Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (George Packer)
De Tocqueville's Art of Self Government in 2021
I like and do not like this book; I leafed through some parts but read a lot of it. Ultimately I have not come up with any better plan, so I give Mr. Packer credit for that. I do not think trying to spruce up the Estate Tax is going to fix an America void of 5% year-over-year post-WWII economic growth; some anti-trust regulation might help, though, and breaking up the information monopolies. I really like his "Four Americas" analysis (“Just” as in Justice America, Smart America for the professional managerial class and tech, Real America for Sarah Palin, and Free America for Libertarianism). He seems to understand what it’s like to be on both sides of the left/right coin. “It was not hard to imagine our neighbors’ bitterness at seeing their town changed, their values challenged, and the wife’s path blocked by self-certain outsiders without deep roots or high stakes.” But, despite understanding, the book is still written with disdain and contempt for the political right that renders the political right so angry at an elitist political left, which is a tone I find curious given his many comments exhibiting his understanding of Real America. Mr. Packer acknowledges we're all in it together, that you can't pick your fellow citizens, and that you have to either try to persuade them, or crush them, the latter of which really doesn't work and is authoritarian. Echoing the similarly left-leaning Albert Camus, he asks, “Are my fellow citizens the people I’d choose to be quarantined with? Well, there’s no choice. They’re mine, and I’m theirs.” Where there ought to be empathy for a frustration that the system is not working for our fellow citizens that feel they have no voice, who are trying to make their voice heard in a supposed “Democracy,” there is a slap in the face that they are trying to steal Democracy from the rest of us and that they should almost be crushed out of existence. Mr. Packer, a journalist, has suggestions for political amelioration that seem mostly to be platform planks for the Democratic Socialists of America; he does not see revival of Civic Institutions where we create community as part of the solution, but does propose fines for people who do not vote, and representation by workers on the Boards of companies. Looking past his political solutions, he gives good color to a lot of what is going on. “Self-government is democracy in action—not just rights, laws, and institutions, but what free people do together, the habits and skills that enable us to run our own affairs. 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.” “This is why freedom isn’t free. It brings you out of shallow isolation into the deeper responsibilities of self-government.” “Here, take my freedom for me, I can’t bear it.” “Libertarianism, like Marxism, is a complete explanatory system. It appeals to super-smart engineers and others who never really grow up.” In a World where people understand how the World works less and less, “But for the sinking working class, freedom lost whatever economic meaning it once had. It was a matter of personal dignity, identity. It began to see trespassers everywhere and became the slogan of a defiant and armed loneliness: Get the fuck off my property. Take this mask and shove it.” He takes good shots at the professional managerial class, who consider themselves perfect angels but the “one percent” as the real bad guy, “Most of the books and columns and gossip aimed at the 1 percent come from people just a few percentage points below, implying that the high salaries of elite professionals are legitimately earned, while the capital windfalls of business executives and investors are crooked.” “The winners in Smart America—connected by airplane, Internet, and investments to the rest of the globe—have lost the capacity and the need for a national identity, which is why they can’t grasp its importance for others.” This, David Goodhart’s Somewheres vs. Anywheres. “Their passionate loyalty, the one that gives them a particular identity, goes to their family. The rest is diversity and efficiency, heirloom tomatoes and self-driving cars. They don’t see the point of patriotism.” “Trump’s voters were not the wretched of the earth. They were generally ill-educated, living far from prosperous cities in nearly all-white communities, employed in sectors on the downward slope of the economy, gloomy about their own and their children’s prospects, ready to think nonwhites were cutting in line or taking a free ride, threatened by competition from immigrants, and enraged by contemptuous elites who made rules that benefited only themselves. It isn’t necessary to choose among race, class, culture, and social status to understand why Trump won. It was all of them together, reinforcing one another.” On Identity politics and the inherent racism of “anti-racism,” “But in identity politics, equality refers to groups, not individuals. All disparities between groups result from systems of oppression and demand collective action for redress, often amounting to new forms of discrimination—in other words, equity. In practice, identity politics inverts the old hierarchy of power into a new one: bottom rail on top. The fixed lens of power makes true equality, based on common humanity, impossible.” “It can’t talk about the complex causes of poverty. Structural racism—ongoing disadvantages that Black people suffer from policies and institutions over the centuries—is real. So is individual agency, but in the Just America narrative it doesn’t exist. The narrative can’t talk about the main source of violence in Black neighborhoods, which is young Black men, not police.” “All four narratives are driven by a competition for status—the consequence of this broken promise—that generates fierce anxiety and resentment.” “A decadent politics that solves no problems but gives partisans a permanent arena for performances of righteous vitriol. Endless dysfunction, probably violence. The divide far exceeds any policy disputes over immigration or policing. Political differences are conflicts of core identity, and the mutual antagonism has the quality of hatred that precedes sectarian war.” We cannot be creative to solve problems in a political atmosphere such as the current, with the volume at 11. “In an atmosphere of stifling conformism—a desire for the crowd’s affirmation or a fear of the sound of your own voice—honest, clear, original work is not going to flourish, and without it, the politicians and tech moguls and TV demagogues have less to worry about. Fear breeds self-censorship, and self-censorship is more insidious than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a surer way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfettered mind.” Mr. Packer is at least willing to think and take a stand with an unfettered mind.