Book Review: Last Best Hope

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

A friend recommended this book to me when it came out in 2023, but I guess it took the tumult of the 2024 election to make me want to understand just what the heck is going on in our country these days. Packer does a good job of breaking it down for us. (I may get a few of the details wrong, because I read it a while before writing this review.)

The first part of the book discusses the events leading up to the 2020 election, especially with regards to the botched pandemic response. Packer has no love lost for the ass-grabbing reality TV star nepo-baby who lost the 2020 election, and he waxes poetic about the depth of the damage that thieving rapist’s selfish lust for power and disregard for America did for our collective ability for political stability and civil discourse. But he also recognizes that ubiquitous rabble-rousing, lying, attention whore is just the most obvious lesion of a deeper cancer, and that the division in our country is years in the making.

With unexpected sympathy, Packer divides America into four categories of people, each of whom believe that they represent the only genuine force for good: Real, Just, Smart and Free. Real America and Free America are mostly the right wing, representing the Evangelical Christians and Libertarians who most value moral righteousness and personal freedoms. Just America and Smart America are more liberal, representing people who are most concerned with social justice for the historically downtrodden and the myth of the meritocracy, (of which Smart America are the beneficiaries.) He discusses in general who these people are, how they came to believe in their version of the path America needs to take, and how the pandemic shaped it.

I’d like to say that this book gave me more sympathy for people who think differently, but I think it actually just convinced me that everyone is wrong in their own special way. Just Americans are often out of touch with the people they claim to be defending and do more harm than good in their efforts to balance the scales. Free Americans don’t realize that removing government regulations often just damages their own health and livelihoods while benefiting huge corporations that are deeply entrenched in the political machine. Smart Americans don’t realize that the so-called meritocracy is just a codified way of using education to leave swaths of people behind while pretending the disenfranchised had a fair shake, and of course I don’t much identify with Real Americans because I think that the Christo-Fascism they’re peddling is a dystopian nightmare and that “Christian morality” is usually neither Christian nor moral.

I’d recommend this book for anyone who’s been watching the news since 2020, fearing for the future of our country, and wondering how and why things went off the rails.




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