George Packer discusses his newest reporting on Donald Trump and American politics.
Democrats have veered into id politics and away from the pursuits of the working class. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, George Packer joins Jeffrey Goldberg to debate his latest reporting on the Democratic Occasion’s illusions and the way forward for American politics.
Donald Trump’s reelection ought to put an finish to 2 progressive illusions, Packer defined final evening: The primary of those illusions is the notion that id is political future; the second is the speculation that the Democratic Occasion has been stored out of energy by a white Republican minority thwarting the favored will by means resembling voter suppression or gerrymandering.
“The Democratic Occasion has turn out to be the occasion of firm, of establishment, of the establishments,” Packer stated. The occasion has come to prepare itself below a framework that the “most simple id of a citizen is group id primarily based on race, gender, sexuality.” However in doing so, they’ve “misplaced a lot of strange People who don’t see themselves primarily in these phrases, who’re principally working-class … and who was once the spine of the Democratic Occasion.”
In the meantime, as with the drift of the working class away from Democrats and in direction of Republicans, the nation’s more and more isolationist international stance has additionally been constructing. “We’re not the unipolar energy that we have been after the tip of the Chilly Conflict,” Packer stated. “We stood for a sure order, a sure set of values, a sure liberal view of the world, and I feel that would collapse in a short time below Trump as a result of he doesn’t consider in it—in actual fact, he desires to destroy it, and so do the folks he’s placing into key positions.”
Packer discusses this, in addition to his reporting on conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in Phoenix, Arizona, the nation’s fastest-growing metropolis, with the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Watch the total episode right here.