The actual West is on fire. The mythologized West is burning to the ground. Millions of acres are being laid to waste as a result of climate change. It's less American exceptionalism that American exemptionism - the idea that America was exempt from limits, exempt from social obligations, exempt even from death itself.

Historian Greg Grandin traces America's imperial journey from frontier to border wall - as the centuries-long expansion of force and capital that propelled US growth reaches the physical limits of possibility, the nation finds itself trapped by reactionary nativism and its own failures to imagine a future within its own borders.

Greg wrote the book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America from Metropolitan Books.