What Happened to the GOP?

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If 2018 has been anything, it has been a year of tumult for the country and for American politics.

Democrats, shut out of power, spent this year making the case to voters that their democracy is at stake.

Republicans, meanwhile, have controlled every branch of the government, and yet the party has spent much of its time making anti-democratic moves across the country.

Leading up to the midterms, there was a wave of Republican-led voter suppression campaigns in states like Georgia.

After big losses in November, lame-duck Republican legislatures have moved to strip authority from incoming Democrats in Wisconsin and Michigan, with similar efforts underway in Ohio and Missouri.

And for most of this week, with Republicans in charge of the House and the Senate and the White House, it's looked as if we were headed toward a shutdown of the federal government.

That is all to say nothing of what happens next year when Republicans will cast the deciding votes in determining what happens to the president and his administration in the wake of the Mueller investigations.

This week on the show, we're going to examine what happened to the GOP.

When did it become a party interested in power at the expense of leadership?

And what does it mean for the future of our democracy?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hello, this is Alex Wagner, contributing editor at The Atlantic.

With me on this very special year-end wrap-it-up with a bow episode of the podcast is the great George Packer, journalist, novelist, playwright, and as of a few weeks ago, to our great delight, an Atlantic staff writer.

George, welcome.

It is great to be here, Alex.

We are so happy to have you.

And your first piece for the Atlantic is really the organizing principle of

really this entire podcast, maybe our year, which is the corruption of the Republican Party.

And you begin this wonderful career, I'm sure that will last many, many years at the Atlantic with a powerful thesis talking about the corruption of the GOP.

Can you describe what you're seeing right now as we sort of look at the landscape at the end of 2018 as it concerns Republican actions?

We're seeing many of the things you mentioned at the top, Alex.

State legislatures trying to undo the results of November elections by defanging incoming Democratic officials, governors, attorneys general.

We're seeing what we've seen for years, but intensified, is efforts to suppress voting and to make it harder to vote.

We had in Georgia the Secretary of State who'd been responsible for eliminating thousands and thousands of voters from the rolls and then ran for governor without resigning his office and oversaw the very election in which he was competing, which is mind-boggling.

We had the same thing in Kansas with Chris Kobak.

In Georgia, Brian Kemp won.

In Kansas, the Republican lost.

But to have

the interested party overseeing the rules is, if that isn't a conflict of interest, I don't know what is.

So we're seeing all kinds of ways in which in the States and in Washington, but really it's most vivid in the States right now.

Republicans throwing away the rule book, saying the rules don't apply to them, acting as if democracy is a convenience.

And when it works, great.

And when it doesn't, toss it out and

grab for power in some other way.

And so when the midterms didn't go their way, we saw something ugly come out in the Republican Party, which was a sense that power is theirs almost by right.

And if they don't get it, the electoral way, they'll find some other way to hold on to it because it's power rather than democratic process and values that are the highest value.

The sort of nugget that I think stands out as far as the organizing principle in all of this is this statement that you make in the piece, which is that Democrats are coalitional, the Republican character is ideological.

Can you explain that in sort of a little bit more detail, what you mean by that?

What I wanted to do was look at how all these

events that we're seeing in the news every day fit with each other and with history because it can be too disorienting or too much ad hoc to just be

alert to individual acts of power grabbing without understanding what are the deeper causes of it.

Why is it that it's the Republican Party that has come to this?

And so what I did

in the piece in the Atlantic was to look at its history since it became an ideology-based party.

And that is what the modern Republican Party has become.

And it really began in 1964 with the nomination of Barry Goldwater as a Republican presidential candidate.

Now, my fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom.

Our people have followed false prophet.

We must

And we shall return to proven ways, not because they are old, but because they are true.

Goldwater was an unabashed conservative of actually a rather paranoid, conspiratorial, Cold War type.

He actually mellowed in later years, but in 1964, if you read his speeches, they were scary.

And if you read the books written by his supporters, like None Dare Call It Treason or A Choice Not an Echo,

they were InfoWars.

Before there was info wars.

Yeah, exactly.

And

millions of Americans were attracted to Goldwater and to that cause.

And even though he lost in a landslide, it was the defeat that led to future victories because it was the beginning of the takeover of the Republican Party, but by what I call an insurgency.

It was the first insurgency.

Let me just set the table a little bit for sort of the, for our listeners.

You make a sort of provocative argument in the piece, which is that the degradation of the Republican Party, the power grabbing at the expense of leadership and actual policymaking and governance, is really

what we're seeing now is the harvest of seeds that were sown a half a century ago.

That the modern Republican Party extends back into the year, and you peg it, 1964, which is when Barry Goldwater enters the scene.

You look at Barry Goldwater as kind of an insurgent who leads the charge of a new strain of Republican politics that denounces the political opposition as a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Let's talk a little bit about that, George.

Grievance and racism animated the movement in the 1960s, and Goldwater's strongest support came from white Southerners reacting against civil rights.

You write at the time that liberals effectively didn't pay enough attention to the burgeoning moment, right?

Goldwater's defeated.

But what happened to sort of make people not take these guys perhaps as seriously as they should have?

Yeah, this is the subject of a terrific book by Rick Perlstein from many years ago called Before the Storm.

And Perlstein delights in quoting people like Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Hofstadter,

who looked at Goldwater and at his followers as kind of the lunatic fringe and who could take these people seriously.

They have loopy conspiracies.

They're one step away from the John Birch Society, if not firmly planted in it.

They

seem to be welcoming World War III and nuclear destruction.

And they are either outright bigots or they are

apologists for bigots in the name of states' rights.

So how can we possibly think that they are the future of America?

The future of America is bright.

It's progressive.

We're moving in the right direction.

There was a post-World War II consensus that a mixed economy with a welfare state and capitalism, with rights being granted to more and more Americans, with protest movements claiming the rights that were not being granted, everything seemed to be moving toward a more optimistic future in the early 60s, even with the assassination of John F.

Kennedy and the beginning of the Vietnam War.

Goldwater was this dark figure who was prophesying disaster.

And at the end of that 64 campaign, Ronald Reagan, who at the time was just a pitch man for General Electric and a retired actor who hadn't had much of a career, went on national TV and did a half-hour ad for Goldwater.

The following pre-recorded political program is sponsored by TV for Goldwater Miller on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate for President of the United States.

Ladies and gentlemen, That was brilliant and powerful and

absorbed, you know, kind of channeled all of Reagan's acting abilities into a message that said

Medicare and civil rights and all the things that the Democrats and the moderate Republicans who really were the power in that party then are bringing.

This is totalitarianism.

It's going to take your freedom away.

Now,

one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity.

The line has been used, we've never had it so good.

But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future.

No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income.

Today,

that was Goldwater's message, and it seemed easy to dismiss because the consensus was so strong in America that this was the best possible future for our society.

And yet you write that sort of while that kind of nihilistic republicanism is waved away by establishment figures, the years of the sort of 70s leading into the 80s are the years that conservatives begin to hammer away at institutional structures, denouncing established ones for treacherous liberalism, you write, and building alternatives in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, magazines, publishers, professorships.

Yeah, I would not call it nihilistic yet.

In fact, it was idealistic.

Idealistic, okay.

Yeah, I mean, I think the early conservative movement leading up to the Reagan presidency had very clear and very high ideals.

They wanted to get rid of government intervention in the economy.

They wanted to roll back communism.

They wanted to free Americans from the heavy hand of government.

Right.

And And whether or not you agree with those, those are ideals.

And

they clung to them.

They pursued them with amazing single-mindedness over a very long period of time.

And they were not like the usual American politicians who kept taking polls and shifting their position a little bit and looking to the very next cycle of elections for their affirmation.

Instead, the conservatives were more like, I hate to say it, Leninists.

They had a long game.

They were pursuing an ultimate ideal and were not deterred by defeats along the way.

And they also saw the need to build their own institutions because they thought that the mainstream newspapers, universities, foundations were liberal and were hostile to them and to their vision.

So

I see them in some ways as being a kind of model of how ideology can transform politics.

But it was ideology.

In other words, it was a fixed idea of the truth and a politics that tried to stay very close to that idea of the truth rather than making compromises, joining in coalitions and all the grubby things of normal democratic politics that we all despise.

You also write that Reagan commanded a revolution, but he himself didn't have a revolutionary character.

He didn't think the public needed to be indoctrinated and organized, only heard.

How does that work?

I mean,

how do you command a revolution without actually yourself being an insurgent?

I think that in order to have one of their own reach the pinnacle of power, the conservatives needed to find someone who didn't seem like an ideologue.

Because ideologues are sort of frightening.

They're rigid.

They have an authoritarian streak.

And they don't actually seem all that American.

We are more used to ordinary people ascending to that office or to

career politicians or to people with kind of without very clear political views at all, but just who we like, who seem like good people.

Reagan was in that mold.

He seemed like a good guy.

He had an optimistic vision.

He had a real knack for using language in a way that seemed to rise above sordid reality and paint a picture that people could actually aspire to.

So he didn't have that insurgent militancy that might have frightened away the voters.

He actually was a militant in his views, but his character, I think, and temperament and style were

so

Main Street cinematic man.

Morning in America.

Horseback, morning in America, that he made

the conservative insurgency seem like just good old American values that we could finally see in the White House.

Aaron Powell, so what you're saying basically is the politics of the Reagan era were very much on the sort of insurgency continuum of this new strain of

Republicanism.

It's just that the actor that was selling them was not.

He was from sort of traditional American central casting, quite literally.

The golden boy from California, almost the gateway drug, if you will, to this new brand of Republican politics.

Right.

Even though he himself was a hardcore conservative,

nonetheless, he didn't sound like one.

But I would say, as important as Reagan was, more important than Reagan for where we are right now was a guy who got elected to Congress two years before Reagan was elected president.

A man

who's still on the national stage.

He'll never leave.

He will always be with us.

And what is that man's name, George?

His name is Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich.

We are going to talk all about Newt Gingrich right after the break.

Stay with us.

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We were just talking about a man named Newt Gingrich, who ends up being a pivotal figure in Republican politics and the insurgency that has led us to this moment we are presently in.

George, what's Gingrich's role in all of this?

Gingrich came into the House of Representatives in 1978, and his ideology was all over the place.

He wasn't fixed in the way Goldwater and Reagan were, but his tactics and his sense of destiny were robust.

He came in to smash the place to pieces.

And you write that his insurgency really started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

So this is the sort of like ADBC line in the sand where this sort of Reagan-esque Morning in America style message or overlay veneer is smashed in favor of someone who is going into Congress with

a hammer and an anvil and is there

to, as he calls it,

return politics to their most primal essence.

That's a quote from McKay Cobbin's recent profile of Newt Gingrich for The Atlantic.

Yes, exactly.

And that profile captured

in live action that Gingrich is unchanging.

There's something so fixed about him.

He's exactly the same as the young guy who was this bad boy, enfanterable, who came into Washington in 1978,

talking about the corrupt left-wing machine and quoting Mao on

war being politics with blood.

He was playing for real, and he was not going to play by the rules.

He was going to go after the very top figures in the House of Representatives, Tip O'Neill, and then after O'Neill, Jim Wright.

He was going to try to destroy them personally as well as politically, using language that until then was considered over the top or

out of place in the halls of Congress, Congress, calling colleagues traitors and talking about treason and making these audio tapes that he distributed to Republican candidates.

And they would drive around their district campaigning for office and listening to Gingrich's audio tapes.

And they were like primers on how to talk in politics.

And they were, you know, you need to use this vocabulary that's vicious and that demonizes your opponent in order to break through, in order to to target and smear the guy so that the voters will think that voting for him is evil.

Right.

McKay, in his piece about Gingrich,

notes a speech that Professor Gingrich gave in June of 1978 to a gathering of college Republicans.

And I just want to read some quotes from that speech to your points, George.

Gingrich says, one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty.

We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire, but are lousy in politics.

For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on.

The next generation of Republicans would have to learn to, quote, raise hell, to stop being so nice, to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat war for power.

That's the key phrase in all of this.

Here we enter the stage, the battle stage, where it becomes a war for power.

Can I just ask you, George, what you think of Gingrich's operating principle that

it is a war for power

and that what we're witnessing in this moment is really simply a return to the sort of pugilistic roots of politics.

What do you think of that?

Well, of course, politics is a war for power,

but if there are no limits and restraints, then it becomes a kind of

World War I

where each side starts using mustard gas and eventually everyone is lying dead in a trench and rotting away.

And pretty much year after year, you just have piles of bones and no one can even remember what the war was about in the first place and why you're still fighting.

And that is the politics of polarization that we've been living with now for a couple of decades.

And if one person is to blame for it, it's Newt Gingrich because he brought it in.

He thought that it would lead to his own personal power, which it did.

He became Speaker of the House against all odds, and to Republican power.

You know, the odd thing about Gingrich is as much, it's all negative.

It's all about the enemy, the left-wing machine, liberals, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Obama's, you know, supposed colonial views coming from Kenya.

It's all about how to label the enemy.

It has very little in the way of what kind of society do we want to live in?

What are the things worth living for?

What is the good society?

What does justice mean?

What does equality mean?

You don't hear Gingrich talking about that stuff very much.

Right.

There's no cohesive or coherent or articulated platform here.

It's just about the destruction of the enemy.

Yeah,

the city on a hill of Reagan is more like

a little shithole in which everyone is constantly at war with each other.

Let's get a little bit into sort of how Gingrich made that happen, though.

Because I, you know, this is the period when the moderates from the party are effectively purged.

How does that happen?

I mean, they were at one point greater in number, right?

So what goes on?

Well, it's not just Gingrich.

An important thing going on at the same time as Gingrich and kind of parallel to Gingrich, who's inside the party, is the media outside the party.

And a key event was when Ronald Reagan's

Federal Communications Commission got rid of what was called the fairness doctrine, which required essentially equal time for different points of view on the public airwaves

and

a kind of wholesome civic content to it all.

And once that was gone, Rush Limbaugh, he was the first to take advantage of it, could be heard on hundreds of radio stations without any liberal counterpart.

And from Limbaugh, it went to Fox News and Matt Drudge, and from Fox News News and Matt Drudge to Breitbart,

and from Breitbart

to Steve Bannon and to Alex Jones.

So there's a line, a rather, you know, downward sloping line from, say, 87 and Limbaugh to today and Alex Jones.

And Gingrich found a way to put on a show.

I mean, he's someone who begins to sort of see the C-SPAN cameras in the House chamber as an opportunity to put on, you know, to deliver a soliloquy,

to sing his aria, if you will.

Even though it's an empty chamber, he knows that whatever he says is going to be beamed to Americans on their TV sets across the country.

There is a serious effort, it would seem, on the part of some politicians, particularly those who believe in the liberal welfare state and in the last 20 years of doing business, the people who believe in higher taxes, bigger bureaucracy, more welfare programs.

There's an effort almost gloatingly to focus on the stupid side of the Graham-Rudman approach.

And this becomes sort of the performance is the piece itself, right?

The performance is the politics to a certain degree for Gingrich.

He was brilliant.

I mean, C-SPAN came into the House of Representatives just when Newt Gingrich arrived, and he immediately saw that these,

you know, unmanned cameras that were always fixed on whoever was speaking

and that could be beamed into people's living rooms through through cable could be a way to talk to voters and to get around what he saw as the liberal media that was always filtering and distorting his message.

And so he got up there and spoke as much as he could and got his allies to do the same thing.

And once again, you know, the Democrats seemed slow on the uptake and unable to see the threat.

in their in their house and didn't take him or this new technology and this new approach to sort of direct contact with voters very seriously.

I have to say here that the parallels between that moment and the moment in 2016 that led to the election of Donald Trump, who mastered control of conservative airways to win the American presidency, much to the shock and surprise of the rest of the country.

I mean,

the parallels are nearly exact.

Yes, I think Gingrich is a

probably a leap from Gingrich to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump.

Gingrich,

far smarter than the other two, a far more cunning politician, but using, yeah, these

mouthpieces, these tools of propaganda from C-SPAN to Fox News to Twitter, in order to get around

the establishment, whether Republican or Democratic, and stir up feelings, not so much analysis and rational debate, but feelings about

the other, about those people who are taking away our jobs or taking away our rights

and those liberals who are corrupt and decadent and who despise you.

That kind of talk, which, you know, we've seen in the past with Joe McCarthy and with Father Coughlin in the thirties.

But it's the difference now is that is the heart of the Republican Party.

And Gingrich, I think, planted it there by becoming the Republican leader in the 90s and bringing his own entirely negative view of politics into the practice of the Republican Party.

And then a whole new generation of politicians began to imitate him.

Let's talk a little bit about how the sort of post-Gingrich era led us to where we are now.

I want to bring in, I mean, one of the things that I constantly quote and discuss is your National Book Award-winning award-winning 2013 tome, The Unwinding, where you profiled Americans around the country who were sort of at the forefront of major changes in America in the last 50 years, including the subprime mortgage crisis, the decline of American manufacturing, our changing economy, the influence of money on politics.

That's what's happening sort of independent of politics, right?

But those voters, in many ways, are the ones that elected Donald Trump.

So I guess I wonder when you think about these these strains, these changes happening in Republican politics, and you think about the changes happening in American society and the economy and culture, how did those voters come to choose Trump and the nihilism he and his party represent?

That's a great question.

And the answer says something about this insurgency, because I don't think those voters

moved to the Republican side out of ideology.

I don't think it was because

they had been liberal in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, and then suddenly they became conservative.

Right.

They were not reading the conscience of a conservative.

They were not necessarily acolytes of William F.

Buckley, right?

They weren't watching old reruns of Firing Line and suddenly realizing that they didn't get woke by old episodes of Fire Day.

Yeah, the reverse woke didn't happen to them that way.

I think what happened was globalization swept through their communities and their lives and was an absolute catastrophe in many cases where factories all over the heartland were shutting down and big box stores were crushing small shops and jobs were disappearing.

And

in some cases, immigrants appeared to be doing better than native-born Americans.

They were coming in and buying up motels and chain restaurants and

becoming the new middle class.

And to those

working class, mainly white Americans who had seen themselves as kind of the backbone of the country,

their

place in our country and their world seemed to be disappearing.

And it was, they were just ripe for being

seized by one party or the other.

And the Democratic Party had moved in a direction that seemed to them like a repudiation.

Essentially, the Democrats became the party of the educated professionals, people living in cities and suburbs, people with college degrees, people who worked with computers,

people who were at ease with

a world of

mass immigration, a multicultural landscape of traveling abroad, of playing the stock market,

and seeing capital moving around the world at lightning speeds as a good thing.

And

suddenly, the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson was no longer the Democratic Party

that seemed to stand for their interests.

So,

you seem to suggest that to some degree both parties bear some responsibility here, right?

I mean, in your last piece for The New Yorker, you wrote about the demise of the moderate Republican, and the congressman you profile, Ryan Costello, tells you that liberal pressure groups don't go to the red parts of Alabama or even Pennsylvania.

They're going to purple and they're going to beat up on people like him because they're the vulnerable ones, and that's how you take back the house.

That they basically targeted moderates, and as a result,

you know, they're not trying to win over red parts of the country anymore.

And that's functionally made the Republican Party even more extreme.

It's effectively rewarded the sort of nihilistic tactics of Trump and his accolytes.

Aaron Ross Powell, right?

If you look at the map of red and blue America and what happened between 2008 and 2016, the Obama years, the vast middle of the country was painted red.

State legislatures, governorships, senators, presidential votes.

It just, the red kept moving further and further toward the coasts until the blue were these very densely populated but small pockets on the East Coast, the West Coast, a bit, you know, in the Rocky Mountains, a bit in the upper Midwest.

But essentially, the Democratic Party lost the middle of the country and didn't even seem to know it.

It was as if Democrats were so riveted to the story of the Obama presidency that they didn't pay very much attention to the fact that both houses of Congress and two-thirds of the state houses were under the control of Republicans who were able to redistrict, to draw new congressional districts in ways that entrenched them in power, you know, for years or maybe even decades.

Right.

The 2010, this 2010 census.

Which I think is the third insurgency.

If we have Goldwater and Gingrich, the third insurgency begins in 2009 with the Tea Party, which was a direct reaction to the election of Obama.

to, I would say, two things.

One, having a black man in the White House, and two, having

government

pushing for large spending for health care

and for

control of Wall Street as a reaction to the financial crisis.

Saying nothing, but that it is confusing, though, because many of these same workers, you know, you talk about an economic inequality.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is supposed to theoretically help them.

And that was an outgrowth of Wall Street reform in the wake of the 2007, 2008 reform.

You're so right.

You're so right.

And, you know, try to explain why

a

mixed

health insurance system with both insurance companies and the government playing a part or why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be good for

ordinary workers in Ohio while they're also seeing jobs not coming back

and

incomes not going up

and cultural and racial changes that for some some are disturbing, it's pretty hard to do.

It's a situation rife for demagoguery.

And that was how the Tea Party led to Donald Trump and his presidency, I'd say.

Does this base that we're talking about know or care that the current Republican Party's tactics are effectively anti-democratic?

And by that I mean the extreme gerrymandering, the voter suppression, the last legislative end runs around fair fair elected governance

in the next year in certain state houses.

I mean, is that a matter of concern, do you think?

I would say for those who've been so thoroughly

indoctrinated into hatred of liberals by Fox News and by Republican politicians and maybe by their own experience, although I think most of it is filtered through conservative media, it'll never make a difference.

They're tribal voters.

They're voting for their gang, for their tribe, which is led by Donald Trump.

And whatever their tribe needs to do to stay in power and to stick it to the liberals

is good.

How many voters is that?

You know, apparently it's about 35 or 40 percent of the country who will never abandon Donald Trump.

But that leaves a lot of people who voted for Trump and are abandoning him, or at least having deep second thoughts, and a lot more people who never cared for him in the first place and who seem to have been

motivated to come out and vote after forgetting to vote for the last couple of elections.

So

it's a mixed picture, but I

let's just say, you know, political corruption of the kind I wrote about is rarely the main thing voters care about because it doesn't seem directly connected to them.

But I think it's reached a point where it's so blatant and will be connected to them because, for example, in Wisconsin, the state legislature took away from the incoming Democratic governor the right to sue to get Wisconsin into the Medicaid provisions of

Obamacare.

So it's actually directly related to health care on one of the bills that was passed.

So

I think it's going to have more and more of an effect.

I think corruption is going to be a big issue in the next couple of years.

You draw such a linear story here, and it it works so elegantly from 1964 to Trump now, you know, with Gingrich in the middle and the Tea Party setting the stage for Trump.

But so many things had to go right, for example, for Trump to win the presidency, including, you know, what appears to be unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Do you think your thesis about how the Republican Party has changed would still work if Jeb Bush were president?

Jeb Bush would not be president.

You just think that's an impossibility, that that never could have been possible.

Yes, Hillary Clinton could be president if things had swung a little bit differently, including, you know, Russian interference, including 80,000 votes across three states.

But Donald Trump's becoming the Republican nominee and the Republican president, I think, was almost foreordained by

the

degree of dissent that the party traced over these decades, and especially in the last 10 years.

He was almost the inevitable product of a party that began with

a high-minded commitment, unwavering commitment to an ideal, a conservative ideal.

And because it was so unwavering, when that commitment and when that ideal were threatened by the majority of voters in various elections, including, what, five of the last six or six of the last seven presidential elections in which Democrats have won the popular vote,

then that commitment became a commitment to power because

the idea was threatened by the power of the opposite side.

So power above all.

But I don't think the Republicans would have descended to that level of power worship unless they had already been committed to an ideal that they would not be

detoured from.

And that's ideology.

That's the effect of ideology in politics.

It leads to a kind of corruption if it's taken to that extreme.

So I think Trump was inevitable, not him as a person, but that kind of politics once the Republican Party went down the road in which power at all costs was their North Star.

You know, you're very prescient.

And this line of thinking,

it makes what is a particularly nonsensical period in American politics feel like at least there's some sort of organizing principle.

And for that, I think we're all thankful.

I mean, thanks, Alex.

For me, the question, and maybe we'll talk about this another time, is how is the Republican Party going to come out of this ever?

This is our last episode of the year, George.

And that is an important and urgent question because the road ahead in the next even weeks and months is going to be a true test, not just for the party, but for democracy itself.

Exactly.

It is always great to have you on any show, but but particularly this show, now that we're colleagues.

Well, it's great we've landed at the same place, Alex.

It's really great.

Finally, finally.

It's been years in the making, George.

Exactly.

Like Republican.

It's taken a long time.

Many insurgencies, right?

George Packer, thanks for your time.

Great to have you on the home team.

Take care, Alex.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks, as always, to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, to our podcast podcast fellow Patricia Jacob, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is the Battle Hymn of the Republic as interpreted by John Batiste.

Check us out at theatlantic.com slash radio.

If you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

But most importantly, and we really mean it, thank you for listening.

We will be off.

The next two weeks for the holidays, everyone out there gets some rest, rejuvenation.

Call your mom, tell her how much you love her.

See you in 2019.

Tune back in.

We'll see you then.