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
And while Obama, as you know, John, was struggling to pass legislation that could address these things, it just didn't seem to be reaching people and making them feel as if, yeah, this is going to change my life and he cares.
Instead, it felt very far away and slow.
So I would say there are three reasons.
And they go back to the 70s, some of them.
The end of the industrial economy and the rise of the knowledge economy, which created categories of winners and losers that were more extreme than anything we'd seen since before the Great Depression.
So...
college degree, that's the big dividing line.
If you're comfortable with symbols, with words, with computers, you have a future in this country.
If you're in a rural area, in a small town, in an industrial town, if your industry is leaving, if you've been working with your hands all your life, if you didn't go to college or even finish high school,
And decade after decade, your chances are bleaker and bleaker.
So we all know that story.
My book kind of portrayed it in the lives of ordinary people.
The second is cultural change, dramatic cultural change, beginning, I would say, with the 60s and the late 60s, the –
The change in immigration laws that brought in large numbers of people from the global south, in a phrase, changes in family, in rights, in sexual mores, in identity groups, which gave some people a place at the table for the first time.
So not bad, good.
But over time, the speed of it, the scale of it made other people feel as if their America was disappearing and that they were somehow not counted, not respected.
And then the third is more recent, and it's social media, which has – because of the greed and wickedness of the tech oligarchs, to be blunt about it, has –
has driven us to our worst selves because that's what keeps us glued to the, to the screen.
And that's what amplifies the, the most extreme and, you know, hateful voices.
And those three things together created a kind of cold civil war and,
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