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.”