“Our bridges are buckling, another factory has closed up, badly ventilated schools are failing to educate another generation of children, hospital beds are overflowing again, local shops are posting out-of-business signs while Amazon delivery trucks fill the streets, our thought leaders sound like carnival barkers, our citizenry seems to be suffering through early-stage National Cognitive Decline, and the common skeleton is unknitting and likely to fall apart in a heap of bones for future archaeologists to study with furrowed expressions of puzzled sadness.”
Terse and direct, "Last Best Hope" is both insightful and simplistic, as George Packer strives to deliver sane explanations to contemporary America and the events of 2020.
“It achieved its ultimate expression on the last day of 2020, in all those yellow Gadsden flags waving around the Capitol – a mob of freedom-loving Americans taking back their constitutional rights by shitting on the floors of Congress and hunting down elected representatives to kidnap and kill. That was their freedom in its pure and reduced form.”
Packer notes the myriad of similarities between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, differentiated primarily by the style of delivery only. The author also documents how the standards for someone holding higher office have all but disappeared.
“He offered his supporters a deal: they would give him unprecedented powers, even the power to decide for them what was true; in exchange, he would drag the elites down and elevate his supporters as ‘the people.’ He would give them equality in servitude to him.”
“Sexting with a staffer does more harm to a politician than profiteering in a national crisis.”
“A character in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom puts it this way: ‘If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. 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. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life.’”
His thoughts on the identity as the core issue in the country -- and the four national segments he has defined -- are fascinating, but the book struggles when too many binary conclusions are drawn.
Attempting to ascribe reason to an unreasonable state of existence is an unenviable task for any writer. Packer brings meticulous research and a flurry of citations, but "Last Best Hope" ultimately offers no solutions -- are there any? -- and reinforces the hopelessness of the current climate.
“When I began this book, millions of voters were standing in long lines and there was not yet a vaccine. As I finish it, Trump is gone and people are lining up for shots. He left us less free, less equal, more divided, more delusional, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader. But he’s gone, and we’re still here.”
“Democracy depends on belief in democracy – on an extraordinary leap of faith by ordinary people that their rulers will abide by the rules, that their votes will count, that their compatriots won’t tear the country apart, that lies won’t become truth. When the checks and balances have all given way, the last barrier to an authoritarian regime is public opinion. Even that might not be enough.”
