A modern de Tocqueville, Jouet analyses today’s polarized United States from the perspective of a scholar who was raised in Paris by a Kenyan father and a French mother. Now teaching at Stanford Law School, Jouet examines Americans’ clashing views on criminal justice, gay rights, gun control, and other issues, finding that American society is more deeply divided than those of most Western countries. As he investigates the contradictions in a nation that elected a black president yet erupts in racial violence, that excels in science yet still argues about the truth of evolution and climate change, he proposes that this divisiveness is now the quality that makes America exceptional.

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