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)