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George packer3/14/2023 It’s a phrase Palin used during the 2008 campaign. It was a white Christian-nationalist narrative that said, “Your free trade, your immigration, even your corporations and monopolies have not improved a lot of towns, and rural areas have sunk and are in deep trouble, and have some of the same serious problems that the inner cities have had for decades.” And so, when Trump came along, in 2015, he intuited in his reptilian way that the old, sunny, optimistic Reagan message didn’t cut it, and that something more dark and nativist and ugly would appeal-that people didn’t want to hear how good things were. And that rebellion was out in the heartland. There was a rebellion from below within Free America. Sarah Palin was the early warning sign that Free America was breaking up. And Democrats of Clinton’s generation moved way over toward the Free America side, in terms of their willingness to see the private sector as the main engine of both growth and fairness. But underlying that there was a consensus about what the economy needed and what society needed. Bitter political fights between the parties in the nineties, all kinds of scandals and impeachment. To me, he embodies it.Īnd this is also the Democratic Party going along with the Reagan consensus.Įxactly. Free America in the eighties, Smart America with Clinton in the nineties. And in a way you can see they have followed each other in power from one decade to the next. But, really, Smart America takes on the parameters set by Free America: deregulation and free trade and open immigration. So there’s affirmative action, there’s diversity hiring, there’s children’s health insurance. It’s Americans who believe that talent and effort should be rewarded but who also think we’re part of a society and that society has to make sure that everyone has roughly an equal chance. It doesn’t quite apply to a different group of Americans, and a different story, which I call Smart America. And that was a really potent story that Reagan told, and that the Republican Party lived by for decades, and to some extent still does. The best way to make it is to get government out of the way and to cut taxes and deregulate and set us free in order to use our industry and talent to make something new. And it says, “We’re all individuals.” We all have a chance to make it. It’s been the most dominant narrative in our society. And this is really the story of my adult life, from the late nineteen-seventies onward. The basic division that I began to see begins with libertarianism, which I call Free America, which is Reagan’s America. But I felt that in the last few years, politically and culturally, things have happened that showed that there are divisions within, as well as between, those two big blocks of Americans. We’ve all lived with the red-blue division for about twenty years. Why did you decide to structure this book around four Americas? He is also the author of the books “ The Assassins’ Gate” and “ The Unwinding.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Barack Obama failed to change the direction of the country, whether a more progressive form of patriotism is possible, and whether the cultural controversies roiling American institutions are an inevitable result of inequality. I recently spoke by phone with Packer, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic and was previously a staff writer at The New Yorker. He proposes a different vision, which he thinks offers brighter possibilities, centered around the concept of equality and non-demagogic appeals to patriotism. “I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them,” Packer writes. during the pandemic, and then offers sketches of four different visions of the country: Free America, of Reaganism Smart America, of Silicon Valley and other professional élites Real America, of Trumpist reaction and Just America, of a new generation of leftists. In his new book, “ Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal,” George Packer writes that the United States is in a state of disrepair, brought about primarily by the fact that “inequality undermined the common faith that Americans need to create a successful multi-everything democracy.” The book opens with an essay on the state of the U.S.
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