Last Best Hope Quotes

“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 safety protections, unemployment insurance that doesn’t fail in a crisis, a living minimum wage. These are the basis for any decent life, for any American to do more than survive just below the misery line.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“To believe that Trump showed us who we really are is no different from believing that Obama showed us who we really are. Narcissism is expressed in extremes of self-contempt as well as self-adoration. Both are paralyzing.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“A character in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom puts it this way: “If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“To save our democracy, we must restructure our economy to make us equal Americans.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality and freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which dominant groups subjugate other groups. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“I’m here to tell you: under-education + lack of faith in the political and economic system that has failed them + Christianity + 40 years of conservatism becoming more and more extreme + right wing talk radio + virtually no mental healthcare + lack of interaction with anyone outside of their race mixed with stereotypes that have become “normalized” + social media + no good jobs + poor health from over-work/dangerous jobs + economic desperation x magical savior = trumpism.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“What’s the point of merit that exists only to protect privilege?”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“The country that always modeled social mobility for the rest of the world has become more class-ridden than recent aristocracies like Austria and Japan.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“If anything can lower the fever of populism in Real America, which easily spikes into white nationalism, it will be this: the experience of shared responsibility in worker organizations, and improvements in people’s daily lives, partly made possible by the help of a government that is manifestly on their side.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“One way to give labor more power is to make it easier to organize workers by passing labor law reform bills—the perennial campaign promises of Democratic candidates that go perennially unfulfilled. Another is to direct large-scale government investments into key national sectors—clean energy, manufacturing, education, and caregiving—to create jobs, stimulate innovation, and raise the pay and status of workers. And a third is to form new institutions for worker power that are better suited to a postindustrial economy, as Michael Lind argues in The New Class War: labor representation on corporate boards, collective bargaining by sector rather than company, and wage boards that set minimum terms for low-wage industries like fast food.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power. Unlike orthodox Marxism, critical theory is concerned with language and identity more than with material conditions.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“Libertarianism, like Marxism, is a complete explanatory system. It appeals to super-smart engineers and others who never really grow up.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“We need an activism of cohesion. We need an activism that doesn’t separate Americans into like-minded factions but brings Americans together across tribal lines.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“Any writer who is afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear has chosen the wrong profession.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“I hate that 74 million of my compatriots voted to keep in power our worst president, who convinced most of them that the election was stolen. The stab in the back will fester in their minds for years, a threat to the rest of us. But it’s too easy to be riveted to that disturbing number and forget the 81 million who voted him out.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

“America is neither a land of the free and home of the brave nor a bastion of white supremacy. Or rather it is both, and other things as well, changing all the time and yet somehow remaining itself. Whether you see it as one or the other or something else altogether is not a neutral observation -- it's a choice. Every choice satisfies a desire. Neither Sinful America nor Exceptional America, the 1619 Project nor the 1776 Report, tells a story that make me want to take part. The first produces despair, the second complacency. Both are static narratives that leave no room for human agency, inspire no love to make the country better, provide no motive for getting to work.”
― George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal