George Packer during one of his lectures at the Tribeca Film Festival.Astrid Stawiarz / Getty Images
This interview is part of a series of talks with leading intellectuals, editors, activists, economists and politicians who help to describe the state of affairs before the elections.
You can read the other installments here
.
Few authors have tackled the decline of American capitalism as crudely and effectively as George Packer.
El Desmoronamiento
(Debate, 2013), national essay award, debtor of the
Dos Passos
Trilogy USA
, nostalgic for that Roosevelt republic that Ronald Reagan buried, is a portrait of four decades of deregulation, inequalities, polarization, which created the substrate in which years later the populist seed of Trumpism would germinate.
He again investigated the decline of the empire in
Our Man
(2020), a biography of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose life marked 70 years of US hegemony in the world.
Star Journalist of
The Atlantic,
Packer (Santa Clara, California, 1960) attends these elections with a mixture of fear and hope.
The interview begins with drums of civil war, and ends dreaming of an era of great progressive reforms not seen since the 1960s.
Question.
In what physical form does the United States enter the elections?
Answer.
In a terrible way.
In the intensive care unit.
With serious symptoms of a weakened democracy, the body divided, one part unable to communicate with the other.
Unable to believe in our institutions and not even in the survival of our democracy.
I don't think we are heading into a civil war, but the fact that so many people talk about it, not just historians and political scientists, but ordinary people, indicates that we have reached a turning point.
We are not strong enough to survive a failed election, in which no one wins or half the country believes the results are illegitimate.
We have an election at the end of a crisis year and the election may be the ultimate crisis.
Q.
Already in 2013 you wrote about the collapse of the American dream.
Would you say, then, that Trump is more a symptom than the disease?
R.
Trump embodied the cynicism and fear of many Americans.
They liked the fact that he didn't speak like a politician.
He spoke what he thought, even if what he thought was ugly, hateful, and divisive.
We used to think that if a presidential candidate said those things, it would hurt him.
Trump has shown that this is no longer true.
Although it came as a symptom, now it is the disease.
It has become the main cause of the deterioration of our democracy.
That is why this election is so urgent.
More than anything that I have ever lived.
P.
How do you see the Republicans?
A.
A demographic change has pushed the Republican Party into a minority position.
I think of the Republican Party as the southern states before the Civil War.
They see the rest of the country move forward, become richer and more multiracial, and instead of trying to compete for that vote, they have decided to harden their own ideology and appeal to a smaller base.
But the system allows them to use that minority force to cling to power.
The popular vote is constrained by the Senate, in which Wyoming has two votes and California another two.
Wyoming's population is 600,000;
that of California, 40 million.
Similar is the case with the electoral college system, which brought Trump to the White House.
And then there are the courts, the unelected branch of the state, which have been the focus of Trump and the Republican Party since they came to power.
They do not use the legislature to govern.
They do not pass laws.
They simply appoint judges, now crucially in the Supreme Court.
Thus, if the majority returns to power in the White House and in Congress, which is what I believe will happen, the Republicans will continue to have the courts to prevent the majority from ruling over them.
Those are all the ways that, like the pre-Civil War South, a minority entity clings to inordinate power.
All of that has worked for four years and he is about to face a powerful force, which is that of American voters.
Trump is throwing all the signs that he is unwilling to accept the will of the voters, which is something we have never heard from a president in this country.
Every day, we hope that your party will tell you that enough is enough, that you have gone too far.
But they follow him.
And they will follow him, because their destiny is tied to him.
This is the setting for a conflict.
P.
The reinforcement of the conservative majority in the Supreme Court can prolong for a generation that separation between real America and its laws.
That's another tinderbox ...
R.
If the courts are the branch of the State that restrains popular policies, it will generate discontent.
And I think the question that Biden avoids about adding more justices to the Supreme Court, to correct the conservative bias, is a real question.
It should be discussed.
It would be somewhat dramatic, but it could be legitimate if the Supreme Court becomes a power tool for the Republican Party, rather than the ultimate politically neutral interpreter of the laws and the Constitution.
The game is to appoint more young judges to sit there forever ruling in your favor.
That is one more sign of a sick democracy.
Q.
Is it just pragmatism, the desire to control the judiciary for years, for example, that ties the Republican Party to Trump?
A.
No. When a party goes so far in the direction of corruption and a certain moral nihilism, it cannot change overnight.
It is a long process, but I don't see that they are even going to try until they are defeated, and defeated again, and then maybe a third time.
And when the democratic will of the people tells them over and over again that they don't want them, then they will have to pull the Republican Party out of the depths it has gotten into.
Q. You
argue that the last time the Americans reacted united to a great threat was 9/11.
All subsequent crises further divided the country.
Did Obama do enough to unite the two sides?
A.
If Obama can be accused of anything, it is precisely that he was too naive about the Republican Party.
Blame it on the Republican Party, which finds itself against popular opinion on one issue after another.
And instead of moving towards popular opinion, it tries to seize power through non-democratic means.
Underneath is a polarization of the country that has happened in the last 40 years, for many and deep causes: demographic changes, economic inequality, the division between winners and losers.
We are so far apart that we can't even argue with each other.
We don't trust each other.
It is as if we belong to two different countries.
And that is scary because we have to live together.
Each part imagines that the other is going to disappear, but it will not.
Both parties are still here, and they are still going strong.
There are an incredible number of people in this country who want Trump to remain president.
That's a fact Democrats don't often face.
But it's there, and you can't make it go away just by wanting it.
Q.
How do you see Biden?
A.
Your job is much easier thanks to Trump, who has united the Democrats.
But I was amazed at how well Biden is running the campaign.
He has been steadfast, cunning, and has not fallen into traps.
He has not made big mistakes.
It just seems like a calm and decent influence.
I think if he wins, all of that will change because the power will create a buzz of influence around him.
And all the energy is in the left of the party.
If that left decides to pressure Biden immediately, it will be dangerous for the party.
I think what Biden should do is focus on two or three essential things.
Health, pandemic, employment.
And use the majority in Congress, if you get it, to push through two or three big pieces of legislation that put money in the hands of the people, stimulate the economy, and control the pandemic.
Then you will have more capital to work with.
He has done a good job on the campaign.
It will be much more difficult if he becomes president.
Q.
Will Trump be a parenthesis or has the country changed forever?
A.
I think, unfortunately, it has changed us and our policy.
It has made us all worse.
And it's easy to go down.
It is easy to get rid of taboos, norms, and rules.
But it is very difficult to reinstate them once they are gone.
I'd hate to see Democrats act and govern like Trump, but the temptation will be there.
First, for revenge.
Second, because the entire atmosphere is already polluted.
We all breathe the Trump air.
It is not an accident or a detour.
There is something wrong with us, something wrong with our politics and our culture, something that Trump embodies.
When it goes away, as a heartfelt wish that happens, that thing will still be there.
We will have to face her.
Q.
Will Republicans have less pull without Trump?
A.
If he goes, what I think the Republicans will do is find someone who embodies Trumpism.
A strong man with an authoritarian style, but less pathological and better political.
A smarter human being.
Trump is the Reagan of our time, in the sense that he embodies what the party is.
Q.
And the Democratic Party, will you be able to reconnect with non-college working white people?
A.
What I would like is to see a Democratic Party that studies Roosevelt and studies Truman.
You cannot go back in time, there cannot be a new New Deal.
But there can and should be a Democratic Party that appeals to working people and understands that, culturally, there are divisions.
You can't kick them out simply by wanting to kick them out, but you shouldn't make them worse.
You should not stick your finger in people's sensibilities.
There are issues that unite the United States and that do not open those wounds.
Topics such as the minimum wage, health, the environment, protection at work.
They are things that are waiting for a strong Democratic president and Congress.
We haven't seen that in a long time.
Bill Clinton alienated the party from those voters.
Obama connected more, but was blocked by the Tea Party and Mitch McConnell for six years.
I speak of a return to something that we have not seen perhaps since the 1960s. A Democratic Party that truly governs for reform, great reforms that make this country fairer, more equal.
That is what I would like to see.
P.
The pandemic has underlined the importance of the public, of the State, which has once again come to the rescue of the economy.
R.
Exactly.
Americans don't like the state.
They don't trust him for a couple of reasons.
First, because they have been listening for 40 years that the State does not work and that it is going against them.
But also because the State, in effect, has not worked for them.
It has been captured by corporations and special interests, a corruption in Washington that is legal but highly corrosive.
If the Democrats, in power, can show that the state works, that it can be honest and pass laws that improve people's lives, that will slowly smooth some of the divisions and neutralize the vitriol in our system.
There's a lot of weight on Biden's 77-year-old frail shoulders.
But, even though I was skeptical, I insist that I think he has handled the campaign brilliantly.
If you surround yourself with the right people and Congress decides not to commit suicide, as Democrats often do, then I think this could be the beginning of a long period of Democratic control.
This is my most optimistic view, having started the interview by telling you that we are on the brink of civil war.
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