Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

In the class structure of Smart America, meritocrats occupy an important level. Above them sit the always-getting-richer very rich, whom they regard with loathing and envy, and at whom they direct a continuous barrage of critical fire. Most of the books and columns and gossip aimed at the 1 percent come from people just a few percentage points belo

By some accounts the stimulus payments and unemployment relief put more money in the hands of desperate people than the New Deal had done. It staved off widespread hunger and homelessness. Another chunk of money saved tens of thousands of small businesses from destruction. But by the end of summer most of the money was gone, while the virus was sti

The year 2020 began with an impeachment trial, the third in American history. The president had used his official powers to extort a political favor from a foreign leader in order to help his own reelection. His guilt was clear—only the tribal loyalty of his party kept him in office. But before long hardly anyone remembered the impeachment. The yea

This influence always went far beyond our ability to impose our will. It’s strongest where no coercion is involved. Our culture has a pervasive reach beyond anything the British Empire or Soviet internationalism or the French mission civilisatrice achieved—this in spite of Americans’ unwillingness to live abroad. Gilbert and Sullivan did not catch

Americans are now meritocrats by birth. They know this and, because it violates their fundamental beliefs, they go to a lot of trouble not to know it.

The cosmopolitan outlook of Smart America overlaps in some areas with the libertarian views of Free America. Each embraces capitalism and the principle of meritocracy: the belief that your talent and effort should determine your reward. In the narrative of Smart America, meritocracy stands alongside democracy as the twin pillars of the American sys

What is the narrative of Just America? It sees American society not as mixed and fluid, ever more so through time, but as a fixed hierarchy, like a caste system. (Caste is the title of one of the most popular books of Just America; two others are The New Jim Crow and Stamped from the Beginning.) In the words of William Faulkner, for Just America, “

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. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new social arrangements, new ways of living. They ref

These conditions, largely the result of decades of anti-government ideology, turn equality into a lie, and the lie deranges everyone. The way to begin reversing the deterioration is to show the American people that government can make their lives better. We’ve been ravaged by a short emergency—the pandemic and the depression-like conditions that it