A Renegade History of the United States - Thaddeus Russell

This was a wild-ass book, and while I 'read' it via audiobook, which is how I consume most book-length content, I'm somewhat curious if the actual book had any citations for these claims.

Not that citations would add much to the arguments asserted here, since the pattern is largely: make an assertion about something contrarian, e.g.:

• Slavery was generally better than portrayed (basically he argues that there were more opportunities to slack and few methods of punishment that did not also negate the economic utility of the slave)
• The American revolution was actually a move backwards for freedom because of a self-policing nature of democracy
• FDR was basically a fascist (lower case f like Benito) because of the specific ways he expanded the federal government not only economically but also culturally like via creation of the FCC and the accompanying censorship laws
• Blackface as a sincere form of flattery/yearning for enslavement by white folks
• Capitalism, shopping and sex-work were integral parts of women's liberation

Find a contemporary quote to support the fact that things were that way (cue IASIP Frank: "those were the days..." Dennis: "it sounds like you yearn for those days"). Usually the quote is from a privileged, white, conservative dude saying something outrageously offensive (preferably with some slurs) and then Tad just kind of accepts that (I'm calling him Tad, even though apparently he works at Occidental College as an adjunct prof in History) as evidence of the thing being generally true. Then he kind of weaves in a hand-wavy point about how these 'renegades' paved the way for our modern freedoms (to slack, to drink, to swear, to abandon existing social mores, and to fuck) by existing in this way, which, sure I guess, renegades do do that, broadly.

I think this book suffers from chronic contrarianism and I see why someone like Michael Malice gave it 5 stars, as halfway through I thought Tad Russeller might be a nom de plume of Malice's. The other point to this theory was the random attribution of all good outcomes to things in the market (literally making the point that lady shopping/drinking/engagement with capitalism was a driving factor into the workforce during WWI, as opposed to broad economic trends like all the men being sent off to war. And I get it doesn't have to be one of the other and he's trying to make a different point here about.... freedom or something. And freedom always means markets to a certain kind of person.

So that's a lot of shitting on this book by a dude who's probably spent a lot more time with primary sources than I have but I will say that I thought some of the parts about race and whiteness (i.e. the sliding scale of whiteness for the Irish, Italians and Jewish Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century) made similar points to those made in Isabelle Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020, 10 years after Tad's book), which she used to make more interesting arguments about the structure of racism across the Jim Crow south, Nazi Germany and India. Tad's contrast of Frank Sinatra (literally called "Old Blue eyes") as the conformist 'white' Italian singer vs Louis Prima the Sicilian musician from New Orleans as his opposite was admittedly something I found genuinely interesting. And Prima is someone I need to learn about/listen to more.