With radical candor and sardonic wit, Randolph Lewis offers an autopsy of the recent past, looking for glimmers of hope and redemption among the detritus strewn about by neo–Gilded Age billionaires, Big Tech, and political extremes during the first Trump administration and the pandemic era. American life took a weird turn in June 2015, when an aging reality star descended a golden escalator to announce his bid for the White House. From there, Lewis watched from his longtime home in the Lone Star State as the country slipped into an endless fever dream churning with chaos, uncertainty, and fear.

Wanting to decipher how things went sideways in such a hurry, Lewis drove all over the Sunbelt and beyond, trying to make sense of what was happening. He sojourns to an apocalyptic slab of the Mojave Desert; the rugged mountains under assault near Colorado Springs; the epic sprawl of Las Vegas, Austin, and Houston; the expat communities of central Mexico; the hotbeds of racism in the Deep South; and the fjords of Norway, from which, surreally, Lewis watched the unfolding news of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and decided to go there. In a register mournful, meditative, and darkly comic, Lewis offers a portrait of modern American life under a system whose democratic norms have been stretched to the limit.

Lewis, an American studies professor for three decades, examines the trajectories of cultural burnout that have ushered us into a new Gilded Age of fear, hustle, and hype. In this passionate critique of the anxious new world we inhabit, Lewis offers sketches of where we’ve ended up, why it feels so wrong, and how we might find our way out of Bummerland.