In his new book, “Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal,” George Packer writes that the United States is in a state of disrepair, brought about primarily by the fact that “inequality undermined the common faith that Americans need to create a successful multi-everything democracy.” The book opens with an essay on the state of the U.S. during the pandemic, and then offers sketches of four different visions of the country: Free America, of Reaganism; Smart America, of Silicon Valley and other professional élites; Real America, of Trumpist reaction; and Just America, of a new generation of leftists. “I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them,” Packer writes. He proposes a different vision, which he thinks offers brighter possibilities, centered around the concept of equality and non-demagogic appeals to patriotism.
I recently spoke by phone with Packer, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic and was previously a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is also the author of the books “The Assassins’ Gate” and “The Unwinding.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Barack Obama failed to change the direction of the country, whether a more progressive form of patriotism is possible, and whether the cultural controversies roiling American institutions are an inevitable result of inequality.
Why did you decide to structure this book around four Americas?
We’ve all lived with the red-blue division for about twenty years. And it’s true. We are divided that way. Every passing year makes that clearer. But I felt that in the last few years, politically and culturally, things have happened that showed that there are divisions within, as well as between, those two big blocks of Americans. The basic division that I began to see begins with libertarianism, which I call Free America, which is Reagan’s America. And this is really the story of my adult life, from the late nineteen-seventies onward. It’s been the most dominant narrative in our society. And it says, “We’re all individuals.” We all have a chance to make it. The best way to make it is to get government out of the way and to cut taxes and deregulate and set us free in order to use our industry and talent to make something new. And that was a really potent story that Reagan told, and that the Republican Party lived by for decades, and to some extent still does.
It doesn’t quite apply to a different group of Americans, and a different story, which I call Smart America. There’s an overlap. Smart America is the meritocracy. It’s the professional class. It’s Americans who believe that talent and effort should be rewarded but who also think we’re part of a society and that society has to make sure that everyone has roughly an equal chance. So there’s affirmative action, there’s diversity hiring, there’s children’s health insurance. But, really, Smart America takes on the parameters set by Free America: deregulation and free trade and open immigration. And in a way you can see they have followed each other in power from one decade to the next. Free America in the eighties, Smart America with Clinton in the nineties. To me, he embodies it.
And this is also the Democratic Party going along with the Reagan consensus.
Exactly. Bitter political fights between the parties in the nineties, all kinds of scandals and impeachment. But underlying that there was a consensus about what the economy needed and what society needed. And Democrats of Clinton’s generation moved way over toward the Free America side, in terms of their willingness to see the private sector as the main engine of both growth and fairness.
Sarah Palin was the early warning sign that Free America was breaking up. There was a rebellion from below within Free America. And that rebellion was out in the heartland. It was a white Christian-nationalist narrative that said, “Your free trade, your immigration, even your corporations and monopolies have not improved a lot of towns, and rural areas have sunk and are in deep trouble, and have some of the same serious problems that the inner cities have had for decades.” And so, when Trump came along, in 2015, he intuited in his reptilian way that the old, sunny, optimistic Reagan message didn’t cut it, and that something more dark and nativist and ugly would appeal—that people didn’t want to hear how good things were. They wanted to hear how bad things were. I’d call that Real America. It’s a phrase Palin used during the 2008 campaign.
The fourth America is also a rebellion. As Real America is a rebellion against the ossified libertarianism of Free America, Just America—which is a difficult term, because it doesn’t quite capture it—is a generational rebellion against the complacency of Smart America, which had promised, “As long as you get an education and work hard and play by the rules and go as far as your God-given talents will take you, you will have a successful life.” And the generation that came after Clinton, the millennials, found out that this wasn’t true, and that the sanguine promises of their liberal parents just didn’t resonate. And that generation has embraced a different narrative, which sees us less as striving individuals with an imperfect but ever-improving society and more as a fixed hierarchy of groups, some of which are oppressive and some of which are oppressed. And both are in an almost permanent state of conflict, in which the country really isn’t progressing. It’s stuck in its original hierarchy, and that hierarchy has to be overthrown in order for justice to come.
A lot of people think of Just America as a response to Trump, too, which is why it’s interesting that you’re defining it as just as much a reaction to Smart America.
Well, I think Smart America is the one it’s closest to—in a sense, it’s one generation overthrowing the previous one, children overthrowing parents. In many ways, this reminds me of the nineteen-sixties, and millennials and boomers have a lot more in common than either side has acknowledged. I think you’re right. Trump threw a great deal of accelerant onto smoldering discontent. But it preceded him. And one thing that’s interesting about both Real America and Just America is the rate of change, how fast they’ve come on and how quickly they’ve seized a lot of cultural ground—at least, a lot of the discourse, if not the institutions of power.
Joe Biden was elected last year with more votes than any candidate ever, and it doesn’t seem to me that he fits into any of these Americas exactly. How do you understand that?
He doesn’t fit. He really doesn’t. Generationally, he’s closest to Clinton. But somehow, maybe because of where he comes from or what kind of career he’s had, he doesn’t feel like a very modern figure. His reference points all seem to go back to Roosevelt and Truman and trade unions. It’s as if he didn’t experience the late sixties and the seventies in the way, say, Bill Clinton did. And maybe we needed that. Maybe we needed someone who could think outside the really toxic divisions that we live with. He has done more to pursue social justice than any President since Johnson. It’s really early, and we don’t know how much he’s going to get done. He has certainly made it clear he’s trying. But it seems to me to come out of a pre-modern sensibility that goes back to the New Deal.
Almost any Republican now can be slotted into the Reagan mold or the Trump mold, or they’re pretending to be one but they’re clearly the other. But with Democrats it is harder. Where does Bernie Sanders fit in? Maybe this says that the Democratic Party is about to undergo something big.
