Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

Knowing who we are lets us see what kinds of change are possible. The past doesn’t tell us what will happen next, but it suggests what we can and cannot become. The desire to be equal, the individualism it produces, the hustle for money, the love of novelty, the attachment to democracy, the distrust of authority and intellect—these won’t disappear.

Libertarianism, like Marxism, is a complete explanatory system. It appeals to super-smart engineers and others who never really grow up.

But Smart Americans are uneasy with patriotism. It’s an unpleasant relic of a more primitive time, like cigarette smoke or dog racing. It wakes up emotions that can have ugly consequences, from sports fans chanting “USA! USA!” all the way to the hypernationalism of the post-9/11 years. The shining city on a hill is heavily armed and dangerous. Bett

Plenty of politicians come from the working class—Palin never left it. She went after Obama with particular venom. Her animus was fueled by his suspect origins, radical associates, and redistributionist views, but the worst offense was his galling mix of class and race. Obama was a Black professional who had gone to the best schools, knew so much m

The first big step is to repair the safety net so that workers and families are no longer at perpetual risk of falling through and drowning, as millions have in the pandemic. This means essentially extending the New Deal to more Americans in more areas of their lives: universal health care, child care, paid family and sick leave, stronger workplace

The quality of Free America’s leaders steadily deteriorated—falling from Reagan to Gingrich to Ted Cruz, from William F. Buckley to Ann Coulter to Sean Hannity—with no bottom.

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

Americans are now meritocrats by birth. They know this and, because it violates their fundamental beliefs, they go to a lot of trouble not to know it.

Perkins spent the twelve years of Roosevelt’s presidency doing more than anyone other than FDR himself to make the New Deal a reality. Everything on her list became law, most notably social security, changing the basic relation of Americans to their government. She also desegregated the Labor Department cafeteria, tried (and failed) to bring large

The oldest conflict in American politics is the one between individualism and centralism. Reagan changed the terms by inverting them: the descendants of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, with their desire for independence, became sturdy car-company executives and investment bankers yearning to breathe free of big government. The heirs of Hamilton’s arist