https://archive.ph/qRg7X https:// www. theguardian. com/books/2021/jun/20/last-best-hope-by-george-packer-review-shrewd-analysis-of-americas-ruptures
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
Peter Conrad Sun 20 Jun 2021 02.00 EDT
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.
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.
"Packer, having moved his family from Brooklyn to a Covid-free rural retreat" - George Packer, city-dwelling bourgeoisie aristocrat, oppressor of the Ancien Régime, hides amongst the rural ghettos of the Trumpian sans-culottes to escape the plague-ridden city.
"the letters spelled out: they were as succinctly satanic as the number 666 – the mark of the beast in the Book of Revelation" - Writer George Packer and the Guardian's Peter Conrad, not hysterical fuckwits.
Commenting on an American meritocracy whose sole merit is its luck on the stock market, Packer predicts: “As with any hereditary ruling class, political power will fall into the hands of increasingly inferior people.” To prove his point locally, I nominate slick Sunak, shifty Hancock, Patel the bully and Williamson the schoolroom dunce.
stock market > publicly traded > public > socialist > 'American socialist meritocracy of the stock market' roflmao
https://archive.ph/yozYk https:// www. theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-packer-four-americas/619012/
HOW AMERICA FRACTURED INTO FOUR PARTS
People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
By George Packer JULY/AUGUST 2021 ISSUE
Tracing the evolution of these narratives can tell you something about a nation’s possibilities for change. Through much of the 20th century, the two political parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country. This arrangement held until the late ’60s—still within living memory.
"Democrats emphasized social solidarity", like slavery, eugenics, the Ku Klux Klan, FDR and Mussolini's fascism?
Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. The freedom it champions is very different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other people—the negative liberty of “Don’t tread on me.”
"I NEED 'positive liberty', the state must hand me muh self-control and self-realization." -t. George Packer, a literary genius
The traditionalists were sin-fearing Protestants, orthodox Catholics, southern agrarians, would-be aristocrats, alienated individualists—dissidents in postwar America.
"Where is muh solidarity, muh comnunity, muh collectivism? The state must give me a sense of community while I keep anally dildoing myself in my Brooklyn mansion." - t. George Packer, certainly not an alienated commie retard
Adjacent to the traditionalists were the anti-Communists. Many of them were former Marxists, such as Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, who carried their apocalyptic baggage with them when they moved from left to right. Politics for them was nothing less than the titanic struggle between good and evil, God and man. The main target of their energy was the ameliorative creed of Eleanor Roosevelt and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., good old liberalism, which they believed to be a paler communism—“the ideology of Western suicide,” Burnham called it. The anti-Communists, like the traditionalists, were skeptics of democracy—its softness would doom it to destruction when World War III broke out. If these hectoring pessimists were the sum of modern conservatism, the movement would have died of joylessness by 1960.
"Eleanor Roosevelt"
"Even Eleanor Roosevelt, more liberal than her husband, privately suggested that a "benevolent dictator" might be what the country needed. The vague idea was not a police state but deference to a strong leader unfettered by Congress or the other inconveniences of democracy. Amid the crisis, the specifics didn't go beyond more faith in government by fiat." - https://archive.ph/QcaL9 https:// www. npr. org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=5525748 - Author Reconstructs FDR's 'Defining Moment' - July 01, 2006 5:17 PM
"good old liberalism"
LMAO
In their insistence on freedom they could claim to be descendants of Locke, Jefferson, and the classical liberal tradition. Some of them interpreted the Constitution as a libertarian document for individual and states’ rights under a limited federal government, not as a framework for the strengthened nation that the authors of The Federalist Papers thought they were creating." Oddly, the most influential libertarians were Europeans, especially the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, whose polemic against collectivism, The Road to Serfdom, was a publishing sensation in America in 1944, during the most dramatic mobilization of economic resources by state power in history.
"The founding fathers, after defeating an oppressive and strong nation, desired a strong government. Where's daddy Hitler? I miss daddy Hitler's 'dramatic mobilization of economic resources by state power in history'!" - t. George Packer, Hitlerian economics enthusiast
What distinguished libertarians from conventional, pro-business Republicans was their pure and uncompromising idea. What was it? Hayek: “Planning leads to dictatorship.”
George Packer, master of perfectly accurate quotes. No mischaracterization or propagandizing whatsoever.
The purpose of government is to secure individual rights, and little else. One sip of social welfare and free government dies.
George Packer: "Social welfare did nothing wrong."
Thomas Sowell:
Libertarians were in rebellion against the mid-century mixed-economy consensus.
George "Joined Auschwitz because there's a public consensus, heh gamers" Packer
Despite or because of the purity of their idea, libertarians made common cause with segregationists, and racism informed their political movement from the beginning.
"Libertarians are racist", George Packer asserting without evidence.
Their first hero, Senator Barry Goldwater, ran for president in 1964 as an insurgent against his own party’s establishment while opposing the civil-rights bill on states’-rights grounds.
"Their first hero," citation needed.
"Senator Barry Goldwater", literally one person.
" 'opposing the civil-rights bill on states’-rights grounds.' Senator Barry Goldwater, the libertarian Jewish racist." - t. George Packer, a factual persoyn
But libertarianism stretches all the way to the present. James Burnham is mostly forgotten, but I’ve met Ayn Rand fanatics everywhere—among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, at the office of the Tampa Bay Tea Party, on a road-paving crew. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (who read Atlas Shrugged in high school) brought Rand’s pitiless philosophy of egoism to policy making on Capitol Hill. Libertarianism speaks to the American myth of the self-made man and the lonely pioneer on the plains. (Glorification of men is a recurring feature.) Like Marxism, it is a complete explanatory system. It appeals to supersmart engineers and others who never really grow up.
"Lolberts are like Ayn Rand (female), emotionless robots, and also sexist against wombyn." - t. George Packer, totally not making things up
"Real grown ups despise liberty and libertarianism. Grown ups should instead embrace unfreedom like National Socialism." -t. George Packer, totally not retarded
The majority of Americans who elected Reagan president weren’t told that Free America would break unions and starve social programs, or that it would change antitrust policy to bring a new age of monopoly, making Walmart, Citigroup, Google, and Amazon the J.P. Morgan and Standard Oil of a second Gilded Age.
Walmart Inc. (WMT) stock quote
Citigroup, Inc. (C) stock quote
Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) Stock Price
Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) Stock Price
JP Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Stock Price
"With U.S. Steel, Morgan captured two-thirds of the steel market, and Schwab was confident that the company would soon hold a 75% market share.[26] However, after 1901, its market share dropped; and in 1903, Schwab resigned to form Bethlehem Steel, which became the second largest U.S. steel producer." - https://archive.ph/9jdmH https:// en. wikipedia. org/wiki/J._P._Morgan 5 Jun 2019 14:15:59 UTC
"Rockefeller ran the company as its chairman, until his retirement in 1897. He remained the major shareholder, and in 1911, with the dissolution of the Standard Oil trust into 34 smaller companies, Rockefeller became the richest man in the world, as the initial income of these individual enterprises proved to be much bigger than that of a single larger company." - https://archive.ph/6xfV3 https:// en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Standard_Oil 22 Jun 2019 22:01:51 UTC
"Stocks are publicly traded, lolberts love publicly owned syndicates. Also, monopolies never implode in lolbertistan." - t. George Packer, a master of understanding
The shining city on a hill was supposed to replace remote big government with a community of energetic and compassionate citizens, all engaged in a project of national renewal. But nothing held the city together. It was hollow at the center, a collection of individuals all wanting more. It saw Americans as entrepreneurs, employees, investors, taxpayers, and consumers—everything but citizens.
"Where's my soytizens, where's Hitler, where's the king, the high priest? I need these guys." - t. George Packer, requires the state to supply him a community
A very stupid book by a very stupid man.
https://archive.vn/BfJAL
Many such cases.
Already 2 lines in and calling the Trump administration a “near-death experience” while employment plummets and have gas prices skyrocket the second the next guy comes in and stomps out all the work Trump did. Christ, how disingenuous to you have to be to start with a false pretense and then extrapolate this ridiculous logic even further?