Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

Written by George Packer

Narrated by George Packer

Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides.

This program is read by the author.

In the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy.

In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression.

In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art” of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250816122

George Packer

George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His previous books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.

Reviews for Last Best Hope

[fletch941 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Some books are polemic, offering an unabashedly biased opinion that you may agree or disagree with. The tragedy of this work is in the author's attempt to bring insight and solutions to serious problems without recognizing his own bias. By his own definition, the author is a member of 'smart America', but his inability to step outside of his own bubble hinders his ability to analyze his own segments weaknesses. This is an interesting book, but I can't recommend it. I believe his desire to help us pure, but the execution comes across as offensive and alienating to the majority of Americans as he accuses others of being. If he had followed his own advice and turned off his computer to have more real conversations with those who have differing opinions from himself, we would have all been better served by his efforts.

[Chris Bason · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I would recommend The Upswing by Robert Putnam instead. Its is much more of a detailed and interesting thesis based in fact.