Book Review: "Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal"

The newest book from George Packer is a call to action to heal our divided nation.

When I read George Packer’s newest essay for The Atlantic, in which he lays out the four different Americas currently clashing within our fractured republic, I knew that I’d be interested in reading the book from which it is adapted. Now that I’ve finished Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, I think it’s safe to say that this will surely become one of the books you simply must read if you want to understand how we find ourselves in this dreadful situation. Though I don’t always agree with each of his points, overall I found the book to be an erudite, if humbling, explanation for the state of our nation. 

Packer begins from the obvious premise that America is not a well nation. Whatever self-serving myths that Americans were able to tell themselves in the decades since the 1970s crashed into the unyielding reality of a virus that brought this vast  behemoth to its knees. COVID had the unerring ability to exploit every crack and crevice in the American body politic and, as Packer so skillfully outlines, there were plenty of them to take advantage of.

Indeed, the central part of the book, in which Packer develops his idea of the four Americas, is simultaneously its most rewarding and most frustrating. In his reading, there are four competing narratives, which are both incompatible yet also interpenetrating. Free America (one might call this libertarian America) focuses on liberty above all; Real America, whose avatars are the likes of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump; Smart America, the realm of technocrats and the false promise of meritocracy; and Just America, the social justice warriors who view America as an irredeemably racist nation. 

There is, to be sure, some truth in the taxonomy that Packer lays out, but his delineation is necessarily reductive. As much as I found myself reacting to his simplification of Just America in particular (especially since he seems to see it as a mirror image of Real America), I also had to admit that there’s some truth to what he identifies as its shortcomings. It would have been nice, however, to not see the same sort of both-sides-ism that is all too common in a certain kind of center-left intellectual these days, but unfortunately that seems to be their go-to position.

Of course, these four Americas didn’t emerge in a vacuum, and Packer claims (mostly rightly, I think) that they are largely the result of the enormous economic inequality that emerged in the 1970s and has only gotten worse since then. This inequality has allowed the bonds that unite us to slowly dissolve, so that we’ve begun to see one another as enemies, all of us competing against one another for a shrinking portion of the same pie. The reality, as he pointedly reminds us, is that we all have to live in this country and, since secession is both politically and strategically impossible, it’s best if we find a way of doing so without resorting to bloodshed and mutually-assured destruction. 

Fortunately, Packer isn’t content to simply diagnose the problem and let it go at that (a common problem in books of this sort). Instead, he spends the latter part of the book showing us individuals who rose to the occasion and tirelessly worked to make America better. What’s more, he reminds us that, though many millions of people voted for Trump and the bleak nihilism he represented, significantly more voted for Biden. More importantly, perhaps, he proposes that we aim, not for a Free, Real, Smart, or Just America, for an Equal America. Americans, he reminds us time and again, don’t generally want equal outcomes (which must often be enforced by the government) but equal opportunity. If we are to have any hope of stitching up this divided country, we’ve got to make real structural changes to our economic system. 

At the same time, Packer also makes clear that just changing the economic reality isn’t going to be enough: we’ve also got to change our habits and patterns of thought. We need to actually go out and mingle with people in the real world, engage in meaningful conversations with those that disagree with us. To do so, to acquire a new sense of shared Americanness, we need to detach ourselves from the internet--from Facebook, from Twitter, and so on--and though that will seem like a heavy lift to many, I agree with Packer that it’s a necessary one. As he points out several times in the book, the rise of the internet, rather than binding us ever closer together, has instead led to even greater atomization. 

There’s a lot to enjoy in Last Best Hope. Packer is one of those writers who wears his learning lightly, and though his analysis is deeply informed by both American history and American philosophy, you don’t need to have a degree in either of those things in order to grasp his larger point. Sometimes, it has to be said, his prose does tend to get away from him, and he’s never quite able to shake that tone of faint condescension that seems to hang about most of those who write for The Atlantic on a regular basis, and I’m sure that some (particularly those in both Real and Just America) will find this a turn-off. For those willing to overlook those stylistic flaws, however, Last Best Hope has a lot to teach us. 

More than anything else, perhaps, it reminds us of the political and intellectual value of optimism. We don’t have to give into Trump’s toxic mantra of “Make America Great Again” to embrace an ethos of civic and national renewal. Instead, as Packer reminds us repeatedly, we can instead simply “Make America Again.” We have endured times of enormous strain and strife at various periods in our history and somehow emerged ever stronger, ever more committed to our central ideals. We can certainly do so again.When it comes right down to it, we, the American people, are our own best friend and worst enemy.