Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

by George Packer

Overview

One of The New York Times's 100 notable books of 2021

"[George Packer's] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling." —William Galston, The Washington Post

Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides

In the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy.

In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression.

In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art” of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374603670
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	555,655
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His previous books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.

Table of Contents

Prologue 3

Strange Defeat 13

Four Americas 63

Equal America 141

Equalizers 165

Make America Again 187

Epilogue 217

Further Reading 221

Acknowledgments 225

Editorial Reviews

04/12/2021

Warring tribes are tearing the country apart, according to this conflicted meditation on America's discontents. National Book Award winner Packer (The Unwinding) parses the uproar of 2020 in terms of four competing "narratives" of America: the "Free America" of the Republican elite, composed of antigovernment conservatives; the "Smart America" of the liberal, globalist professionals, academics, and journalists who make up the Democratic establishment; the "Real America" of Trump's base of xenophobic white populists; and the "Just America" of "social justice warriors" who see white supremacism everywhere. All these visions, Packer argues, skirt the central problem of economic inequality, and he sketches a vague program of progressive economic and welfare policies, plus mandatory national service, as a means of defusing sociocultural antagonisms. Packer presents sharp, insightful critiques of all sides—for many white, well-educated progressives, he writes, "confessing racial privilege is a way to hang on to class privilege"—but occasionally slips into melodrama: a neighbor's Trump campaign sign reminds him of "an evil shape in a far more serious red and black." Worse, his economic determinism rarely addresses the substance of divisive issues such as immigration, transgender rights, and policing. This eloquent yet unfocused take on American politics further muddies the waters. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"In 2021, almost nothing is harder to write than a fresh take on the multiple crises confronting post-Trump America. But with this sharp, short new book, that is exactly what George Packer has given us, confirming his place as one of our most valuable journalists . . . Packer’s courage [is] the closest we have to Orwell’s." —Charles Kaiser, The Guardian

"Like many public intellectuals who are worth reading, George Packer . . . [doesn't] toe a predictable line . . . Packer is at his best when he ties his thesis about Americans’ loss of the art of self-government to the inequality that he has covered extensively and intimately in his career as a journalist." —Emily Bazelon, The New York Times Book Review

"Packer has a story to tell about our decline, and he tells it well . . . Packer’s sharp portraits of [America's factions] are the heart of this book . . . [His] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling." —William Galston, The Washington Post

“In the great tradition of Richard Hofstadter, but with a reporter’s eye, George Packer has given us a thoughtful and ultimately hopeful book about crisis and opportunity. Americans seeking to understand our current moment—which is to say, most Americans—will find much to profitably ponder in these pages.” —Jon Meacham, author of His Truth Is Marching On and The Soul of America

“George Packer has written a small but big book. The end of the pandemic should be pure joy, but the fact that a public health crisis deepened our divisions has weighed down our hearts. Is there anything that could glue us together as one people? Packer answers yes. And the case he makes in doing so provides the vaccine I have most wanted—hope.” —Atul Gawande, surgeon and author of Being Mortal and The Checklist Manifesto

“In Last Best Hope, George Packer retells the story of 2020, offering an original account of the fracturing of the country’s mind and suggesting how we might restore unity. Ranging from Tocqueville to Trump, this extended essay will provoke you to think harder about America’s past as well as America’s future.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy and Gulag

“In the summer of 2020, America seemed to divide into two different nations. Anyone who observed the crack-up will cherish this flinty analysis, which offers new insights into how Americans from Frances Perkins to Bayard Rustin to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol have understood and defined freedom. The result is a clear-eyed explanation of how a progressive nation can be a unified one.” —John H. McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, contributing editor at The Atlantic, and host of Slate’s Lexicon Valley

From the Publisher

01/01/2021

National Book Award winner Packer (The Unwinding) argues that to address their current malaise, Americans must get beyond four suffocating narratives: Libertarian America's focus on individuals determining their own fate while cozying up to corporations; Cosmopolitan America's failure to acknowledge that globalization disenfranchises many residents; Diverse America, which sees the country in terms of identity groups that have inflicted or suffered oppression; and White America, whose misconceived nationalism poses the greatest challenge to democracy. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

The author deftly defines four Americas: Free America (independent, “don’t tread on me”); Real America (Christian nationalist, anti-expertise); Smart America (winners in the meritocracy); Just America (equality overall). He takes on all four while narrating with precision, passion, and empathy, letting the stories and quotations speak for themselves. He delivers this pithy audiobook at a good pace, and the force of his convictions comes through. His historic north stars, Alexis de Tocqueville and Walt Whitman, provide context for his ongoing project of understanding the fractures in our democracy. This provocative audiobook is at its best in its finely crafted profiles of editor/publisher Horace Greeley, labor advocate Frances Perkins, and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. Packer’s evaluation of the state of contemporary journalism is compelling. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

JULY 2021 - AudioFile

★ 2021-03-30
Can we save ourselves from ourselves in America’s “cold civil war”?

As New Yorker contributor and National Book Award winner Packer notes in this sharp and concise analysis, there’s one good thing to say about the current pandemic: With its arrival, “it became impossible to pass through the world in the normal bovine manner.” Of course, it also revealed massive cracks in the system and amplified a rift in which people either scream at each other or maintain a polite silence, an avoidance that “solves nothing” and indeed, by Packer’s account, is “part of the collapse.” Something is badly amiss in what used to be thought of as the last best hope in the world. Instead, we are overrun with instability, contending tribes, and useless politicians. Into this chaos stepped Donald Trump, who failed to become the dictator he so obviously wished to be only by virtue of “his own ineptitude, along with our creaky institutions and the remaining democratic faith of the American people.” Even so, Packer charges, we’re all responsible for Trump, in part because there are yawning gulfs among numerous visions of America. There’s the “Free America” of the libertarians, so susceptible to demagoguery; the “Smart America” of the progressives, which leaves blue-collar workers in the dust; the “Real America,” a bastion of racism, ignorance, and resentment; and the “Just America,” which “forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today.” In all of these, there are the ingredients of a fifth vision: “Equal America,” which involves “extending the New Deal to Americans in more areas of their lives,” from affordable and universal health care to a living minimum wage and beyond. It’s a project that “asks us to put more faith in ourselves and one another than we can bear,” but it surely beats where we are now.

A thought-provoking study in civics, history, and the decline and fall of self-government.

Kirkus Reviews