George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His previous books include "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America" (winner of the National Book Award), "The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq," and "Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century" (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography).
In the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy.
In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources.