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The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America
A harrowing tale of how polarization threatened to break apart two American communities and how one found a way back while the other splintered.
Donald Trump's November 2016 electoral victory was the beginning of four years of demagogy, presidential name-calling, and—ten months into a pandemic—an incitement to violence that led a mob of thousands to descend on the Capitol in Washington, DC. Fueled by suspicion, conspiracy, and bigotry, a faction of Americans had decided to seize control. But the biggest effect of this right-wing wave may not have been on our national politics, but on the local governments of communities around the country.
In Chaos Comes Calling, Sasha Abramsky investigates the empowerment of the far-right over the past few years, stoked by the Trump presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic. He tells the parallel stories of two communities, Shasta County, California and Sequim, Washington, where toxic alliances of QAnoners, anti-vaxxers, Christian nationalists, militia supporters and other denizens of the far-right have worked to take control of the levers of power.
The trajectories of both communities expose the stark divisions and extremism that have come to define our political landscape over the past decade, and offer revealing glimpses of what the future may hold. While Sequim ultimately recalibrated in 2021, returning to rationality, Shasta County has descended further into a climate of intolerance and toxic divisiveness.
Chaos Comes Calling vividly captures both the regressive forces gaining momentum all over the country and the tireless efforts of citizens determined to organize against them.
"[An] enthralling account...an eye-opening close-up view of American politics." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An excellent, fearless work of political reportage in the face of America's violent discontents." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"An unflinching, sobering, and essential read, filled with first-person narratives and reflections that offer an urgent warning about the fragility of democratic institutions in the face of rising extremism in the United States and around the world." —Library Journal
"[A]n important and disturbing book...[a] fine-grained account of political and social turmoil." ―Shelf Awareness
"There are real people in this intimately reported book, real consequences—and also real hope. The great achievement of Chaos Comes Calling is what it reveals about how communities become captive to the little fascisms of would-be tyrants, and how some, at least, free themselves. This story about small places has big implications." ―Jeff Sharlet, New York Times bestselling author of The Undertow
"Abramsky takes us out of the Washington, DC, media echosphere and its myopic coverage of national horseraces and puts us on the ground in real communities where Trump, Bannon, and their cacophony of lies and falsehoods have already curdled the local governments, perverting the laboratories of democracy into wellsprings of authoritarianism. The fight against these people starts at home." ―Elie Mystal, New York Times bestselling author of Allow Me to Retort
"In this chilling report from the American West, Abramsky shows how the extreme right has mobilized to upend local democratic institutions and warns of a fascist threat that's alarmingly close and widespread. A disturbing, necessary book." ―Eric Klinenberg, author of 2020
This information about Chaos Comes Calling was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sasha Abramsky was born in England in 1972, grew up in London, and studied politics, philosophy, and economics at Balliol College, Oxford. He got his B.A. in 1993 and moved to New York to study journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lived in the New York for ten years, before moving to California in 2003.
Abramsky is currently an author, freelance journalist, lecturer at the University of California, and a senior fellow at Demos. His work has appeared in the Nation, Atlantic Monthly, New York magazine, American Prospect, Salon, Slate, NewYorker.com, LA Weekly, Village Voice, Daily Beast, and Rolling Stone. His 2013 book, The American Way of Poverty, was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and his 2015 volume, The House of Twenty Thousand...
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