Packer’s slim book, Last Best Hope, begins with patriotic despair ... 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 ... But Packer’s lens of analysis is economic.
... incisive, deftly argued ... Packer – who as well as contributing to the New Yorker and the Atlantic has edited collections of George Orwell’s essays – goes on to attempt something close to the ideological fables in Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four ... Despite imperial puffery, we may never have been the best, but we used to be better than this. Now we seem doomed to be last, and there’s no hope anywhere.
Packer brings Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal home at a touch over 200 pages, and for many of those pages it’s unclear whether he’ll have enough material to make it to the end. The physical thinness of these books betrays the frailty of liberal thinking in its moment of crisis: Assailed from both the left and the right, hostage to finance, and no longer able to secure the equality that grounds its central promise of individual freedom, how can liberalism reinvent itself? ... Neither genuinely critical nor full-throatedly prescriptive, these books are closer in spirit to catechism. A basic incoherence defines the genre. Last Best Hope is no exception ... The orientation of this investigation is strangely solipsistic, a fact captured by the surgery that Packer has performed on the line that gives the book its title. Whereas Abraham Lincoln once declared that America was 'the last best hope of earth,' Packer believes—correctly—that the United States can no longer claim to be 'a light unto the nations.' In the hands of a different writer, perhaps even an earlier version of Packer himself, 'last best hope' might have been repurposed ironically, as a critique of America’s projection of its own power abroad or as an injunction to learn from the rest of the world; what we get here instead is its deployment in the service of an earnest, unthinking insularity. 'No one is going to save us,' Packer declares. 'We are our last best hope.' The only way America can fix itself is with more America ... he spends much of the first half of the book summarizing year-old tweets ... Tiny shards of insight do emerge occasionally, but they do not pierce the book’s curtain of nationalist kitsch. Packer is not unaware of the real drivers of American dysfunction, but he never seems particularly interested in probing these causes too deeply. His real interest is in description, not analysis ... a Friedman-esque exercise in overexplaining the obvious, which basically boils down to the idea that radical forces are buffeting the political establishment on both the left and the right. This jaunt through the four Americas sees Packer indulge his flair for dad-style moralizing and the off-kilter character sketch ... What this silly taxonomy makes clear is that Packer’s real beef is not with Free America, Smart America, or Real America, which are mostly treated with humanizing sympathy, but with the wokes and snowflakes of Just America ... In an era crying out for radical thinking, Packer offers the damp squib of incrementalism ... If liberalism is to remain America’s guiding political star, it needs a better vision—anchored in creativity, care, ecology, whatever it might be—of how individual freedom and the common good can knit together. That vision is not the one found here.
While this is not a new subject for Packer, the tone and tenor of his latest book is decidedly insular. At times he does not seem wholly convinced by his own increasingly abstract pronouncements. Never fully answering the question of how we arrived at our current predicament, Packer does not explain how a revitalized liberalism can get us out of it. The search for causes and policy remedies remains secondary to the reassertion of ideological precepts: above all else, that liberalism and America in general remain our era’s last best hope. To his credit, Packer identifies a core problem: Inequality in the United States ... Packer’s effort to renew the liberal faith by divvying up the past into a set of progressive parables is sadly endearing. His failure to consider how the same liberal faith he sought to renew decades ago has contributed much to the dismal political and economic situation we confront today feels like malpractice.
National Book Award–winner Packer explains our current political tensions as the collision of four incompatible narratives about what makes the U.S. special ... To some extent, [Last Best Hope] answers questions about American identity that Packer posed in The Unwinding (2013). But Packer’s optimism has been rattled by four years of Trumpism and a botched response to COVID-19, and this book is both an argument and a plea.
Like most books written by patriots in moments of national crisis, George Packer’s Last Best Hope tries to answer two questions: How did our country get into this mess, and how can we get out of it? ... Packer has a story to tell about our decline, and he tells it well ... As the industrial era waned, the New Deal party alignment gave way to four Americas ... Packer’s sharp portraits of these new tribes are the heart of this book, and his critique of them reveal his central concerns ... Packer’s account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling, even though it leaves out tens of millions of Americans who belong to none of the four tribes and see them for what they are. His account is distorted, however, by its core premise that economic inequality is driving all our other pathologies [...] and that increased equality can cure them. The consequence is tunnel vision; place, culture, religion, demography, even immigration go largely unseen and are treated as effects rather than causes when they make cameo appearances.
In a great book—and I have no hesitation calling The Unwinding and Our Man great books—such romantic authorial blind spots are forgivable. But Packer’s latest, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, is all blind spot. At barely more than two hundred pages, it manages to feel more indulgent than his previous books, respectively two and three times as long. Packer is a gifted reporter and storyteller but a mediocre polemicist, and with Last Best Hope, he has embraced polemics at the expense of reporting and storytelling ... Last Best Hope is shaped by the context in which it was written: during a period when Packer, like many of us, had a lot of time to kill and a lot of things to get off his chest.
Packer presents sharp, insightful critiques of all sides [...] but occasionally slips into melodrama ... 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.
