Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.
The Short American Century, which began in 1945 and continued until 2016, was made up of four distinct eras. The first, from the victory in World War II until the student rebellions of 1968, was an era of confidence in which most Americans believed that the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan provided just cause for the United States’ domination of the “free world.” The second, which lasted until Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, was an era of skepticism—the failures of Fordism at home and the Vietnam War abroad suggested to many that global American “leadership” might not be achievable at an acceptable cost. The third, which comprised the 1980s, was an era of exuberance, as deregulation, financialization, and a renewed American militarism reinvigorated a hegemonic project that the 1970s had almost annihilated. And the fourth and final era, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, was characterized by a hubris that insisted the Soviet Union’s collapse demonstrated the ultimate triumph of US-style democratic-capitalist imperialism.
Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put the kibosh on the widespread consensus that the United States was a New Rome, able to weather any domestic or international crisis. It turned out that the Great Recession and the Global War on Terror had undermined both American society and the “liberal international order,” and that the faith in eternal US domination had been misplaced.
In retrospect, it is clear that the populist rage that fueled Trump’s rise marked the end of the Short American Century. But for many liberals, it took quite a while to accept this new reality. Liberals spent much of Trump’s first term trying to explain his victory as an aberration, the consequence of the anti-majoritarian structure of American politics, or Russian interference, or the innate racism of a foolish American populace who didn’t realize, as Hillary Clinton put it, that “America never stopped being great.” For them, Trump’s election marked a brief but unfortunate departure from the progressive arc that US and world history were bound to trace, and once a Democrat won the presidency again, things would return to normal.
Joe Biden’s election in 2020 seemed to confirm this perspective. Liberals concluded that Trump the person, and Trumpism the movement, were anomalies. True, some admitted, Trump had exposed some disturbing fissures in American society, and maybe the economy was more of a problem than they had supposed. But the Biden project was primarily viewed as a restoration—as the president himself declared to European allies soon after he assumed office, “America is back.”
Trump’s second victory, however, revealed that this perspective was profoundly mistaken. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump soundly defeated Kamala Harris, winning 312 to 226 in the Electoral College and garnering 2 million more votes than the vice president.
The 2024 results forced liberals to take their heads out of the sand; it turns out that you can only deny reality for so long. Finally, after almost a decade, liberals started to reckon with the fact that the era of unipolarity, globalization, and neoliberal consensus had produced a nightmare instead of a utopia.
If any individual embodies the closing era of the Short American Century, it is George Packer. His résumé reads like an establishmentarian bingo card: Currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, Packer was previously a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, a fellow at the Washington think tank New America, a member of the Peace Corps, and a graduate of Yale University. The world that Trump destroyed was to a significant degree Packer’s world.
Though best known for his nonfiction—his 2019 biography of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize—Packer has just published a novel, The Emergency, which wrestles with the reality of Trump and Trumpism. Described by the author as a “political fable,” the book is Packer’s attempt “to convey what it feels like today…to watch a world you thought would always be there because it had always been there disappear before your eyes with a speed that you can’t begin to fathom.” Unfortunately, The Emergency makes it clear that while liberals like Packer are finally opening their eyes to the world as it is, they have little to offer when it comes to charting a way out of the crisis, because they cannot admit that it was their own regime that created it.
The first thing to say about The Emergency is that it is boring. It is not so much poorly written as indifferently written. The prose is workmanlike—“Looking back, Doctor Rustin realized that the Emergency had been a long time coming. This was how empires of old that he had learned about in school fell: imperceptibly, then shockingly”—and the plot twists predictable. Ironically given the title, the novel lacks urgency; it is there to teach you something, entertainment be damned.
The protagonists of The Emergency are a family named the Rustins: Dr. Hugo Rustin and his wife, Annabelle, as well as their daughter, Selva, and their son, Pan. The Rustins live in “the city by the river” in “the empire,” which has ruled for as long as anyone can remember. This empire has two main social classes: “Burghers,” who live in the cities and whose elite embodies the professional managerial class, and “Yeomen,” who live in the countryside as peasants and farmers. Since the world of The Emergency doesn’t seem to have any advanced industry, there is no industrial working class. As such, Packer presents a stark binary between the urban and urbane and the rural and uncultured—the liberal PMC vision revealed.
To be fair, Packer does offer a critique of meritocracy when The Emergency addresses “Excess Burghers”—those who do poorly on a series of “comprehensive exams” that Burghers take as teenagers, which “placed them on tracks to positions in their family guilds.” If a Burgher does well on these exams, they are afforded a life of dignity; if they don’t, they are doomed to live on society’s margins. And beyond Burghers and Yeomen are a group referred to only as “Strangers,” who speak a different language and are not considered by either Burghers or Yeomen as a part of their shared political community.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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Needless to say, everything in The Emergency has an obvious analogue to our own reality: The divide between Burghers and Yeomen reflects the divide between the PMC and red-state America; the comprehensive exams and their outcomes reflect the SATs and the sorting that occurs between those who ace them and those who do not; Strangers represent immigrants; and so on.
Indeed, if anything defines The Emergency, it is these ham-handed references: Packer may believe that he is writing for the cognoscenti, but he doesn’t seem to trust his audience very much. Every point in the novel is underlined in proverbial red ink. For instance, Packer criticizes social media by having young Burghers wear “goggles” that immerse them “in a continuous stream of images that seemed to leave them smiling and optimistic.” Meanwhile, Yeomen boys embrace a reactionary ideology called “Dirt Thought,” which is essentially the philosophy of the far-right Internet influencer Bronze Age Pervert transposed to a rural setting. The obviousness of these references could be forgiven if they were in service of some greater insight. But they are not. Packer doesn’t like social media and he doesn’t like the manosphere; it doesn’t go much beyond that.
The titular “emergency” refers to the breakdown of the empire. Nevertheless, Packer is extremely vague regarding what exactly led to the crisis, stating only that it began with an “impasse at the top of government,” which led to a “standoff” that dragged on “for weeks, paralyzing imperial functions,” which was followed in turn by “street fighting in the capital,” the flight of “the ruling elite,” and the dissolution of the empire. Burghers and Yeomen are thus left in a situation where there is no recognized political authority, which soon leads to social revolution in the city by the river and causes relations between the two classes to disintegrate.
It is quite strange that a novel about collapse glosses over the reasons for that collapse. The only explanation that Packer gives for the end of this great and mighty empire is that it “died of boredom and loss of faith in itself.” The absence of class conflict as an explanation for the empire’s downfall is telling and suggests the limits of a novel that attempts to explain Trump’s rise without sustained reference to the system that produced him. There are many reasons why Trump won in 2016 and 2024; “boredom” and America’s “loss of faith in itself” are not among them.
After the empire’s fall, a new social movement takes over the Rustins’ city. This movement, which dubs itself “Together,” has six rules: “Everyone belongs,” “I am no better and neither are you,” “No Burghers are Excess Burghers,” “No one is a Stranger,” “Listen to the young,” and “You shall be as gods.” Together is a transparent reference to the youth movement of China’s Cultural Revolution; suffice it to say, Packer thinks that Together’s communalism is both ridiculous and naïve—in an interview, he called it a “flimsy new utopian philosophy.” Predictably, Together rapidly degenerates into tyranny, and eventually, in an echo of the infamous Red Guards, a paramilitary youth organization called Wide Awake assumes control over the city by the river.
The Rustin family is directly affected by these developments. Paterfamilias Hugo, much like American liberals in 2016 (in an interview, Packer explicitly referred to Hugo as a “liberal”), refuses to accept that things have changed and soon loses his job as chief surgeon at the local hospital. Hugo then enters a long, dark night of the soul, which forms the spine of the novel’s plot. For their part, his wife Annabelle and daughter Selva embrace elements of Together—the former its focus on community and the latter its emphasis on radical equality. Eventually, Hugo and Selva go on a trip into Yeoman country, where they learn that the sureties of imperial life are unlikely to return.
The major outcome of this journey is that Selva becomes the victim of Yeoman violence, which after several twists and turns leads Hugo to abandon his liberal faith in reason and rational exchange. By the end of The Emergency, Hugo has rejected the notion “that if we just all sit down and talk to each other…we will understand each other and be able to get along through compromise.” Instead, he embraces a gauzy humanism—The Emergency literally ends with Hugo, in the middle of a battle sweeping the city by the river, preparing to open his door to help a stranger.
Hugo Rustin serves as a stand-in for Packer, who admits that “a few years ago, I began to lose faith in the power of facts to create any kind of shared reality.” But nothing has replaced this disillusionment, save for a general disorientation. As with Hugo, Packer’s shift from liberalism to humanism is an evasion masquerading as evolution. Liberalism at least claimed to have answers, whether institutions, norms, or reasoned discourse. Humanism, in contrast, offers only the possibility of individual moral gestures. That this is Packer’s answer to the collapse of the empire suggests how thoroughly he has given up on any collective political project that might actually address the crisis he describes. It is hard to imagine a more damning statement on liberalism’s present condition.
If any emotion defines The Emergency, it is bewilderment. Hugo just doesn’t understand the new world, and neither does Packer, who repeatedly—and perhaps despite himself—defaults to prejudice in his novel. Yeomen, for example, are nothing more than a collection of liberal anxieties about the white working class: They are drunk, ignorant, bigoted, and violent. The same can be said for Packer’s treatment of Together as naïve idiocy. For all his understanding that things have changed, Packer isn’t interested in examining the sources of this transformation, as his hurried explanation of the empire’s collapse underlines.
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On some level, Packer understands that the era of liberalism is over. In an interview with the podcaster Andrew Keen, he remarked that “it seems today as if [liberalism has] run out of gas, as if it no longer has answers for the deep dissatisfactions of Western publics.” But this is about as much self-reflection and diagnosis as we get, from Packer and in The Emergency.
When Packer was asked by PEN America’s Julia Goldberg what “it might take for Americans to demonstrate the same willingness [that Hugo Rustin has] to open their doors to everyone, metaphorically speaking,” all he could offer in response is that Americans must “take the risk to go out and encounter, really see, the other,” and in so doing “face our country’s moral collapse and return to human decency, common humanity —something more basic and universal than politics.”
Yet even Packer seems dissatisfied with this rather timid response. The Emergency ends with a civil war breaking out between the Burghers and the Yeomen (the Yeomen, of course, strike first, deploying “shitapults”—catapults filled with feces). Uninterested in addressing the causes of social decay or exploring the political and economic solutions that might chart our way out of the morass, The Emergency concludes with fantasies of savagery. Like all capitalist realists, Packer can more easily imagine the end of civilization than he can the emergence of an alternative system.
Packer claims that he wrote The Emergency because he believes fables are a useful means to illuminate present politics. And The Emergency is useful, albeit not in the way Packer intended. The light it sheds is on the limits of a liberal imagination indifferent to both the causes of and the solutions to our current crisis. The Short American Century is over, and while no one knows what comes next, it has become increasingly clear that liberals likely won’t be the ones leading us into the future. The Emergency is thus less of a novel than it is a confession: that liberalism has nothing useful left to say.
Daniel BessnerTwitterDaniel Bessner is an historian of US foreign relations, and cohost of American Prestige, a podcast on international affairs.