Title: Last Best Hope
Rating: 3 Stars
I’m concerned about the state of the US. I still haven’t processed how tens of millions of Americans can think that our last presidential election was a fraud. I don’t understand how receiving a potential life saving vaccination is a political act. I’m aghast that women are being stripped of rights that were earned decades ago.
As a literary geek, this concern is manifesting by reading. From my last post you know that I’ve just re-read American Nations. I’ve just now finished George Packer’s Last Best Hope. Both books try to reconcile my concerns by theorizing that we’re not just one America but several very different Americas. Over time, one or more of these Americas wrest the reigns of power and attempt to force their will upon the others.
While I found Woodard’s American Nations to be informative, I was not so impressed with Packer’s.
While Woodard has twelve nations with their behaviors mostly set in place by their early founders, Packer has four nations. They seem to be much more, I don’t know, philosophically clustered than geographically clustered, although with the political self segregation that is an increasing feature of American life, there is a significant amount of segregation amongst the four.
Packer was inspired by the twin upheavals of the year 2020. First, there was the pandemic. After an initial burst of civic togetherness, it rapidly degenerated into deep schisms of vaccinations, masks, and school policies. The second crisis was the aftermath of the presidential election. Citing fraud with no credible evidence, Trump came scarily close to succeeding in staying in power. A relative few Republicans in state positions put country before party and thwarted attempts to have state legislatures override their voters’ preferences or to send in alternate slates of delegates. When that failed, January 6th happened. For the first and only (hopefully) time in my life, I saw my Capitol assaulted. Much to my dismay, the assaulters were people that looked just like me.
The first America is named Free America. This group held power for decades. It’s what people of my age think of when we hear the word conservative. They believe that the government should be out of the regulatory business. Capitalism, not government programs, is the answer to our problems. If you’re not rich and successful, it’s your fault and the government is not going to bail you out. Although they are anti-regulation, they are also in league with Christian fundamentalists, although the desires of the latter often take a back seat to business priorities.
The next America is Smart America. This nation believes in meritocracy. They believe in higher education. They are at peace with modernity. They think that globalization has been a force for good. They have sympathy for the poor and disenfranchised and are supportive of government programs that could help them. This is true as long as these programs don’t impact their 401K and as long as those unfortunate souls don’t try to live in their neighborhood. Since higher education requires money and influence, it’s actually quite difficult for someone without money or influence to get into a top rated higher education program. Therefore, the meritocracy is really an aristocracy in camouflage.
Next up is Real America. As Packer cleverly states, for this nation, Sarah Palin was the John the Baptist for the ascendant Donald Trump. Classically, this is thought of as small town America. Their values have not changed over time while the rest of the country apparently has, much to their disgust. They hold know-it-all intellectuals in disgust. It is essentially a whites only club, seeing all non-white immigration as an invasion. In the class structure, it looks up and sees a parasitic elite and it looks down and it sees a shiftless underclass. The manufacturing that has disappeared and has destroyed entire communities as a result of globalization has been devastating to this nation.
The final nation is Just America. These are the Gen-Z and millennials that see the systemic racism, sexism, and classism that is at the core of our country from its founding. The American myth of the city on the hill or that we’re on some inexorable positive path of progress is meaningless to them. They see a near constant video stream of police brutality. They know the statistics of mass incarceration. They take to the streets in protest and use their cultural power to silence those that disagree (the so-called cancel culture).
There’s a couple of things here. First of all, this set of nations does not seem complete or orthogonal to me. It would seem to me that many Americans would look at this list and not see themselves reflected in it. Given where I lived, the profession that I chose, and my academic background, most people would probably place me in Smart America, and for the most part I would agree. Even so, there are many parts of Just America that ring true to me as well. Reading the different nations left me feeling that I was reading the political equivalent of a horoscope. Once you put yourself in one of the nations, confirmation bias quickly leads you into agreeing with the attributes of it.
A second problem is that it seemed to be light. The book had some half dozen essays. They were at best loosely connected. The four nations essay read like a long form article in The Atlantic. That’s not a random observation. In fact, the first time that I encountered the four nations was in a long form article in yes, The Atlantic. It seemed to me that the other essays were added for the primary purpose of getting to a book length.
A final problem is that there really wasn’t a ‘where do we go from here’. There was some pablum about strengthening our local press, extending the New Deal, strong unions, and such, but these are all horses that have long left the barn.
We have to strive to create a new America, an Equal America. OK, I’ll get right on that.
dorkenstein 