When I began this project I had no idea how colossal it would become or that it would so completely change my view of America. For nearly a decade it has made me rethink our foundations and reassess our driving passions, and it has been something of a personal odyssey as well. Some time ago, in my second or third year of teaching a course called “Prisons and Punishment” at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, my colleague Jennifer Radin and I arranged what we thought would be an instructive and highly civil debate about the death penalty. This being Boston, I expected the class to be roughly divided on the topic, if anything fewer for than against, and that arguments on both sides would emerge quite naturally.

To my surprise, the class irrupted. Those who supported the death penalty vastly outnumbered their opponents. At first I was prepared to write this off as a matter of campus demographics, but it struck me that something was terribly wrong. The arguments on the one side were not so much arguments as they were expressions of outrage. The students on the other side cowered, and as I tried to fill in and help them make their case, to venture the usual concerns about human dignity or compassion, my arguments seemed hollow and fell completely flat.