Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

He died in 1987, but it took another twenty-six years for him to receive his due, when President Obama bestowed the Medal of Freedom on the late Bayard Rustin.

For much of the twentieth century, the two parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. The interests of business were on one side, workers on the other. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasize

The American passion for equality is thwarted by vastly and permanently unequal conditions. If Americans are to achieve the equality that has always attracted and always eluded us, government will have to be the prime mover, though not the only one.

Inequality destroys the sense of shared citizenship, and with it self-government.

as long as the promise of equality is mocked by the reality, and the chance of a poor kid getting into a good university is close to zero, and that chance remains the only entry point to a dignified life, then we are going to keep enduring emergencies of one kind or another. We will continue to be threatened by demagogues exploiting the people’s ha

now it’s clear that all the important trends began in the seventies. It was the end of postwar, middle-class, bipartisan America.

Nothing Trump did was more destructive than turning the pandemic into a central front of the partisan war. How many of the hundreds of thousands of American dead would be breathing today if he had told the whole country to wear a mask?

There’s another way to understand Just America, like the other three narratives, and that’s in terms of class. Why does so much of its work take place in human resources departments, reading lists, and awards ceremonies? In the summer of 2020 the protesters in the streets of New York were disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees m

Ever since Reagan, the Republican Party has been a coalition of business interests and downscale whites, many of them evangelical Christians. By 2010 it was like a figure in a hall of mirrors whose head and body have been severed but continue to move as if they’re still attached. The persistence of the coalition required an immense amount of self-d