MAGA may not deliver material benefits for the vast majority of its adherents, but it does provide them with a coherent worldview, demonizing dark-skinned groups (lately Somalis), snooty liberals, and anyone Donald Trump doesn’t like. Sections of the electorate can at least enjoy a flush of superiority while MAGA’s main beneficiaries — the ultrarich, particularly the tech oligarchs who gathered at the White House on Inauguration Day 2025 — wreak havoc on regions and communities that backed Trump.
That’s hardly a formula for long-term sustainability, but it does befit the era of scorched-earth capitalism. Randolph Lewis’s Bummerland: Ruin and Restoration in Trump’s New America is a collection of dispatches from Austin, Texas, and beyond exploring the culture of the transformative moment.
A fluid stylist with a keen eye for detail, Lewis states at the outset that his collection of thirty-five short essays aims to illustrate why the contemporary United States “often feels more like a woodchipper for the soul than a safe place to call home.” Although he is more interested in diagnosis than prescription, Lewis advocates what he calls a “soft revolution,” one that emphasizes “networks of neighborliness and compassion.”
Randolph, whose previous books have profiled radical documentary filmmakers, is a professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The climate is increasingly hostile to his kind. In mid-February, the university system’s board of regents decreed that faculty should steer clear of “unnecessary controversial subjects” in their classrooms, which many interpret as an attempt to chill left-leaning instruction.
In Bummerland, Lewis ruminates on how Austin’s once-famed “weird” iconoclasm became a thing of the past. These days, he notes, the city is “home to super bros like Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and thousands of California transplants who have turned ramshackle hippie cottages into multimillion-dollar…
Auteur: Theodore Hamm
