582 | George Packer: The Emergency - The Post-Literate Age and the Unwinding of American Liberalism

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: The Realignment – Episode 582

Guest: George Packer
Hosts: Marshall Kosloff
Date: November 11, 2025
Episode Title: George Packer: The Emergency - The Post-Literate Age and the Unwinding of American Liberalism

---

Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Marshall Kosloff sits down with George Packer, acclaimed journalist for The Atlantic and author of several influential books, to discuss Packer’s new novel The Emergency. The conversation uses the book as a springboard for a wide-ranging exploration of America's post-literate age, the unwinding and exhaustion of liberalism, and the search for new worldviews and narratives in a time of tremendous cultural and political upheaval. With references to Packer's prior works (The Unwinding and Blood of the Liberals), Kosloff and Packer grapple with what has been lost in American democracy, the centrality of reading and sustained attention, generational divides, and what the liberal project requires for renewal.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Post-Literate Age & Decline of Reading

(Start–13:00)

• Defining the Post-Literate Age:
  • Packer discusses the growing dominance of visual and shorthand communication (emojis, TikTok, AI-generated content) over deep reading and written word.
  • “The age of mass literacy has coincided with the age of democracy. And it’s not a coincidence.” (Packer, 05:39)
• Implications & Concerns:
  • Fiction, especially, has been a casualty, as fewer people read novels.
  • "Who, why read a 400 page novel when you can communicate with six characters or six images?" (Packer, 04:37)
  • The rise of audio-based platforms (e.g., Clubhouse) and the move from “Homeric” storytelling to “slop” (AI-generated distraction) marks a transition from optimism to pessimism about post-literacy.
• Silicon Valley Attitudes:
  • Early tech optimism positioned the shift as a return to ancient oral tradition, but now platforms optimize for mindless attention.
  • Notable quote: “Sam Bankman-Fried once said, I’m going to paraphrase, anything that takes more than like three or four paragraphs isn’t worth reading.” (Packer, 10:06)
• Addiction to Devices:
  • Even committed readers (Packer included) find themselves listening more and reading less, struggling with smartphone-induced attention deficits.
  • “It’s overwhelming...someone at my age who’s been reading all my life seems to be just as vulnerable to the addiction as kids are.” (Packer, 12:58)
• Hope for a Cultural Swing Back?
  • Kosloff expresses optimism that public rejection of what “doesn’t work” can spur renewal, citing widespread school phone bans as evidence.
  • “You actually cannot have a K-12 education system or any sort of pro-social institution with phones, especially with children.” (Marshall, 16:29)

2. Why Fiction? & Writing The Emergency

(18:30–31:00)

• Novel’s Purpose and Structure:
  • Packer’s pitch: "The Emergency is a political fable set in a collapsing empire, exploring generational and class divides, city vs. country, and the quest for meaning and order after liberalism’s collapse."
    • “The Empire...collapses as I write, from boredom and loss of faith in itself, there’s no invasion, there’s no revolution. It sort of dies of boredom in the void.” (Packer, 19:14)
    • The main characters are a liberal doctor, his wife, and their children, caught between utopian and reactionary youth revolutions in city and country.
• Why Not Base It on Trump?
  • The novel is not a disguised retelling of current events or about demagogues like Trump, but aims to dig deeper into American moods and divides.
  • “This is a book about us, about, in a sense, the ordinary people of this country who have produced Trump...he came out of conditions the whole country...produced.” (Packer, 28:11)
• The Power of Fable vs. Political Fiction:
  • By couching its themes in mythic terms (Burgers—city folk, Yeoman—country folk), the book encourages readers to step outside partisan patterns and engage on a more fundamental level.
• Building a Reading Habit:
  • Kosloff recommends fiction as a tool to break phone addiction and foster sustained attention, touting The Emergency as a “page-turner” good for readers seeking to rebuild their capacity for serious reading.
  • “If you look, the case for fiction for me is if you’re looking to de-addict yourself from your phone, if you’re looking to build a reading habit, fiction is just such a good way to do it.” (Marshall, 25:09)

3. Generational and Ideological Unwinding

(31:00–43:30)

• Generational Divide as Central Theme:
  • The conflict between the liberal father (modeled after Packer’s own) and his revolutionary daughter in the novel reflects Packer’s experience of the “great awokening” and the sense of being left behind by sweeping social change.
  • “Part of the impulse of The Emergency is being middle aged...I sympathized with aspects of it, but I also found a lot of it deeply disturbing.” (Packer, 23:49)
• Fiction’s Unique Power:
  • The novel’s structure, switching viewpoints between father and daughter, allows readers to inhabit both sides of the generational rift and understand the roots of youthful rebellion.
  • Striking scene: The teenage daughter delivers a speech at the city’s “suicide spot,” condemning the meritocratic but brutal society her father helped sustain.
  • “He accepted the injustices because that was the only world he knew. And she is telling him...how could you have said that you could not imagine a world better or worse than the one you gave me?” (Packer, 35:36)
• Liberal Exhaustion and Loss of Worldview:
  • Kosloff, echoing themes from Blood of the Liberals, observes that the 2010s were also “a mood, a vibe, a dynamic, but it didn’t actually leave anything behind,” underlining the need for a modern liberal worldview (Marshall, 50:30).

4. The Unwinding: Lessons for a Lost Generation

(43:30–47:00)

• Why The Unwinding Mattered:
  • The book resonated among 30-something center-left political types who felt the right, in the early Trump years, asked better questions than the left or center.
• Storytelling as Political Foundation:
  • Trump (and the populist left) succeeded by telling stories about “how we got here.” Centrist and liberal politics struggle for lack of compelling stories.
  • “If I were on that stage as basically a candidate, what I would basically say is this country is broken. People feel like it’s broken. We as the center, as institutional people...we own that.” (Marshall, 44:36)
• Roots of Pre-Revolutionary Mood:
  • Packer describes the research for The Unwinding, capturing the feeling of disconnection and betrayal in “left behind” regions well before the rise of Trump.
  • “All of this added up to me to something closer to the early Depression years than to the post-racial, multicultural, technological future.” (Packer, 39:10)

5. Liberalism’s Project and the Failure of Vision

(47:00–56:00)

• Liberalism vs. Party Politics:
  • Both express exhaustion with technocratic, personality-driven Democratic politics; what is needed is an ideological project, not just new party tactics.
  • “It is not where the creative work is going to happen. It’s where things go to calcify and die.” (Packer, 49:45)
• The Need for World-Building and Philosophy:
  • Modern liberalism’s retreat from ideology (and its embrace of technocratic solutions over bold vision) leaves its adherents “homeless.”
  • “Maybe the job of politics now is to manage our hard-won freedom and prosperity. For that, we don’t need visionaries, we’ll need technicians. When people critique the Democratic Party and...abundance...the worst version is a technical one rather than a vision one.” (Marshall, 51:31)
• Personal Roots and Historical Parallels (from Blood of the Liberals):
  • Packer recounts how his father, a 1960s liberal, was blindsided by protest movements, and how his grandfather, a Southern populist congressman, lost touch with the New Deal.
  • “There is a divorce between the populist liberals and the technocratic liberals...Populism has become a right-wing worldview and technocracy has led the Democratic Party and a lot of liberals into kind of a dead end.” (Packer, 53:17)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Post-Literate Age:

  • “We can’t think, communicate, imagine, or govern ourselves as a free society without words, sentences, books, literature… the age of mass literacy has coincided with the age of democracy. And it’s not a coincidence.” (George Packer, 05:39)

• On Writing Fiction Now:

  • "Jonathan Franzen, the novelist, said, you know, it’s unlikely that good fiction is being written next to an Internet connection… Because literature, writing, imagination…take a sustained immersion that is the opposite of what our phones are doing to us." (George Packer, 14:51)

• On The Emergency’s Relevance:

  • “This is a book about us, about...the ordinary people of this country who have produced Trump… He came out of conditions that the whole country in some ways produced.” (George Packer, 28:11)

• On the Generational Crisis:

  • “People don’t know where to stand. They feel homeless, they feel like they know the old truisms no longer work, but they don’t know what else to embrace.” (George Packer, 32:50)

• On the Liberal Project:

  • “It is not where the creative work is going to happen. It’s where things go to calcify and die. The idea of a project that actually is simply about civic participation is so much more important...” (George Packer, 49:45)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–04:30 | Introduction, framing the episode, Packer’s background | | 04:30–13:00 | The post-literate age: what it means, why it matters | | 13:00–18:30 | Tech, culture, and the difficulty of going back | | 18:30–31:00 | Overview and pitch for The Emergency; the power of fiction | | 31:00–36:30 | Generational divides, social change, and “wokeness” | | 36:30–43:30 | Historical parallels, The Unwinding’s predictions, storytelling as politics | | 43:30–47:00 | The lack of story in centrist/liberal politics | | 47:00–56:00 | Liberalism’s exhaustion, the need for worldview-building, lessons from Blood of the Liberals |

---

Conclusion

This episode stands out for its focus on the foundational crisis of American liberalism, the necessity of storytelling, and the dangers of a society losing its capacity for deep reading and critical thought. George Packer’s unique dual vantage—as journalist and novelist, as son and grandson of engaged liberals—offers listeners both a diagnosis of our cultural unwinding and a tentative hope that by acknowledging our lost narratives, we can begin to build new ones. Whether reflecting on the implications of smartphone addiction, the necessity for new political ideologies, or the rich characters in The Emergency, Packer and Kosloff provide a generous, searching conversation for listeners grappling with similar questions.

Recommended Reading:

• The Emergency by George Packer
• The Unwinding by George Packer
• Blood of the Liberals by George Packer

Closing words:

"I so enjoyed it, Marshall. I'll come back anytime you want to have me." (George Packer, 56:04)

---

Transcript

[A]

Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. My guest on today's show is the Atlantic's George Packer. George has a new book out today, a work of fiction called the Emergency. The Emergency is a political fable about, quote, an empire collapsing in boredom and lack of faith in itself. If that sounds like america in the 21st century, you are on exactly the right track. What I really appreciated about the book is that the story isn't about Donald Trump. As George puts it in this interview, it's an intergenerational story of how liberals and their children navigate the cultural upheaval of a world that's collapsing in on itself. There's no Trump demagogue character, though, and you'll be able to read and think about the Emergency's themes without the latest news scandal popping into your head. A few weeks ago, George also wrote a piece in the Atlantic on our post literate age and why he shifted from writing books of journalism to fiction. In the case of the Emergency, since this show is really focused on books and reading, we start there. On that theme, George and I also discussed two of his previous books, the Unwinding and Blood of the Liberals. Those books have both really served to shape my POV on the show's big topics. The Unwinding is a journalistic exploration of the 2010s of Obama's America. Though the unwinding came out after Obama's reelection, the story really cuts through the decades pre Trump elite optimism and make clear that something Trump like was coming down the pipeline. I've made a lot of hay about the political center lacking a straightforward story of how we got here as a country in stark contrast to the populist left and right. If you are someone who could tell that story, you need to start with the Unwindings Foundation. The second book we mention is his 2000s family biography, Blood of the Liberals, which tells the story of 20th century American liberalism's downfall to the present through his family. George's father was a Stanford leader overwhelmed by the campus protests of the 60s, and his grandfather was a populist turned anti New Deal congressman who represented Birmingham, Alabama. But a little Liberals really made clear to me what the show's project needs to be if we look at what the actual problem right now in America. That problem is ideological. That problem is liberalism, not the mechanics and specifics of the Democratic Party, whether it's polling or focus groups or the specific issue sets and solutions anyone is offering on the table. Liberalism triumphed under FDR back in the 30s and 40s, then lost its confidence in the 60s and today has nothing to say in contrast to its opponents. Just as the Realignment revitalized American conservatism via the New Right, the same opportunity exists for the liberal project today. I hope you enjoy all of the books I just mentioned and this conversation, of course. George Packer, welcome back to the Realignment.

[B]

Good to be back with you, Marshall.

[A]

Great and excited to chat with you. So you have a new book out. This will release with publication, obviously, but it's called the Emergency and I actually don't read much fiction and this show does a lot of books and I often get emails from folks saying, hey, does the Realignment have any fiction lists? You've got lots of good Iraq War history nonfiction recommendations. What's some fiction we should read? And it's always been tough with me because I think ever since junior year English, I've just been reluctant and repelled by fiction. You sort of want to focus on the nonfiction and be serious and never got over the assigned reading part. But you actually have a great new piece out in the Atlantic that's tied to both your journalistic career and the fact that you published a novel. It's called A Post Literate Age. So you do two things in this opening. So one, describe what the Post Literate Age is and the implications of that. And then two, why in a world of post literacy, should you add fiction on top of the things you should be doing?

[B]

Yeah, well, that's a phrase I've been seeing. I certainly didn't come up with it myself, but I've been seeing it from other writers who were alarmed, as I am, by not just the ubiquity of our devices, which after all do have text in them, but the fact that those devices are now more and more just images, videos on TikTok emojis, almost like hieroglyphs. We are communicating more and more through a shorthand of, of, of graphics of symbols and AI, which I look on with a fair amount of dread. Seems like it could easily take us all the way there because it's efficient and AI is all about efficiency and, and tech is, is all about, you know, digital tech is all about efficiency. Whereas who, why read a, a 400 page novel when you can communicate with six characters or six images? And it does seem that there's a lot of polling, and I refer to it in that Atlantic piece that shows people are reading fewer and fewer books in this country. It's been on decline, no surprise, throughout the social media age and really going back to kind of the beginning of the, the commercial Internet age. And fiction is the big loser because it seems that what we are reading is shorter and shorter and maybe more and more pointed and directed at something useful or something in the world. Whereas to actually take the time to sit down and read a novel seems like a luxury. So I, why do I worry about that? Because I don't think we can think, communicate, imagine, or let's put it this way, govern ourselves as a free society without words, sentences, books, literature that's been, you know, the age of mass literacy has coincided with the age of democracy. And it's not a coincidence. So that's, that's the, the kind of creed of curve behind that piece in the, in the Atlantic this morning about basically why I, I, after 25 years of journalism, decided to, to write a novel, actually another novel I'd written a couple that no one has heard of back in the 90s that have disappeared into the ether.

[A]

You know, it's funny because I think we should really talk about what the sort of post literacy we're concerned about actually looks like because did you ever go on Clubhouse, like the audio talking app that was really hot during COVID For a hot second there I was.

[B]

I think I was invited on once or I heard about it and I had this feeling it was kind of a, an insider group that I didn't really belong to. But I know exactly what you're talking about.

[A]

One, it's interesting because, and this is where this gets depressing. So think of peak Clubhouse as late stage 2020. Everyone was stuck at home and it was just this really cool at its peak. It was really, really, really great. And you know, especially during that period, tech companies were trying to move beyond the idea that this is just sort of social media apps or just sort of B2B SaaS companies. They wanted to have an idea and the way they sort of intellectualized this idea was very compelling. Which is the idea was, hey, we're moving into a post literate age. They were saying that in their own sense. And they were saying, though, this doesn't have to be a bad thing because think of, think of Homer, think of the Iliad and the Odyssey that was oral for, for centuries before it's even written down. So by us getting on Clubhouse and talking intellectual ideas, it's not that post literacy equals something that's negative and unserious. We're actually returning to the majority of human trad. So obviously Clubhouse didn't work that was less sustainable. But that version I think is one that you you could pull some thread of optimism from that versus the 2025 version where you have, you know, OpenAI and Facebook releasing their Vibes app. And the Vibes app, people on Twitter joke about it, they call it slop because it's literally just AI generated things you are just scrolling through that will get ever optimized to hold your attention. So we've gone from like, we're returning the tradition of homeric storytelling to just sitting on your phone and scrolling. So in this five year period, we've just lost the bull case for post literacy. For my pov, right?

[B]

The. The Silicon Valley folks had given us a glimpse of the future that was a shining city on a hill, and it didn't work out. I mean, and no surprise. I mean, look, to be honest, I listen to a lot of podcasts and books on audio and I, you know, growing up and until like the last five years, I didn't listen to books, I read books. So obviously I am losing something of my own literacy. If you think of it as reading, I read less, I listen more. But the books exist. There has to be a book in order for me to listen to it. Someone has to write the book. Someone has to write the material that the podcaster is talking about in order to have an intelligent conversation. But once we're back to where we were 5,000 years, 4,000 years ago, with hieroglyphs, what is that conversation going to be like? And how deep can it go? How much can it really explore the human condition in symbols? Do you remember Sam Bankman Freed once said, I'm going to paraphrase. Anything that takes more than like three or four paragraphs isn't worth reading. In other words, why would anyone write or read a book? And that is the efficiency model of Silicon Valley and of course, of a crypto criminal who doesn't see what's useful about books, about writing, about literature. And in some ways, it's hard to make a case for usefulness. You have to start talking about things like humanity and reflection and depth. But in terms of the churn of daily life, the digital churn of daily life, no, it's not all that useful. It doesn't immediately make money. It may never make money. I think W.H. auden in one of his poems said, poetry makes nothing happen. But he didn't mean that it's useless. He just meant if you're waiting for the world to change because a poem has just appeared, you may wait for a long time, but the poem itself has this incalculable value. That isn't known to a defrocked crypto billionaire like Sam Bankman Fried.

[A]

And the thing is too, I, I'm really curious on if you think there's going to be a cultural swing back when it comes to literacy. Because in American society and basically any society, you have trends and they swing and there's culture. So Silicon Valley in the, you know, late 2000s, early 2010s, everyone's wearing plain black T shirts and hoodies. Mark Zuckerberg really sort of starts that theme. And Alvin's dressing really well in Silicon Valley. The leather Jensen Wang of Nvidia has his leather jacket. People wear jeans, they look nice. I'm not going to say who this is, but a Silicon Valley billionaire, I had dinner with him and I wore a button up shirt, not even tucked in, and he made fun of me for sort of being from dc. This person now wears suits and ties in his public appearances because that conveys something. So is there a world where we could look at post illiteracy or post literacy? Hopefully we have a post illiteracy society. If we look at our post literate society, do you see a world where things could swing back or is this just a trend that's going to go further and further and further?

[B]

I mean, those same people who are now dressing better are creating the products that are making us post literate. Because as the father of two teenage children, I know. And as an addicted smartphone owner myself, I know how powerful it is. I know how addictive it is. I know how it gets in the way of having the attention span necessary to be able to pick up a book and not put it down three minutes later in order to check your phone, it's overwhelming. And someone at my age who's been reading all my life and seem to be just as vulnerable to the addiction as kids are. So I don't think it's as simple as changing clothes. We're on this trajectory that basically Silicon Valley has put us on and we have all gone along with. And isn't it interesting? I, I don't know, Marshall, if you remember back when there were some stories about how tech executives wouldn't let their own children near the phone. Well, why is that? It's sort of like a tobacco manufacturer who makes sure their kids don't smoke, you know, because they know, they know. So no, I think we are, they can't have it both ways. They can't claim that the digital revolution has changed everything and we can never go back and expect some of the destructive side effects of that revolution to simply disappear, because that's the trajectory we're on. And it just takes a concerted individual effort by everyone and by institutions like schools to, to resist the, the overwhelming power. Not. We can't get rid of it, we shouldn't get rid of it. It's useful. I understand that. I use it all the time, but just to clock how it's changing your, your attention, your brain, your ability to read and to resist it. You know, when I wrote the Emergency, the novel that I hope we'll talk about, to do it, I had to first of all shut off the Internet on my laptop with a, with, with a piece of software and kind of hide my phone two rooms away. Now I knew where I could get my phone if I, if the urge was overpowering. But two rooms is just enough distance that I would really be, you know, I would, I'd be able to say, no, just sit where you are. But if it was right here on the desk next to me, wherever it is now, I would never have written the Emergency. Jonathan Franzen, the novelist, said, you know, it's unlikely that good fiction is being written with and you know, next to an Internet connection. And he was roundly scorned for being a snob, et cetera. But I do think there's something to it, because literature, writing, imagination, even non fiction books, take a sustained immersion that is the opposite of what our phones are doing to us. And so it's like everyone has to be a little bit of a revolutionary and declare their own liberation from the device long enough to maintain the habit. It's a habit of reading. And whenever I see someone under 20 with a paperback or hardcover book, an actual book and paper, I feel a little charge of hope. Yeah.

[A]

And before we get to the emergency, I want to say my sort of line of hope on this. So my actual line of hope I developed is if things don't work, then I think that is the root of renewal and change. So think of the dramatically sweeping bipartisan swing against phones in schools for kids. Not political. Everyone's doing it. It's not maga maha, liberal lefty. It's just like a thing. It's just a thing. And then I read Jonathan Heights, the Anxious Generation, and one of my neighbors was talking about four year old twins and he was just saying that like he was never gonna let them have a phone. I just made a joke over the anxious Generation. He said, like, I don't know that book. This was just like an idea that he said he was talking out with friends and he was just really imposing it. So I think the reason why the phone ban spread is you actually cannot have A K through 12 education system or basically any sort of pro social institution with phones, especially with children. And I think when it comes to thinking about politics and policy and things that this show focuses on, I actually think that so many of the problems that we experience are post literacy in our leadership class. Like it's wild to read these biographies of like great, like not just like 18th century, not just the, not just the founders, not just Theodore Roosevelts, but even like into the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, Reagan, everyone. It's so funny that the sort of generic take on Reagan is that Reagan is dumb and intellectual, but he still reads a lot. So like with every year as we become literate. Reagan. Exactly. George Reagan. The funny take is that like Reagan and Bush, as we become increasingly post literature literate, we have to up rank their literacy relative to the actual dynamic there. So I think there's a lot of optimism here. And I, what I will say is like the thing that motivates me to read a lot is I am searching for answers. This podcast is a podcast where people are searching for answers and I just have not found anything useful or generative in a podcast, despite this being a podcast. I listen to podcasts because it's helpful, especially when it comes to like the news, but when it comes to sort of like the deeper, bigger like human questions, not just political ones and cultural ones. I think podcasts can point you in a direction. But I think books and reading and taking the time to think about it is just really, really huge. So let's get actually to your newer release book. Then give us the quick summary pitch for the Emergency.

[B]

Okay, you put me on the spot because I haven't really done this yet. Since the book is, as we speak, it's still not even officially published. So you're going to want the raw first draft of my. Of my. My pitch. The Emergency is a fable. It's set in an unnamed time and place known as the Empire. But it's a political fable that has a lot of resonance with our own situation here in America today. The Empire that's been a long standing and sort of stagnant place collapses. The elites flee. It collapses, as I write, from boredom and loss of faith. In itself, there's no invasion, there's no revolution. It sort of dies of boredom in the void. The citizens have to form their own self government. How are they going to run their affairs? And it's a kind of division opens up very quickly between the city and the country. And the main characters are a family in the city. A doctor, a surgeon, his wife and their two children. And just as between city and country, this gap opens up a sort of gap of social class because the city folk are the educated, the professional, the country folk are farmers and artisans. There's also a gap that opens up between the generations. And the main story is about the surgeon, Dr. Rustin and his daughter Selva, who had been the, you know, the apple of his eye, his pride and joy. But at age 14, she becomes caught up in the new ideas of the post empire in her, in their city, which is a kind of utopian egalitarian philosophy called together. And for her father it's, it's alienating. It doesn't seem to have a place for him, for his experience, for his status. And the story is about how that new radical philosophy separates this family, you know, creates fractures in the family. And also there's something going on out in the country that he discovers because he and his daughter go out of the city into the countryside on a kind of humanitarian, rather ill advised mission. And they discover out in the country the yeoman are also undergoing a kind of revolution of a new idea, which is also a youth idea. So we have a kind of youth rebellion in both the city and the country. The city rebellion is utopian and egalitarian. The country rebellion is sort of quasi fascist. It's basically physical strength, maleness and, and hierarchy and dominance. And this doctor, who's what you would call a liberal, he's, he's a middle of the road liberal, is trying to find out what's happening in his world and what his place in it is and what's left of the old values that he lived by and that he tried to raise his children by while still holding on to the core relationships in his life. His wife, his daughter, his son. So it's a, it's a political novel. It's also a thriller. It has a, a strong plot. It's a page turner, I'm told. And the story, when they go out into the countryside, becomes a story of conflict and even, even violence. So that's. That may be longer than a pitch. I don't know. Is that a pitch, Marshall, or is that simple?

[A]

It is. Well, I'll add to your pitch. So two things, because I really want to treat this as the George Packer Hour. I want my listeners to, because there's a funny story you'll appreciate about the unwinding that I'll Tell a little later, which was your 2013 book in the episode. But my pitch for this is I read the Emergency while I was also listening to Blood of the Liberals. So your 2000 family biography, and you're dealing with the evolution of liberalism through American history in the Blood of the Liberals in the 50s and 60s. And as I'm thinking about the father character, I'm just the Doctor, I'm just thinking he just seems exactly like how a 1950s, 1960s liberal would go through. I'm also reading my Niskanen colleague Jeff Kappa surface book, the Guardians, which is about the fall of the liberal higher education establishment in the 1960s, as they sort of go from the heyday of the new frontier to, like the disaster of Vietnam and the protest era. And I just like, see him in all of those people. So I really appreciate that. But I think the real.

[B]

You are right on target. Marshall, that is a. A really keen observation because the main character, the Doctor, is a bit like my father, who was a liberal in the 60s who fell afoul of the student revolution. And I have become more like my father because part of the impulse of the Emergency is being middle aged and living through the great awokening and the upheavals of the late teens and early 20s, especially the summer of 2020, when it seemed as if there was a real cultural revolution going on. And I sympathized with aspects of it, but I also found a lot of it deeply disturbing. And I was aware. I'm getting old. This is what happens when you get old. You feel as if the times are leaving you behind. And that's the kind of basic mood that this Doctor finds himself in after the collapse of the Empire. And it's. You're exactly right. It was what I saw as a little boy happening to my own father.

[A]

No. And then these are sort of my two further parts of the pitch and the praise, which is that a. To your point, it actually is a page turner. My recommendation for people who are seeking to be post literate, because you have to make this a bit of a lifestyle podcast too, of course, is someone told me, look, just read 50 page to build a reading habit, just read 50 pages a day. Could do it in two sittings. It's pretty straightforward. And that actually, really, once you realize you can do that, you're like, well, I just did 50 pages in an hour and 15 minutes. I actually have 18 hours in a day. And it adds up, adds up very quickly. I sat down to read the Emergency, and then very quickly I'd done 100 pages versus the struggle still that I experienced to read a nonfiction book that I'm really, really enjoying. So my suggestion for listeners that if you look the case for fiction for me is if you're looking to de addict yourself from your phone, if you're looking to build a reading habit, fiction is just such a good way to do it. Rather than starting with, I'm going to read this 400 page history on this deep, deep, deep topic to feel smart and then find yourself really struggling to do 25 pages a day, which is how I read like the big books. But I did Nixon land. 25 pages a day. It's a struggle. I love the book, but it's still a struggle. But I did 95 pages just like that. So that's part of my pitch for it, but then the third part of the pitch. And this is where I think my bipartisan listenership should appreciate this. In your post literate age piece, when you're writing about the book and the process, you specifically mentioned how he is not named in the book, he being obviously Donald Trump. I think the biggest weakness of post 2016fiction books and frankly a lot of history books, from very popular historians who like went from sort of writing the serious histories to the more popular airport book works that tend to excite people in that audience is just by not making this about Trump, but making this about big, it lets you escape right to your point about Fables. I should be able to read this book and I'm thinking about your father. I'm thinking of that generation of people. I'm thinking about 2020, what I'm experiencing. But I'm not just thinking about it purely in a new sense, in a deeper sense. And that's like a real achievement. And that's like my real pitch for this. Even if you're someone who is, if you basically come in thinking, is this going to be just sort of like an anti Trump, like fictional novel which many exist. This just isn't that. And I think that makes it so key to what you're trying to do with the purpose.

[B]

Well, thank you. I mean, what I wanted to do was not replicate American reality through fiction. I wanted to get away from American reality. I was sick of it. I had grown, you know, sort of numb with all the language of our politics and the deadly familiar arguments and get away from it, but not completely away, but to go under it, to get to the depth of it. What does it feel like to be alive in America today? What does it feel like to Worry that you're losing something precious in your society, that you no longer understand your children, that you look across the class lines and feel as if you don't even belong to the same country, or the partisan lines. And those feelings are very hard to convey through journalism. You can capture them to some extent, but I think imagination is where you really get closest to what reality is like, but at the level almost of sensation, physical sensation. So you mentioned that he is nowhere in the book. Thank goodness. My son at one point asked me, is there a demagogue in your novel? This was while I was writing it. And I said, no, there isn't. And for a moment I thought, should there be? Should I have some figure who takes over through, you know, exercise of, of power? No, because this is a book about us, about in, in a sense, the ordinary people of this country who have produced Trump, all of us. That's been my feeling all along. The whole country made Trump, he's too big and violent a disruption to say that was just these people or just those people. He came out of conditions that the whole country in some ways produced. So what interests me more than Trump and more than the day to day politics that we're all obsessed with, and I'm no different from anyone, is the, the way in which ordinary people are living and thinking right now. And so the, the novel is about Burgers and Yeoman. Basically those are the two social groups, city people and country people. And there is a deep divide in this country between urban and rural, between college educated and non college educated, between metropolitan and heartland. That I think is the most profound division. And that's sort of in, in a way, I created these two types of people in the sort of mythic sense, almost fable like that. They, that these groups, readers will recognize the analog in our society, but they'll also feel as if they're reading more of a fairy tale than journalism.

[A]

You know, it's funny, I've been thinking hard about and help doing Blood of the Liberals in this context. Sort of like my story and how I'm coming into things. And a real evolution that's occurred with me over the past 10 years post college has really been shifting from an era where I was more interested in what I knew. So I came to D.C. i joined the reform conservative crew. I knew all those people. I had to be a wonk. That was the thing you had to do. I was like, oh man, I have to read all the papers, I have to read all the things, I have to know all the things. But what I'm increasingly most obsessed with and I think, which is becoming very helpful for me is I'm more interested in how I think rather than what I actually, actually, actually know. Because there are a lot of people who know all the facts, especially in center left, like liberal world, which is me like returning to my familial roots from my sort of rebellious teens and twenties where I was interested in the right. And I think what, the way you write the book and I think what good fiction can do is help you just think about how you think. So like when there's a conflict between the doctor and his daughter, I think what you effectively establish here and what makes this not just sort of like an anti woke parody that'd be unhelpful is actually the before society that the youth were rebelling against was not good. There are all sorts of bad things about this society. This is a very screwed up system. But at the same time the means of the youth rebellion, the ideas, the themes, they're actually, and I don't just mean this to be like jokey, like problematic, to put it lightly, they raised some really, really dark questions. So being able to say like, okay, so we have two sides of this story and this isn't just like a both sides or anything, but you've got two different sides of the story. How should you as a person think about this? Like, how would you as a 30 something Marshall who has a 9 month old be in this situation? How would you as a teenage Marshall be in this situation? So I just really want to shout that out because I think that's just, I think this is under. If we're thinking of like young policy political leader types in D.C. i think that type of thinking has been severely underinvested in for the past two decades. And the more and more, and this is how we'll get to a couple other books you've written. But of course you could write your answers back to the emergency. The more and more I get texts from my 30something friends who are genuinely lost right now, some of whom are in elected office. The questions they're asking are not what's the policy response to this moment? It's I'm lost, I don't know what to think. My worldview doesn't make sense anymore. Which is a different question than reading a bunch of policy papers.

[B]

Well, as a 60 something Marshall, I have the same conversations with my friends. People don't know where they're, where to stand. They feel homeless, they feel like they know the old truisms. No Longer work. But they don't know what else to embrace. And they also don't want to get rid of the things that they feel are permanently of value. There's a scene in the novel, by the way. What you say about going from the father to the daughter is mirrored in the structure of the novel, because the first part is from the point of view of the father in the third person. But we're very close to his consciousness as he watches his city fall under the spell of this new philosophy that he finds alienating and his daughter especially. But the second part is the daughter's point of view as they go out into the countryside on their mission. And it was a key thing to decide to switch to her point of view because, as you say, it allows you to understand and why a teenage girl would want to throw out all the things she thought she had learned from her father. And the father can't understand it in part one. In part two, the reader can, because we're with her, even if there's some recklessness. But there's a scene in part one where there's something called the suicide spot, which is a gallows that some of the teenagers in the city have built. And it's a place where teenagers can come in front of a crowd, climb up onto the gallows, put the noose around their neck, and have a sort of public therapy session with a couple of other teenagers who are specially trained. And the point is not to commit suicide. It's to talk through all of their turmoil in order not to commit suicide. But it's done in this very public, dramatic way with the noose around their neck and they're standing over a trapdoor. They could hang themselves if they wanted. And the doctor's daughter does this. She goes to the suicide spot. And her father is so lost at this point that he kind of secretly follows her there and watches her. And what he hears from her is all that she has found wrong with his world. You mentioned that the. The world that he helped to build and then it's now disappeared was not all good. In fact, there was a lot of injustice. There's these groups called Excess Burgers, who are these young people who have failed their exams at age 14, and they're basically outcasts. They've. They've. They've lost their place in society because it's a rather brutal. You could call it a meritocracy, but it's a brutal one. And she reminds the audience of. While she's got the noose around her neck, that her father had said, that's just the way it has to be. He accepted that world. He accepted the injustices because that was the only world he knew. And she is telling him without even realizing he's in the crowd listening to her. How could you have said that you could not imagine a world better or worse than the one you gave me. And that breaks my heart. And he's listening and kind of beginning to understand why he is losing his his daughter. So I don't want to to indict wokeness, nor do I want to defend social justice. I want to understand how the generations experience a social upheaval and how the most important bonds in our life can be threatened by political change.

[A]

So for this last section, I want to focus on two of your previous books that I've mentioned, both on this show and then also in previous episodes. So firstly, this is just a fun fact for you, right? Obviously you argue in the post literate age piece that journalism is essential, but a fun fact for you that you may or may not know. There's a weird crew of millennials who are center left, but we experience right wings sort of tendencies during the early Trump period. Because the way I sort of explained the period was the new right especially asked really good questions that we didn't see the center over left actually asking. And when we're talking and so we've been talking about our backgrounds and our deals here and these are very impressive people, some of who have been on the show. And a common thread is we all read the unwinding. So your 2013 book and the reason why the Unwinding meant so much for us is that it came out in 2013, which is when we sort of tell the story of like the 2010s we tell through the lens of like look like after 2012, Obama was reelected. So it seemed like we were on the path to that 2050 progressive, diversified future Hitler considers to be president. And when you read the it's one of those few books of like in the moment political journalism. But I still think matters even though and actually it gets more and more relevant the further you get. Because if you read the Unwinding, or at least our interpretation of the book and because we actually did like a long call about this is just that reading the Unwinding, it's not that you predict Trump, though, in a weird way, Peter Thiel kind of does predict Trump in a very, very brilliant way. We could question 2025 Peter for very legit reasons. There was something there in 2012 Peter but the point being, a country where a book like that could be written was not a book where we were on a path to 2050 and where you could see a right answer some of the questions that were raised by the book. So can you just talk about the unwinding real quick? Just because it really means like, I mean, this seriously. There are a lot of like, people. We're 30 somethings, right? So like, the book means a lot to us.

[B]

Thank you. That means a lot to me to hear it. That's what any writer wants, is for a book to reach a new generation and to last. To last beyond its little moment. I mean, I worked on that book between basically 2010 and 2013. So it was Obama's first term and where I live in Brooklyn, there was a lot of Obama worship and I was as impressed by him as anyone. But I began to be sent by the New Yorker. Where I was then, I'm now at the Atlantic, but I was at the New Yorker then. And I went out into the country. I went to western North Carolina, the old tobacco country and textiles. I went to Youngstown, Ohio, and I was reporting. But I was also finding the main figures of the unwinding. Dean Price, son of tobacco farmers in North Carolina. Tammy Thomas, former assembly line worker turned community activist in Youngstown. And what I found, Marshall, was the optimism of of Washington, New York and Silicon Valley and Hollywood in those years was not in the least shared by the people I was meeting in these kind of left behind places. I was also in the Tampa area of Florida because of the housing bust. So it had just laid waste to all these new developments in the counties around Tampa Bay. And what I heard over and over in all of these places was the system's rigged. The elites don't care about us. They're in a deal with each other. Washington, Wall street, the big banks, big government. And there's something. The middle class has disappeared. No one is middle class anymore. And the state of mind was, you could call it almost pre revolutionary. There was a lot of churn and fever, people searching online for answers, where's the explanation for all of this? And some of them were more rational and practical explanations and some of them were close to lunatic fringe, but they were common and I saw them everywhere. There was also loneliness. So many of the people I met were living alone or had kind of been cut off from their family or their community, their church. There were no unions. Civic life had collapsed in these places because of deindustrialization and the, you know, the end of the 20th century economy. All of this added up to me to something closer to the early Depression years than to the post racial, multicultural, technological future. And so I just wrote it. I mean, all I did was go out, talk to people and write. I mean, I wrote it in a novelistic way because I want all of my non fiction to have some of the feeling and power of fiction. But it was just a kind of portrait of the country going back a couple of decades. I got people's stories going back to the 70s and 80s, up until the moment of the book's end in 2012. And it was impossible to feel that America was moving in a good direction and was doing right by its ordinary people. They hadn't given up. It was a lot of energy and entrepreneurship and people thinking for themselves and coming up with solutions for their own community. But it did not feel as if the, you know, the age of American dominance and of American greatness was going to last. And so when Trump came along a couple years later, I certainly didn't see him coming. I did see why he might come and why he might be so attractive. And I began to argue with a lot of people I knew about. No, you've got to take this guy seriously, because I've been to the places that are now embracing him.

[A]

Yeah. And the thing about this is a schtick of mine which may end up becoming my sort of professional, because everyone needs, as a public, ideas person, need kind of like a thing. And I interviewed your former Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson and Representative Jake Auchinquas at the big centrist gathering called welcome Fest. And I think something that the Unwinding really did for me is just introduce the idea of story. And then, because once again, what is Trump doing? Trump sees this unwinding, and he tells a story about the unwinding in his version, like how we got here. The elites, they screwed everything up. They don't care about you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then the populace left as their own version of that. And as I was sitting at the centrist gathering, I just was like, man, I'm just not hearing a story here, a story that could activate or even just ground ourselves in understanding what we actually need to do to come up with things. And I asked Jake and Derek what. What their story from a centrist perspective was, and they said they didn't have an answer, which is a real problem for the liberal project and centrism specifically. And my real suggestion for people, if they're looking to a lot of people just like, written and saying, like, they don't know the story either. That's a way of reducing, like, I don't know what we're doing here. That's why I say it's not that we don't know that, like, this is the specific version a single parent healthier needs to pass. That would be a good problem to have right now. The problem right now is, like, I actually am unrooted and to your point, homeless. So I think storytelling gets you there. And my suggestion for folks, before we pivot for the final bit of love of the liberals, is that reading the unwinding, if I were on that stage as basically a candidate, what I would basically say is this country is broken. People feel like it's broken. We as the center, as institutional people who go to places like the Aspen Ideas Festival, we own that. And whatever we do that comes next has to be built on that foundation rather than this idea that everything was just great and it's crazy that Trump get out of nowhere. So I just really suggest the people who are interested in my sort of story that take the unwinding not as, like, the story they need to just like, tell, but as just sort of a good starting place for, for grounding that.

[B]

Well, you know, if you go from the unwinding to the emergency, you can sort of see the arc of that story from nonfiction to fiction in its, in its social, it's deeper social context to its outcomes, to the effects in people's minds and in their lives. And Marshall, if you have a story of the future that makes sense for someone who believes in liberal democracy, I hope you'll tell me, because I would like not to simply keep writing books that tell the story of our unwinding. But I'm not the kind of writer who thinks well in terms of, like, future projects. I'm more focused. I, you know, I, I learn from the past and the present, from what I can see. But I do feel like it's a responsibility of all of us to try to imagine a story that can counter the story of grievance and resentment that we've been living with the past decade that is more unifying and, and doesn't just save democracy, but actually improves it. I'm not there. But if you're there or if you ever get there, let's talk again.

[A]

And here's the thing. And this is so, this is sort of my audience hates when I do this, but I think it's necessary to sort of, once again, like, I think it's important that we like root our thoughts and our sort of backgrounds. Like my background is I was sort of a politician kid in high school, so I went to Boys Nation, I was youth governor of Oregon, I was a student congress state champion. So like I'm not actually a public wonk intellectual type. The more I spend time with those people, I'm like oh wait, we do different things. I'm a politician type who is interested in ideas, but that's not the same thing as sort of the public intellectual. And so my answer is my job, especially with this show is not to like just come up with that story, but actually think like that's a participatory democracy opportunity. I think like what actually needs to happen is and why Frank Wright have been let down by every single center left right reform group that's tried to work on this sort of post 2024 moment is that it's not about having a set of policy recommendations or polls, it's about creating a project. And that takes us to blood of the liberals. Because the thing that I've really realized and why I've learned more become less. Because every once in a while I just look back on me spending times on the right in the 2010s I'm like dude, that was so immature. That was just so contrarian. What was the purpose of all of that? But what I've actually under realized, actually it gave me something incredibly valuable which is that conservatism is an actual ideology and it's a thing. And the key thing that I learned from my conservative days was I did not think of myself as a Republican. I never voted for Trump, but I thought of myself as a conservative. I thought of myself as a member of the new right. And when you think about things from an ideological perspective and not a party first perspective, that helps you think about projects. So once again I think the real failure of the Democratic liberal institution with center is that no one's building a project right now. The thing that's actually crazy, whenever I reference this sort of riff going on right now, I get so many emails from people saying whenever, like if you ever formally, I'm not going to like launch a 501C3 or anything, but someone's like dude, if you want to launch something or you want to do something, if you want to create a project, I love that you're calling it liberal. People should note. And I think, you know, I've talked to Fencer Klein about this. He listens to the show. Ezra started calling himself a liberal. And the thing that's funny about abundance. The book is he frames abundance as a pathway to renewing American liberalism. I think it's so important that we're starting to see people pivot from framing things around the Democratic Party, which I think is a huge mistake in an anti institutionalist age. The last thing, talk about a project that no one actually wants to join except DC people. Hey guys, we're going to fix the Democratic Party. That is the lamest project I could ever, ever, ever imagine. Versus hey, there was once something called American liberalism. It gave us the New Deal, the arsenal of democracy. It built the middle class. It meant something. But it lost its way in the 1960s and it lost its confidence and it retreated. And part of the reason why we have such a corporate institutionalist Democratic Party is the Democratic Party jettisoned ideology and then focused mostly as a coalition of interest groups who you throw different policy papers and ideas to. That is the problem. So I just that that that's just like my whole thing. I'm obsessed with this. I would love like any thoughts of with you on this because I'm just like thinking out much. This is where I'm just sort of like wrestling over the past three or four and this is what I read liberals. So that was the thing.

[B]

And I totally agree first of all with that. I'm not going to speak for long, but I want to amplify and echo your exhaustion with party politics. It is not where the creative work is going to happen. It's where things go to calcify and die. And the idea of a project that actually is simply about civic participation is so much more important than finding just that right mix of populism and moderation that could find the right candidate with the right kind of shirt on to be the right next Democratic presidential candidate. None of that really interests me very much. What interests me is exactly what you've been saying.

[A]

So the last shout out question. So as I referenced I read Blood of the Liberals. I really recommend people read. It's not a trilogy obviously, but read the Emergency, read the Unwinding and then read Blood of the Liberals to really understand here. And I was reading the final chapter and there are just these amazingly pathetic quotes that you offered at the end. I just want to read a couple of them to you and we can close out. But I think it's just like so important. So you know you refer to the 1960s as a mood, a powerful mood, but a short lived one. It didn't leave behind a worldview. That's what the 2010s were like, that is why my millennial cohort feels lost. Because like our political early days, the 2010s and the summer of 2020 through early Biden years, it was a mood, it was a vibe, it was a dynamic, but it didn't actually leave anything behind. And that's why I think the project is worldview building and ideological, because you actually have to build something. Second quote is maybe the job of politics now is to manage our hard won freedom and prosperity. For that, we don't need visionaries, we'll need technicians. When people critique the Democratic Party and they can critique the center left and say, there's no juice. When people critique abundance, which I'm an abundance person. But the worst version of the abundance project is a technical one rather than a vision one. So you writing that in 2000 and just presaging that this is the problem that liberals need to focus on is so important. And the final thing is, the thing I'm really pushing Jake and Derek and other liberals on is like, you actually need a worldview. Trump has a worldview. Bernie has a worldview. Andrew Cuomo does not have a worldview. That's why he is about to embarrass himself. So the quote is, we don't have a philosophy. We do not have a political philosophy to play the role that parents play essentially in guiding and shaping as an offering, a way of, like, thinking about the world. So I think that is just such an important thing that I really want to point people to as we're thinking about this.

[B]

Thank you. Well, I wrote that book in the 90s. It's a history of about 100 years, three generations of my family and of. Yeah, of the history of liberalism in, in the 20th century, you could say. And it's a complicated story because my father, academic law professor, Kennedy era intellectual, was what you would think of as kind of the modern type of liberal, which was about to run into the twin explosions of the new left and the new and the, the resurgence of the right with Nixon. My grandfather, my mother's father, was a Southern populist congressman from Alabama who, you know, had all the deficiencies of a Southern white Democratic politician in the early 20th century. And I lay them out in painful detail. But he also had a kind of feel for the anger and hope of this. The farmer, the coal miner, the steel worker. Those were his constituents in Birmingham who were getting a raw deal from the, from the banks, the railroads and the government. And that is something I think liberalism lost touch with over the latter part of the 20th century and maybe into the 21st, and maybe Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are kind of the shining examples of these great political figures who didn't have a feel for what ordinary people were going through and then were shocked when those ordinary people abandoned the party and voted for Donald Trump. Mostly white in 2016, but by 2024, more and more brown and black. So there is a, a divorce between the populist liberals and the technocratic liberals. Let's say that has been bad for both of them. Populism has become a right wing worldview and technocracy has led the Democratic Party and a lot of liberals into kind of a dead end. I don't have anything like a vision of the future, but the fact that we're talking about this and acknowledging the, the kind of fatality that liberalism found itself in, the exhaustion and the need for new thinking, the need for a new story, that to me is a hopeful thing because otherwise, if you, if you're simply looking for that right mix of policies and personalities to win the next election cycle, you're, you may win it, but you won't solve the problem.

[A]

Closing quote that brings to mind your grandfather. So once again, populist congressman, and this is the key part of the story people read the book, is that he turns against the New Deal. He really experiences that quote. In the New deal heyday of 1935, liberalism lost its connection to something vital from the past. In the summer of 1935, to the harm of both liberalism and populism, the brain trusted her with his briefcase and the Gallas dirt farmer parted ways. So I just think that if there's the definition of the starting point for what the project is and how you could pick up the history, I think that's really it. So, George, that's been great, very generative and thank you for coming on the show.

[B]

Hey, I so enjoyed it, Marshall. I'll come back anytime you want to have me.

[A]

Thanks.