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 that's because we're not a totalitarian-type country.
We are more a country whose greatest risk is that we will amuse ourselves to death.
And so people would walk away from Trump rallies before they were over.
because they were bored and had something else to do.
And that just did not show a level of commitment that you would expect from a great authoritarian state.
Whereas I do think young people, especially young men with a sense of isolation and meaninglessness, I've been to Charlie Kirk's
I went to one in Phoenix a couple of years ago for Turning Point USA, and he was thrilling 13,000 young people, mostly young men, with his sort of calls to action because young people want to be young.
told you can do something and it's going to be a great adventure.
And so I don't think JD Vance has the rhetorical or charismatic power to get millions of people to throw themselves at his feet.
Charlie Kirk might have, if he were running for president, if he had not been tragically killed, and if he were running for president, I think he could, with his mix of Christianity, nationalism, and kind of self-improvement, could have gotten quite a galvanized support among the young.
But I do worry that they are looking for it.
They're looking for some leader to tell them,
Here's the great cause, and it's going to make you sacrifice.
It's going to make you suffer.
You'll have to go through some terrible things, but at the other end will be a world that you can only dream of.
That's an exciting thing for young people to hear.
It's a great question, John, and a kind of core question about liberal democracy.
I think Francis Fukuyama at the end of his misunderstood essay, The End of History, said the problem with the victorious liberal democracy is that people are going to get bored for just these reasons because people actually want more than just a good time.
more than just the right number of calories and a wide array of streaming video.
They actually have higher and deeper aspirations.
Showing 521–540 of 697 · page 27 of 35
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