Thursday, February 24, 2022
This is a continuation of the discussion I began on February 9 on our extreme polarization, shifting attention from Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized to George Packer’s Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, which came out last summer. Packer has written for The New Yorker about foreign and domestic policy and is now a staff writer at The Atlantic. His previous books include The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (2005) and The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013), which won the National Book Award.
Why We’re Polarized and Last Best Hope share the same purpose: both authors set out to understand the causes of the nation’s deep divisions and then offer us suggestions for healing and moving forward: diagnosis and therapy for the body politic. But these are very different books. Klein is uniformly objective and dispassionate; he might occasionally tell us that he finds a fact or phenomenon frustrating, but his style is generally flat, and he betrays no personal anguish in the country’s crack-up. Why We’re Polarized is wonky, its title is direct and to-the-point, and its sources are mostly academic. Klein’s ambition is to describe American politics as a system subject to impersonal forces, and he deliberately ignores the role of individual human actors.
Packer, on the other hand, wears his wounded patriotism on his sleeve, is sometimes sarcastic and bitter, his disappointment in the country bubbling beneath the surface. His title is dire, borrowed from Lincoln’s 1862 address to Congress, in which the president called the survival of American self-government the “last best hope of earth.” Packer is interested in American dreams and aspirations, and in how equality and self-government are embedded in our culture. He cites James Baldwin, D. H. Lawrence, Albert Murray, Walter Lippman, George Orwell, French historian Marc Bloch, and especially Alexis de Tocqueville. He quotes Walt Whitman, who called democracy "the fervid and tremendous IDEA, melting everything else with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual emotional power." To which Packer responds:
Any idea is a fragile thing, even—especially!—a fervid and tremendous one. We should have taken better care of ours.
For Packer, this is not a story of impersonal forces. He names men and women he admires and some he deplores, and he insists that self-government requires the courage, integrity, and activism of individual citizens. He also begins with a personal account that reads like trauma, describing his shock and bewilderment, toward the end of the 2020 election, at seeing two big red Trump signs on his next-door neighbors’ lawn—people with whom his family had warm, friendly relations. The signs made him imagine, under other circumstances, swastikas:
My children were confused and upset. My wife was appalled. I spent the rest of the night trying to connect the red signs out on the road with the decent people who had put them there. I couldn't—I can't.
Like George Packer, I can’t help but take our national crisis personally. January 6 and its aftermath feel to me like a death in the family, and I’ve moved around the house this past year like someone in mourning. All my life I’ve nursed a quiet, intense patriotism—something that I cannot disentangle from a faith in democracy and justice—that now feels trashed; Americans’ commitment to democracy and justice now appears uncertain. I’ve not been blind to the crimes and contradictions in the American past and present, but the democratic American myth has always been real and alive to me. I’ve always assumed that the United States was something special, that it was founded on ideas—fervid and tremendous ones—of human dignity and freedom, principles that we were dedicated to expanding, and that, because of this, we were an inspiration to the rest of the world. This patriotism, though it often actually chokes me up, is something I don’t think I’ve ever expressed to anyone—I suppose because, like all strong affections, it sounds childish and naïve when said aloud, vulnerable to rational challenge. And also because other people’s patriotism can sometimes appear skewed and ugly and dangerous to me, when it manifests as pure nationalism, simpleminded militarism, untethered to facts or history or principle. Perhaps by expressing these sentiments here I’m admitting that my patriotism, too, may also have been childish and naïve, untethered to facts. False, in other words. Here’s how Packer describes the change we’ve undergone:
The idea that America is unique and superior among nations, exempt from the cruder forces of history, with a special mission to shine the light of liberty to the world—the idea that led to some of our noblest ventures and worst mistakes—has become impossible to sustain. A series of disasters, most of them self-inflicted, including Trump and the ravages of the pandemic, have thrown the shining city off its hill and down into the swarming world. . . .
In short, we were just one country among many, vulnerable to the same catastrophes as others, no exemptions granted. Big, rich, important, but nothing special. Certainly no longer a beacon of democracy. I have to admit—that hurt. What a comeuppance!
Last Best Hope begins with a summary of the headlines of 2020 that reads like a catalogue of civic dysfunction, starting with the impeachment, moving through the bungling of the pandemic response, the killing of George Floyd and the protests and recriminations that followed, the political campaign, and ending with the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. The year, Packer writes, “began with attempted blackmail and ended with attempted sedition. Between them was everything else." What we saw on display all year was complete national incoherence. You would think that a pandemic, second only perhaps to a foreign attack or invasion, would be something capable of galvanizing the government and unifying the public, dictating national defensive strategies and shared sacrifices. But no. Despite our technical prowess, the U.S. became the world’s COVID basket case. "There was no national plan for dealing with the greatest threat of our lives," Packer writes. Using Jared Kushner and Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia as his prime examples, Packer shows how, at the highest levels of government, the prevailing responses to COVID were cynicism, corruption, and venality: "leaders used their positions to benefit themselves while leaving the public to its fate."
In April, as case numbers exploded into hundreds of thousands and deaths into tens of thousands, Trump abandoned any pretense of managing the crisis and settled into the natural response of a demagogue. A deep instinct told him that his best bet for survival was to divide up the country. He had staked his short political career on the American people's readiness to turn on one another, and they had not let him down. With his inerrant knack for driving Americans into frenzies of mutual hatred, he scoffed at mask wearing. . . .
Nothing Trump did was more destructive than turning the pandemic into a central front of the partisan war. How many of the hundreds of thousands of American dead would be breathing today if he had told the whole country to wear a mask?
The virus exposed the extremes of inequality in our economy and forced us to face that some workers were essential and others nonessential—and weirdly, that nonessential workers, whose jobs weren’t critical to the safety and survival of the community, were generally vastly better paid and significantly less vulnerable to the disease, able to work from home, on a computer, on Zoom. Workers designated under the pandemic as “essential” were the new American working class—doctors and nurses, yes, but also store clerks, UPS delivery people, home health aides and nursing home staff—and how different they were from the muscular, heroic images of industrial-age factory workers that New Deal art romanticized, glorified. Today’s essential working stiffs, unlike 20th-century factory workers, aren't protected by unions and can be fired for not showing up to work sick.
An essential worker was a worker who would be fired for staying home with symptoms of the virus. Think about it enough and you realize that the miraculous price and speed of a delivery of organic microgreens from Amazon Fresh to your doorstep depends on the fact that the people who grow, sort, pack, and deliver it have to work while sick. Think some more and you wonder if you'd really accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home. The underside of the consumer economy—how it implicated everyone—was exposed in all its ugliness.
The divide between the nonessentials at home and the essentials on the job was as wide as that between civilians and soldiers in wartime. If you were a civilian, it was hard not to feel some shame.
Packer discusses two controversies in 2020 that highlighted our national dysfunction and inability to solve problems. The first was figuring out what to do with schools during the pandemic, how to balance the need to prevent infections and to continue teaching children effectively, and how the discussion broke down into tribalism, name-calling, and group pieties without any serious attempt to solve the problem. The second centered around the protests and consciousness-raising after the killing of George Floyd. The anti-racism this inspired in liberal white people, affecting corporations and all sorts of institutions, became a kind of performance art that never approached in any material way the real problems in black America.
Despite all the dysfunction and corruption on display, Packer found one thing profoundly encouraging in 2020—the fact that, despite COVID, Americans voted in record numbers:
We were in the desperate position of clinging to something precious that we expected to betray us. For the election to succeed, we had to think and act as if it would succeed. We had to believe that democratic power still lay in our hands, or else we would have already surrendered it.
“The higher reason,” he writes, “the spiritual reason, why democracy held was this: Americans still want it.” But the vote tally proved something that we already knew: that we were two countries.
Packer’s second chapter, “Four Americas,” is an imaginative way to view our fragmentation. For though we may be two countries in partisan terms, Packer argues that over several decades we’ve actually developed four distinct national narratives, or myths, in conflict with one another. America cannot be understood without its myths: “Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be.” National stories may not stand up particularly well to fact-checking, but they “convey a moral identity,” helping people understand what their history means and what they should do next as a people. They provide cultural coherence and set direction.
In the first half of the last century the two political parties represented two general narratives: Republicans were about “getting ahead” and Democrats about “getting a fair shake”—but in broad terms they were arguing about the same country. Packer sees things changing in 1968, with “a long-term Democratic shift in power from the white working class to the college-educated and minorities”:
It took several decades, but the two parties just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to 2020. . . .
The transformations of the 1970s broke up the old party alignment and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America's moral identity.
Packer names the four new narratives driving our politics Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America. They are radically different visions of what it means to be American—indeed, they exist only in reaction to each other—and they represent different social and economic classes, varying interests, and separate generations. They describe different countries and set different directions. Free Americans and Real Americans don’t think alike, but they uneasily coalesce and vote together as Republicans: you might say that Free Americans hold the political power and manipulate the resentments and passions of Real Americans to achieve policies that will never benefit Real Americans. Likewise, Smart Americans and Just Americans don’t think alike, but politically they represent the Democratic coalition.
Free America is the libertarian, pro-business, anti-government ideology that became Republican orthodoxy after Reagan. It is not, in any literal sense, conservative; it arrived in the 1980s as a kind of revolution, as a radical rejection of certain assumptions, such as Keynesian economics, that both parties had accepted through most of the 20th century. Packer writes that it “always had an insurgent mindset,” that it was intent on breaking established institutions, and that irresponsibility “was coded into its leadership.”
Free America celebrates consumer capitalism, the free market, entrepreneurs, big business, the super-rich, and the rights of individuals. It expresses little concern for society; in some respects, Free America is hostile to thinking collectively about the nation. Its heroes are Barry Goldwater, economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, novelist Ayn Rand, and, of course, Ronald Reagan—who was masterful at selling the narrative to the public with a smile and a corny wisecrack, using cheerful imagery like the “shining city on a hill.”
Free America preaches distrust, even hatred, of government. It opposes most taxes, regulation, social welfare, minimum wages, unions, Social Security, monetary and fiscal policies, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act—all on the theory that all government interventions in the economy and all constraints on business are inefficient, counter-productive, pernicious. Most government action, according to the Free America narrative, deprives the most productive elements in the economy from thriving, limits national growth and prosperity, encourages a dependent underclass, and leads to communism and tyranny. Free America maintains—despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary—that all the country needs to promote growth and prosperity are low taxes and deregulation.
Free America, “like Marxism, is a complete explanatory system,” and is attractive to many because of the purity and simplicity of its ideas: “It appeals to super-smart engineers,” Packer writes, “and others who never really grow up."
Though the Free America narrative directly benefits the wealthiest Americans, it was successfully marketed in the 1980s and 90s to the middle and working classes as something for them:
Reagan made free-market economics sound like the ally of the ordinary American, and government the enemy. . . .
Reagan made Free America sound like the Promised Land, a place where all were welcome to come pursue happiness.
But much of the Free American political agenda, which did not promote the general welfare, was hidden from voters. Implicit in the Free America narrative was “the freedom to run a business without regulation, to pay workers whatever wage the market would bear, to break a union, to pass all your wealth on to your children, to buy out an ailing company with debt and strip it for assets, to own seven houses, or to go homeless.” Free America destroyed the blue-collar workforce, disinvested in infrastructure, strangled competition, created new monopolies, concentrated wealth upward, and fattened new plutocrats. Free America gave us Charles and David Koch, “heirs to a family oil business, libertarian billionaires, who would pour money into the lobbies and propaganda machines and political campaigns of Free America on behalf of corporate power and fossil fuels.” With Free America came a new kind of legal corruption, the cozy deals “between elected officials and business executives: campaign contributions in exchange for tax cuts and corporate welfare.”
As a narrative, Packer writes, Free America "was hollow at the center, a collection of individuals all wanting more.” It “measured civic health by gross domestic product” and viewed Americans “as entrepreneurs, employees, investors, taxpayers, and consumers—everything but citizens." Though sold in the 1980s as something radical and liberating, Free America now drags the economy down like a ball and chain. The GOP has never officially abandoned its low-taxes-and-deregulation agenda, but since the turn of the century, and especially since Trump, the Free America narrative has lost its power over the party’s voting base and thus informs less and less GOP rhetoric. Today’s Republican politicians are caught, rhetorically, between two highly divergent narratives: their campaign funding and policy agenda still come from Free America, from corporate and big-money sources, but to stay viable they need to keep pandering to their Real American MAGA voters—who couldn’t care less about low corporate taxes.
Unlike Free America, Smart America isn’t an ideology. It’s a way of life, a social class. Smart America is the narrative of college, credentials, and careers. It is prosperous and comfortable, in the ten-percent income range. Most consumer goods, especially elite brands, are marketed to Smart Americans. They go to good schools, get advanced degrees, enter professions, and are good at their jobs in the knowledge economy:
[They are] salaried professionals in information technology, scientific research, design, management consulting, the upper civil service, financial analysis, medicine, law, journalism, the arts, higher education. They go to college with one another, intermarry, gravitate to desirable neighborhoods in large metropolitan areas, and do all they can to pass on their advantages to their children. Their success depends on brain power, not the exploitation of natural resources or accumulation of capital.
The Smart American narrative takes meritocracy for granted, the idea that one gets what one deserves. Smart Americans believe in effort, intelligence, checking the right boxes, scoring well on the right tests, putting in the hours, playing by the rules, and playing well with others. They’re driven by class anxiety, by a fear of criticism and failure and a horror of not living up to expectations. They work prodigious hours, both at home and in the office, both on their careers and on their social status, of which they are highly conscious. As consumers they’re early adopters, liking diversity and novelty. They make status-conscious purchases: the brands they wear and drive, their homes and addresses, the foods they eat, and their hobbies and extracurricular pursuits all send signals about who they are.
Smart Americans are passionately driven to raise smart, successful, meritocratic children, who will themselves get into the right schools, get the right credentials and careers, earn the right promotions and salaries, and enjoy their own privileges and status. In this respect, Smart America is a nearly closed, self-perpetuating system. It is very hard today for a poor child, without his own driven upper-middle-class parents, to get the credentials necessary for entry into the competitive world of Smart America. Thus our educational system and knowledge economy have “created a new hereditary class structure,” an aristocracy:
Educated professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with diminishing chances of seeing their children move up. By kindergarten, upper-class children are already a full two years ahead of their lower-class counterparts, and the achievement gap is almost unbridgeable. After seven decades of meritocracy, it's as unlikely for a lower-class child to be admitted to a top Ivy League university as it was in 1954. The country that always modeled social mobility for the rest of the world has become more class-ridden than recent aristocracies like Austria and Japan.
Packer comments that the citizens of Smart America are not nationalistic and seem uncomfortable with patriotism. This has two significant downsides. The first is that the nation must tap patriotic feeling if it wants to tackle big economic and social problems. The second is that if Smart America abandons patriotism, worse groups will claim it.
Real America is the narrative that Sarah Palin—“working-class to her boots”—galvanized and championed and that Donald Trump inevitably inherited and rode to victory. Packer's name for it derives, in fact, from Palin's use of the expression. Real America rose in direct opposition to Smart America, for whom Obama was the prime avatar:
[Palin] went after Obama with particular venom. Her animus was fueled by his suspect origins, radical associates, and redistributionist views, but the worst offense was his galling mix of class and race. Obama was a Black professional who had gone to the best schools, knew so much more than Palin, and was too cerebral and classy to get in the mud pit with her.
Packer writes that in 2008 “the country was still too rational for a candidate like Palin,” but in her white identity politics, “her proud ignorance, unrestrained narcissism, and contempt for the ‘establishment,’ she was John the Baptist to the coming of Trump."
Real America’s chief characteristics are grievance and resentment, anger with a tendency to violence, and nationalism expressed as an exclusive claim on patriotism. As Packer points out, Real America has very old roots: much American revolutionary fervor in the 18th-century was kindled by farmers and working men opposed to anything smelling of “aristocracy”—a term that meant anyone who didn’t work with his hands. The United States has always had a white, working-class, fundamentalist-Christian element that is not only poorly educated, but vigorously anti-intellectual, suspicious of authority, and hostile to modern ideas. In addition to resenting the elites above them, Real Americans resent what they imagine are shiftless freeloaders below them, Blacks and immigrants getting free rides.
Real Americans didn’t identify with the Smart Americans and the minorities in the Democratic coalition, to put it mildly, so they voted—unenthusiastically, until Trump came along—for the GOP. They were always attracted to the 2nd-amendment and anti-abortion positions in the Republican platform but indifferent to its low-tax-and-deregulation philosophy. It was Trump’s reptilian genius to bring Real America’s white identity politics, its grievance and angry energy, to the fore, overwhelming and quickly dominating the clueless GOP establishment.
Trump voters were not the wretched of the earth. They were generally ill-educated, living far from prosperous cities in nearly all-white communities, employed in sectors on the downward slope of the economy, gloomy about their own and their children's prospects, ready to think nonwhites were cutting in line or taking a free ride, threatened by competition from immigrants, and enraged by contemptuous elites who made rules that benefited only themselves. It isn't necessary to choose among race, class, culture, and social status to understand why Trump won. It was all of them together, reinforcing one another.
Just America is the newest of the narratives influencing our politics and culture, and it belongs to the youngest generation in the workforce. It entered the political arena in 2014, according to Packer, with the killing of Michael Brown by the police in Ferguson, Missouri, which ignited nationwide protests and led to the emergence of Black Lives Matter. Polls showed that in 2014, among white Democrats and people with college degrees, the percentage of Americans who believed in systemic racism shot up.
The Just American narrative is laser-focused on the existing injustices in American life:
It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today—the betrayal of equality that has always been the country's great moral shame, the dark heart of its social problems.
Just America rejects the story of the slow and steady progress of American freedom and opportunity; it is unimpressed with stories about free enterprise, economic growth and opportunity; it rejects faith in meritocracy; and it denies that the Civil Rights era and affirmative action achieved any significant progress. It is a narrative primarily, though not exclusively, about race, also making room for gender inequality and climate change as adjunct concerns.
The strength of Just America is that, unlike the other three narratives, it acknowledges America’s real, fundamental problem of inequality. Its weakness is its academic, rhetorical baggage. With its nearly untranslatable vocabulary, Just America struggles to communicate its positions broadly and effectively and seems almost uninterested in solving the problems it protests.
Like Free America, but unlike Smart America and Real America, Just America is an ideology. It is a distinct way of thinking that emphasizes subjective experience and group identity over objectivity, reason, and persuasion: "The focus on subjectivity moves oppression from the world to the self and its pain—psychological trauma, harm from speech and texts, the sense of alienation that minorities feel in constant exposure to a dominant culture.” The roots of the Just American ideology are in the academy—in university humanities and sociology departments—and it derives its ideas from critical theory. It thus rejects liberal, Enlightenment values, including the roles of reason and objectivity in solving problems. In critical theory -
[Liberal] values are an ideology by which dominant groups subjugate other groups. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power. Unlike orthodox Marxism, critical theory is concerned with language and identity more than with material conditions. In place of objective reality, critical theorists place subjectivity at the center of analysis to show how supposedly universal terms exclude oppressed groups and help the powerful rule over them.
Packer considers the Just American narrative a missed opportunity, a dead end, and a tragedy:
This country has had great movements for justice in the past and badly needs one now. But in order to work it has to throw its arms out wide. It has to tell a story in which most of us can see ourselves, and start on a path that most of us want to follow.
But Just America’s language doesn’t do this: it is often alienating and doctrinaire, chilling free speech and stifling open dialog about race. It also insists on a description of the nation that most Americans will instinctively reject:
Just America has a dissonant sound, for in its narrative justice and America never rhyme. A more accurate name would be Unjust America, in a spirit of attack rather than aspiration. For Just Americans, the country is less a project of self-government to be improved than a site of continuous wrong to be battled. In some versions of the narrative, the country has no positive value at all—it can never be made better.
Packer ends his chapter on the four Americas by concluding that he doesn’t want to live in any of the nations these narratives describe. Each may have its strengths, highlighting some positive aspect of our national character, such as freedom, justice, fairness, education, intelligence, hard work, and patriotism; but each is too constrained, exclusive, and divisive, and each fragments the nation into warring tribes, is incapable of uniting it or solving its problems.
Moving on from his descriptions of the four Americas, Packer speculates on how we might resolve our polarization. He doesn't start out particularly hopeful. The 2020 election gave us a binary choice, and across the partisan divide each viewed the other as “an existential enemy with whom compromise would be betrayal." Given the seemingly irreconcilable anger and hatred in this division, Packer asks, What choices do we have? He lists three logical options, each one intolerable or impossible: secession, conquest, or the dysfunctional status quo.
The first, “secession,” is what it sounds like, an admission that we’re not the United States of America anymore and had better stop trying to be—that we need to negotiate an amicable divorce, an actual break up of some kind, before more blood gets spilled. Ted Cruz and other Texans like to throw the s-word around every now and then just to rile up the base. “Conquest” is the hope that one side will achieve a decisive political victory, forcing the other side to slink away into impotent oblivion. The third option, maintaining our status quo, preserves –
[a] decadent politics that solves no problems but gives partisans a permanent arena for performances of righteous vitriol. Endless dysfunction, probably violence. The divide far exceeds any policy disputes over immigration or policing. Political differences are conflicts of core identity, and the mutual antagonism has the quality of hatred that precedes sectarian war. After the election, it was easy to draw comparisons with the year 1860.
Secession or partition may seem superficially attractive, but how would it be done? Red America and Blue America aren't regions with contiguous territory. They aren't even really states, since so-called red states have blue counties and blue states have red counties. Even some sort of radical federalism—in which localities would govern themselves with little connection to or input from Washington—would have to work county by county. (Thinking this way, by the way, conjures up horrible images of other benighted, divided countries in the recent past, like Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Rwanda. What a comeuppance!)
Conquest—one side winning the political battle decisively—is the dream of all partisans, the goal of political strategists:
Each side of the divide harbors a fantasy of winning. It imagines that the other side will eventually go away, whether through demographic change, repeated election defeats, the magical powers of a demagogue, or collective social suicide.
A little reflection reveals how unpalatable this would be. In our current environment, if one side wins it will have to govern the other side as a kind of captive territory. Each election, we hope, will settle the matter, but that hasn’t happened and isn't going to happen, because we're split nearly evenly. Today a slim majority of the population favors Democratic governance and policies, and this margin is likely to grow. But our Constitution favors minority rule—favors empty geography over cities full of people—and Republicans seem dedicated to seizing and holding power through undemocratic means, so there’s a strong possibility that after this year’s elections a minority of Republican citizens will, for extended periods, rule over a captive Democratic majority. Or imagine that Democrats succeed in some way in tipping the scales—winning the White House through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), for example, or (even less likely) controlling Congress and the presidency by winning statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico; then Democrats would rule over Republicans in an unstable political conquest, which would, Packer writes, solve "the political impasse but not the existential one." Regardless which side wins, how sustainable could such a conquest be, and is this really what we want for ourselves? We would remain polarized and at each other’s throats.
This seems like a dead end, yielding only despair. But Packer’s response to this, in his concluding chapters, is Not so fast! We have been here before, he says, and have come through. The U.S. has had other near-death experiences: the Civil War, of course, but also the pervasive corruption and inequality of the Gilded Age, which the Progressive era and the New Deal took on, and the horrors of Jim Crow, which the civil-rights era took on. We are indisputably in another crisis now, another near-death experience, but we can come through again, though it will take work. Self-government is hard, the job is never complete, and democracy must always battle certain corrupting forces in society, because they are constants of human nature.
The source of all America’s near-death experiences, Packer argues, is inequality—the one thing, according to Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s with amazing shrewdness and prescience, that Americans will not tolerate:
Tocqueville found that the most striking thing about American democracy, the central fact from which all his other observations sprang, was “the equality of conditions.” He didn't mean equal results . . . . He meant equal status in society—the desire to be no one’s inferior. This “passion for equality” (even as it excluded the enslaved, indigenous, and female inhabitants of America, a parenthesis almost as big as the country) was stronger than the love of freedom. “Freedom,” Tocqueville wrote, “is not the chief and continual object of their desires; it is equality for which they feel an eternal love.” Americans would rather give up their political liberty than their feeling of being equals. “They will put up with poverty, servitude, and barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy.”
This from the 25-year-old French aristocrat who toured America for a mere nine months.
In our history, Packer maintains, all our national crises have been functions of extreme, intolerable inequality: inequality of wealth and opportunity, of status, and of political power. In the 1850s and 60s it was the cognitive dissonance of liberty for me, slavery for you—that unsustainable contradiction built into our founding documents. In the Gilded Age it was unprecedented wealth and opulence juxtaposed with the wretchedness and misery of the immigrant slums. In the 1950s and 60s it was the awareness of Jim Crow, the realization that emancipation had never taken hold in the South. Our own day, Packer writes, is just another Gilded Age, another era of highly concentrated wealth and political power, with distinct, self-perpetuating classes and a strangling of opportunity and social mobility.
Warehouses of books are devoted to explaining how America became two countries. But if I were to put it in a single sentence, I would say: Inequality undermined the common faith that Americans need to create a successful multi-everything democracy. The post-industrial era has concentrated political and economic power in just a few hands and denied ordinary people control of their own lives. Overwhelmed by unfathomably large forces, Americans can no longer think and act as fellow citizens. We look for answers in private panaceas, fixed ideas, group identities, dreams of the future and the past, saviors of different types—everywhere but in ourselves. When none of these sets us free, we turn against one another.
If millions of Americans believe that the system is rigged, that government doesn’t work, that elites look down on them, and that they can’t get ahead, they are not wrong. The tragedy, a highly predictable one, is that Real America’s anger and resentment have been skillfully manipulated in the service of those already rich and powerful. In a formula as old as ancient Rome and repeated everywhere throughout history, demagogues can smell proletarian resentment, like gasoline, and they understand its explosive usefulness. Packer writes that Trump reached the White House on the strength of Tocqueville’s insight that Americans will not endure elites:
He offered his supporters a deal: they would give him unprecedented powers, even the power to decide for them what was true; in exchange, he would drag the elites down and elevate his supporters as “the people.” He would give them equality in servitude to him. Trump's inherited wealth and garish lifestyle didn't invalidate him as a populist tribune in their eyes, as progressives thought it should. Money alone doesn't violate the American idea of equality—what offends ordinary people is being looked down on by those with unwarranted power and privilege. Trump got a pass because he articulated the essence of his people's condition, which was resentment. Its taste was in his mouth, too.
In Packer’s view, our four narratives emerged in reaction to “half a century of rising inequality and declining social mobility”:
Americans tolerate more economic inequality than citizens of other modern democracies . . . . We have a stratified society in which not just wealth is unequal but also status, like a hereditary aristocracy in which some people are considered superior to others. We don't look each other in the face as fellow citizens.
In such a world, belief in equality is broken, while the desire for it still exists, stifled and smoldering, and this deforms our identity as Americans. All four narratives are driven by a competition for status—the consequence of this broken promise—that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. . . .
The idea of governing ourselves as equals has lost its hold on us. It's always an ideal, never reached, often violated. But without it America doesn't work.
If Tocqueville was right, that our “passion for equality” is our strongest national trait, then we have a lot of work to do to repair our broken world. We need to cultivate a new national narrative of Equal America:
Equality is the hidden American code, the unspoken feeling that everyone shares, even if it's not articulated or fulfilled: the desire to be everyone's equal—which is not the same thing as the desire for everyone to be equal. Equality is the first truth of our founding document, the one that leads to all the others. The word of the eighteenth-century Declaration became flesh in the dynamic commercial society of the nineteenth. Tocqueville described equality as the “ardent, insatiable, eternal, and invincible” desire of democratic peoples.
The passion for equality has an inherent danger, a by-product of our faith in rights—a danger that Tocqueville called “individualism” and Packer calls “atomization.” It’s what happens when people over-emphasize individual rights and neglect to balance them with a sense of responsibility to the community: people get "the idea that they don't owe anything to anyone.” The revolutionary and post-revolutionary generations were highly aware of this problem; they thought deeply and wrote extensively about balancing individual rights with duties to “the commonwealth.” The Founders feared the tendency of democratic societies to degenerate into “licentiousness”—a term that lacked the sexual flavor it has today and meant simply lawlessness, disorder, mob-rule, and indifference to the common good, including uncontrolled avarice. The Founders would have considered our anti-vaxxing and anti-masking hysterias in the midst of a pandemic as “licentious.” They believed that “republicanism”—what today we call democracy—could only succeed among a “virtuous” people. In their view, a successful republic required both a recognition of individual rights and a widespread dedication to the common good. Therefore, then as now, what protects a democratic society from falling apart is a belief in self-government, in which equal citizens work through free institutions for a common purpose. Without the sense that they are equal, they will not cooperate in the project:
[When] equality disappears, there's no longer any basis for shared citizenship, the art of self-government is lost, and everything falls apart. This is our condition today. Democracy is not just parchment and marble, the Constitution, rights, laws, and institutions. It's also the action that can bring us out of our isolation and bind us together. But we cannot act as fellow citizens unless we are equal.
To Packer, we cannot revive and protect self-government without correcting the real and perceived inequalities in our culture, society, politics, and economy: “Permanently unequal conditions in such a rich country . . . shred the social cohesion on which self-government depends.” He makes reasonable recommendations, but he downplays, it seems to me, how gargantuan the task is that he’s proposing. He itemizes the essential components of an equalizing agenda, one that requires an interventionist government and that reads like a point-by-point reversal of the Free America agenda that the GOP has preached and pursued for the past 40 years. It’s also something that the right will, of course, attack, with relentless cynicism and hyperbole, as “communism.”
The first step is a robust economic safety net to keep poor and working Americans from drowning, to help them “do more than survive just below the misery line.” Self-government isn’t possible when the lives of large segments of the population are consumed with the struggles of just getting through the month. This safety net includes “universal health care, child care, paid family and sick leave, stronger workplace safety protections, unemployment insurance that doesn't fail in a crisis, a living minimum wage.” Readers will notice that many of these provisions were included—and have subsequently been stripped out in congressional negotiations, and effectively defeated, at least for now—in the Biden Administration’s “Build Back Better” initiative. Packer quotes Walter Lippmann from 1914: “You can't expect civic virtue from a disenfranchised class,” and “the first item in the program of self-government is to drag the whole population well above the misery line.” As Packer notes, Lippmann’s observation still holds a century later: “What kind of civic virtue is possible for a nonunion Amazon warehouse associate putting in mandatory overtime with a fever and leaving her remote-schooled kids in the care of her elderly mother?”
But an equalizing project that restores Americans’ faith in self-government needs to do more than just reduce misery. It needs to reform elections, making it easier for everyone to vote while simultaneously restoring faith in the integrity of the process. It needs to protect the political and economic power of average working Americans by strengthening labor law, making it easier for workers to organize, and creating new institutions to buttress labor’s power in post-industrial sectors of the economy. It should expand the estate tax. It should fundamentally democratize education by restructuring school funding, relying less on local taxes and more on state and federal revenue sources. The equalizing project needs “large-scale government investments into key national sectors—clean energy, manufacturing, education, and caregiving—to create jobs, stimulate innovation, and raise the pay and status of workers.” And it desperately needs a new assertive federal antitrust regime to battle the anti-democratic power of today’s monopolies:
Today the greatest obstacle to economic freedom is monopoly power. By allowing corporations to dominate both government and workers, Free America has weakened the countervailing powers that are as necessary to genuinely free markets as checks and balances are to free governments. . . .
A second antitrust age would increase innovation, decentralize power, revitalize depressed regions, and free both workers and small businesses to compete. Its strongest supporters should be Free Americans.
All of this is less radical than it sounds. In some ways it just restores good-government structures that we took for granted in the middle of the last century, before Reagan and his libertarian, anti-government ideology started demolishing our broad middle class: “The way to begin reversing the deterioration is to show the American people that government can make their lives better."
To achieve these goals Packer believes that we have three primary tools at our disposal; all three are necessary, and they are all hard: good journalism, good government, and activism. These are the same tools that Americans used to address earlier crises—slavery in the middle of the 19th century, extreme poverty at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, and segregation and racial disenfranchisement in the middle of the 20th century. Packer includes short biographies of three admirable Americans to illustrate his point and to inspire us: Horace Greeley, the mid-19th-century abolitionist and activist publisher of the New-York Tribune; Frances Perkins, the social reformer who became Secretary of Labor under FDR, the prime architect of the New Deal, and the first woman cabinet member; and Bayard Rustin, the gay civil-right activist and behind-the-scenes strategist for Martin Luther King, Jr.
Packer’s tone at the end of Last Best Hope is hortatory and cautiously encouraging:
All of this asks us to place more faith in ourselves and one another than we can bear. On some days the project seems preposterous and the effort exhausting. But I'm an American and there's no escape. We've never known any other way of life. We have to make this one.
If we want to achieve a more equal, democratic America we need to start moving in the right direction, he says, though the battle will be long and slow because of "the headwinds of resistance from opposition forces” and “the structural obstacles embedded in the Constitution.” He believes that the agenda itself will be broadly popular because its benefits will accrue to the whole society. “Weakening the new aristocracy and restoring the dignity of labor will help to break up the concentrated power that corrupts our politics and puts all of the economy's rewards in the hands of speculators and meritocrats."
Finally, Packer calls for progressive activists to reform their movement—specifically for the protesters of Just America to broaden their perspective and appeal, to drop their “ideology of rigid identity groups” and confront the oppression of the whole American working class:
We need a new form of activism in the coming decade, the kind that [Bayard] Rustin was reaching for in the years after the great civil rights victories. We need an activism of cohesion. We need an activism that doesn't separate Americans into like-minded factions but brings Americans together across tribal lines.
Last Best Hope is a provocative read, but I’m not sure how convincing I find all of it, nor am I as optimistic as Packer is about our future. I agree that our extreme inequality strangles us economically and politically and limits the extent to which we can all participate in self-government, and that the end-goal of our activism should be to reverse inequality—to raise the national economic floor, so to speak, and give average Americans more control over their own lives. I like all the elements Packer listed in his Equal America agenda. But make no mistake, this will be fiercely, relentlessly, viciously opposed by the right, so the first step in our activism must be to secure political power—what Packer calls “conquest”—for longer than a tenuous two-year House term. Unless Democrats can achieve a fairly durable and decisive victory in congressional and presidential elections, with substantial and progressive majorities in both the House and the Senate, we have no chance of enacting any kind of broader equalizing agenda to improve the lives of all Americans. So election reform, including a new voting-rights bill, statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, massive support for Democratic Senate candidates in purple and red states, and the NPVIC, all need to be at the top of our national agendas. At state and local levels, liberals / progressives / Democrats need to infiltrate government everywhere and work to make GOP positions less and less secure.
And I probably agree with Packer that inequality is at the root of the Real America phenomenon. What doesn’t appear in his analysis is the outsized role that organized and deliberate propaganda has played in turning a legitimately resentful faction into a giant, explosive insurrection. There’s something incendiary going on, and it’s bigger than Trump, and I don’t think that Packer—or Ezra Klein, for that matter—has gotten to the heart of it.
Finally, I think that Packer is a little too negative about Just America—motivated, probably, by the desire to be equally snarky about all four narratives: he’s an equal-opportunity snark. His description of Just America strikes me as a caricature—one that probably rings true on certain college campuses and perhaps in some newsrooms, but can’t define the whole of the movement. If Just America includes people like Stacey Abrams, Bryan Stevenson, and Sherrilyn Ifill, for example, then we may not have to worry about its members being consumed with critical theory, subjectively inarticulate, or unwilling to address the nation’s real problems.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374603663/lastbesthope