Excerpt from Fortress America by Elaine Tyler May, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Fortress America looks primarily at the personal side of the security quest: the ways in which Americans have endeavored to protect themselves on a daily basis in a world they perceive as dangerous. It builds on the rich body of scholarship that has yielded insights into the domestic ramifications of the Cold War and the militarization of American life that followed in its wake. The central aim of the book is to point out the distance between our fears and reality, to show how unwarranted fears have damaged our country, and to suggest more sensible, humane, and democratic routes to safety and well-being.

The quest for security—and its resounding failure to achieve a safer society—propels the story that unfolds in the following chapters. The book's narrative is both thematic and chronological. It starts with how Americans learned to be fearful for their personal safety in the early years of the Cold War and came to understand that they were responsible for their own protection against both external and internal enemies. Over time, these warnings, and the fears they generated, took on a life of their own. As a result, large numbers of Americans—especially, but not only, white Americans—began to behave in new security-minded ways. They bought guns and promoted gun rights over gun control. They bunkered themselves in their homes and hired private security companies for protection. They retreated from public streets. They promoted draconian laws that resulted in mass incarceration. They turned away from the government, seeing it as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

By the early twenty-first century, because of ill-founded and unjustified fears, millions of Americans were locked up in prisons for no good reason. Millions more locked themselves up behind gates, walls, and security systems—also for no good reason. Americans came to fear strangers who might attack them, retreating to fortified homes. Fear of crime rose, even when rates of crime fell. Parents debated whether to hover over their children like surveillance helicopters or to give them "free range," allowing them to play freely within their own neighborhoods, or even walk to and from school without supervision, like the parents themselves had been able to do when they were children.

With the dubious distinction of leading the world in both gun possession and gun violence, Americans ignored all the data demonstrating that more guns led to more gun violence, consistently opposing gun control legislation. Citizens remained hostile to government and distrustful of the police. The government and the police did quite a bit to deserve that distrust and very little to earn back public confidence.

Millions of Americans hunkered down in gated communities and fortified homes. Although climate change began to gain public and political attention, affluent, security-seeking Americans drove around in gas-guzzling, military-style vehicles that endangered not only the environment but also those who rode inside them and those who encountered them on the streets.

Americans believed they were protecting themselves. But they were not. Decades of "law-and-order" policies made the United States a lawless and disordered society. Legislation on gun rights and "stand-your-ground" laws advanced to such an extent that vigilante violence—once the very definition of lawlessness—became legal. In many states, the kind of vigilante outlaws that had been valorized in frontier myths and Hollywood films were legally defined as law-abiding citizens.

Meanwhile, the security obsession caused unintended consequences that harmed our democracy and led to the neglect of real threats to the security of Americans, such as severe and increasing economic inequality; poorly maintained and dangerous infrastructure, such as bridges, levees, and drinking water; environmental degradation and climate change; and threats to the safety of food and other consumer products. In the rush toward self-protection, true security has eluded ordinary citizens.

Excerpted from Fortress America by Elaine Tyler May. Copyright © 2017 by Elaine Tyler May. Excerpted by permission of Basic Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.