Mugambi Jouet teaches at Stanford Law School. His writing has notably beenfeatured in the New Republic,Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post,Salon,Guernica, The Hill, Truthout, Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur, and Le Monde, France's flagship newspaper.

In this provocative exploration of American exceptionalism, Mugambi Jouet explores why Americans are far more divided than other Westerners over basic issues-including wealth inequality, health care, climate change, evolution, the literal truth of the Bible, abortion, gay rights, gun control, mass incarceration, and war. Drawing inspiration from Alexis de Tocqueville, Jouet, raised in Paris by a French mother and a Kenyan father, wields his multicultural sensibility to parse the ways in which the intense polarization of U.S. conservatives and liberals has become a key dimension of American exceptionalism-an idea widely misunderstood to mean American superiority. Instead, Jouet contends that exceptionalism, once a source of strength, may now spell decline, as unique features of U.S. history, politics, law, culture, religion, and race relations foster grave conflicts and injustices. This book offers a brilliant dissection of the American soul, in all of its outsize, clashing, and striking manifestations.