The challenges of 2020 exposed the nation’s underlying conditions – discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities and how difficult these problems are to remedy.
In his new book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: June 15, 2021) National Book Award winner and Atlantic staff writer George Packer argues warring tribes are tearing the country apart. Packer divides the uproar of 2020 in terms of four competing “narratives” of America: the “Free America” which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the wealthy and interests of corporations; the “Smart America” representing the worldview of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; the “Real America” who are the white Christian nationalists of the heartland; and the “Just America” or citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression.
Packer argues, none of these narratives or groups can sustain a democracy. To lead a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality – the “hidden code” – that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Packer contends that today we are challenged to fight for equality and renew the art of self-government. Packer charts the road American Democracy has been on and presents options for the future with the goal – NATIONAL RENEWAL.
George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His previous books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.
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