
Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“Now we’re in an age where you can simply reinforce your own viewpoints. And it’s hard to have a discussion of the facts when you’re dealing with two separate sets of facts—two sets of talking points that came down from on high. With the Internet, all of us were going to be content producers, but it’s become an echo chamber.”
George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
What do foreigners say about us? Exactly what we notice in our compatriots when we encounter them abroad, cringe, and head the other way, because we recognize ourselves. That we speak in loud voices, that we smile a lot, that we immediately use first names, that the answer to how we’re doing is always “Great,” that we make friends easily and have n
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The financial crisis of 2008, and the Great Recession that followed, had a similar effect on the home front. The guilty parties were elites—bankers, traders, regulators, and policymakers. Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman and an Ayn Rand fan, admitted that the crisis undermined his faith in the narrative of Free America. But those who di
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The libertarians were different. They slipped more easily into the American stream. In their insistence on freedom they could claim to be descendants of Locke, Jefferson, and the classical liberal tradition. Some of them interpreted the Constitution as a libertarian document for individual and states rights under a limited federal government, not a
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The first big step is to repair the safety net so that workers and families are no longer at perpetual risk of falling through and drowning, as millions have in the pandemic. This means essentially extending the New Deal to more Americans in more areas of their lives: universal health care, child care, paid family and sick leave, stronger workplace
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The quality of Free America’s leaders steadily deteriorated—falling from Reagan to Gingrich to Ted Cruz, from William F. Buckley to Ann Coulter to Sean Hannity—with no bottom.
George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
Just America isn’t only concerned with race. Some followers of the narrative are socialists and environmentalists, and they devote their efforts to minimum-wage laws and green energy. Some care passionately about sexism. Some are militants for abolishing the biological definition of gender. The most radical version of the narrative lashes together
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The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires.
George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” Lincoln said. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”