Reading George Packer’s account of the shredding of America’s social contract, it becomes clear that the author, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is no John Dos Passos. That’s not too surprising, since Dos Passos, who died in 1970, was always a one-off, whether as the communist-sympathising novelist whose trilogy U.S.A. remains the great epic of 20th-century America or as the Goldwater-admiring conspiracy theorist he became in old age. 

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