George Packer (24:51)
That is the big question. And I've been trying to figure it out for well over a decade. I wrote a book in 2013 called the Unwinding that it was kind of a big panoramic narrative Rather than a polemic or an analysis. But it essentially showed a landscape on which someone like Trump was very thinkable. And a couple years later, there he was because of the level of alienation, the cynicism about the elites, about business elites, government elites, media elites, the loneliness, the fact that Americans seem to be cut off from one another, the lack of any institutional sort of foundation for people's lives to support or maintain a middle class life. I was kind of left behind parts of the country and was seeing that everywhere. This was really the post financial crisis years. So it was Obama's first term. And while Obama, as you know, John, was struggling to pass legislation that could address these things, it just didn't seem to be reaching people and making them feel as if, yeah, this is going to change my life and he cares. Instead, it felt very far away and slow. So I would say there are three reasons, and they go back to the 70s, some of them the end of the industrial economy and the rise of the knowledge economy, which created categories of winners and losers that were more extreme than anything we'd seen since before the Great Depression. So college degree, that's the big dividing line. If you're comfortable with symbols, with words, with computers, you have a future in this country. If you're in a rural area, in a small town, in an industrial town, if your industry is leaving, if you've been working with your hands all your life, if you didn't go to college or even finish high school, decade after decade, your chances are bleaker and bleaker. So we all know that story. My book kind of portrayed it in the lives of ordinary people. The second is cultural change, dramatic cultural change, beginning, I would say, with the 60s and the late 60s, the change in immigration laws that brought in large numbers of people from the global south, in a phrase, changes in family, in rights, in sexual mores, in identity groups, which gave some people a place at the table for the first time. So not bad, good. But over time, the speed of it, the scale of it, made other people feel as if their America was disappearing and that they were somehow not counted, not respected. And then the third is more recent and it's social media, which has, because of the greed and wickedness of the tech oligarchs, to be blunt about it, has driven us to our worst selves because that's what keeps us glued to the screen and that's what amplifies the most extreme and hateful voices. And those three things together created a kind of cold civil war that is sort of a class war. Between the educated, less educated, urban, rural. It's sort of a generational war. By the way, this is what. I don't know if we're going to get to talk about it, but this is what my. My new novel is all about. It. It is about class and generational conflict, but in an allegorical story, the emergency. So those are the three factors. They've all played a part. I don't know how to weigh them, but one thing I'm sure of is when Trump was elected in 2016 and progressives decided that he was elected because America is a white supremacist country, full stop, that was a big mistake because it was analytically insufficient, didn't explain too many things, and it was politically stupid because it alienated people who might have been persuadable. And it turned out that we are not a country divided into identity groups that vote according to their race or gender. In fact, especially on race, it's become more and more fluid, as the last couple of elections have shown. So that's a long answer, but you asked me the hard question.
