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
It seems pretty clear that it is and your healthcare costs, which is about to become a much bigger one.
Last year's presidential election sort of taught us that if, if one side is saying we have to save our democracy, a lot of people think, well,
Our democracy isn't working because of X, Y, and Z in my life, and it hasn't worked for a long time.
So why is this the issue?
Why should saving democracy be the thing I vote on when democracy hasn't done anything for me lately?
So there's a kind of...
hollowness to the big abstract language we use that doesn't speak to the thing that is hitting someone on the most personal level.
And the other side thinks that democracy is in danger too, weirdly enough.
I mean, the polls showed that Trump supporters were just as concerned about democracy as Harris supporters.
They were just concerned for the opposite reasons.
So in itself, it just doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that if you're in the politics business, which I'm not, you want to make your message because it just doesn't have a clear effect that's going to favor your candidate.
That is the big question.
And I've been trying to figure it out for well over a decade.
I wrote a book in 2013 called The Unwinding that it was kind of a big panoramic narrative rather than a polemic or an analysis, but it essentially showed a landscape on which someone like Trump was very thinkable.
And a couple of years later there he was because of the level of alienation and
the cynicism about the elites, about business elites, government elites, media elites, the loneliness, the fact that Americans seem to be cut off from one another, the lack of any institutional sort of foundation for people's lives to support or maintain a middle-class life.
I was kind of left behind parts of the country and was seeing that everywhere.
This was really the post-
financial crisis years.
So it was Obama's first term.
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