George Packer: Trump Was a Symptom

Transcript

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Hey, everybody. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

I taped this show with George Packer earlier in the week.

I talked about his new book and some bigger picture themes about state of affairs in the country and the maybe waning, I don't know, the quasi-emergency that we're in.

And so, I hope you guys enjoy it. Hope you have a wonderful and restful holiday.
And I'll see you back here on Monday with Bill Crystal. But stick around for my conversation with George Packer.

Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, host, Tim Miller.
Delighted to welcome back, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

He's the author of numerous books, including The Assassin's Gate and The Last Best Hope, America and Crisis and Renewal. His latest book is a novel, The Emergency, which was published this month.

It's George Packer. How are you doing, man? Hey, good to see you, Tim.
Welcome back. Happy Thanksgiving.
What does the Packer family Thanksgiving look like?

Do you have any feuds, any political feuds, any old rivalries that come to the fore? Is it all joy? Do you have an annual soccer tournament? You know, we don't have a tradition.

I mean, we've lost three parents in the last three years. So

our kids, yeah, it is. And our kids' sense of the bigger family has really shrunk.
So they're basically stuck with their parents this Thanksgiving. But our son has been at college.

We're really looking forward to having him home. But it's going to be a really small Thanksgiving, but I'm going to try to make it special with a Capon,

which is a castrated chicken.

There may be some listeners who are going to object, but it's, you know, it's all okay by the authorities, I think. And it just tastes better than chicken.
Got it. A castrated chicken.

I'm trying to think about who the political figure would be that would

best fit that bill this week. Maybe Mike Johnson.
I don't know.

Because it's sort of a chicken chicken, right?

A chicken chicken. I'll think, I'll pray on that.
Maybe at the end of the pot, I'll have a more apt. Mike Johnson is my initial nominee.

I want to start here. I'm going to get to the book because the book very much, I started reading it on the plane earlier this weekend.

I'll confess I'm not, I'm not done, but you know, I've done enough as a podcast host to, I put in a good faith efforts given all the things out there.

So we'll get to the book, which, which touches on a lot of our current themes. But just first, really quick, at like the broadest level, we're 10 months in, 11 months in, really, to Trump 2.0.

It's been a minute since we've talked. What's your take? I saw a pretty ominous assessment from you with Jeff Goldberg saying it's taken Trump 10 months to do it.
It took Orban 10 years to do.

Maybe expand on that.

Any other big picture thoughts from your one? It's a sort of contradictory picture, I think, isn't it? On the one hand, he has accumulated more power than I thought possible in 10 months.

There are precious few checks on his power. Congress has abdicated.
The Supreme Court has invited him to do what he wants. The opposition is pretty feckless.

And the public, although they did vote in some Democrats a few weeks ago, there doesn't seem to be a sense of mass unease with an authoritarian regime, which is what we are in the process of getting.

So he is a truly dangerous figure. On the other hand, he seems weaker than at any time in his presidency.

He's got MAGA cracking open over the Epstein files, over any sign of disloyalty from the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who for maybe a minute is going to be profiling courage to

never Trumpers and anti-Trumpers, but we mustn't forget that she's actually nuts.

And he's got a bad economy getting worse.

He's got tariffs that are all over the map, and he keeps putting them on and taking them off in order to keep his poll numbers above 40, which I don't think they are at this point.

So, and the corruption is just off the charts. It's everywhere.
Every story you read, it turns out that, oh, Cash Patel

has been using FBI SWAT teams to escort his girlfriend on her singing expeditions. That's just a tiny one.
So the picture is both bleak and frightening.

picture of an authoritarian accumulating an immense power and a picture of a flailing, inattentive, unfocused president who can't keep his coalition together. So that's my contradictory view.

What do you think? Yeah, no, it feels right. It's interesting.
I try hard to fight my nature, which is to be a slave to the moment.

I wish there are some people who are very good big picture thinkers. Like, that's not me.
I always say it with my sports teams. Like, we win a game.
I'm like, oh, we're going to win the championship.

We lose one. It's like, fire the coach.
Like, I'm an emotional creature. And so I try not to be a slave to the moment.

But so when you're talking with Goldberg at Politics and Pros about the book, where you sort of made a similar point and talked about how there are few checks on his power, that was about literally two weeks ago from the time this publishes, like not that long ago.

And I almost feel like... In the interim, a lot of checks have started to emerge, or a lot of potential checks have started to emerge.

And I think that his grip on things is much more tenuous than it may have seemed in the summer. And so that is not to say that there's not danger ahead.
There is.

And frankly, if he starts to feel that his hold on power is tenuous, maybe he starts acting in an even more aggressive and authoritarian way than he has, right?

It's hard to exactly predict how he'll respond. But, you know, I don't know.
The Epstein file, you know, TBD on what the impact will be of the actual material that comes out is.

But just the fact that he lost, right? The fact that he was forced to submit to to the Marjorie Taylor Greene Massey wing, combined with all those things. Don't forget Bobert.
She was. And Bobert.

Yeah, yeah. Combined with all those things you laid out about the economy weakening, about, you know, people in Congress starting to feel less intimidated by his power.

You know, a public that maybe there's a mass mobilization, but there is, you know, unhappiness, growing unhappiness, it seems, in the public with him. And I don't know.

I look at all of that and I think maybe the story of year two will be that a lot of the checks that we are hoping to see this year, like they kind of flex a little bit.

The courts this week, hell, the courts this week, pushing back on his

effort to go after his political foes with Comey and James and having that case thrown out.

I don't know. I just see some glimmers of pushback to his attempt to grab the reins of the government.
I think that's right.

And the biggest question I have is whether the Republican Party will become a political party again.

It's showing little bit of signs of life as a party, that is to say, a grouping that allows for certain disagreements about some things and is an occult following of one person, which is what it's become.

And the question is whether a couple of little cracks in that monolith might begin to lead the entire thing to crumble.

Is there sort of everyone waiting for the moment when a couple of people have shown you can get away with it. You've got your own people behind you if you defy Trump more than they are behind Trump.

And then suddenly there's

a mass crumbling of the structure. I haven't seen that yet.

And it's been quite a long time since that structure has been a monolith, but that would make the biggest difference if suddenly Congress, the Republican Party, began to act like an independent branch of government rather than like a Duma

of the White House, exactly. exactly.
You know, it's interesting the way you frame it like that,

that to demonstrate dissent and argument would show that it's a functioning party. I do think that's like a misnomer a lot of times in the political debate where you see that.

It's like you see Democrats in disarray, you know, when they're Democrats disagreeing. It's like a common trope you see online.

And I think about that thinking back to that key moment after Biden dropped out when people are like, we can't have a primary because then there will be disagreements and the disagreements will come out in public.

And

if that happens, that will be bad for the party. Terrible.
And that's like not really right. Right.
I mean, sure.

Like sometimes if the disagreements within the party are so grave and so intense and personal, you can, you know, it can create a fissure that undermines the party.

But at some level, like a working party. as an actual functioning institution does have like dissent and disagreement and and open debate.

And it's, I don't know, it's just kind of an interesting way to think about it versus the common perception. Right.

I mean, it really went well for the Democrats after they all were forced to line up behind one candidate, didn't they?

Because it's much better than choosing the strongest candidate through a primary process or at least an open convention. Yeah, I think you're right.

And I think that also belongs to a bygone era when the press and the public were just looking for little mistakes and little disagreements to say, aha, you're in disarray when everything is in disarray today.

I mean, people say anything they want. Politicians sound like people at a football game who've had three or four beers and their team is losing.
I mean, there's like

no decorum that requires a political party to show that they're all on the same page.

Trump has proved that you can change your mind every hour, you can contradict yourself, you can get caught in blatant lies and still have a bright future.

So I don't know why the Democrats are determined to look virtuous and united.

Although I don't believe that that's necessarily a good thing that Trump has shown, but he has shown that we're not in the 20th century anymore when one little disagreement between like the president and his

leader in Congress is going to be the end of the party. Where are you at on the state of where the Democrats are right now and that kind of ongoing conversation? I thought it was interesting.

There was this earlier this week, there was this Carville op-ed in the New York Times where he was like, the Democrats should be more economically populist and cut to the middle on the culture war.

And like, it's the same thing that James Carville's been saying for 40 years, basically.

And like, on the, but because he has this reputation of being a consultant in the establishment and whatever, and being old and all such, like, I saw a lot of young leftists on the internet saying, like, Carville agrees with us.

Carville agrees with us. And I was like, no, like, this is, this was been, this has been the model that he's been hitching since Clinton.
But it does feel like there's a coalescing around.

This has been him.

It does feel like coalescing around that kind of idea, though, on the left. I think that's what he meant by the economy, stupid.
Yeah, yeah.

Maybe Carville and I are both old relics who are incapable of real change. That's basically my view.

The party should answer the unhappiness of the public over the cost of living and over corporate power, corruption.

Those should all be winning issues. And

the party's great vulnerabilities are all on the social and cultural issues where it got way to the left, way too far to the left over the last decade.

But unfortunately, it can't get away with just saying nothing about those issues, because if you say nothing, then the opposition is going to hang it around your neck. So they actually have to

do something to show that they get it, that the open border was a great mistake, that on trans issues there should be equal rights for all, but some things like women's sports should not be what all the trans activists are insisting it be and they have to be willing to make some people unhappy in their own coalition which is back to what we were just talking about you can't have a perfectly happy party

we the people in order to form a more perfect union These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution. They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

They're also the cornerstone of MS Now, Now. Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

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Master distiller Jimmy Russell knew Wild Turkey Bourbon got it right the first time. Mellowed an American oak with the darkest char.

Our pre-prohibition style bourbons are aged longer and never watered down. So you know it's right too, for whatever you do with it.

Wild Turkey 101 bourbon makes an old-fashioned or bold fashion for bold nights out or at home. Wild Turkey bourbon, aged longer, never watered down to create one bold flavor.

All right, let's go to the book. Because I sensed some themes in the book about where your critique of the left comes from,

from some of the characters. Maybe I'm just, maybe I'm reading into it, but I sensed some of your views on

a left critique. It is a fiction book.

The premise is that it's basically a crumbling of a society and of the governmental order in a fictional country and the divide between kind of the urban elites and the rural outsiders.

and obviously some parallels to what's happening in our society.

But talk about the book and then we can get into the themes. Can I show the book before I talk about this? Please?

Oh, yeah, please. There's the book.
The emergency cover. It's a great cover.
It's a great cover. Who did the cover?

For Arstraus Giroux, my publisher, they have an in-house designer, Rodrigo Corral, who did a beautiful job. It is beautiful.
I had to go outside the house on my cover.

They were sending me a bunch of covers for like an elephant. And I'm like, a dying elephant.
And I was like, no, no, come on. No,

political books that seldom get beautiful covers but this is fiction so the first question really is why would I after 25 years of journalism at the New York or the Atlantic write a novel I actually wrote two novels in my 30s not very many people read them I know you didn't Tim which one did you like better of the two

probably Central Square okay basically I decided to become a journalist after writing two novels fiction had been my love it still is I read fiction all the time. My heroes are novelists.

I wanted to be a novelist. I tried hard.
I wrote two pretty good novels, but they just didn't do anything. And I wasn't prepared to be an unread writer for the rest of my life.

So I went into journalism. Eight reviews on Goodreads.
Oh, God. Did you look it up?

Not the best. Yeah, just a Google Earth.

No one had heard of it. No, that's unfair.
That's unfair.

I'm just teasing you. I'm just teasing it.

By 2021 or two, Tim, I had begun to have a crisis of my faith in facts, in my profession, because they seemed to be unable to establish any kind of shared consensus about what's real.

For example, what happened on January 6th, 2021? For about three news cycles, people agreed what happened and that it was terrible. And then it...

just began to fall apart almost immediately because we are not that country anymore that can come to any basic agreement about what is real and what is true.

But I couldn't stop writing about our country. That's my eternal subject.
I wanted to do it in a new way.

And so I thought of writing it as a kind of political fable set in a time and place that are not named. So it kind of goes back to some of my heroes, George Orwell's 1984, Albert Camus's The Plague.

And

the story is about an empire that collapses and it dies, as I say, of boredom and loss of faith in itself. So it's not overthrown.
There's no revolution. It's just it ends.

It's like a marriage that ends because there's not enough love to keep it going. And in the vacuum,

young people begin to form these new social movements. And in the city, the burgers, as I call them, the young burgers movement is called Together.

And it's a kind of inspiring, utopian, egalitarian philosophy with a morally coercive undercurrent so that basically everyone agrees and the room for disagreement.

You're not going to get executed if you disagree, but you will experience social death.

And so that is what's keeping the young kind of coherent around this new idea about how to organize society and its egalitarian. And the main character is a doctor and his family.

And his daughter, who's 14, gets caught up in this movement. And the doctor, who's kind of a

successful, respected member of society of the old order, is trying to make the change because he doesn't want to lose his daughter, but he can't because it doesn't have a place for him.

And he doesn't really like what he's seeing. So the tension between the doctor and his daughter, who had always been the apple of his eye, is sort of the main emotional line of the story.

He is disgraced at the hospital. He gets into trouble because he's not doing what you're supposed to do in the new order.
He gets kind of thrown out, canceled, if you will.

And to redeem himself, he goes out into the countryside on a kind of humanitarian mission that is rather ill-advised because it's gotten quite dangerous out there.

And the reason is the country people who are called yeomen are also having a sort of an upheaval of their young, except it's farm boys who are gathering together to train in some kind of semi-military way for combat.

And it's all about physical strength and maleness and violence, that kind of power. It's not moral power, it's physical power.

And the doctor's daughter goes with him on this trip. And a lot of bad things happen to them out in the countryside because he has been too naive, too liberal.

He's a good liberal humanist, like the author, too naive to understand

how far along this new society has gone toward civil war. And that's the specter that kind of hangs over their whole trip into the countryside, which ends in violence and in some tragedy.

But in the end, I don't want to say, you haven't finished it, so I'm not going to spoil it for you. Yeah, don't ruin it.
But I do want to say it doesn't end with simple tragedy.

It ends also with a kind of an affirmation that we really only have each other and the human bonds that connect us, both within a family and in a larger society, have to be maintained or else we do kind of collapse into nihilism.

And that's the doctor's moral task is to hang on to those connections, both to his daughter and his family and also to the society that he's a part of. That's sort of the semi-long version.

In the desire to write a political fable, it's interesting that you say that when I was reading it, I've had a running, every time your colleague Ann Applebaum is on, I've asked her to give us a book recommendation for those who want to, and she suggested a couple that are in the vein.

Like one was called The Captive Mind, which is a Polish

book about

authoritarianism. Czeslaw Milos, yeah.
Yeah, and the other is The Oppermans, and both are like classic efforts.

I was wondering if you picked Anne's brain about any of this because as I was reading it, I was like, oh, it's interesting.

At least the frame or like the idea of how to think about the book was sort of similar to those that she had recommended. I read the Oppermans a couple of years ago.
It's an amazing novel.

It was written in 1933. It's crazy.
When you read it, you're like, how was this written in 1933? How did he do it? He's a German Jewish novelist who was in flight.

He was leaving Germany for his life and writing this great novel. You know, the difference is my novel is not about a totalitarian terror regime.
It doesn't have a demagogue at at the head of it.

My son asked me, is there a demagogue in your novel? And I thought about it. I said, no.

And should there be maybe? No, there shouldn't be. And the reason is the onus is on the ordinary people to try to figure out how to live together.

And it isn't put on a Trump-like figure who gets all the blame for all that goes wrong. It's about a society.
that's cracking up, that's tearing itself apart.

And I think Trump is doing it to us, but he's also a symptom of what we were already doing to each other.

So, in a way, it goes deeper than just the obvious relation to things happening today, which people can pick up from reading it.

It's trying to get at what does it feel like to be alive in America today and watch a country you thought you knew and you thought would remain roughly in the same shape as you grew up with disappear.

And a whole new world seems to be taking its place.

The other comment that I think it feels like you're making, I'm wondering, you know, if you could expand on this a little bit, it's just about like how quickly things can unravel.

You know, like at some level, like that is in the beginnings of the book, at least, like it's hard for like the main character to kind of deal with everything and like process how quickly things have changed.

It's just something I think about a lot in this country.

It's like on the one hand, man, we're really good at muddling along through challenging stuff and having like the basic basic structure stick together.

But on the other hand, you know, there have been plenty of societies where things happen very quickly.

And just look at Assad and Syria, maybe most recently, not particularly relevant to the book per se, but only just in the sense of like sometimes the whole system can just break down very quickly.

And I'm just wondering if like when you wrote about it, were you thinking about us or how did you think about that, like that notion? That's a very good insight. I absolutely was.

I think because those of us who are alive today, we're not alive during our Civil War. So we've never had this experience.

We don't know what it's like for society to lose its foundation and for the things we thought were carved in marble to turn out to be made of wax.

And it's very disorienting and you don't quite believe it. I took my dog for the same walk I always do.

I wrote the same article for The Atlantic that never got me in trouble and I'm still not in trouble. So what's the problem?

It's It's very hard for us to imagine. And one reason to turn to fiction is it kind of sharpens the imagination.
It makes the world clearer.

You're taking the reader into a strange world and at the same time making our world clear.

And if you could give me 30 seconds to read the first couple sentences of the novel, because it's very much about

this point you just made.

Looking back, Dr. Rustin realized that the emergency had been a long time coming.
This was how empires of old that he had learned about in school fell, imperceptibly, then shockingly.

Even with an enemy army gathering outside the walls, no one can believe that a way of life is about to end or imagine the strange new life that will replace it.

That's what you saw, and that is, I think, a problem for us. We can't imagine it, but we have to imagine it in order to see it coming and know what to do about it.

I do wonder, and you can talk about this in the context of the book or broader society.

And maybe this is just my

personal biases being brought to it, as you bring to anything. But like, at some level, that is a case for a broken status quo, right?

Like, I find myself sometimes being a defender of a status quo that's not serving people that well because of my small C conservative instinct that like things can get way worse.

And yet, just that mindset can then contribute to a more radical type overthrow of the system because people feel like their complaints aren't being heard, right? Their needs aren't being heard.

There is a little bit of that. And some of them in the book I did, I was like, well, are you making a case in defense of the status quo?

Because now you can see how bad things get if we let it unravel.

Well, but there's, don't forget, there's a 14-year-old girl who is the doctor's daughter. And about a third of the way through the novel, the perspective shifts from him to her.

And so we we begin to see what's happening in the world in quite a different way from the eyes of a 14-year-old girl. And her feeling is,

you handed me a shit sandwich, Dad. It fell apart.
And it fell apart because it was unjust. And it didn't give anything to my generation.
Your generation did fine, but what about us?

And here are all the things that you took as just the way it is that looking back were completely immoral. And how can you justify it?

And they have these long conversations where he tries to tell her: Yeah, my generation made a lot of mistakes, but if you're throwing out everything, including reason and

objectivity and being willing to listen to the other side, then what are you going to stand on? Do you think your new movement is enough for you to build a new world?

It just came the day before yesterday. How are you going to do it? And that back and forth across generations is very much about

what is it about the status quo that we should try to preserve and what should we be willing to get rid of?

And I think we liberal Democrats, that is to say believers in liberal democracy, which you and I both are,

have a real problem because we're now constantly in this defensive posture of trying to protect the rule of law, due process, free speech, all of those values, which I'm not prepared to get rid of.

To me, those are permanent. That's what makes life worth living.
That's what makes a society decent. At the same time, what are we prepared to change? We cannot live in the 20th century forever.

There must be some way in which the Democratic Party or the opposition to Trump has to think anew, as Lincoln said, and act anew.

Trump did that in a terrible way, but he was recognizing a kind of used up status quo. And that's why so many Americans threw out their own sense of what's decent and have supported him.

Do you have any thoughts or suggestions on that front? Because I agree.

I'm like, I'm way more open to radical thinking than I've ever been in my life following Trump's victory. And yet at the same time,

anytime like specific examples come up, I start to be like, ooh, I don't know. But not that one.
You know what I mean? Right. It's hard.
I mean, this is maybe not my strength.

I'm not really a political, either a strategist or a philosopher.

I just reviewed a book called Furious Minds by Laura Field in The Atlantic. And it's quite a good anatomy of MAGA, of the different strains of thought.
And what's clear is

they have attached themselves to a vehicle of destruction and it's become, as always with Trump, a vehicle of their own destruction. But

they were thinking radically.

They were reactionaries reactionaries who wanted to get rid of so much of the modern world and return to a Christian republic or some good society that I wouldn't want to live in.

But they were willing to do it because they felt that the modern world had failed to provide the good life to all of us. So whereas Democrats, it's all policy stuff.
It's the abundance agenda.

At the most, it's constitutional reform. And I'm open to all of that.
Or it's economic populism and social moderation, as you were saying earlier. But is there a deeper

radical change that

believers in American democracy are prepared to see?

Like something like putting more power in people's hands to make decisions locally, like having ordinary citizens become parliaments or legislatures in their own area and not letting the career officials get in the way.

We'd be willing to do that because they would make a ton of mistakes, but it would also maybe bring people into politics and start to answer their alienation with involvement.

The deconcentration of power is where it all comes back to on that. That's like one micro level at the

most local. You know, I think one of the examples that just popped to mind is I was thinking, like, I was just reading last weekend,

like Graham Plattner was out that said in some speech, he was like, If I'm in there, Palantir and Google shouldn't exist. I'm like, Okay,

I'm like,

How are you gonna do that?

A, how are you gonna do that? B, I'm like, I don't know. Like, I'm for a lot of things about going after

Palantir and Google, don't get me wrong, but you know, I don't know.

There's some way to, there has to be at least some effort to try to decentralize the power because it seems like more so than ever.

And you just look at the stock market, that's kind of what I want to get to next a little bit, which is AI and like the degree to which just a handful of companies are driving all the growth in the country.

Something that's like

straight out of the Rockefeller era.

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, these words are more than just the opening of the Constitution. They're a reminder of who this country belongs to.
and what we can be at our best.

They're also the cornerstone of MS Now, whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

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Master distiller Jimmy Russell knew wild Turkey Bourbon got it right the first time. Mellowed an American oak with the darkest char.

Our pre-prohibition style bourbons are aged longer and never watered down. So you know it's right too, for whatever you do with it.

Wild Turkey 101 bourbon makes an old-fashioned or bold fashion for bold nights out or at home. Wild Turkey bourbon, aged longer, never watered down to create one bold flavor.

I guess there are two AI topics. I wanted to talk to you about your Atlantic article about being in a post-literate age and how AI plays into that.

But I guess I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on either of those.

It's also connected to the emergency because in the novel, there are these sort of retro pre-digital robots. There's no digital technology.

in the novel and listeners should understand they're not going to recognize this world. It doesn't have all the trappings of our world.
They'll recognize it by how it makes them feel, but

not in the surface of life. So there's no digital technology, but there are these better humans, as they're called, which are like

steampunk robots that are made to look like the young people of the city. And the young go into this workshop in order to have their better human assembled.

and created in order for them to be able to stop being themselves and start being more like perfect, to have perfect thoughts, perfect speech, perfect ideas. Face tuned.
Yeah, exactly.

And it's, you know, this impulse almost to get rid of our humanity. This is what I see both in AI,

in

the manosphere of

Bronze Age pervert and raw egg nationalists and all of the

real men on the MAGA right.

It's this impatience with the messiness and the weakness and the ambiguity of being human. And it's as if young people have had it.

They want to give it up to a machine, which in the novel is called a better human. And AI terrifies me because I think, I mean, if social media

was a nice looking thing that turned out to be a weapon of mass destruction for the brains of a whole generation.

What is AI, but a hundred times that?

We seem ready to turn over everything to the computer, whether it's our

spiritual life, our sex life, our politics, our friendships. It seems like a perfect vehicle for us to stop having to carry the burden of being human.

So Sam Altman and company, I heard Sam Altman on Joe Rogan saying something like, Wouldn't it be cool if the president was an AI and he went around and talked to everyone in the world and knew what everybody was thinking and went right down to the bottom of their

existence and made decisions on the basis of what the sum total of all those people had put into him, the president, the AI president? And I'm thinking,

This is madness.

He then sort of said, but maybe it wouldn't be the best idea, but you could tell it was tempting. Talk about totalitarian.
Yeah. And this is like hat to mind, like on steroids, right?

I want a computer to know your every thought, and then we're going to combine them all into everybody's thoughts and then make a choice based on that. It's like, what?

And in a weird way, the better humans sort of anticipate that.

And there's another AI thing I anticipated at the end of the novel. I'm not going to spoil it, but at the end of the novel, there is a weapon that is used by one side of this growing civil war.

And it's essentially a catapult that flings human excrement over the walls at the enemy. The weapon is called a schittapult.

And that's all I'll say about it, but it is a very deadly weapon that one side in this civil war uses.

And I thought maybe I was going a little too far with the imagination until Donald Trump releases an AI video of himself piloting a fighter plane and releasing an immense load of human feces on some protesters down below.

Harry Sisson, my man Harry Sisson, got shit upon you. Yeah, and

I realized that I had intuited somehow just how low his lower mind could go. And that, again, is how fiction operates without really analyzing.

But by intuiting, you get to where reality has already gone or where it's going. So, yeah, and that was another use of AI that terrified me.

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You talk about,

and then the Atlantic Peace, we kind of referenced the novel as well, this, the post-literate world and how that all ties into AI. To me, that's the thing that worries me the most.

Like, we're already heading a direction towards, you know, certainly less interest in long-form reading and literacy.

I had a book that I was reading for one of these interviews in an Uber last week, and the Uber driver, God love him, was like, you like reading? I said, yes. And he goes, it gives me a headache.

I don't want to pick on the poor guy, but it's like, I'm sure there are people who got headaches from reading in every era. But the trajectory that we're on, it seems very obvious.

And the AI trajectory towards both post-literacy and towards, I think, post-truth in a way that is even more intense than what Orwell had seen, just as far as just the ability of the machine to be able to give people what they want to hear.

I don't know. How do you process all that? And how did that, the thinking about that come, you know, intersect with the decision to write a book?

This is where we don't need a totalitarian regime to destroy the idea of truth. We do it to ourselves.

We do it by staring at our devices all day long and scrolling and surfing and never being able to stay in one place for more than a few seconds until we light on something that makes us feel good.

And that becomes the truth. And then we might stay with that for a little while.

I mean, when I'm riding the subway in New York, I look around and New York used to be a very literate city and everyone is staring at their phone. There may be one person with an actual physical book.

And what does does that do? I think it means we're leaving the world of the word.

We are becoming more and more a society of images, of icons, of emojis,

of auto-writing by AI so that we don't have to think of what we want to say because AI will do it for us until we're almost in like a

4,000 years ago with hieroglyphs, where there's just a kind of system of symbols.

And we all kind of know what this little face with the tear coming down means, and so you don't have to put anything into words.

And there's a political consequence of that, which I think is a threat to democracy because democracy, which relies on some sense of shared truth,

depends on our being able to think for ourselves. And if you can't or won't read and write, you stop thinking for yourself.
The auto-right thinks for you.

And then you're no longer capable capable of participating in a democracy, and you're an easy target for a demagogue or an autocrat.

So I do think there's a deep relation between post-literacy and post-democracy. And AI is the perfect way of taking away our free agency.

That's exactly what it does. And I turned to writing fiction partly

almost for my own sanity to get away from what had become sort of the overly familiar language of our society, our politics. You know, the word polarization began to make me feel slightly nauseous.

And instead, I wanted to create a world where you don't encounter that.

You feel the feelings we have, but you may feel them in a more, I don't know, a more clear way, in a way that makes reality come back to life for you, because we're all so numb to it because we're all reading the same things and scrolling through the same sites.

There's another conundrum about super intelligence and these machines that I've been thinking about. To your point, about how fiction can kind of clarify and make you think about things differently.

For me, it was not reading, unfortunately, but watching the show Pluribus. It's on Apple right now.
Well, I don't know. What is it? It's interesting.
It's worth watching.

It's by the guy that did Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan.

We're only on episode three, so I don't exactly know, but there's some wavelength that comes from the aliens that allows every person's brain to become on the same wavelength, and they know what every other person thinks or thought, right?

And so they all become the same. And then there are like seven or eight people who it didn't work on, there was a glitch, and so they remain

remain as normal humans. And so it's a story of those humans in a world where everybody else is

basically an AI for us. It's really good.

But the one thing that made it interesting that you were talking about that has made me think about it is like there's this tension and conundrum between like all AI really is is a collection of human knowledge.

It's not like the computer has some independent knowledge that it's come up with. It has just collected the mass of human knowledge that's available and processes it faster, basically.

And you watch that show and you think about that, what you're describing, about how people become less literate and start to, you know, we start to become an emoji hieroglyphic society.

And it's like eventually you reach a point where like the AI starts to become dumber, right? You know what I mean?

Like that's the

super intelligence becomes dumber. Like that's the inevitable end game to this.

Because it's being trained on what we do.

And if what we do over time is getting dumber and cruder in its language and incapable of complex thoughts and of holding two arguments in your head at the same time and seeing where the resolution might be, all those things which are part of democracy, once they're gone, the AI is going going to sound like Trump

all the time. Yeah.
Hector Macho, Camacho, the president of a deocracy.

Okay, I have a couple other political things. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, these words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

They're a reminder of who this country belongs to. and what we can be at our best.

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i want to end with but is there anything else in the book i didn't ask you about any other themes you wanted to riff on? The book, it doesn't take a political position.

It doesn't come down on the side of

one faction or one generation, one class.

For me,

it's an attempt to say we have lost touch with basic decency, which is, for me, a very ordinary word that's very important. Because,

yeah, there are a lot of ways you can criticize what is happening in Washington, but I would say the basic criticism is indecent. It's just a lack of human decency.

And the doctor, having lost a lot of his status over the course of the story, having been estranged from his family, lost his position at the hospital, he comes to realize that

there is something you have to hold on to.

And it really isn't what society thinks of you or what your position in society is, but whether you're willing to accord the people around you, each person you run into, almost person face to face, the dignity of being a human being.

And it's very hard to do because we are conditioned by smartphones, by social media, AI, politics, everything to reduce the other to something less than human.

And it's a return to something basic that we seem to be losing. And that I think if we lose, it'll be.

it'll be the end of what I consider valuable about this country.

It's a nice transition to what I wanted to ask you about because you saw a lot of this indecency around this event, which was the Charlie Kirk assassination and how

basically everybody responded.

I was like, how 80% of society responded to that. I found pretty noxious, frankly, across the board.

Two times ago, when you were on the show, we talked about your piece about Arizona and Arizona being a kind of representative of where America is going across a lot of different dimensions,

the climate threats, but also kind of this right-wing populism that was sprouting there.

And Charlie Kirk started DPUSA there and you, I think, tried to interview him, but he didn't want to talk to the establishment Atlantic for that piece.

But I was just wondering. The elites, the elites.
That was the elites.

Yeah. I was just wondering what you thought about all that kind of in the context of your reporting from Arizona.
And that scene is pretty... striking for some people, inspiring, nauseating for some.

I couldn't even watch it because just of my conflicting feelings about it, but like that scene in Arizona with

his memorial.

Yeah, well, the memorial, I have to admit, I missed several hours of kind of the more religious parts of the memorial, but it seemed to be a weird mix of the religious and the hyper-political.

And once I got to Stephen Miller

and Trump, it was some of the vilest rhetoric I've ever heard from national leaders, including Trump simply telling Erica Kirk, who had just done

a kind of magnificent thing forgiving her husband's killer. Trump Just, ah, I'm not into that, Erica.
I like to, I hate my opponent.

I heard Charlie Kirk speak at the TPUSA convention in Phoenix in December 2023 for the Atlantic piece on Phoenix. It was terrible.
I mean, it was hateful. It was not charming.

It was not, I'm going to listen to the other side. He did that on college campuses, but it was always in a bit of a context of, gotcha, he's going to win that argument.
It was set up for him to win.

This was more demagogic and just whipping up 13,000 people in an arena into a state of contempt for the enemy. And then everyone who followed him was worse than the last.

So I don't have a whole lot of affection for

TPUSA or for that side of Charlie Kirk. Now, I think there was another side who tried to reach young men who were lost and

helped them to turn around their lives, maybe by becoming Christians, maybe by getting involved in politics, maybe by just becoming better people.

And for that and his willingness to go into the lion's den and duke it out with college students,

I have respect. But the Charlie Kirk I saw in Phoenix was part of the problem, part of what's corrosive about politics.
And he was doing quite well on that basis.

So I guess when he was killed, I was horrified. Political violence is absolutely unacceptable in every way.

And I

didn't want to say anything bad about him. I wrote a short piece saying, you know, this is horrifying.

And what he was doing was what we should want him to do, which is going onto a college campus and arguing. That's what we should want.

But I didn't talk about what I'd written about in that Phoenix piece out of respect for him and his family.

But that Phoenix piece will tell you what he was like in his sort of glory, in his full-throated leadership of

a kind of testosterone-fueled young MAGA. I'll put that Arizona piece here.
There's just something about Arizona and the nature of it. And it's just like watching that event in Glendale.

And it was all there, right? Just like the rage that you see from the populist right.

There's the religious kind of element to it, you know, but it was like the co-opting of that, you know, of the, of the religion for political ends in a lot of ways on every single speech, right? But

I don't know. It's pretty striking that I guess you wrote that, that like that Arizona was going to be the fulcrum of all this.

And in a lot of ways, that that event felt like very much like the center. It did.
It did, because you just felt a turbocharging. of the rage and the hatred.

And suddenly the federal government is is going to start going after anyone who elders a peep of dissent or who is part of an organization that supports the opposition.

We're going to investigate ACT Blue. We're going to investigate George Soros.
And that

was

a giant step toward authoritarianism with Charlie Kirk as the pretext, as sort of the excuse.

So now we're back to the beginning of our conversation. How far along that road have we gone since the death of Charlie Kirk?

I'd say we've gone pretty far with the use of the Justice Department as a way of not only going after his perceived enemies, but pardoning his friends who are lining his pockets.

So the federal government, the key institutions, the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the State Department, have been turned into instruments of personal power and personal enrichment.

That's pretty far into a kind of modern authoritarian state. I want to close with, you told me I was right in the green room.
So I like hearing that on the podcast.

Yeah, our last chat was about your article about J.D. Vance.
I kind of forget, it's one of the doing this every day. I kind of,

you know, they all start to blur together. So I sort of forget what our argument was about, but I'm happy to hear that I was correct.
It wasn't an argument, but you were.

You thought I had been a little soft on J.D. Vance.
Oh, that sounds like me. And you said that there is no politician in the country who you would rather not drive across America with than J.D.
Vance.

And you offer Ted Cruz ahead of J.D. Vance as

a

seatmate, a co-passenger in a cross-country drive. So I had just reread Hillbilly Elegy and I was still a bit in the feeling, the language, the thinking of that J.D.
Vance.

And I was still almost looking for him because he had so completely disappeared. And I was trying to offer the best case scenario for what happened to him in order to be fair.

And that scenario was he changed his mind. He had a political change of heart about tariffs and trade and immigration and became a MAGA Republican, like a lot of people between 2016 and 2020.

You charted a lonely course. There aren't very many of you.
Most Republicans made their peace and maybe he too. Okay, but his behavior, his willingness to tolerate the most

sordid

bigotry,

racism, misogyny, people attacking his own wife, and he can't bring himself to denounce them because he might be getting himself into a bit of trouble with some corners of MAGA that he might need because they still don't quite trust him, because he called Trump cultural heroine way back when.

Well, morally and intellectually, this is someone who

should have been better, given what I liked Hillbilly Elgy maybe better than you did.

And that comes with a, to me, there's more to condemn than with Trump, who never should have done better, who was always sub-moral, sub-mind. He's just operating on that like a shark.

He's feeding, he's reproducing, he's hunting, he's killing. J.D.
Vance has a mind, and he's used it to the most destructive political ends. So

I'm not driving across the country with him anytime soon. Yeah, it's the fake.
You refresh my memory. It's the phoniness now.
That's the fundamental thing for me.

It's just like, I don't, and that's maybe part of the reason why I didn't like Hildeology because I was like, I just don't buy any of it.

It just all, it all feels to me like the person who's changed his name and religion and politics like a million times. And I'm for change.
But like this, to me, I'm for change in this growth sense.

We all change. I've changed and grown.
I don't, I don't see that from him. I see change.
I see opportunism and I see the talented Mr. Ripley.
And then I

smar me while he's about it. Yeah, the piece was called the talented Mr.
Vance. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And he's smar me when he does it.

And so I'm like, okay, at least, at least have some humility while you're spitting on me. Right.
Why don't you show the better side of opportunism?

Hypocrisy Hypocrisy has its virtues, but with him, it's opportunism in the worst direction.

Like all politicians are opportunistic, but what he's done is used his lust for power in a way that is unforgivable. So I'm with you, Tim, on JD Vance.
All right, great.

I'm happy to have you on board.

We've covered some dark territory. It is Thanksgiving weekend.
Do you have anything you're thankful for? Anything you want to leave people with? Any uplift?

I was asked by the New York Times: what has made you hopeful since 2021 when you published last best hope and my answer was ukrainians

neil young at 80 yeah

and my kids that's and i'm gonna i'm not gonna see any ukrainians or neil young at thanksgiving but i'll i'll be eating capon with my kids and i'm very thankful for that well obviously i guess jd is going to be the cape on we'll take people out with neil young so you can have uh you can have your kids and the listeners can have neil young your latest book is The Emergency aforementioned was Last Best Hope and The Assassin's Gate.

Go check those out. It's George Packer.
Thanks for spending the holiday with us. Happy Thanksgiving to you, Tim.
All right. Thanks to George Packer.
We'll be back on Monday with Bill Crystal.

I'm taking a one extra day Thanksgiving holiday. So if there are nieces and nephews screaming in the background, you're just going to have to deal with that.

I'll let this be a little post-holiday, you know, ambiance for you guys on this podcast. I look forward to it.
Enjoy your weekend. We'll see you soon.

George Packer: Trump Was a Symptom

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