Most accounts of contemporary America take it for granted that the country is characterized by deep-rooted political divisions that prevent cooperation or even meaningful communication between different groups. In her new memoir, The Last American Road Trip, Sarah Kendzior writes that “every day I wake to a pundit or member of Congress calling for civil war—or its euphemistic parlance, a ‘national divorce’.” The images of conflict insist that these differences are so fundamental that they must be accommodated rather than challenged. Liberalism and conservatism, to use the deceptive labels that dominate the American media, are understood as fixed identities.
Despite this, there are a number of assumptions that connect these distinct groups and so provide a basis for understanding the parameters of current American political discourse. One of the most significant is a conviction that the United States is not merely in decline but is either about to collapse or has already done so. The apocalyptic rhetoric of Trump’s first inaugural speech, with its images of “American carnage,” has parallels across the political spectrum. Whilst Trump maintains that the country can be returned to a past greatness, paradoxically by destroying its established institutions, norms, and values, liberals have struggled to do more than mourn the country their opponents are reconstructing.
Throughout The Last American Road Trip, Kendzior emphasizes her sense of loss. She is clear that “if someone with a time machine asked me whether I wanted to live in the past or the future, I would instantly answer ‘the past’,” and her text is dominated by a conviction that the country is on the verge of destruction. The journeys she describes are motivated by a desire for her children “to see America before it ended.” Her anger at those who, in a well-chosen phrase, want to “strip the United States down and sell it for parts” is necessary as well as welcome but the book demonstrates the ways in which liberals are currently struggling to produce an alternative model of patriotism. As Eric Hobsbawm argues, when America was founded patriots were radicals oriented towards the future, people “who showed the love of their country by wishing to renew it by reform or revolution.” Kendzior insists the United States is “worth saving, that miracles occur even in the worst of times,” but the word “miracles” does not suggest much confidence in the possibility of renewal or much sense of agency.
There can be no doubt about Kendzior’s commitment to America; she reiterates it throughout the book, even telling her daughter that “I love this country more than anyone I know.” Like all love, her attachment is defined by its irrational excess, the fact that it persists even when it is difficult to justify or enjoy. There is, Kendzior insists, “a pain in loving a place that is so terrible and wonderful at once,” and this is reflected in her accounts of her travels, which always involve an “anticipatory grief,” like “visiting a relative diagnosed with a terminal disease.” The book resembles the work of a salvage anthropologist, whose attempts to preserve a culture in words acknowledges its imminent disappearance in fact. Kendzior insists that she refuses “to believe our nation’s fate is preordained,” but this is not always reflected in a text which, as its title suggests, records a country seen as if for the last time.
The primary objects of the road trips Kendzior takes with her family are America’s national parks. Their determination to see as many as possible is a minor act of resistance, a response to Trump’s practice of “treating [their] employees… as enemies of the state,” and takes them everywhere from Theodore Roosevelt National Park, one of the least visited in the country, to the Great Smoky Mountains, the most popular. The parks, like pessimism, connect an otherwise fragmented population; they are “one of the few things all Americans support.” They are also one of the country’s great recent achievements, demonstrating a commitment to the nation, not as an abstraction, but as shared land which there is a shared obligation to protect. Collectively funded but open to all, they are democratic spaces. The attacks on them may understandably be obscured by the immediate threats to democratic principles, economic stability, the judicial system, and freedom of speech but any attempt to open them to commercial exploitation is an assault on American values, achievements, and potential that must also be opposed. The decision to focus on these institutions is arguably the greatest strength of Kendzior’s book, and she not only makes a strong case for their importance but for visiting them in person.
The Last American Road Trip is an uneven book but it is often moving and always revealing. Kendzior’s claim that “I love America with all my heart and would never live anywhere else” is convincing, but she struggles to overcome her despair, despite insisting that she “cannot help but find heaven in other people’s idea of hell.” Her well-founded “pessimism of the intellect”, to borrow Antonio Gramsci’s famous phrase, is too rarely combined with the “optimism of the will” radical patriotism requires. As a consequence, Kendzior achieves the difficult task of making current conditions seem bleaker than they are. The statement that “the world my children had inherited was worse than anything I could have imagined” suggests a lack of imagination rather than, as she presumably intended, a clear-sighted appraisal of problems. The images of catastrophe are counterproductive as well as inaccurate. Politics requires a conviction that the world can be changed, but for much of the text Kendzior relegates even the “hope things could get better” to the “Before Times” that ended with the Great Recession. This is particularly frustrating because The Last American Road Trip provides a concrete example of what a better country might look like. The national parks are not utopian abstractions but the concrete, imperfect products of an imperfect political system, a demonstration of what is possible. It requires political will to achieve anything on that scale, a commitment to reform or revolution, but that is what loving a country demands.
NONFICTION
The Last American Road Trip
By Sarah Kendzior
Flatiron Books
Published April 1, 2025
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