campaign trail (so many hotel room beers) and the outlandish circumstances of this particular election season with his astute observations about our polarized national condition." --Salon

"This is the post-campaign book I was waiting for. Essential reading for understanding this country now and going forward." --Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640091047
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	08/07/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jared Yates Sexton is the author of The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore. He is a contributing political writer at Salon, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University. You can follow him at @JYSexton.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS


PROLOGUE: Ugly Vibrations in These United States vii

PART ONE: SLEEP OF REASON BREEDS MONSTERS

CHAPTER 1: Canaries in the Coal Mine 3

CHAPTER 2: The American Dream Is Dead 21

CHAPTER 3: Nine Dead in Charleston 29

CHAPTER 4: The Ego Is Not Master in Its Own House 43

CHAPTER 5: They’re Tryin’ to Win This Thing 57

CHAPTER 6: Life Outside the Cloud 69

CHAPTER 7: The End of an Uneasy Truce 83

CHAPTER 8: The Joke Is Over 93



PART TWO: THE SUMMER OF RAGE

CHAPTER 9: An American Horror Story 107

CHAPTER 10: The Road to Ohio 119

CHAPTER 11: There Will Be Blood 133

CHAPTER 12: A Nation Forever on the Brink 143

CHAPTER 13: When the Devil’s at Your Door

the republican national convention 151

CHAPTER 14: The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore

the democratic national convention 169

CHAPTER 15: Against All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic 181

CHAPTER 16: The Green Party National Convention 191



PART THREE: A NEW KIND OF RELIGION

CHAPTER 17: A Voice for the People 203

CHAPTER 18: A Tiger by Its Tail 217

CHAPTER 19: The Cult of the Movement 229

CHAPTER 20: We Come to the End 239

CHAPTER 21: Anatomy of a Car Crash 249

CHAPTER 22: Waiting for the End of the World 263

EPILOGUE: We the People 279

AFTERWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 289

NOTES 291

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore

Named a Best Book of 2017 (The Coil)
A Best Book by Hoosier Authors in 2017 (Indianapolis Monthly)

"An impressionistic and often disturbing account of the 2016 presidential race . . . Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate's presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election . . . This book reveals the incremental nature of public displays of hatred, growing from harsh chants and bumper stickers to, say, an open and unmasked gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville . . . [His] dispatches are bracing." --The Washington Post

"With a novelist's flair for the dramatic scene and evocative detail, Sexton expertly marries the quotidian tedium of the campaign trail (so many hotel room beers) and the outlandish circumstances of this particular election season with his astute observations about our polarized national condition." --Salon

"Sexton writes as a reporter who experienced both life and politics in the 2016 campaign. His book is excellent . . . [It] tries to make sense of a country trying to make sense of itself." --Winnipeg Free Press

"A ground-level account, sticking close to Sexton and his increasing miseries as he wades into the festering sewer of the 2016 election. The unique perspective, eye-deep in hell, is equal parts mortifying and edifying. Sexton measures the depths of depravity as he goes, but reminds us that these depths have always existed in the nation." --The Coil

"Jared Yates Sexton, previously a minor-league pundit, is now making an outsider's case for having penned one of the important books of the 2016 presidential race. The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore gets outside the iron ring of microphones that surround, suffocate, and trivialize campaign journalism." --Los Angeles Review of Books

"Sexton's first-person account is both candidly relatable and viscerally frightening . . . [His] seamless blending of his reporter's objectivity with the personal evaluations of a voter who has skin in the game yields trenchant analysis . . . Sexton's is a critical and important voice in helping readers understand the cultural and political sea change the election created." --Booklist (starred review)

"First of all, this is the best book title of 2017, hands down. Second, and more importantly, this is the book to read if you want to understand what the hell happened in the United States in 2016. If you follow Sexton on Twitter (and you should), you know he brings a sharp eye, fierce intellect, and resilient capacity for surprise to the problem of American political life. And that's just 140 characters at a time. Just imagine what he can do with 300+ pages." --Bookriot

"A leftist counterweight to Hillbilly Elegy, laced with shots of Hunter S. Thompson . . . A useful snapshot of a tumultuous presidential race." --Kirkus Reviews

"Sexton's reporting provides a unique nuts-and-bolts look at the campaigns, and his eyewitness reports of the aggressive displays at Trump rallies are both terrifying and fascinating." --Publishers Weekly

"This is the post-campaign book I was waiting for. Nothing else has shown me so clearly the ruptures in our culture aligned with Trump's candidacy, or even the nature of the way we choose a president. Essential reading for understanding this country now and going forward." --Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"Jared Yates Sexton didn't just randomly become a phenomenon in his chronicling of Donald Trump's fans and foibles, it happened because he's our Jane Goodall to Trump's Deplorables. His work has been indispensable to those who have tried to understand our times, with an honesty lacking among most of our mainstream media. Read this book." --Cliff Schecter, bestselling author of The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him--And Why Independents Shouldn't and a columnist for The Daily Beast

"Jared Yates Sexton ventured into the dark heart of American partisanship and emerged with a warning that all of us would do well to heed. Thoughtful, compassionate, and exceptionally brave, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how--and why--our country turned on itself." --Bronwen Dickey, author of Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon

From the Publisher

05/15/2017
Political columnist and fiction writer Sexton (I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World) shares a chilling account of his cross-country tour covering the 2016 presidential election. He follows Trump to rallies in South Carolina, where attendees he dubs the “White and the Angry” taunt Black Lives Matter protesters, and to the carnivalesque Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where he observes the surreal juxtaposition of Nazi salutes and a “Gays for Trump” event. The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, is a snooze fest “engineered down to the last detail,” which Sexton criticizes for failing to mobilize embittered young Sanders supporters. Sexton highlights other pivotal events, such as the shooting at a black church in Charleston that ignited debate about the Confederate flag, and he traces the modern political divide to Fox News’s founding. He also covers the chaotic inauguration, where protesters were teargassed blocks away from tux- and gown-clad ball attendees. While the Trump-acolyte demographic has been explored ad nauseam, Sexton’s reporting provides a unique nuts-and-bolts look at the campaigns, and his eyewitness reports of the aggressive displays at Trump rallies are both terrifying and fascinating. Readers still feeling raw from the election, however, may not appreciate its rehashing. Agent: Christopher Rhodes, the Stuart Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

2017-07-03
The 2016 election finds the author on a search for the real America.Sexton (Creative Writing/Georgia Southern Univ.; I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World, 2016, etc.) found himself in the political cross hairs when some of his reportage on the Trump campaign drew attention—and even death threats—from his supporters. "Trump wasn't the cause, he was the disease personified," writes the author, and then continues, "Trump's true talent was finding the pulse of these ignorant, livid people and playing them like a virtuoso strumming an instrument." Yet these people are as recognizable to Sexton as his own family and the blue-collar milieu in which he was raised, and he understands how and why Hillary Clinton couldn't connect with them. He has more of an affinity for Bernie Sanders, who inflamed the passions of the left just as Trump had with the right and whose campaign went from making a statement to a surprisingly strong bid for victory. The author reserves his deepest exasperation for those purists of the far left who refused to see a significant difference between Trump and Clinton and who even turned on Sanders when he attempted to unify the party. "They were purists," he writes. "To them, there was right and then there was wrong." Sexton's campaign coverage comes from a ground-floor, grass-roots perspective. The only convention that gave him press credentials was that of the Green Party, so he generally writes from the periphery, among the crowds who sometimes seem more like mobs at the rallies. Whatever he learned didn't make him more prescient, since pretty much until election night, he strongly believed (as did millions of others) that "Donald Trump will not be president." His book sometimes feels like a leftist counterweight to Hillbilly Elegy, laced with shots of Hunter S. Thompson, and it's clear that Sexton couldn't believe what he had seen until it was too late. Though it lacks the stinging punch of Thompson, the book is a useful snapshot of a tumultuous presidential race.

Kirkus Reviews