George Packer: On Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

Julian E. Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, a CNN political analyst, and a regular guest on NPR’s Here and Now. He is also the author and editor of 22 books, including The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (2015), winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress; Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (Norton), co-authored with Kevin Kruse; Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party (Penguin Press), named a New York Times Editor’s Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books 2020; and his latest, Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement (Yale University Press). Soon-to-be-released titles are Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours (Columbia University Press), co-edited with Paul Starr, and a new edited collection, The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton University Press). Zelizer, who has published more than 1,000 op-eds, has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the New York Historical Society, and New America.

George Packer is an author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His previous books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, winner of the National Book Award; The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq; and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. In 2020, a ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election undermined by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country. The events exposed the nation’s underlying conditions – discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities – and how difficult they are to fix. In Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Packer explores four narratives now dominating American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression. None of these narratives, Packer argues, can sustain a democracy. Looking for a common American identity, he finds it in the passion for equality. The Washington Post noted that “sharp portraits of [America’s factions] are the heart of this book. [Packer’s] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling.”