Writer explores idea of four Americas, defined by their own narratives: Free, Smart, Just and Real (the most rural one)

A country with a two-party system and a three-piece geography (urban, suburban and rural) is actually four nations, George Packer writes in a seminal piece for The Atlantic. Based on recent history and current events, he names them with names they might choose themselves: Free America, Smart America, Just America and (this is the most rural one), Real America.

They are not really nations, of course; they are competing narratives about what the United States is and what it has been. To Free America, "the most politically powerful of the four," it is libertarian ideals and consumer capitalism, Packer writes. Smart America is based on the new "knowledge economy" and is mainly urban residents, but "their local identities are submerged in the homogenizing culture of top universities and elite professions. They believe in credentials and expertise—not just as tools for success, but as qualifications for class entry." Just America (or Unjust America, the name Packer actually prefers) "assails the complacent meritocracy of Smart America. It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today." And what about Real America?

"Real America has always been a country of white people," Packer asserts. "Real America has also been religious, and in a particular way: evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. . . . Its attitude toward the rest of the world is isolationist, hostile to humanitarianism and international engagement, but ready to respond aggressively to any incursion against national interests. The purity and strength of Americanism are always threatened by contamination from outside and betrayal from within. The narrative of Real America is white Christian nationalism." That is strongest in rural areas, but those areas have more diversity than many think.

Recent events have alienated Real America, Packer writes: "Meeting anyone in uniform in Iraq who came from a family of educated professionals was uncommon, and vanishingly rare in the enlisted ranks. After troops began to leave Iraq, the pattern continued in Afghanistan. . . . The financial crisis of 2008, and the Great Recession that followed, had a similar effect on the home front. The guilty parties were elites—bankers, traders, regulators, and policy makers. . . . Working-class Americans [were] thrown into poverty by a pink slip. The banks received bailouts, and the bankers kept their jobs. The conclusion was obvious: The system was rigged for insiders. The economic recovery took years; the recovery of trust never came."

But Donald Trump came. "He had a reptilian genius for intuiting the emotions of Real America—a foreign country to elites on the right and left. They were helpless to understand Trump and therefore to stop him," Packer writes. "He was the first American politician to succeed by running against globalization—a bipartisan policy that had served the interests of 'globalists' for years while sacrificing Real Americans." Packer says that became clear to him during Trump's campaign, "in a town near Canton, Ohio," where local locked-out steelworker Jack Baum told him he liked Trump’s “patriotic” stands on trade and immigration, "but he also found Trump’s insults refreshing, even exhilarating. The ugliness was a kind of revenge, Baum said: 'It’s a mirror of the way they see us.' He didn’t specify who they and us were, but maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe he believed—he was too polite to say it—that people like me looked down on people like him."

Packer says racism played a role in Trump's rise but it has been overblown. "Racism alone couldn’t explain why white men were much more likely to vote for Trump than white women, or why the same was true of Black and Latino men and women. Or why the most reliable predictor for who was a Trump voter wasn’t race but the combination of race and education. Among white people, 38 percent of college graduates voted for Trump, compared with 64 percent without college degrees. This margin—the great gap between Smart America and Real America—was the decisive one. It made 2016 different from previous elections, and the trend only intensified in 2020."

Summing up, Packer says all four narratives "emerged from America’s failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid. They rise from a single society, and even in one as polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one another. But their tendency is also to divide us, pitting tribe against tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and ever more extreme version of itself."

He concludes, "We remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two narratives: Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on."