Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way it renders the Black working class invisible. From its beginnings Real America has also been religious, and in a particular way—evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. The truth w

Trump violated conservative orthodoxy on numerous issues, including taxes and entitlements. “I want to save the middle class,” he said. “The hedge-fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.” But Trump’s main heresies were on trade, immigration, and war. He was the first American politician to suc

The historical demand of the oppressed is inclusion as equal citizens in all the institutions of American life. With identity politics, the demand became different: not just to enlarge the institutions, but to change them profoundly.

Tocqueville described self-government as an “art” that needs to be learned. It’s what Americans no longer know how to do, or even want to do together. It’s hard work, for it needs not just ballots and newspapers and official documents, which we still have, but also trust, which we’ve lost. It depends on the ability to argue, persuade, and compromis

At the start of the pandemic, supermarket cashiers and delivery drivers were suddenly heroes. At the end of the year the heroes were just as obscure: election officials, poll workers, vote counters. Despite the virus and the lies and the fears, the election of 2020 turned out to be the biggest and best run in American history. Voting systems were n

At the heart of our divisions is almost half a century of rising inequality and declining social mobility. Americans tolerate more economic inequality than citizens of other modern democracies: if anyone can become anything, today’s unequal results are fair and might well change tomorrow. That was never completely true, but now it’s plainly false.

These conditions, largely the result of decades of anti-government ideology, turn equality into a lie, and the lie deranges everyone. The way to begin reversing the deterioration is to show the American people that government can make their lives better. We’ve been ravaged by a short emergency—the pandemic and the depression-like conditions that it

What do foreigners say about us? Exactly what we notice in our compatriots when we encounter them abroad, cringe, and head the other way, because we recognize ourselves. That we speak in loud voices, that we smile a lot, that we immediately use first names, that the answer to how we’re doing is always “Great,” that we make friends easily and have n

The shining city on a hill was supposed to replace remote big government with a community of energetic and compassionate citizens, all engaged in a project of national renewal. But nothing held the city together. It was hollow at the center, a collection of individuals all wanting more. Free America measured civic health by gross domestic product.