Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

by George Packer

Overview

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

How, in a few decades, did the United States transform from a broadly prosperous middle-class country, with relatively healthy institutions and competent leaders, to a nation defined by discredited elites, hollowed-out institutions, and blatant inequalities—feared and pitied by our friends, mocked and sabotaged by our adversaries, first in the world in Covid cases and deaths, and led in recent years by an incompetent authoritarian bigot? Last Best Hope is a bracing account of our current crisis and of how a new era of civic revitalization may bring it to an end.

Combining reportage with historical narrative, autobiography, and political analysis, Packer depicts and assesses the four inadequate narratives that dominate American public life: Libertarian America, which imagines a nation of individuals responsible for their own fate, and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Cosmopolitan America, the ideology of Silicon Valley and the professional elite,which celebrates globalization and leaves many American communities behind ; Diverse America, which defines citizens as members of large identity groups that have inflicted or suffered oppression; and White America, a shallow nationalism that fears the contamination of non-whites and treachery of coastal elites, and poses the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime.

At a time when many fear that the American experiment in self-government may collapse, or, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “die by suicide,” Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain American democracy. To point a better way forward, he looks back at previous eras of crisis to discover the resources for invigorating self-government. Combining trenchant social analysis with a vibrant and stinging essayistic voice and a deep knowledge of America’s past and present, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national self-examination the times demand.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374603663
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	33,744
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of many previous books, including The Unwinding (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate, and Our Man (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography).

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

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

★ 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

"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