Department of Fate: The Promise, the Power, and the Collapse of America's Most Consequential Institution

Summary

Rachel Maddow leads a revelatory, rollicking trip through the history of the Justice Department, finding heroism and treachery in equal measure—and, in the end, a rescue effort for our battered democracy.

Over its nearly 150 years, the United States Department of Justice became America’s most consequential institution, determining the rules and limits of what makes us who we are as a country: our political freedoms, our economy, and our nation’s most revolutionary core principle: equal protection under the law.

As the Department made wildly consequential decisions about what types of Americans to target, and for what crimes, it has been steered at times by patriotism, bravery, and self-sacrifice, but just as often by lust for power, corruption, and vengeance. Its political masters have cherrypicked economic winners and losers, determined which causes will be allowed to succeed or fail, and dictated which people and places will thrive and which will be beaten down. The department has fixed the path of the nation’s political swings.

In this searing new history, Rachel Maddow traces these triumphs and misdeeds through the founding and rise of the KKK, the riotous chaos of the Red Scare, civil rights murders and violence, railroad barons’ crushing of unions, cabinet scandals that make Watergate look like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the faux erudite lawlessness of the Reagan Administration, and the collapse into thug rule in the Trump Administration.

Written in her typical whip-smart prose and with a biting sense of clarity, Department of Fate invites us to see how the history of this key institution illuminates a path ahead for a more resilient, re-democratized America committed to making good on even its loftiest promises. In a moment beset with polarization and misinformation, Maddow’s voice shines in this blistering demand to do better—to rebuild the republic, and stronger this time.