1/14/2024 0 Comments George packer![]() On the center left, there’s “Smart America,” the people from the fanciest colleges with the highest test scores, educated professionals who rode the meritocracy escalator. You can’t uphold traditional values while proudly supporting the blatant crassness and corruption of Trumpism unless life in Real America isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The “conservative orderly heart” that Norman Mailer sniffed at during the 1968 Republican Convention has mutated into ressentiment and self-pity. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. Packer’s quote from Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010) elaborates: If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Palin had not much more to offer the American public than platitudes about hockey moms and stock phrases such as “you betcha.” The deeper you look, life in Real America isn’t as it seems, partly due to the policies of Free America, whose winner-take-all economic vision left Real America in the lurch, ravaged by opioid addiction, defensive, and conspiratorial. Packer cites Sarah Palin as a representative and she was indeed very popular for a time, but this gives a media creation far too much credit.Ĭonsider Palin’s very American slide from vice presidential candidate to reality TV star. Nothing wrong with any of these, of course, but the dirty little secret is that Real America doesn’t adhere to those standards any more than the rest of us. Real America touts faith, physical work, honesty, modesty, decency, and patriotism. Depicted in a million gauzy, nostalgic political campaign ads, this is the land of small towns, family farms, community churches, and town diners. The gradual allegiance with so-called “Real America” seems counterintuitive. “For Reagan and the narrative of Free America, it meant freedom from government and the bureaucrats.” Naturally, there was a catch: “he majority of Americans who elected Reagan President did not vote for the destruction of the blue-collar workforce, or the rise of a new plutocracy, or legislation rigged in favor of organized money.” The economic precarity still felt all across the country can be traced to that laissez-faire mentality. ![]() It appeals to Silicon Valley types and anti-government militias alike by reacting to any regulation on the market or the individual as vampires respond to garlic.įree America fully emerged in the Reagan era. The freedom it champions is about personal and corporate freedom-the negative liberty of ‘don’t tread on me.’” The foundational texts are from Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the steely selfishness of Ayn Rand. We begin with “Free America,” the most politically influential, which “draws on libertarian ideas … install in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. A novelist and a playwright, his schematic is infused with history and literature as ways of judging each narrative’s virtues and vices. Packer acknowledges this, letting that complexity inform his understanding. American life is too open-ended, multifaceted, and improvised to be neatly placed into specific categories. To this end, Packer maps out what he calls “the four Americas.” Of course, this is bound to be reductive in some ways. They’re mine, and I’m theirs.” As long as we’re all still Americans, at this chaotic moment we need to take stock of the true state of the Union. “Are my fellow citizens the people I’d choose to be quarantined with? Well, there’s no choice. Inspired by political pamphlets such as Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) and George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), Packer mixes mordancy and hopefulness. Given this dismal picture, it’s encouraging that Packer has emerged from Covid’s imposed isolation still committed to working through the American democratic experiment. ![]() Packer is kidding, as Al Franken used to say, “on the square.” We still haven’t yet passed the national Covid test, and there is the very real possibility that someone will attempt to overturn the next election, which is exactly what traditionally made Americans pity other countries. No, I don’t want pity.” This humble, witty self-deprecation doesn’t come naturally to a country that habitually claims it is the greatest in the history of the world. Journalist and novelist George Packer begins his latest book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, with a joke. Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewalīy George Packer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pp., $27)
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