American Rule Quotes

“I’d been a member of what I now call the Cult of the Shining City: a white identity evangelicalism rooted in the myth of American exceptionalism, a myth that has co-opted the United States of America and, by proxy, the rest of the world. That nationalistic, white identity evangelicalism has corrupted American religion and all but broken our politics.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“Setting an awful precedent for the future, Lewis had found what so many Americans would come to realize in the very near future: The murder and plunder of people across the land proved most beneficial to the aims of the United States of America.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“The First Great Awakening had been characterized by fear of an angry God who had chosen peoples and who smote sinners; the Second was oriented toward saving people from damnation and offering personal redemption.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“Whereas religion had been in decline since the founding, by the mid-nineteenth century, one-third of the population identified as religious, twice as many as in 1776.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“It also established the domination of the narrative of history as a means of perpetuating an all-powerful, all-uniting, all-fabricated lie that the United States of America was founded upon, and dedicated to, the liberty and freedom of the people of the world, all while it continued to consolidate power and empire under the invisible flag of white supremacy.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“America’s original Noble Lie is the mischaracterization of its founding. The facts of its conception, its independence, and the process by which its Constitution was penned and then sold to the world have been twisted to fit a larger story of universal morality, white supremacy, and social Darwinism, and it has been used since its beginning as a means of manipulation and control.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“That lie, as Plato continues, is a tale of a society in which the people are citizens of a country watched over by a moral God who oversees a system of inequality that still manages to reward hard work and talent, inspiring a faith in a moral and fair hierarchy.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“Plato supposed that in order for society to flourish, there must be a story of unification that yokes citizens to one another while managing their discontent.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“The narrative is rooted in the Greek philosopher Plato’s “Noble Lie,” the concept that myths or pious untruths are necessary to stabilize society and promote progress, an idea he elucidated in his work The Republic.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“This approach blended the rigidity of control in past and existing empires with Enlightenment thinking, instituting a new reality where people were to be controlled but believe themselves to be free.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“The American Myth paints the process as divinely inspired and the result of a work of distinctly American genius, the Constitution itself an impeccable guide in all things and a means by which freedom and liberty might be bestowed upon every citizen.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“What feels like reality disintegrating is really truth manifesting, as some Americans’ perception of the United States was never true to begin with. The reality the Cult of the Shining City and devotees of American exceptionalism clung to was a fiction to begin with, a subjective reality serving the interests of white patriarchal supremacy at the expense of everyone else. The story we relied on as the gravity for our world never existed beyond our imaginations and our ability to force the disadvantaged to act within its definitions.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“our evangelical faith merged with the occult and American history, creating a mystical reality where spiritual and civic warfare raged every single day.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“What had started with Ronald Reagan had now come full circle. The day-to-day actions of the United States of America had been packaged and sold back to the American public as a television show with a cast of good guys and bad. Past foreign policy mistakes and the sacrificing of ideals were laundered and scrubbed clean of the stain of hypocrisy and effectively commoditized. With world events playing out on their television screens, all of it appearing to be divorced from them, Americans began to feel as if their government and the course of human events were a spectacle to be watched, an entertainment beyond their control.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People