On George Packer's "Four Americas"
It's a nice little story about our country. Too bad it gets so much wrong.
In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, staff writer George Packer adapted his new book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, into a 13-page feature in which he attempts to offer a plausible explanation for why American society has polarized to the extent that it has. Along the way, he sketches out a theory that the country, lacking the alleged unity of the early postwar decades, has fractured into four political tribes based on competing narratives about national identity. As an addition to the ‘Why We’re So Divided’ canon, I’m not sure I find “The Four Americas” particularly convincing, but in so far as Packer’s diagnosis is reflective of the mainstream center-left view on the subject, it’s still worth taking a look at what his argument gets right and wrong.
The Past Sucked Too, Just Differently
“The Four Americas” takes as its point of reference the mid-20th century, a time in which Americans, though living in a society that was “less free, less tolerant, and far less diverse, with fewer choices,” enjoyed a degree of economic equality, shared tastes, and political cooperation. The Republican and Democratic Parties offered competing visions of the country - “getting ahead” and “getting a fair shake,” respectively - but they could at least come to a workable consensus on certain fundamental issues. Beginning in the late 1960’s, however, this state of affairs gave way to our current era of rancorous political and social division. “Getting ahead” and the “fair shake” have been swapped out for four new stories about American moral identity, in the process splitting the United States of yesteryear into two mutually hostile, internally schismatic nations.
The Republican nation is made up of “Free America” (the pro-market, anti-regulation heirs to the Reagan revolution whose extreme individualism has hollowed out American civic life) and “Real America” (the gun-toting, Fox News-watching white Christian nationalists of the Rust Belt). “Smart America” (the highly-educated liberal meritocrats who love globalization and disdain its losers) and “Just America” (woke young people whose privilege-checking and pronoun-asking has turned the academy into a gulag) correspond to the Democratic nation. Each tribe’s narrative gets some things right, but as national mythos none is adequate on its own. Only an “Equal America” where rights and opportunities are evenly distributed can provide the basis for “shared citizenship and self-government.”
As the summary of a summary, my outline is bound to lack whatever nuance is contained in the original book; based on reviews of the full work, I actually agree with some of Packer’s policy prescriptions for creating an Equal America, such as a more robust welfare state and a living minimum wage. But taken on its own terms, and though there are a few nuggets of insight scattered throughout, his Atlantic piece is more of a clever caricature than an accurate depiction of the current balance of ideological power. He’s right to point out that the United States is going through an identity crisis, of course. His account of America’s descent into social discord is, however, a schematic reading of a more complex story.
Packer’s retelling of the events of the past half-century, while not completely inaccurate at any particular point in the narrative sequence, is dependent on so many sweeping generalizations that the overall picture comes out recognizable but clearly distorted - the historiographical equivalent of cubist painting. Take his characterization of the midcentury political landscape. There’s an element of truth to the premise that the era’s key ideological split was between “getting ahead” and “a fair shake”; for much of the 20th century, the Democrats were the party of the New Deal and the Republicans were the party of big business. But to argue that the key feature of political life in midcentury America was a feel-good choice between two pithy narratives risks overstating the degree to which either of the two parties represented an identifiable worldview: a 1950 report by the American Political Science Association, for instance, criticized the lack of a clear programmatic distinction between the Democrats and Republicans, arguing that this resulted in a political system less accountable to voters.
Likewise, in establishing the postwar era as a stable baseline of unity from which the present order is an aberration, Packer massively understates the depth of the cleavages in the American body politic at the time, simply noting that the Democrats’ fair shake involved “eventually abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow” and emphasizing that “[l]iberal Republicans and conservative Democrats played important roles in their respective parties.” To be sure, bipartisanship was more common in a less ideologically charged partisan environment. It bears repeating, however, that in the 1960s those ‘conservative’ Democrats were in charge of an apartheid state encompassing much of the country’s territory, while those liberal Republicans helped pass through Congress civil rights measures like the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act. The stakes were clearly higher than Packer lets on, and the divisions threatening to rip apart the social contract were as acrimonious then as they are now; they just weren’t expressed as party polarization yet.
More Like Five or Six, At Least
The notion of “four Americas” doesn’t fare much better under scrutiny, despite its rhetorical elegance. For one, it gives a false sense of proportion to the groups that back each narrative. Packer acknowledges that the libertarian Free America story and the people and organizations behind its rise - Chicago economists like Hayek and Friedman, the Koch brothers, Reaganworld and Bushworld - have been the “most politically powerful of the four” for the past fifty years. Beyond this, however, he devotes little space to actually quantifying the relative size and influence of each tribe. I’m skeptical that it makes much sense to hold up Free/Real America and Smart/Just America as mirror images of each other, especially considering that, by Packer’s own admission, Just America is a vanishingly small cohort of highly educated people significantly overrepresented in media and academia but with little political clout.
(It’s worth pointing out here that Just America is by far the most sloppily caricatured narrative of the four. Clearly there is legitimate criticism to be leveled against the excesses of the diversity training industrial complex, but it’s hard to think of any actual figures in government who resemble the overly sensitive woke bullies Packer describes. He (rightly) caught some flack on social media for claiming that last summer’s BLM protestors were “disproportionately Millennials with advanced degrees making more than $100,000 per year”; less attention was paid to his dubious characterization of “critical theory” mainstays like the Frankfurt School and Foucault as significant influences on mainstream identity politics.)
To return to the question of proportion, Smart America, like its socially conscious coalition partner, is numerically small with “outsize economic and cultural influence.” But how small is small? According to Packer, members of Smart America are concentrated between the top 10% and top 1% of earners, a group in 2018 made up of those earning at least $158,002. In 2019, for reference, only about 8.3% of American households earned between $150,000 and $199,999. The size of this share of the population expands to about 12% if you include those earning between $200,000 and $249,999, and it expands again to somewhere between 12% and 18% of households if all incomes above $250,000 are included. If Smart America represents only the moderately liberal segment of the elite, however, and Free America includes (but is not exclusively made up of) more conservatively-inclined elites, the actual size of the former group is likely pretty small, not even approaching a quarter of the population; subtracting the well-off Robin DiAngelo readers who fall under the rubric of Just America thins the ranks of the cosmopolitan meritocrats even further.
Despite downplaying the overlap between the narratives and their supporters in practice, looking at four separate ‘Americas’ is analytically useful in that it offers a more lucid view of the tensions within each party coalition. Packer describes the animosity between the waning Romney and dominant Trump factions of the Republican Party quite well, for example. The main shortcoming of this approach, though, is that there are almost certainly more than four Americas. At least three of the ones identified by Packer - Free, Smart, and Just - consist primarily, if not exclusively of a small number of economic elites. The other one - Real America - is coded as entirely white, Christian, and working class. Taken together, however, all four paint at best an incomplete portrait of the American people.
It’s strange that Packer references the disconnect between hyper-woke whites and the Black and Latino working classes, but pays hardly any attention to the latter groups - ones that make up a significant portion of the Democratic voting bloc - as political actors with their own distinct ideological orientations. As Osita Nwanevu writes in a New Republic review of Ezra Klein’s similarly flawed but more rigorous Why We’re Polarized,
America’s racial minorities scramble the picture considerably. African Americans and Latinos are intensely religious and fairly socially conservative on a variety of issues, but they are also much more Democratic than the population at large. That’s a consequence not only of rhetorical antagonism from the right but also of public policy—their material interest in generous social programs, a fairer criminal justice system, a more humane immigration policy, and so on.
The non-white working class played decisive roles in both the 2020 presidential election and the 2021 New York City mayoral primaries, in the latter ensuring the victory of an ideologically eclectic but conservative-leaning Black Democrat over the favored candidates of more affluent Manhattan technocrats and Brooklyn progressives. But this electorally influential demographic - by no means monolithic in its political views - finds virtually no representation in Packer’s Americas. Neither do immigrants of any background, who come to the United States with a variety of ideas about and expectations of their new home country. Nor do a number of groups falling outside of the most easily recognizable political identities: middle class Asian-Americans supporting tough-on-crime conservatives in response to racist attacks; rich suburban whites shifting their allegiance from William F. Buckley to Tucker Carlson, despite weathering 2008 just fine; committed Southern labor organizers focused more on workplace protections than cancel culture; the mass of politically disengaged non-voters. The list could go on. For better or worse, they too will play a role in shaping the American narrative to come.
It’s the Power, Stupid
Recall that the preamble to “The Four Americas” frames the conflict at hand specifically in terms of affect, idea, and narrative:
Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness… The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires… But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts - they need stories that convey a moral identity.
This is the framing that Packer returns to at the piece’s conclusion. He claims that while each narrative has a particular virtue - whether openness to change or a sense of rootedness - they all have a tendency to “divide us, pitting tribe against tribe” as they retreat into more insular and extreme iterations of themselves. That may well be true of the four Americas Packer describes. But beyond any particular quibbles with his generalizations or the blind spots in his typology, I found myself wondering whether the focus of his entire project is not misplaced.
Is it really a lack of shared self-understanding as a nation that’s behind our present turmoil? Would faith in the story of an ‘Equal America’ really stitch up such a fractured country? I’m doubtful on both counts. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an orthodox Marxist, but at least while reading “The Four Americas” my mind kept wandering back to Marx and Engels’ German Ideology, which holds that ideas, instead of having an independent existence, are “reflexes and echoes” of real material circumstances. What’s more, in the early Marxist view, ideas are not merely reflections of an underlying physical reality, but simultaneously reflections of that reality as they suit the interests of a given society’s elite:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.
I’m not sure I agree 100% with this view of the relationship between material reality and ideas - I’d argue it’s more of a mutually constitutive than a mechanistic one, as some later Marxist scholars have - but it seems that Packer’s piece errs in imputing a decisive power to narratives rather than to the actual economic and social circumstances of which those narratives are (at least in part) self-serving justifications. It’s especially strange that he takes this tack given that he argues, not entirely unconvincingly, that the balkanization into ‘four Americas’ is largely the result of the unraveling of the New Deal order, which began in earnest in the 1970s. Free America’s rabid libertarianism, though gestating throughout the early 20th century, finally came to power in the wake of stagflation and oil crisis with the advent of Reagan. Smart America’s meritocracy emerged from the creation of the globalized “knowledge economy” on the heels of trade liberalization. Real America’s racist pseudo-populism fed on discontent as domestic manufacturing collapsed. Just America’s preoccupation with identity reflects both the severity of racial oppression and the status anxiety of downwardly mobile Millennials who never knew life before deregulation and a fraying social safety net.
The problem, then, really lies with the power exercised by the incumbent political and economic elite and the institutions they dominate; the unsatisfying and alienating narratives they deploy to shore up their influence are symptoms rather than causes of our malaise. Packer, in proposing to unite the country under the aegis of a revived welfare state, tacitly admits that this is the case.
So why the insistence on narrative and storytelling?
I think there are two main reasons. The first is that, like many authors writing in the 'Everything is So Divisive Now’ mode, Packer betrays a wish to avoid political conflict. David Klion makes this point well in his review of Last Best Hope for The Baffler:
[P]olitical change requires picking a side and recognizing the hard truth that some of our fellow citizens must be politically defeated… “I’m tempted to say the hell with them. . . . Let’s make America again without them,” writes Packer, before acknowledging this might not be realistic. Instead, he concludes, “we have to look for those ideas and policies and dreams that will make it possible to live together as equal Americans.” But what if there are no such ideas and policies and dreams? As he reaches the end of his polemic, Packer has left us with a binary choice between willful naivete and nihilistic rejection of America. Is it not possible to take a clear look at this country, reach sober conclusions, and live with those conclusions even when they’re unflattering?
Packer fails to grasp that the ambitious policies he touts as having unifying potential - universal healthcare, paid sick and family leave, breaking up the tech monopolies, among others - will have to be won in vicious political struggle. That means repudiating and defeating the representatives of Free, Real, and sometimes even Smart America in legislative battle should they stand in the way. There is unfortunately no magic rhetoric to whisk away that reality.
Secondly, the emphasis on the affective and ideational over the material reflects Packer’s desire to vindicate an older incarnation of liberalism in the face of threats from newer ideological currents. This likely explains his inclusion of Just America as one of the Big Four narratives despite its fairly limited reach, all things considered, as well as his shots at Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones, both of whom reject (or at least complicate) the Clinton-Obama era “march of progress” view of history in favor of something more pessimistic. At the end of the day, Packer wants to once again live in a familiar country where, despite that pesky Jim Crow thing, people still had faith in America’s ability to offer them a leg up or a fair shake; he yearns for a country where things gradually got better and better, even if they weren’t always perfect. One gets the sense that he knows that he can’t unlearn what he has about America - about the ugliness, the cruelty - but nonetheless argues as if it were possible to return to a more innocent time, if only we had the right collection of phrases and symbols in our arsenal.
This isn’t to say that the dream of a new, egalitarian American narrative is completely worthless; on the contrary, as history has demonstrated, its value lies in its potential to mobilize passions, to embolden us to point out the ways in which our current state falls short. But mythmaking about a nation’s moral identity is insufficient to make a tangible difference in the lot of its citizens. That requires a clear-eyed view of the world as it actually is.