Featuring a new foreword that responds to the troubling and surreal events in American politics since its first publication, journalist Jared Yates Sexton's book remains precisent and necessary, a boots-on-the-ground account of the 2016 presidential election. "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) When he agreed to cover the 2016 election season, journalist Jared Yates Sexton didn't know he was stepping into what would become--for both political parties--the most rageful and divisive political circus in U.S. history. His initial dispatches showed Democrats at war with their establishment, coming apart at the seams over the long-gestating ascendancy of Hillary Clinton and the upstart momentum of Bernie Sanders, whose grassroots campaign provoked uprisings of people desperate for change. Then, on June 14, Sexton attended a Donald Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the first journalists to witness these rallies and give mainstream readers an idea of the raw anger that occurred there, Sexton found himself in the center of a maelstrom. Following a series of tweets that saw his observations viewed well over one million times, his reporting was soon featured in The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, and Mother Jones, and he would go on to write two pieces for The New York Times. Sexton received online harassments, campaigns to get him fired from his university professorship, and death threats that changed his life forever. 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 divided both parties and powered Donald Trump into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton's book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy's political polarization--a result of our self-constructed, technologically assisted echo chambers. Like the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer--books that have paved the way for important narratives that shape how we perceive not only the politics of our time but also our way of life--The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is an instant classic, an authoritative depiction of a country struggling to make sense of itself.

CONTENTSPROLOGUE: Ugly Vibrations in These United States viiPART ONE: SLEEP OF REASON BREEDS MONSTERSCHAPTER 1: Canaries in the Coal Mine 3CHAPTER 2: The American Dream Is Dead 21CHAPTER 3: Nine Dead in Charleston 29CHAPTER 4: The Ego Is Not Master in Its Own House 43CHAPTER 5: They're Tryin' to Win This Thing 57CHAPTER 6: Life Outside the Cloud 69CHAPTER 7: The End of an Uneasy Truce 83CHAPTER 8: The Joke Is Over 93PART TWO: THE SUMMER OF RAGECHAPTER 9: An American Horror Story 107CHAPTER 10: The Road to Ohio 119CHAPTER 11: There Will Be Blood 133CHAPTER 12: A Nation Forever on the Brink 143CHAPTER 13: When the Devil's at Your Doorthe republican national convention 151CHAPTER 14: The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shorethe democratic national convention 169CHAPTER 15: Against All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic 181CHAPTER 16: The Green Party National Convention 191PART THREE: A NEW KIND OF RELIGIONCHAPTER 17: A Voice for the People 203CHAPTER 18: A Tiger by Its Tail 217CHAPTER 19: The Cult of the Movement 229CHAPTER 20: We Come to the End 239CHAPTER 21: Anatomy of a Car Crash 249CHAPTER 22: Waiting for the End of the World 263EPILOGUE: We the People 279AFTERWORDACKNOWLEDGMENTS 289NOTES 291