With pitiless precision, the year 2020 exposed America's underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy. Tracing the problems back to their sources, the author of the National Book Award-winner The Unwinding suggests that there are four warring narratives in our nation, none of which can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, George Packer looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries.