George Packer
speaker
697 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 6 May
George Packer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The offices of the Atlantic are not being raided.
Our computers aren't being smashed.
So it doesn't look like
what you might call 20th century authoritarianism.
It looks more like 21st century authoritarianism, which is a sort of veneer of democracy and of freedom, but gradually an erosion of all the ways in which the citizenry and the institutions can check the power of the leader.
And if you go through them,
Congress, no, because the Republican Party has become a tool of cult of personality.
And since September, there's been a little movement on that, and maybe we should talk about that, but only by comparison with the utter –
that was going on before.
The Justice Department has become a tool of the president's own whims and grievances, doing favors for friends and punishing enemies.
The military is becoming more and more partisan with speeches by the president and by Hegseth treating the military as if it's part of the Republican Party and part of the
administration's political outlook.
The courts, I mean, the lower courts have been fighting hard, but so far I don't see much sign that the Supreme Court is willing to challenge the president on the really important cases that come before it, the ones that have to do with executive power.
And the public has been in some ways paralyzed by
Again, I wrote this before the November elections, and that showed a sign of public dissatisfaction with the president and his party.
But we don't see the kind of demonstrations and mass discontent that you would expect of Americans when they watch their –
250-year-old democracy slowly or not so slowly erode.
In fact, Trump has done in 10 months what it took Viktor Orban 10 years to do in terms of co-opting media corporations, co-opting law firms, co-opting some, not all, universities.
Anyway, those are all the institutions that should be applying pressure on an out-of-control leader.
And
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