Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel on leftists, Demons, follows a liberal teacher who doesn’t understand how his high-minded idealism leads to nihilism and civil unrest. George Packer, a National Book Award-winning journalist and writer at the Atlantic, is a high-minded liberal who is here to teach us about American identity and why nihilism and civil unrest are rampant. His new book, Last Best Hope, introduces liberals to populist critiques of the status quo and merges them with a liberal historical narrative of how we got here. There are many things to commend in Last Best Hope, but its partisanship undermines its most important points and demonstrates that there is no narrative or myth that will save us.
Last Best Hope raises the quality of political discussions at a time when they’ve degraded. Packer asks why we’ve become a mess, whether we’re moving toward civil war, and if America is even a “we” anymore. The book begins by describing the events of 2020 and then gives their backstory.
Packer uses the idea of narrative or storytelling to organize the book. “Instead of analyzing trends and events and numbers, I want to talk about what happened [to get us to 2020] in terms of narrative.” Packer describes four different “narratives” of America: “Free America” is the Libertarian vision of life, “Real America” is the populist Right’s vision, “Smart America” is the technocratic elite’s vision, and “Just America” describes the vision of the woke.
“Equal America” is Packer’s response to these false narratives. It represents the vision that he thinks can glue us together. Packer writes that “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.” His single sentence description of how we arrived at the events of 2020 is that “inequality undermined the common faith that Americans need to create a successful multi-everything democracy.” He blames the Republicans for pushing an economic agenda that breeds wealth inequality and the meritocratic Democrats for creating a sneering culture that looks down on others. He discusses interesting ideas such as the negative impacts of trade on our manufacturing base and elite overproduction.
Referencing Alexis de Tocqueville, Packer calls on us to rediscover the “art of being free.” Refreshingly, he reaffirms that freedom is not just a passive state but an activity that requires virtue. And he delivers important messages that are absent from mainstream liberalism, as when he writes that “countries are not social science experiments. They have organic qualities, some positive, some destructive, that can’t be wished away. Knowing who we are lets us see what kind of change is possible.”
Packer identifies many of the most salient critiques of the political status quo prior to Trump, but by using “narrative,” he gives himself permission to make assertions without argument. Those who live outside Park Slope might find it laughably absurd what Packer chooses to mention versus what he leaves out. For example, Newt Gingrich is depicted as an epoch-defining villain instead of a minor character. Meanwhile, President Bill Clinton’s policy on trade with China is portrayed as the mistake of a well-meaning genius, with no mention of how the Chinese Communist Party funneled money into the Democratic National Committee in order to get that policy change. And it’s hilarious to trace the origins of Trump’s vulgarity without mentioning Clinton’s sordid escapades with an intern and a cigar.
Narrative must leave out information in order to function. In “Smart America,” Packer relies on the work of Michael Sandel and Michael Lind to deliver now-familiar critiques of meritocracy. But why did attempts to create a cognitive elite end up lowering standards and dumbing down public conversations? In “Just America,” he states that the woke phenomenon is truly about the relationship between white and black America. But why was its rise accompanied by calls for children to be chemically castrated? And it’s not as if liberals have been silent about equality. Like the liberals in Demons, Packer never questions his own ideology’s role in creating the situation. Why hasn’t liberal fixation on equality done anything to stop us from becoming a more unequal society?
Packer admits that his use of the word “narrative” is closer to the idea of “myth.” “The most durable narratives,” he writes, “are not the ones that stand up best to fact checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires.” George Washington and the cherry tree is a myth. It’s a story that took hold in the American imagination because “I cannot tell a lie” echoed, “Thou shall not bear false witness,” and the average American’s natural love for home merged with his religion in the figure of a national hero. This story grew organically out of the people’s imagination, and it united them because, unlike a narrative, it was never created with intent.
The rationalistic view of man that places the consenting individual at the origin of society constantly dissolves the bonds between citizens. Intellectuals who understand this often propose creating new “shared stories” or myths. This is not a new idea — it can be traced back to Plato’s noble lie. But narratives don’t work as myths when everyone is aware they are constructed. Today, political actors attempt to create myths to motivate their supporters, but such consciously created myths are more like propaganda. Instead of uniting people, they divide them, shifting the blame for their troubles onto designated enemies and intensifying polarization.
The word Packer is looking for is neither “narrative” nor “myth” but “tradition.” Despite constant propaganda warfare, people still depend upon their society’s stories to answer existential questions. A society’s explicit and implicit myths, stories, and symbols contain different possible paths of evolution, and each generation moves them in certain directions. This process is called tradition, and traditions can be derailed.
Tocqueville wrote that the formal laws of American democracy only worked with the Anglo-American tradition. He observed that when people outside our tradition copied our laws, it resulted in a curious combination of anarchy and tyranny. Packer grounds his vision of “Equal America” in the tradition of the Declaration of Independence, writing, “Equality is the first truth of our founding document, the one that leads to all the others.” But already, at the time of the declaration, there was a 100-year-old political tradition on this continent. If we wish truly to capture our tradition’s different possibilities and perhaps reclaim symbols to unite us, we must trace that tradition to its origin: the Mayflower Compact.
The Mayflower Compact teaches us that the heart of the American tradition is the concept of self-rule. There is nothing in it about individual rights or about liberty or equality in the modern sense. Instead, the compact describes the liberty to “covenant and combine” as a people to create “just and equal laws” that serve the “general good.” Packer uses the term “self-government,” but he defines it simply as “democracy in action.” There are so many ideological accretions on the word “democracy” that it obscures important contemporary dynamics, such as how mass immigration undermines self-rule by diluting the power of current citizens. The great quest of the 21st century is to use new technology to create the material and media circumstances in which citizens can once again covenant and combine to rule themselves.
The greatest obstacle in that quest is what Packer calls the “conquest scenario,” his term for Democratic plans to destroy the filibuster, add new states, and pack the courts. His book is partly aimed at liberals who may think the conquest option is a good idea, and he does identify an “authoritarian strain” in blue America, but it’s still remarkable that Packer objects to the conquest scenario because it “absolves itself of the democratic imperative to persuade,” not because it would be tyranny.
At one point, Packer critiques libertarians who see freedom as liberation from all obligations, telling them to grow up. But libertarians aren’t the only ones who cling to a childish ideology. If we’re really down to our last hope, shouldn’t liberals be willing to reassess a single concrete issue? Why not immigration? Why not transgender ideology? Packer repackages some of the most interesting conversations of the past five years and picks up the right trail, but ultimately, he fails to go far enough. Politicians and thinkers on the Right have begun to shed their own side’s orthodoxy. Liberals who recognize we have a problem need to ask themselves what role their own ideology has played in bringing us to this point, or else they will continue to trail behind, swinging wildly between fantasies of conquest and narratives of cliche.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
