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
In recent weeks, Vice President Vance has found himself in the international spotlight after he briefly met with Pope Francis the day before he died, followed by a high-profile meeting with Pope Leo at the Vatican several weeks later, where the two discussed pressing global concerns, including immigration and artificial intelligence and the war in Ukraine.
In his article, George Packer examines the contradictions at the heart of Vance's meteoric rise, how the thoughtful, searching voice of hillbilly elegy turned into a politician known for inflammatory rhetoric. Someone who, as Packer writes, sneers at childless cat ladies, peddles lies about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, and sticks a finger in the face of the besieged president of Ukraine.
Packer covers American politics, culture, and foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He's also the author of several acclaimed books, including The Unwinding, An Inner History of the New America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2013. George Packer, welcome back to the show.
Well, George, the name of this article, The Talented Mr. Vance, is this clear play on the talented Mr. Ripley. And that is a story about a man who is brilliant and charming, but deceitful in his quest to become someone entirely different from who he once was. And he's willing to betray nearly anyone to preserve that new identity. Is that how you see Vance?
You make the point to say the problem with Vance is a question about his character. I'm just wondering what makes the way Vance has moved over the last two decades maybe different than your average politician who kind of moves through different worlds and is different depending on the environment and the circumstance.
Going back to his time in the military, he went there as an idealist. What did he witness or experience during that tour, which was it was around 2006 that kind of shifted his perspective about war?
You track his skepticism and also kind of a cycling through a range of belief systems around that time period and identities in his 20s, which like many of us do as we're trying to find ourselves. But what stands out to you the most about that evolution during that time period? What makes this more than a young man simply trying to find himself?
Did you find or learn from anyone you talked to any contradictions between the man that he describes himself as in Hillbilly Elegy and some of the realities that people responded to once that book came out?
As you mentioned, J.D. Vance went to Ohio State University. He went on to Yale Law School. That time at Yale was a transformative time. He arrived there and made friends very quickly, was very popular, as you stated, He also met his wife, who is now the second lady, whom he called his life coach. Can you remind us of her background and how she helped him navigate that world?
Were there really basic things that she taught him about moving through the world?
George, has Vance ever talked about or written about maybe the moral or emotional cost to that kind of class mobility he experienced at Yale. I mean, he basically, which millions of people do, assimilated in order to be a part of that class of people. Because we see what he gained, access to the people in power and elite education, but what did it require him to shed?
Can you explain really briefly, we know that Peter Thiel is a billionaire, but can you explain why he's so influential?
Vance has a law degree from Yale. Right now, his priorities seem to be attacking the courts. What do you make of that?
How do you think that younger Vance who wrote Hillbilly Elegy would think of Vice President Vance?
Our guest today is Atlantic staff writer George Packer. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
Vance went on to work for Peter Thiel. And during that Silicon Valley phase, Vance has talked about being at dinners and explaining the struggles of people like him to billionaires. And has he talked about how he reconciled those encounters?
Did you find signs that it actually troubled him that even among those that he admired that spoke of the ideologies that he now like really accepted and felt found himself in actually also didn't really know much about him and where he was from and people like him?
The thing about Hillbilly Elegy, I mean, I want you to delve a little bit deeper into this because you write, while that memoir really did speak to his life in really deep and profound ways in the lives of many, many people, the memoir belongs in an era that no longer exists. Can you say more about that?
An informant because he's speaking. He's speaking about the working class through his own experiences.
Well, at that same time period, I mean, we're talking like 2016, 2017. I want to actually play a clip of Vance speaking at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics. This was a year after the release of his memoir where he also then started to talk about the appeal of Trump in other ways and more in deeper ways. Let's listen.
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