This is not a book George Packer makes friends with. For the journalist who worked for the New Yorker for a long time and now writes for the Atlantic, America is divided into four camps, each with its own ideology. There is “Free America”, which is committed to libertarian ideas, but mistakenly equates freedom with unrestrained freedom. There is “Smart America” of an urban educated elite that pays homage to the meritocracy and does all it can to pass on its privileges to its own children. There is the rural and small-town “True America”, which clings to religion and nation because it has little else left. And then there is “Just America”, which has committed itself to anti-racism, but is increasingly authoritarian. Each of these camps, according to Packer,have withdrawn self-righteously into their own world - and none of them have constructive suggestions as to how the country can be brought back together.
Packer's book is actually a long essay.
Against the background of the current social crisis and the pandemic, he classifies the social developments of the past decades and repeatedly refers to the broad lines of American history.
His starting point is the concern that social polarization threatens the principle of self-governance.
According to Packer, there is too little that still connects the people of the four Americas.
He sees the deeper reason for the formation of the camp in the unequal living conditions, which made it difficult to meet at eye level.
Provincial views, hyper masculine kind
Packer is primarily concerned with economic inequality that divides the country into winners and losers and even leaves many full-time employees in precarious conditions - without a chance of ever building a secure existence. Packer's thesis: "To save our democracy, we have to rebuild our economy so that it can make us American equal."
But that is precisely what none of the four Americas is striving for, in Packer's eyes, to shape the economy in a more social way.
He is particularly hard on those who describe themselves as progressive.
In the representatives of “Smart America” he sees people who have a “new, hereditary class structure” behind them, individualistic winners for whom collective organizations such as trade unions play no role.
The workers "with their provincial views and their hyper masculine manner" are rather "embarrassing" for their political class.
Inaccurate, excited, phrase-like
He not only accuses the supporters of the activist “Just America” of having severely restricted the scope of what can be said in many places.
Above all, he considers them to be incapable of changing people's basic living conditions: the “great system analysis” usually ends “in small-scale symbolic politics”.
During the pandemic, writes Packer, there were heated debates in San Francisco about whether a school should still be named after Franklin D. Roosevelt;
I was less interested in the fact that the children couldn't go to school at all.
Or, to put it more sharply: "Who (...) Admits his racial privilege can continue to cling to class privilege."