Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

by George Packer

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.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Audiobook, American History, Current Affairs

240 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2021

Reviews

[Bruce Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not going to get this right. For one thing, there's simply too much in the book -- too much to think about, absorb, wrestle with -- to cover in a review like this. For another, I'm very reluctant to quote or say too much about a book that isn't out yet. I'm reluctant to accidentally misrepresent or trivialize any of the author's points.

I liked Packer's last book, "The Unwinding," well enough, but in the end I found it unsatisfying. "Last Best Hope," though, impressed me entirely. I found it an astute, honest, and fair description of where the United States is today in terms of culture and politics, how we got here, and what we need to do if we hope to bring the country together and make it governable. In short, it's timely, earnest, impassioned and, yes, important.

The "where we are" diagnosis Packer lays out here is bleak and familiar. We are a society at war with ourselves. We are two countries inhabiting different worlds. We don't and can't speak to one another. "Americans can no longer think and act as fellow citizens. We look for answers in private panaceas, fixed ideas, group identities, dreams of the future and the past, saviors of different types — everywhere but in ourselves."

In a passage that explains the book's title, he somberly writes, What do we see in the mirror now? An unstable country, political institutions that might not be perpetuated, a people divided into warring tribes and prone to violence — the kind of country we used to think we could save. No one is going to save us. We are our last best hope.

Packer doesn't soften what obstacles must be overcome if we hope to save ourselves. It won't be an easy fix, given the circumstances. "Our thought leaders sound like carnival barkers, [and] our citizenry seems to be suffering through early-state National Cognitive Decline."

(Which of course recalled Yeats', "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as how could it not?)

In "Last Best Hope" Packer offers a kind of taxonomy of the conceptual nations that currently make up America, four narratives that have grown out of an array of cultural, historical, political, and economic currents: Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America. I suppose some might argue that creating categories like this is reductive and facile. I didn't find this to be the case; rather, I found his analysis nuanced and useful. Packer explores in detail these narratives, showing where they overlap, where they diverge, what values motivate them, and what visions of America and patriotism and community shape them. His desciption of these different Americas -- all of which I found convincing -- make up a large part of the book, but his project goes far beyond mere taxonomy. I can do it no justice in any summary I might write here.

Packer is extraordinarily fair-minded, more so than any analysis of our time that I've read. On one side, he makes no attempt to disguise his contempt for what Republicans have become over the past few decades. "By 2010," he writes, "[the GOP] was like a figure in a hall of mirrors whose head and body have been severed but continue to move as if they’re still attached." For years they demonstrated a willingness to do just about anything, including sacrificing democracy, in the search for power. Their cynical hunger for power found a medium through which to express itself in November 2016, and a figurehead that demanded of them no solutions, ideas, or action, only loyalty and a willingness to look the other way. Trump saw the federal government as property he’d acquired by winning the election. And the GOP was happy to go along for the ride. Just as they were (and have been) since the January 6 attack on Congress.

The GOP is definitely undermining the norms of governance, but there's plenty of blame to go around. As Packer says, One party descended into extremism and then nihilism, dragging half the country with it and making the whole country ungovernable. The other party sliced up its half into groups, calculating that the sum of them would keep it in power.

Packer has no patience for the fragmentation he discerns in the politics of the Left, the academic, "critical theory" mentality that sees the world through an unhelpful and rarefied lens. He holds nothing back in identifying the guilty: the universities, newspapers of record (the NY Times gets its share of scorn here, but they are nor alone), the use of language ("instead of ‘wrong’ and ‘unjust’ we say ‘problematic’ and ‘marginalizing,’ words that turn social justice into specialized work and warn everyone else off, while raising a barrier between thought and action"), the limited vision of the Smart elite.

What has developed in America, broadly speaking, is a culture that is more about performance than about communication: No one says what they think when the setting is a university classroom, an anti-bias training session, a newspaper op-ed, or a tweet.

Packer identifies what he perceives as the forces that feed our dysfunction: meritocracy, economic inequality, anger fueled by frustration, flawed and decrepit institutions ("the Senate, an ancient corpse around the neck of democracy"), raw self-interest... More -- and more nuanced and substantial -- than I can hope to summarize or usefully describe here. There are so many highlighted passages, so many notes in the margins of my digital ARC. Some examples:

"To believe that Trump showed us who we really are is no different from believing that Obama showed us who we really are. Narcissism is expressed in extremes of self-contempt as well as self-adoration."

"One country believes we narrowly averted the overthrow of democracy, and the other believes we saw its brazen perversion in a massive fraud. Each views the other as an existential enemy with whom compromise would be betrayal."

"…these two classes, rising professionals and sinking workers, which a couple of generations ago were close in incomes and not so far apart in mores, no longer believe they belong to the same country. But they can’t escape each other."

Packer's analysis provides a solid foundation for what he believes must be done if the US is to survive, not only as a global power but as a functioning, nation. His recommendations, which I won't enumerate here, made a lot of sense to me. What he seeks is not an American Garden of Eden, but something more modest and attainable: a nation that is governable. "[We] don’t have to reach the heavenly shores of brotherhood and sisterhood — just a modicum of trust."

I will be buying a hard copy of the book when it comes out next month. I want to be able to lend it to friends and relatives. Simply stated, I found "Last Best Hope" to be the most incisive analysis of Our Current Situation I've seen. I don't believe it will be universally well received -- it's too candid in its criticism of both parties, both cultures, and many people will doubtless get defensive -- but it deserves very serious attention. It will, I hope inspire an honest and necessary conversation.

[A postscript added several weeks after I first wrote the review: After reflection, I am even even more impressed by this book than when I first read it. The adaptation that is the cover story in this month's edition of The Atlantic offers a thoughtful entree into Packer's analysis.]

My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing a digital ARC in return for an honest evaluation.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, National Book Award-winning journalist George Packer analyzes America's current polarization and paralysis. As with other works that examine our current malaise, his analysis of the roots of the problem is astute. Yet, his solutions, while viable, seem somewhat improbable, given the current state of affairs.

Packard believes Americans are losing their grip on self-government due to rampant inequality and the inability to trust one another. He uses his in-depth knowledge of American History to trace the division of the populace into four warring camps, which he calls: Free America, Real America, Smart America, and Just America.

According to Packard, Republican support comes mainly from the Free American and Real American camps. Free America refers to the Libertarians a la Ayn Rand and Rand Paul, who he characterizes as those who champion individualism over social responsibility, are against government spending on social programs, and favor Reagon's changes in anti-trust laws. In comparison, he portrays Real America as the domain of downwardly mobile whites of the heartlands who have lost well-paid manufacturing jobs due to outsourcing. Many are evangelicals, culturally conservative, isolationists, who resent immigrants and any gains by African -Americans or other minorities.

Smart America and Just America, in Packard's formulation, constitute the foundation of the Democratic Party. He depicts Smart America as the elite liberal professionals and academics who believe in globalization and meritocracy. In contrast, he sees Just America as social justice warriors, like supporters of Black Lives Matter who fight against racism and oppression and focus on identity and language.

While Packard is vehemently anti-Trump, he believes in an Enlightenment liberalism that champions equality and science. He sees the current culture wars as an obstacle to achieving greater economic equality and is critical of all four camps for the discourses and divisiveness they contribute to this end. He emphatically states, "Inequality destroys the sense of shared citizenship and with it self-government."

Packard lays out an ambitious plan to tackle economic inequality. He advocates for new anti-trust regulations and a new New Deal to expand the social safety net and create higher-paying working-class jobs. While measures such as these which have been and are currently being promoted by members of the Democratic party, would definitely be a good thing and improve the quality of life of many Americans, even if some of these measures were to be enacted, I question if this would be sufficient to bridge the cultural wars that currently engulf us and restore a semblance of trust.

Despite my concerns, I felt that Last Best Hope is a thoughtful and provocative book that is worth reading.

[Caren · Rating 5 out of 5]

For all of us still trying to process the year we have just lived through, Mr. Packer's analysis will help clarify intuitions you may have had. The pandemic really did shine a light on problems within our society. Those problems will still be there when the pandemic subsides. This book is not long and is very clearly presented. In his analysis, our population has divided itself into four ways of looking at our country: those who espouse "Free America" (here, I think of the libertarians and Ayn Rand, ideas that the playing field is open to anyone willing to work hard and rise on their own merits) ; "Smart America" (the professional class, really, with all of its credentialism) ; "Real America" (those forgotten people in flyover country, struggling just to survive) ; and "Just America" (identity groups like Black Lives Matter, all neatly and vehemently divided). How can we possibly bring together such disparate groups? His solution is to emphasize the idea of equality at the heart of the American experiment. Wow, I hope he is right. When I look at our apparent return to a sort of Gilded Age, I have my doubts, but , my goodness, we have to start somewhere. He uses exemplary individuals to illustrate how each problem was attacked in the past. Mr. Packer is an award-winning writer and if you need a shot of hope while we are still in the throes of some dark times, well, here it is. This would be a great book for cities to choose as a "Big Read" and then discuss. There is so much of value here.
*My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

[Wick Welker · Rating 5 out of 5]

We're rotting.

This is not a bad post-Trump era commentary on our current circumstances of white nationalism, atomized social groups, group identity epistemology and left cultural authoritarianism. I've probably read one too many books like this at this point so this wasn't particularly profound for me but it was well written. Packer is smart, earnest and has correctly diagnosed the issues. He puts his hopes into one basket that what binds all Americans is their desire for things to be equal. The irony is that the unequal circumstances we found ourselves in don't seem to bother the meritocratic technocrats on the left or the neoliberal populists on the right. They both buy into the myth that America is a meritocracy. As long as we believe the myth, the disparate outcomes are somehow tolerable for the rich and the poor who suffer from the very policies they support. I'm not as optimistic as Packer that his desire to believe in equality is somehow a balm for America.

The solutions offered include supporting the labor class, break up monopolies and re-vitalize journalism and media. Amen to that. The solutions are even more numerous than what Packer outlines. He honestly could've continued more about broadening representation, nixing the filibuster (which he mentioned), universal basic income, deficit spending, infrastructure building and taxing the mega rich. I was happy to hear him talk about increasing estate taxes but we can't stop there. We need a wealth tax, increase corporate taxes, inheritance taxes, increase capital gain taxes and drop federal income taxes. Money is power and we must limit the influence of the ultra wealthy.

The truth is that America is neither a meritocracy or a democracy, it's an aristocratic plutocracy. I believe Packer doesn't really offer anything more than technocratic solutions. Don't get me wrong, I endorse these solutions as well but there is zero political will to do any of these things. I honestly don't know if anything short of a revolution will change anything. In the end, what we need is labor class cohesion. And no, I don't know how to achieve this. The labor class is hopelessly divided, exactly how the plutocrats like us. If the labor class can unite, then you have change.

[Ryan Boissonneault · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you had to summarize the current crisis in American politics using just one phrase, a good candidate would be the inability to embrace a shared national narrative. Several competing and incompatible ideologies are not only pulling us in different directions, but also preventing us from engaging in any kind of productive dialogue with each other.

What the country needs, then, is obvious: unification around a shared set of values. But with polarization growing deeper every day, is there any single, unifying narrative that can pull the country back together? According to journalist and author George Packer, the answer is yes. But before we get to the solution, we need to dig deeper into the diagnosis.

In Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, Packer presents his diagnosis of the American crisis as consisting of the country’s simultaneous embrace of four separate narratives that are ultimately incompatible and unsustainable. Each narrative, if fully realized, would create a world of winners and losers and a political atmosphere of resentment and hatred. The problem with American politics, then, is not that one ideology needs to defeat another; rather, it’s that the total victory of any of the four dominant ideologies would create a country that the majority of us would want no part of.

Of the four insidious narratives Packer identifies, two occupy the right of the political spectrum and two occupy the left. But make no mistake, the narratives on the right are, in general, far more dangerous. While objectivity is important in any author, being “objective” does not mean proclaiming everything to be equal. The dominant ideologies on the right and left may all be harmful in their own ways, but it's a false equivalence to pretend that the extremism we’re witnessing on the right is of the same character and intensity as that on the left.

The left, as far as I can tell, is not primarily interested in disenfranchising voters, gerrymandering, spreading falsehoods, and sowing division as its principal paths to political victory. The left is not, in general, denying science, advancing wild conspiracy theories, and displaying complete antipathy to the democaratic process if it doesn’t work out in their favor (by proclaiming the election was stolen, with no legitimate evidence, and storming the Capitol). The right, in several prominent ways, is collectively engaging in behavior that would otherwise be characterized as narcissistic personality disorder in an individual: from gaslighting to outright lies and manipulation to destructive fits of rage. So let’s do ourselves a favor and stop pretending that there is a moral equivalency between the parties and that any statement to the contrary is a violation of “objectivity.”

With that in mind, let’s start with the right. The two dominant narratives on the right are (1) Free America and (2) Real America. Free America is libertarian in nature, with the only freedom that counts for anything being freedom from government regulation and taxes. This narrative prioritizes the market, big business, and the wealthy—based on the meritocratic myth of the self-made individual—and ignores the needs of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the average worker. The complete victory of Free America leads to extreme inequality, selfish individualism, poverty traps, and growing resentment from below.

The second narrative, Real America, is at heart white Christian nationalist, with its adherents quick to demonize those below them (unskilled immigrant labor) and those above them (the educated, professional class). As Packer wrote, "Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way it renders the Black working class invisible.” Real America and Free America often join forces, finding homes for both white supremicists and plutocrats alike (although of course not everyone in Real America is bigoted), forming an unlikely coalition of business interests, evangelical Christians, and working-class whites. It needs little elaboration as to why a country founded on these principles is undesirable.

On the left, you have the following two narratives: (1) Smart America and (2) Just America. Smart America says things like “basket of deplorables” when referring to the other half of the country, and has all but abandoned the Democratic party’s previous commitment to the working class. Rather than focusing on a unified economic agenda that could expand the middle class, Smart America embraces the frankly conservative meritocratic narrative that prioritizes advanced education and the acquisition of credentials. Smart America leaves the working class behind, and is largely to blame for the creation of the Real America narrative in the first place.

Last, we have Just America, which values power over reason, censorship over debate, and political correctness over truth. While Just America rightly points out America’s checkered moral past—and correctly calls for the redress of injustice—they take things too far, essentially becoming anti-patriotic, self-loathing, hypersensitive, and pessimistic. Living in a country dominated by this narrative would be like living under a psychological dictatorship, with thought police ready to pounce on any perceived offensive or harmful remark (and we wonder why the right has so much antipathy for the left).

What’s interesting is that, as Packer notes, all four narratives have essentially the same root cause: “almost half a century of rising inequality and declining social mobility.” The working and middle class have suffered stagnant wages while the rich keep getting richer. Free America blames this on government regulation; Real America blames it on cultural “elites” (but not on economic elites); Smart America blames it on lack of education and the rejection of globalism; and Just America blames it on white supremacy and institutional racism.

But all of this is only part of the story. Each narrative contains some truth, but also a lot of falsehood. And each narrative creates an “us versus them” dynamic of resentment, hatred, and isolation, a zero-sum game where if one group wins, the other has to lose.

There has to be a better way than this, and frankly, it’s been staring us in the face all along. If the root cause of so much fear, resentment, and polarization is growing inequality, then the solution is the widespread adoption of a new positive-sum narrative, one built into the Declaration of Independence and embraced throughout American history: Equal America.

Equal America is not, in Packer’s terms, a country defined by equal outcomes. Socialism (as traditionally conceived) will never fly in America. It would be unrealistic to expect the universal embrace of a narrative the country has been so averse to for most of its history.

Rather, Equal America, as Packer defines it, embraces an equality of opportunity for the collective working and middle class, a group that includes all genders, races, and sexual orientations. Let’s be real: the Republican strategy, for quite some time, has been based on the following tenet: those who are divided culturally cannot unite economically. That’s why the right rarely has actual solutions to offer for social problems, opting instead to spend most of its time spreading fear and escalating hatred towards the left.

But most of this is exaggeration. What you see on the news is sensationalistic and represents the extremes; real people are simply not as different as the media would have us believe. As Packer wrote:

“Study after study shows that antagonistic groups begin to lose their mutual hostility and acquire trust when they have to work together, as long as they’re engaged in a specific project, with outside help....Americans from red and blue areas can come together in common endeavors. They might find out that the other is less a threat to the republic than they supposed. At least they will be in the company of actual human beings”

Equal America, then, embraces our common humanity and economic interests against those of a small, wealthy aristocracy. The question is, how can we begin to implement this new narrative? A good place to start is by not allowing cable news, talk radio, and politicians to define our relationships with each other and to actually see for ourselves that the other side may not be as bad as we first supposed—in other words, that we’re dealing with actual human beings. One way to do this, as Packer suggests, “might be to require a year of national service, in military or civilian form, repaid by scholarship, training stipend, or small-business grant.” Regaining a sense of civic duty through collaborative projects may be just what the country needs to reconnect with the common good.

Packer’s other suggestions are standard fare: campaign finance reform, overturning Citizens United, eliminating political gerrymandering, making voting easier or mandatory, etc. But the problem is that these solutions are unlikely to be implemented because there is no current incentive for politicians to do so. The pressure to apply these solutions must come from us, but we’re too busy fighting each other to notice that our politicians are not working to serve our best interests, preferring to work instead for the corporate interests that help to get them elected in the first place.





Overall, Packer’s diagnosis and path forward is, in my estimation, spot on, and represents the only possible solution to our deep polarization. Whether or not the country will ever embrace this more unifying narrative—or else further entrench themselves in their own divisive ideologies—is a separate question altogether.

I can only hope that at some point we grow tired of the in-fighting and empty rhetoric and start demanding real solutions from our politicians, and that Real America realizes that a working class white man and a working class black man have more in common with each other than either of them do with the elites in the Democratic or Republican parties, and that their ability to unite economically against the wealthy minority (of which Trump fully caters to but pretends not to) represents our best chance to reduce inequality and become a less polarized country with a stronger middle class. I don’t see any other way out of the crisis.

[Feng Ouyang · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, George Packer proposed his theory of why America is in such a political polarization and what we should do to make it better.
The main part of the book is explaining the political split of America. This part was recaptured by the author’s article on The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/.... According to the author, there are four major forces in today’s American politics.
• Free America. This is the traditional “right-wing.” It came from the merge of economic libertarianism and cultural conservative. American conservative reached its peak under the leadership of Goldwater and Reagan. It keeps a precarious balance between the big business, which advocates free-market and fewer government regulations, and the working class, which buys into its conservative cultural value and self-reliance ideology. Eventually, it became elitist and lost touch with the working class. To regain its popular support, the conservatives link with the extreme rights and racists and slip to populism.
• Real America. This is the white working class. Their economic security has eroded over the decades, causing anxiety and resentment. They hang on to white supremacy and xenophobia as ways to keep some sense of privilege.
• Smart America. These are the traditional “left-wing.” They are highly educated and highly confident. With meritocracy ideals, they believe that they deserve the rewards in wealth and social status. They have a progressive view of the world but do not know how “normal people” live. With increasing inequality, they drift further away from the mass and get trapped in the meritocracy as a privileged and struggling elite class.
• Justice America. These are the younger generation. Seeing their American dream broken, they are angry about inequality and take an active role in dismantling it. The critical race theory was an academic doctrine. It denies objective truth and facts. Instead, it views the whole world as a power struggle. Everything we have accepted and held as truths is just a tool of the Whites to maintain their power over others. In the past decades, CRT has moved outside of the ivy towers and became a social movement, signaled by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The younger generation is impatient about social injustice and takes dramatic actions to change it. The actions include violence and “woke,” which suppresses other voices in social discussions. However, these movements fail to bring real changes because they do little more than shouting and other symbolic actions.
According to the author, none of the above forces offer a viable solution to our social problems. They go to the extreme (as Real America and Justice America) or drift to the extreme (as Free America and Smart America). They are tearing the country apart and threatening the survival of democracy.
The author proposed his own solutions, primarily small-scale reforms that address concrete problems instead of engaging in the war of ideology.
The author puts the problem of inequality at the center of America’s ill today. According to the author, the four dividing forces are all ill-conceived responses to the rising inequality. And his solutions focus on inequality, as well. However, the author does not address a crucial debate: equality vs. equity. In other words, are we focusing on giving everyone equal opportunities and let people’s free choices determine how they fare (equality), or are we focusing on getting everyone the same output (equity)? The “justice America” advocates equity. They view any unequal outcome not as the result of personal or cultural choices but as the consequence of “privilege” and “power” against the group with the poorer outcome. The author takes a negative view of such an ideology. However, he also frowns upon meritocracy as a justification of inequality. It seems that the author wants something in between. Some of his solutions enable people to compete on equal footings, such as improving education. Some others focus on the outcome, such as the social safety net. However, without an explicit discussion of balancing equality and equity, we have no way to make policy decisions. This, in my view, is a critical defect of the book.
The author also focuses on economic (income and wealth) equality (or equity). However, the four fractions, as the author described, actually view the equality issue from different angles. The “free America” wants passive freedom without Government intervention. Their equality is on personal choices and personal rights. The “real America” does not want to be deprived of social status and public voices just because they are less educated and more impoverished. The “smart America” wants more power to shape society, supported by their sense of knowledgeability and rationality. In their view, meritocracy not only justifies the economic rewards they receive but also entitles them to have more political power. The “justice America” focuses almost single-mindedly on racial justice, ignoring economic and cultural factors. It is difficult for the author to make headway in his proposal without offering a reconciliation among these understandings of equality.
The book is refreshing in today’s political discourse because it strives to balance the various views instead of taking a “left” or “right” stand. The author is a good writer. His language is eloquent and powerful. However, the book has too many repetitions. It is a pleasure to read but is watered down for information content. I think reading The Atlantic article cited above should be enough to get most of the benefit of the book.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fans of The Former Guy ("TFG") should skip this book altogether. He's presented as an execrable human being and the worst president in the country's history. Don't look for a laundry list of examples, there are some but it's mostly taken as an absolute. I'm okay with that.

The prologue starts with an interesting scenario: the author is renting a home in an undisclosed location to write the book during the pandemic and his neighbors put up two red signs, each with five letters. He doesn't explain further but the message is clear. The thing is he really likes the neighbors and they get along quite well. They're presented as very good people. Therein lies the issue and from there the author attempts to address its many complications within America today. (On a personal note I know and like more than a few people who are ardent supporters of TFG. I don't get it but I'm sure it goes both ways.)

This fairly small book is divided into five chapters which read like longish essays. Packer seems to be trying to provide a cohesive analysis of the state of disharmony in America from its roots hundreds of years ago through early 2021 but I struggled with the historical portions. I understand that it's essential to understand our history to comprehend present times but the problem I had was that the analysis of the present was outstanding and the historical portions were just okay. The contrast was stark. I just wasn't very interested in direct quotes from Walt Whitman and Alexis de Tocqueville or even writers from the 1950s. I think the author's modern interpretations of age old problems would have been an improvement and no less authentic. Language evolves over time but human nature seems static.

As I mentioned before, Packer's analysis of our modern condition is outstanding. It's relatable, thought provoking and highly readable. See the highlights for examples.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The majority of the content of this book is opinion based, and there was plenty of instances where I disagreed with an argument or theory posed by Packer. Despite those instances though there was still enough here to make this one of the most rewarding books I have read this year. I tend to be much more critical about things than I ought to be, so this was a surprise to me at least.

In the meat of the book he describes the American people as belonging to four distinct groups: Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America. The descriptions and idiosyncrasies he attributes to each group I do agree with, his assessments were fair for the most part. Though just as vast and multitudinous as Walt Whitman was, America is even more so. Putting all American citizens into four categories is a bit oversimplified, though it a better alternative to just red vs. blue.

I understand it is not intended to be an absolute categorization, and that there is plenty of overlap between the groups. There are more ways to slice the pie, but if it were to just be sliced four ways then Packer did quite well.

What I found most rewarding about Last Best Hope is that it described the events of the past year and half and what led to us to this point into words as best as I have seen described thus far. It articulated the evolution of American politics in a way that I do not find too disagreeable. There may be better takes out there, but Packer's is quite on point.

Lastly, I am thankful to have been further acquainted by two people in American politics profiled in this book, Frances Perkins and Bayard Rustin. I look forward to discovering more about their lives and achievements in further reading.

[David Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Packer, a writer for the Atlantic, describes America as floundering, and perhaps as divided as we have ever been. In addition, he posits that the international community is uncertain about America’s ability to endure. For Packer, Americans’ loss of the ability of self-governance is the result of inequality. He argues that “racism is in our marrow, and enough Americans either celebrate or tolerate this evil that it came within a whisker of gaining a lasting hold on power.” He thinks America has fractured principally along lines of social class and material hardship, which increasingly persist across generations.

Packer describes “Four Americas.” The first, “Free America,” is irresponsibly libertarian. Hostility to government, became an excuse for breaking unions, starving social programs, and changing antitrust policy to concentrate financial power. Free America’s cousin, “Real America,” is personified by Sarah Palin. It’s evangelical and isolationist, and it “renders the Black working class invisible.” Real America is also in “precipitous decline” because of the loss of jobs in rural areas throughout the country. For this, Packer faults the false promises of the Clinton era — global trade and education did not raise all ships — as well as cultural alienation. “If the Democratic Party wasn’t on their side — if government failed to improve their lives — why not vote for the party that at least took them seriously?” he asks.

Packer is biting in depicting the left. He divides it into “Smart America” and “Just America.” Neither is a compliment. Smart Americans are the rising professional class, for whom unions hardly exist and college admissions are “the most important event in the life cycle of a family.” Packer allows that striving is human but hammers Smart Americans for being “meritocrats by birth”. “After seven decades of meritocracy, it’s as unlikely for a lower-class child to be admitted to a top Ivy League university as it was in 1954.” In Smart America’s families, passing achievement from one generation to the next is an obsession, and democracy is an afterthought.
“Just America” has dramatically changed the way Americans think, talk, and act, but not the conditions in which they live. It reflects the fracturing distrust that defines our culture. If Just America can create a more humane criminal-justice system and bring Black Americans into the conditions of full equality, it will live up to its promise. But the grand systemic analysis usually ends in small symbolic politics.

What precisely has gone wrong? It is too easy to lay it all at Trump’s door. There is a deeper underlying problem that Packer begins to address by quoting Alexis de Tocqueville on the American passion for equality. Tocqueville thought this American yearning for “equality of conditions” represented the march of God’s will on earth, but he didn’t fully foresee the nightmare to come—that the insistence on equality might someday come to mean that everyone’s opinion, no matter how ill-founded, was deemed equally valid.

The Founders knew democracy could work only if the American populace was well informed. But what if there is more information than anyone can handle and no direction home to the truth? Trump has exploited these conditions brilliantly, creating the concept of “fake news” that autocrats around the world now love to invoke. Indeed, of all the major political figures in the world, it was Trump who figured out first how to manipulate the fact-free digital world, how to transform nonsensical innuendo into viral certainty without fear of effective contradiction. As a result of this and other trends. According to Packer, “Large regions of the country have gone dark, enclosing citizens in private worlds of simplification and lies.”

If a substantial portion of the 74 million voters who went for Trump in 2020 now believe the Big Lie that the election was stolen from him, what sort of precedent does that set for future demagogues? And what message does it send to the rest of the world?

The American sense of a common purpose in nationhood is, bit by bit, being destroyed. Major social media platforms such as Facebook are only contributing to the trend by feeding people “content to support their own interests, which is splintering up communities.” As Packer writes, citing Tocqueville, “The great danger of equality is atomization.”

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exceptional explanation of how our progressive nation can become unified.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2013 I was starting to figure out who I as an adult, finding what aspects of this life were going to be meaningful to me and what my values looked like. I had my degree and my first full-time job and I was rediscovering my love of reading. I don’t remember how it fell into my hands but I picked up The Unwinding by George Packer. I do remember how passionate I was, always pushing the people around me to question the status quo, even if it meant talking out of my ass because I was barely a grownup and I didn’t know much about anything regarding the operations that churn capitalism along. Maybe that was the inspiration to turn to Packer’s book about how America got to where it was then in the Great Recession.

All of a sudden I was awash in facts and figures that enraged me. I knew then that opting out of politics wouldn’t be an option for me. I had a voice and I could learn to use that voice for a force of good that would help more than just myself. But I had to start by looking backward. Packer proved to be the gateway drug to my love of current events books, political history and memoirs, and I’m so lucky to have had such a wonderful author to guide me. It’s no surprise that nearly a decade later I preordered the audiobook of his new reflection on America, Last Best Hope. I feel a bit like I’m coming full circle, I’ve done a lot in the time between, I’m in my 30s and more or less an adult, I’m madder than ever and still motivated to promote change at any level. It’s sad that I’m the interim America has seen only more turbulence than the economic crash post-2008, but like Packer I retain a modicum of hope that America’s greatest years are still ahead, if only more of us can get inspired, get educated, and get loud about what’s important.

[Sean Flinchpaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nabbed this one after a fucking brilliant write-up/adaptation in the Atlantic. In it George Packer describes 4 narratives all born from the end of WW2, each biting and molding the nation in equal fashion. They are "Free America" of the Reagan set, "Smart America" of the Clintonian model, "Real America" of the Trumpian model, and "Just America", which doesn't have a leader, but I guess the closest is AOC(?). Each has its merits and faults, some more than others. He even found one in "Real America" which I'll give him. The book even opened my eyes in a way no one ever quite has despite the numerous reads post-2016 to get a sense of the political axis. And that in of itself deserves 5 stars, as Packer has enlightened me here, in checking my own biases in some ways. There isn't a clear ending, because a nation of 330 million doesn't have a clear narrative, easily identified. But its there. In the end I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic, but its a bittersweet optimism because we're not out of the breach yet.

[S M · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some insightful analysis of the state we're in, but the recommendations are so improbable and without any hint of how they would be achieved that this book provides no "Hope". While not able to articulate this quite right, my feeling is that this book demonstrates the futility of trying to make sense of the world we live in with a humanist and/or other ungrounded worldview - it just doesn't work. The more accurate title of this book would be "one man's secular view on some of our problems".

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Packer, an eminent journalist and a staff writer for the venerable The Atlantic magazine, has given us a remarkable book, one of the most insightful, approachable, and sympathetic assessment of the state of our beloved nation today.

He calls populism “the politics of ‘the people’ turned against ‘the elites.” It is “inherent in democracies, always lurking, and it grows out of control when citizens feel that their needs are going unmet or their voices unheard. Then they will revolt against the class above them that claims to rule by right of superior knowledge and seems to do so for its own benefit.” This is a brilliant, but simple, evocation of what we have heard so often from people who feel that they have not just fallen behind but, worse, left behind. They believe they have been lectured to, used, and demeaned by people who parade their “superior” education, class, or work position.

“Once politics becomes an identity clash or tribal war, a death spiral can set in that’s very hard to escape. Aided by information technology, which gives everyone all the reality of their own that they could want, this epistemic rupture is more powerful than personal experience, monetary interest, or even the fervid and tremendous IDEA. Democracy’s survival depends upon what happens inside our skulls, where anything is possible. The destruction of a shared reality does more damage than economic decline or impeachable acts.” [p. 32]

In his truly fascinating second chapter – one that appears largely intact, in fact, in the current issue of The Atlantic – he describes how the United States has essentially become fractured into four groups each of which has a different narrative about itself, its origin, worth, and legitimacy. Before describing these groups, he writes:
But if I were to put it in a single sentence, I would say: Inequality undermined the common faith that Americans need to create a successful multi-everything democracy. The post-industrial era has concentrated political and economic power in just a few hands and denied ordinary people control of their own lives. Overwhelmed by unfathomably large forces, Americans can no longer think and act as fellow citizens. We look for answers in private panaceas, fixed ideas, group identities, dreams of the future and the past, saviors of different types – everywhere but in ourselves. When none of these sets us free, we turn against one another.

…I want to talk about what happened in terms of narratives. Nations, like individuals, tells stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. [Such] are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one – they compete with one another and constantly change.

The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires.

Like many of the other writers I have read, he traces the beginnings of our descent into the maelstrom to the aftermath of the’60s and such key events as the highly divisive war in Vietnam, the cultural revolution among many of the young, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the middle of that decade, the subsequent exodus of most whites from the Democratic to the Republican Party, and the beginning of the enduring switch in economic thinking and public policy from continuing policies that had led to the flourishing of the middle class (at least for most whites) from the end of the second world war and towards tax and spending positions that led to the present vast gap between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of Americans.

All of this has created an America that is badly riven in which various groupings of Americans see themselves as falling behind, losing their just place in the sun, and seeing little hope for improvement in the future.

What can done?“Equality,” asserts Packer, “is the hidden American code, the unspoken feeling that everyone shares, even if it’s not articulated or fulfilled: the desire to be everyone’s equal – which is not the same thing as the desire for everyone to be equal.” Such equality is what Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, described as “the ardent, insatiable, eternal, and invincible” desire of democratic peoples. Packer acknowledges that this code “always made one exception. The perpetual test of equality in America is the condition of Black Americans.”

Because true equality today has virtually disappeared, Parker observes, “there’s no longer any basis for shared citizenship, the art of self-government is lost, and everything falls apart…. We cannot act as fellow citizens unless we are equal.”

To do that, we are going to have to aggressively “reset” current multiple inequities, and it is in both the process and success of doing so that we can rediscover our mutual bonds. Here is how Packer frames the necessary agenda:

“We have to make changes at the largest and the most personal levels – in economic structures and in habits of thinking and acting. We have to create the conditions of equality and acquire the art of self-government. The two are inseparable, and doing each one makes the other possible.”

He quotes Walter Lippmann from his 1914 Drift and Misery: “You can’t expect civic virtue from a disenfranchised class…The first item in the program of self-government is to drag the whole population well above the misery line.”

Packer continues: “The American passion for equality is thwarted by vastly and permanently unequal conditions. If Americans are to achieve the equality that has always attracted and always eluded us, government will have to be the prime mover, though not the only one.”

1. “To save our democracy, we must restructure our economy to make us equal Americans… The first big step is to repair the safety net so that workers and families are no longer at perpetual risk of falling through and drowning, as millions have in the pandemic. This means essentially extending the New Deal to more Americans in more areas of their lives: universal health care, child care, paid family and sick leave, stronger workplace safety protections, unemployment insurances that doesn’t fail in a crisis, a living minimum wage.”
2. But that is not enough for the “vast lower two-thirds of the income scale.” We have to give labor more power by:
a. Making it easier to organize workers by passing labor reform bills;
b. Direct large-scale government investments into key national sectors – clean energy, manufacturing, education, and caregiving – to create jobs, stimulate innovation, and raise the pay and status of workers.
c. Workers should have representation on corporate boards, collective bargaining by sector than company, and wage boards that set minimum terms for low-wage industries like face food.
3. Expand the estate tax to stop the cycle of ever-decreasing equality of opportunity.
4. Consider reducing the power of professional guilds by changing licensing rules so that nurses and paralegals can do some of the work and make some of the money currently monopolized by doctors and lawyers.
5. Move the funding structure of public schools away from heavy independence on local taxes and toward federal and state taxes, so that spending on children in rich school districts is not longer two to three times what it is in poorer districts.
6. Reward teachers in poorer schools with hardship pay.
7. Tackle both monopoly power and the severe problem caused by the flow of wealthy floods of money into political campaigns and policy matters.
8. Tackle the tremendous difficulty posed by media devoted to disinformation and lies. An important component of this is to revitalize local journalism through innovative funding mechanisms dependent upon community support rather than advertising while also making the Internet a truly more civic space, perhaps by introducing the equivalent of public TV and radio as a source of trusted information.
9. Change our activism of protest into an activism of cohesion. This can best be done at the local rather than the state or federal level.
10. Last, but hardly least, tackle the various ways state legislatures are working not just to suppress voter turn-out, but also to select the voters they wish. End gerrymandering, expand voter registration to make it automatic, and ensure that each district has equal capacity to meet the needs of voters in their locality.

“But,” Packer concludes, “self-government starts in ourselves. The most basic ways Americans can acquire what Tocqueville called ‘habits of the heart’ is by killing their Twitter or Facebook accounts and spending time in the physical presence of other Americans who don’t look or talk or think like them. Study after study shows that antagonistic groups begin to lose their mutual hostility and acquire trust when they have to work together, as long as they’re engaged in a specific project, with outside help. The best idea for making America again as a single country might be to require a year of national service, in military or civilian form, repaid by scholarship, training stipend, or small-business grant.”

A guiding principle for all of this was provided years ago by the remarkable Bayard Rustin:
“If, then, democracy is political, equality is economic and social….We must remember that we cannot hope to achieve democracy and equality in such a way that would destroy the very kind of society we hope to build.”

[Jim Puskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Packer’s central thesis is that there is no longer one version of America that the majority of its citizens will accept as valid and tolerable. He describes a set of four nations, each devoted to its own narrative: “Free America”, “Smart America”, “Real America” and “Just America”. All of them living together as a functioning nation state is becoming increasingly untenable.
As a Canadian, finding myself living next to what has, over the past few years, morphed into a gigantic social-political pressure cooker, I watch the heat rise with dismay. In the absence of even a minimally shared vision of the future, some form of disintegration may become unavoidable.
Reading this book, I was prompted to attempt drawing a Venn diagram mapping those four versions of America, hoping to discover sufficient areas of overlap — something that used to be called bipartisanship. But for that to be possible, the factions would at least need to agree on the facts; what is most discouraging is that in the uproar, objective truth seems to have disappeared. And most tellingly, Packer points out that media organizations of all kinds, rather than being providers of objective truth ”have been sucked into the vortex of polarization, and in many cases they do all they can to further it. They’re under pressures that are political, financial and technological, all pushing media to be faster, louder, simpler and more partisan.”
Inevitably, any solutions that Packer offers are certain to outrage at least one of the “Americas” — and perhaps all of them. Every word in this book is certain to be attacked by Trump Nation as socialist heresy and outright lies. So his argument, valid as it may be, will only add to the shouting match.
Most of what he writes is undoubtedly valid. But much of what he offers reads like New Deal 2.0 and I don’t believe for a moment that he can sell it to any of the four Americas. Which is most regrettable, since much of it would work if given half a chance.
Packer is at his best where he describes the characteristics that all Americans share, what it is that sets them apart from every other citizenry in the world (and which, incidentally, also makes them resented abroad). He shows that despite their angry squabbles, they have much more in common than appears on the surface. But I’m also reminded of a statement made by Richard Powers in The Overstory "The best argument in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story." Packer is a journalist, not a novelist. This is a book full of solid facts and reasoned arguments but it will not change the minds of Americans. To bring about change will require a great story teller, one who can mesmerize Americans into a different kind of thinking, bring them to realize and face up to an existential crisis.

[Murphy C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are we all completely fucked? Well... yeah. Maybe. But this book might give you a little bit of hope. Cheers!!

[Mike Fendrich · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second reading December 2025 - this is a 2-3 star book. It has not aged well at all. I am not a Trump fan but the TDS is getting really old. We need real leadership, we need to support family, church, local community. The divisions and vitriol are now entrenched. This isn't helping anymore.


I purchased this book based upon an hour long interview between the author and Albert Mohler.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dblBy...

This is an excellent discussion.

I am generally on a very similar page theologically and philosophically with Dr. Mohler. I did find his support for Donald Trump very unsettling even with the totally unacceptable main party opponent he faced in 2020. But I did find Mr. Packer's nuanced responses to Dr. Mohler's pandering over Ronald Reagan insightful and helpful, things are not normally as black and white as we want them to be. Knowing Mr. Packer would be more liberal than me (by quite a bit), I thought he would be a good source to understand a differing opinion from mine from a thoughtful commentator.

So I bought his book.

I'm not really sure how many stars to give. There were some areas, especially the 4 Americas section that are 5+ stars. One must accept, and he readily admits, that general classifications are not as monolithic as he presents them, but I found the classifications, definitions and how we got here to be thoughtful and helpful. As is often the case, I find the descriptions of the issues from thoughtful people to be excellent, it's when you get to the prescriptions for renewal that I fall off the train.

While I find the fact, as Mr. Packer stated, the mystifying wonder that so many evangelicals not just voted for but supported one as crass and immoral as Mr. Trump (I am one of the "homeless" as Mr. Packer called me; an evangelical that didn't vote for Trump) understandable, it amazes me that he and others do not consider the absolute implausibility of evangelicals voting for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Biden. The policies, the arrogance, the elitism are just nauseating. It's not just that I won't, I can't.

Anyway, we get to the solutions part of the book (which is about 3 stars for me) and while the issues he brings up are real problems. Mr. Packer thinks the only solution is more government. Granted better, more democratic (small d) government but more none the less.

I am persuaded that renewal in this country, if it ever happens, will be a more sociological rather than politically driven phenomenon. We are going nowhere until the illiberal institutions of family, neighborhood, churches, voluntary associations, local community involvement are thriving. Problems Mr. Packer addresses, such as monopolistic mega retailers (insert Amazon here) closing up downtowns and small businesses, are real problems. Perhaps local grants to have grocery stores in the inner city providing fresh meat, fruits and vegetables would do as much as legislation against Amazon. I don't know, maybe both are necessary. But the Federal government running everything, even if it is functionally better for more people, will not solve the problem of the utter lack of citizenship at the local level where real help can be delivered to real people.

I was also bothered by Mr. Packer's association of Christianity (it was the only faith body mentioned) solely with Real America and aligning it with "white Christian nationalism". While I know this exists, the Christians I know, while being concerned with the direction of the country, want to help and are most certainly not white nationalist/supremacists. And I admit and have commented elsewhere, that parts of the church have lost their primary mission and are associated more closely with the Republican Party than with the worship of the triune God who saves sinners through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. But I have come to not expect much understanding from others who are not willing to investigate the claims of Christianity. It's easier to discard.

So I'm going to give the book 4 stars and a recommendation that this book is a book very much worth reading. I learned a lot and am thankful for Mr. Packer's thoughtful analysis. Read it again (and again) but read it discerningly.

[Namal · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eloquent plea for self-government that draws primarily on the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the early 19th century and found the most striking thing about American democracy, "the central fact from which all his other observations sprang, was 'the equality of conditions'". By which Tocqueville meant that equal status in society was the paramount concern of every citizen [not allowing for enslaved, indigenous, and female citizens at the time, of course, which Packer observed].

Packer recaps the pandemic year by listing the various problems that beset American citizens, problems that preceded the pandemic and were magnified or worsened by it. He goes on to describe American citizens distributed among four distinct groups - Real America [who pride themselves on work ethic and patriotism and believe them to be inextricably linked], Free America [those who support capitalism and business interests unfettered by government interference, libertarians and businessmen whose champion and apotheosis was Ronald Reagan], Smart America [meritocrats epitomized by highly educated, coastal elites], and Just America [younger Americans who demand social justice and draw on critical theory to replace Enlightenment values with subjectivity to explain modern racism and imperialism]. Packer identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each group as a viable, national narrative from which we can draw strength and unity, and explains that none of these narratives is entirely satisfactory [Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits, but does not allow for groups or identities outside the white Christian heartland; Free America celebrates freedom without recognizing the need for government to redress social ills and elevate marginalized groups; Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes social changes, but meritocracy creates a class of stigmatized losers; Just America demands a long overdue moral reckoning, but rejects any sphere of life autonomous from identity politics, and is hampered by an intolerant dogma and coercive tactics].

Packer makes the case for an Equal America, where individual citizens take on civics and self-government as a serious project, and work on strengthening historical tools of citizenship - journalism, government, activism. He draws on the examples of journalist Horace Greeley, bureaucrat Frances Perkins, and activist Bayard Rustin, who embodied the strengths of the four groups described above, and recognized that Americans require above all the passion for equality as a unifying force for social change.

[Jerry Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting, well articulated and pretty persuasive account of the current stage of US society in particular reference to the politics of today and an attempt to analyze how we got here. I say it is persuasive since many people will recognize the central tenets of Packer's thesis, at least those who bother to pay attention. And therein lies the rub; most people probably won't, and are content to sit in their silos hurling bombs at the other side who they hold to blame for all the evils at large in the US, or else are not paying attention at all. The latter is probably more common in my estimation.

Packer looks back at history to chart the polarization and threat to democracy that we see stalking the land in 2021, exacerbated by its ultimate manifestation in the demagogue that was and is Trump. However it would be a mistake to simply categorize this as another in the line of exposes of the malfeasance and malevolence of the previous administration. There are plenty of studies of that and whilst they highlight the actions of that evil regime, there isn't much new that we learn from them. In this book, Trump is merely a manifestation of broader trends and it is very refreshing to read an account that suggests a way forward in its closing chapters.

I think the case for origins of the polarization we see is reasonable and is put forward in several arguments. There are frequent references to historical antecedents when democracy was perceived to be under threat as it is now: civil war, great depression etc. and many citations of Tocqueville's classic study of American Democracy. Since this is written by a progressive author, I am naturally sympathetic to his line of reasoning but I must confess that his assertions were uncomfortable at times and I did recognize that I am guilty of some of the less than helpful attitudes and behaviors to which he alludes.

There is a lot of discussion about the nature of American freedom here and the seemingly all encompassing need to express this as individualism at the expense of society and especially, gasp, socialism in any perceived form. This has the potential to become toxic very quickly of course especially when combined with a frontier spirit and an aggressive religiosity. This is one of the themes that is developed throughout and I wonder if some of the points made (for example the perception of American's abroad and from outsiders) are somewhat anecdotal since, whilst I agree broadly, and there is amusement to be found here, there is little in the way of empirical evidence for this in terms of cited studies etc.

Perhaps the central theme is the suggestion that there are 4 Americas, namely: Free America (holding to the idea that individual freedoms are everything rather than a broader societal good), Real America (the religious, conservative base), Smart America (worshipping meritocracy and the valuing the elite) and Just America (where identity politics reign and there is a search for social justice for oppressed groups. This is an interesting way of looking at things and frames the debate the runs through the narrative. I think I would broadly agree with the characterization BUT it suffers from the flaw of all such categorizations namely it is not all encompassing and there is some cross over between groups. At least that is my take. Also, there is an inherent danger of putting people into categories which may further the polarization and demonization of those not seen as part of "my group". However, for the purposes of the narrative I think this a useful tool.

It was within these categories that I found some discomfort, which is a good thing. As a socialist (champagne socialist probably would be fair) I get very caught up in progressive politics and there is always a danger that I fall prey to some of the more negative, preachy aspects that are mentioned here, and am prone to dismiss things I should take more seriously and people with whom I should empathize. The classic example cited here is pandemic related, where I admit to lacking empathy for businesses that rely on personal interactions and how much they were impacted. It is easy for me who can isolate and work from home. I always understood that but there is more room for understanding from me and I need to work on that more.

However. I detect significant blow back to the social justice movement that has grown over the past few years, at least in influence, especially since the lynching of George Floyd. It is to be expected that this push back would come from the right but I also detect it coming from progressives with suggestions that cancel culture has gone too far, or that we need to have a greater understanding of those who hold conservative, even extreme right wing, views and reach out to them, that race has become too much of a focus and hurts the feelings of white people and is therefore counter productive etc. Whilst I have SOME limited sympathy for these views, I almost NEVER see anything similar from the other side. Indeed, I more commonly see threats of violence, sometimes sexual violence, against progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I see limited or no attempt from that side to reach out, all I see is obstruction and aggression.

Now, maybe that is part of the point Packer is making. We need to come together as a nation and I would agree with that, but I think there is a place for more aggressive argument from the left, making the case for progressive reviews but not inviting the other side to some sort of kumbaya meeting where we try and accommodate hateful views. Although Packer doesn't talk about cancel culture specifically, that seems to me to be yelled by those called out for bigoted language or actions as a way to avoid being held accountable for such views. Can it be taken too far? Of course, but that is true of pretty much anything.

I really like the fact that Packer, in the last chapter or two, suggests a way forward. Some of the ideas expressed here represent, as he admits, wishful thinking but I love that this is in here and raises this book's stock with me. I have read a number of narratives that bemoan the current state of things but only have the most perfunctory suggestions to alleviate matters. It is refreshing indeed that suggestions are provided here, albeit a progressive wishlist that will undoubtedly enrage many of the Americas he illustrated in the text. However, I support almost all of them as they are aimed at providing more social cohesion and really using the government to build a robust society. Wow. How radical.

So, there is much to like here. It is extremely well written and persuasive, although some of the argument is a little anecdotal. I very much enjoyed it and whilst a tad over simplified, that is inevitable when considering such complex and nuanced topics. Categorization is attractive and a good framing for looking at such issues, but naturally can lead to such oversimplification. Having said that, I think it works well here and I look forward to reading more works from Packer, with whom I am very much on the same page.

[Landon Coleman · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only part of this book I enjoyed was Packer's chapter on four Americas. I think his list of four is accurate and helpful, although I strongly disagree with his perspective on each of the four. Packer is clearly less in favor of Real and Free America, he is more optimistic about Smart America, and he has little to criticize about Just America. On the whole, the book tries to blame all of our present problems on Trump and his supporters. As Packer closes the book he offers suggestions for progress, most of which include more government, more spending, more taxes, more regulation, and lower standards (no standardized testing and reduced qualifications for certain professions). Nowhere in the book does Packer give serious attention to the worldview differences that separate Americans, nor does he talk about the role of the family in determining success in the lives of children.

[piet van genderen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een verontrustende analyse van het huidige maatschappelijk klimaat in de Verenigde Staten met ongekend vastgeroeste verhoudingen tussen bevolkingsgroepen. Met hartstocht bepleit de auteur dat wordt gezocht naar datgene wat verbindt voordat het te laat is en Amerika definitief een verscheurd land wordt.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Review: https://www.americanpurpose.com/artic...

My interview: https://www.thedailybeast.com/george-...

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Veteran political journalist George Packer provides a compelling analysis of today's political and cultural conundrums after Covid and the Capital insurrection. His solutions are one we've heard before but his analysis of the problem of political polarization is new. Most interesting to me was how Packer explains that people need a narrative about their world to make sense of it, that the nation-state is the most relevant unit of that world for most people to create a story about, and so that Americans have divided into four groups of stories about how their identity relates to the identity and purpose of the nation:

1. Free America -- Libertarians on the center-right who took over the Republican Party with the election of Reagan in 1980 and whose philosophy of free markets and small government has dominated politics ever since. Their money comes from industries like fossil fuel extraction. With the appearance of Sarah Palin and the election of Trump, the power of Free America to guide the right, led by libertarian rich guys like the Koch brothers, started to wane.

2. Smart America -- Well educated technocrats on the center-left who dominate the new economy of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. They believe that anyone can get ahead with enough education and creativity, basically the theory of Meritocracy. Unfortunately, meritocracy has become a sham, degenerating into a new old-boy network of elite colleges and Wall Street firms that excludes most newcomers and gives a huge advantage to the children of the already successful. Smart America is contemptuous of those who can't make it into Harvard or Goldman Sachs, and the biggest losers of Smart America's vision of the economy are those who didn't bother to get college degrees who are stuck in dinosaur industries like manufacturing, and thus deserve to be phased out.

Smart Americans dominate technology and finance along with higher education and the media, where they relentlessly spread the ideas of "critical theory" for the last few decades. Such ideas have recently broken out into the larger society and created a class of young people who have started to revolt against the meritocratic orthodoxy of Smart America.

3. Just America -- The children of Smart America, who enjoy the benefits of expensive higher education but fewer and fewer of its economic benefits, as the professional careers they expected have started to disappear. Frustrated at their inability to dominate the middle class as their parents generation did, Just Americans have soured on the promises of Meritocracy.

But instead of promoting a new economy where all ordinary Americans would thrive, the angry young people of Just America, who are mostly white, have fixed on the issue of race, as they put it, "racial equity." While certainly necessary to reexamine race, Packer finds that the Just America position that the U.S. is the world's uniquely most unjust nation and that things will never get any better in the future than they were in the past, is self-limiting.

4. Real America -- White Americans living largely in rural areas who were displaced from well paid factory jobs by globalization, they're also frustrated at their economic decline. The direction they took was to retreat into racial nationalism. They want to take pride in the places where they were born and raised, but those places are increasingly decrepit. So they wind up taking pride in identities of race and religion, veering off into white supremacy and fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Inspired by the appearance of Sarah Palin, they found their savior in Trump. Ironically, the right-wingers of Real America share with the left-wingers of Real America (who they hate) a distrust of mainstream American values including Meritocracy and progress.

Real America is also pessimistic and their vision of the future includes very little actual economic improvement but is focused on winning symbolic victories on such social issues as abortion, religion and guns -- all, essentially, to provide the only pleasure they think they can get out of today's society, "owning the libs."

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Packer wouldn't want to live in the republic run by any of these narratives and the groups who promote them, but he also sees that each story offers something necessary to make changes in America's political economy to solve real problems. He thinks we all need to come together under an umbrella of concern for our country that qualifies as patriotism, properly defined and taken back from demagogues. The idea that any of these narratives can achieve ultimate success over the others is illusory. So, we might as well just accept that our fell citizens will disagree on many issues. Instead of hoping to crush them politically, we should find areas of common ground and ways to work together.

Packer wants a synthesis of the most valuable parts of each group's story, integrating personal freedom and reward for entrepreneurial initiative (Free America), with real meritocracy through education that's open to all (Smart America) that includes both fixing the discrimination that makes things unfair for Black Americans (Just America) and a commitment to place and class fairness (Real America).

Packer concludes his book with examples of three lesser-known leaders from the past who managed to make the synthesis that Packer thinks we need today, including labor leader Frances Perkins and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book grew on me. The first 25% or so didn't seem very helpful, as least for a current American reader (maybe it will feel different in the coming years). I decided to read this short book after hearing about the 4 categories, and I'm not sure it was useful to read an entire book vs just read an article about the 4 categories, which can be summarized pretty easily. I liked learning about Frances Perkins and Bayard Rustin and revisiting historical times that inform the current time. I also found potential solutions appealing and optimistic, which seems to be at odds with other reviewers.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Razor sharp cut across the fabric that is the United States. A compulsively readable account and analysis of what, how and when it all started to go downhill, with a carefully hopeful message woven throughout, about how a nation might be able to fight back through trust, integrity and unity.

This also provided a convincing theory of ”The Four Americas” and what equality means to Americans, truly.
All in all, a pristine journalistic effort.

[Jeremy Neely]

This short book fleshes out the assessment of our current predicament which appeared in The Atlantic. I don’t quite agree with all of his assessment, but his framework of these four competing narratives of America—Free, Smart, Real, and Just—provide a compelling starting point.

[Zachery Tyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put one of the best books I've read all year.

[David Fulk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply intelligent analysis of the current fraught state of the republic. Unfortunately, the ones who most need to read it--those living in their hardened, insular echo chambers--are the ones least likely to pick it up.

[Vincentvanbeest · Rating 3 out of 5]

Niet zo sterk als z'n andere boeken. Scherp geschreven als altijd, maar blijft een beetje hangen als het gaat om oplossingen.

[James B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the early ebook. In this slim book the author paints the bleak picture of America’s present: The awful divides of race, political parties, wage inequality and finds our country on the brink of crises that mirrors the Civil War, the Depression and the turmoil of the late 1960’s. The book quickly traces how America came to each of those crises in the past and how they pulled back from the cliff of total destruction. And he shows a series of steps that can lead to a renewed and unified country for today, if only we can find leaders unafraid to honestly lead, aided with farseeing allies working behind the scenes. A frank and bracing book.