LAST BEST HOPE

Can we save ourselves from ourselves in America’s “cold civil war”?

As New Yorker contributor and National Book Award winner Packer notes in this sharp and concise analysis, there’s one good thing to say about the current pandemic: With its arrival, “it became impossible to pass through the world in the normal bovine manner.” Of course, it also revealed massive cracks in the system and amplified a rift in which people either scream at each other or maintain a polite silence, an avoidance that “solves nothing” and indeed, by Packer’s account, is “part of the collapse.” Something is badly amiss in what used to be thought of as the last best hope in the world. Instead, we are overrun with instability, contending tribes, and useless politicians. Into this chaos stepped Donald Trump, who failed to become the dictator he so obviously wished to be only by virtue of “his own ineptitude, along with our creaky institutions and the remaining democratic faith of the American people.” Even so, Packer charges, we’re all responsible for Trump, in part because there are yawning gulfs among numerous visions of America. There’s the “Free America” of the libertarians, so susceptible to demagoguery; the “Smart America” of the progressives, which leaves blue-collar workers in the dust; the “Real America,” a bastion of racism, ignorance, and resentment; and the “Just America,” which “forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today.” In all of these, there are the ingredients of a fifth vision: “Equal America,” which involves “extending the New Deal to Americans in more areas of their lives,” from affordable and universal health care to a living minimum wage and beyond. It’s a project that “asks us to put more faith in ourselves and one another than we can bear,” but it surely beats where we are now.

A thought-provoking study in civics, history, and the decline and fall of self-government.