Hope or Realism?

(Photo by Sushil Nash on Unsplash)

Review of George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2021).

1

George Packer begins his reflections on the state of the nation with the following quip: “I am an American. No, I don’t want pity.” (Kindle loc 30) Packer’s book expresses his hopes for national renewal, however bleak things seem to be; pity is antithetical to sustaining these hopes. However, a paragraph later, he says the following:

I know a woman who said of her own husband and children, “They’re not the people I’d choose to be quarantined with.” Are my fellow citizens the people I’d choose to be quarantined with? Well, there’s no choice. They’re mine, and I’m theirs . . . (loc 30–35)

This is not an expression of hope. It sounds more like an exhausted lament and a premonition that the American experiment may end not with a bang but a whimper. If his fellow Americans are that clueless and corrupt, why should one not feel sorry for him and his nation’s plight?

I was not prepared to like this book when I read about its central premise: that the citizens of the United States have sorted themselves into four hostile and equally benighted camps. I thought it would probably be an extended exercise in both-sides-ism (or, as in this case, all-four-sides-ism). His book occasionally lapses into this kind of…