The White Storm: How Racism Poisoned American Democracy

A piercing examination of America's struggle with racism and why this now threatens the survival of the nation's democracy

When the U.S. Capitol was stormed in 2021, it was an attack on the very idea of America as a pluralist democracy. It was also a reminder that the worst threat to the United States today doesn’t come from any foreign despot, but from domestic racism. In The White Storm, the journalist and author Martin Gelin looks back at two decades as a political correspondent and three centuries of American history to understand this moment of crisis. In the vein of Alexis de Tocqueville or Tony Judt, fellow Europeans who traveled America searching for answers to its political contradictions, this is a journey across time and space, from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to the slave plantations of Louisiana, from mass prisons in rural Arizona to memorials for lynching victims in Alabama.

The book reveals how every step forward for Black Americans is met with a fierce backlash from white Americans, taking two recurring forms: violent extremism and a flight from the commons. The white backlash always grows in proportion to the black advances. After Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, a Black man at a polling station in Detroit said: "We used to pick cotton, now we pick presidents." It is precisely this Black agency that white nationalists refuse to accept.

The White Storm reveals how racism has permeated almost every significant conflict in America’s past. Now it threatens American democracy itself.

Martin Gelin is a journalist and award-winning author of eight books on American politics and culture. Since 2011, he has been the U.S. Correspondent for Dagens Nyheter, a national newspaper in Sweden. He has written for The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Slate, The Guardian, Quartz, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, Parliament Magazine, The Independent, The Prospect, Boston Review, The LA Review of Books, Granta Magazine and Harvard’s Nieman Lab, among others.

He has been interviewed by the BBC, CNN, NPR, Monocle, Quartz and The Times of India, and is a regular commentator on foreign affairs for Swedish TV and radio. His two recent books, The American Conservatives, and The Internet is Broken, were both finalists for the August Prize, Sweden’s highest literary honor. He has also been awarded The Stockholm Prize and The Johan Hansson Prize for his books. His work has been translated to seven languages, including Chinese and French. He has lectured on history and politics at Columbia University, New York University, The University of Hong Kong and the Jaipur Literary Festival. Martin Gelin is the recipient of grants from the Axson Johnson Foundation, The Stieg Larsson Foundation, Institut Suédois, The Japan Foundation, The Swedish Authors Union, The Swedish Federation of Publicists and The Swedish Journalist Fund.