Last Best Hope by George Packer review – shrewd analysis of America’s ruptures

George Packer finds the US caught in a cold civil war' between incompatible versions of the country after its near-death experience' with Donald Trump

George Packer's incisive, deftly argued book about the moral and political quandary of the United States begins and ends with his declaration: I am an American." The statement is self-evident but also self-congratulatory: Americans regard their citizenship as a spiritual credential, a gesture of faith in the country that has always claimed to be the last, best hope of beleaguered mankind. Packer's native land, however, no longer deserves to be quite so certain of its exceptional virtue or its automatic pre-eminence. Early in the pandemic it had to accept charitable handouts from Russia and Taiwan, and Packer sadly accepts a new, reduced reality by calling America a beggar nation" and even a failed state". After this he twists his title from a boast into an abject plea: No one is going to save us. We are our last best hope."

The need for salvation became urgent before the election last November when Packer, having moved his family from Brooklyn to a Covid-free rural retreat, noticed a sign beside the road on a neighbouring farm. His car headlights flashed across a red rectangle branded with five white capital letters. Even here, Packer realised with a shudder, he was not safe. He doesn't need to say what the letters spelled out: they were as succinctly satanic as the number 666 - the mark of the beast in the Book of Revelation - which made Nancy Reagan alter the street address of a house where she and the retiring president were due to live in Los Angeles.