Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I am Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. George Packer is an acclaimed journalist and award-winning author, enjoying a distinguished career at publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic. A graduate of Yale College, Mr. Packer covered the war in Iraq for The New Yorker from 2003 to 2018. He presently serves as a staff writer for The Atlantic.
He’s won the National Book Award. Much of his journalism covers American foreign policy. His biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, chronicled the life of one of the most influential US Diplomats of that century and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He’s the author of numerous books. His latest book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, is the topic of our conversation today. George Packer, welcome to Thinking in Public.
George Packer:
Thanks for having me.
Albert Mohler:
Your new book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, is in many ways a continuation of the work you’ve done before. I think I’ve read just about all of your major books. Why this book at this time? What was the spark that brought this about?
George Packer:
Well, most of my previous works had been long narrative books based on a lot of reporting, a lot of research, travel, talking to a lot of different people. The subject has been America and Americans all the way through.
This time, I was trapped by the pandemic. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t travel. I couldn’t really do meaningful interviews, and for me, they have to be face-to-face to be meaningful. Zoom is the enemy of intimacy. And so, thought I should make some use of my enforced isolation in collecting thoughts I’ve been working toward and wrestling with for all these years as I’ve been reporting on the state of the country and trying to understand the direction the United States has taken in the last two decades.
And instead of a piece of narrative reported journalism, what I’ve written is an essay, essentially. It’s a short book. It’s not, per se, an argument because it’s more of an exploration, more of a meditation. It doesn’t start with a strong point of view and pound you with it for 200 pages. Instead, it arrives at certain conclusions but only after passing through a look at, first, the moment in which I wrote it, which is the last months of 2020, the first month of 2021—dramatic time in American history. 2020 was one of those years that will go down in history as a year of tremendous upheaval and drama.
But also, to look back. Part of the advantage of being forced to sit in one place is you can read, you can think, you can look at history, you can read great writers like Tocqueville, Whitman, Walter Lippmann—those were my companions—in order to try to understand what it is about today that seems connected to American history, to our past, and therefore, might offer some sense of a path forward. So, essentially, I’ve made a virtue of a bad situation and wrote, essentially, a long essay about America today, but looking at both the recent past and then the deep past, going all the way back to the early 19th Century.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, in your work, The Unwinding, which is subtitled I think, An Inner History of the New America, you go into several different locations, follow several different persons as metaphors for what you see as the America that was unwinding. I want to go back to that work, because I see a lot of it actually in the Last Best Hope book. Why did you say that America was unwinding then?
George Packer:
It’s a phrase I heard from one of the main people in that book, Dean Price, who is a son of Tobacco Country in Western North Carolina, who comes from a long line of tobacco farmers, and whose life has coincided with the decline of that region, both tobacco and textiles and furniture were the three mainstays of the Piedmont Region of North Carolina. And they all collapsed in very rapid order, around the turn of the 20th and 21st century. That was Dean’s life and he spoke of unwinding but not to describe that collapse but to describe what he thought of as the solution to that collapse which, in his view, was to somehow extricate ourselves from the economy that he sees as part of the cause of the collapse. An economy in which cheap imports have replaced American manufacturing, in which food is trucked thousands of miles rather than sold where it’s grown, in which energy is imported from countries that have no love of the United States or its values, and in fact, might wish us harm.
He wanted to go back to the 19th Century and his answer was to use locally grown canola in those fallow tobacco fields in order to make biodiesel and to essentially turn the energy economy of his region into renewable, into a green economy. And he had mixed results as a businessman and in some ways, he was a kind of 19th century figure to me—a bit of a traveling salesman/evangelist for his cause, which was biodiesel. And he spoke about it with eloquence and wit and down-home authenticity in a way that charmed me and made me want to follow him and listen to him for weeks and weeks. But when he said unwinding, he meant essentially unwinding the modern economy of fast food and cheap imported oil, and cheap Chinese-made products and instead go back to something local in which people could renew their community right where they stood, by producing local, buying local, consuming local. So, that was what he meant by the unwinding.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Yeah, your book won the National Book Award. It was clearly understood to be a very insightful snapshot, or set of snapshots actually, of America in this early 21st century maelstrom. The book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, is one I really wanted to talk about because of the way you look at America. And I say this as a tribute, you understand that the politics is downstream from something. And you can attract that back to four tributaries. Now, going back to Aristotle, whoever controls classifications controls the argument.
So, I actually want to invite you to control the argument for a bit here, by laying out your classifications of the four Americas. I think, I think anyone, business, culture, politics, and including American church life, and I speak as an Evangelical Christian, should find your classifications very interesting— “Free America”, “Smart America”, “Real America”, and “Just America”. Lay that out for us. I think that’s really the most important contribution of your book.
George Packer:
Yeah, I became a taxonomist, and it’s something I don’t really love doing because I think any shorthand like that has many dangers …
Albert Mohler:
Sure.
George Packer:
… oversimplification and leaving things out, and caricaturing. Normally, what I do is write about the person sitting in front of me, and there, I feel that I have the attention and the empathy to do it justice. In this case, because as I said, I was unable to go and travel and interview, I was dealing in the realm of ideas, but the Aristotle quote is apropos. I have been thinking for a while that red and blue, the divide we’ve been living with for about two decades now, as a shorthand, is inadequate to describing the narratives that Americans carry in their heads of who we are, what it means to be American, what the history of the country says about us, and where we should go, what kind of country we want to be.
I think really there are these, the dominant narratives of my adult life have been these four, and there’s a sort of sequence to them as well.
I begin with “Free America”, which really became into political power in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with Ronald Reagan, and with essentially a narrative of free markets, of strongly pro-business, low taxes, deregulation, get the government out of my life, you know the whole … It’s essentially the Reagan rhetoric which was so eloquent and so … I listened to some of his speeches from the 1980 campaign and even though I didn’t vote for him, I found them quite mesmerizing. He made that America sound like, as he put it, “The shining city on the hill of the Puritans”.
Of the four narratives, Free America has been the most potent politically. It dominated our politics. It set the terms of debate. It changed what you could talk about and what you couldn’t, and really had an effect on the Democratic Party as well as on the Republican Party. I would say by the early 2000s, it was becoming clear that for all the appeal of freedom, which really mostly meant free markets in the Reagan rhetoric, had not delivered on the promise of widespread prosperity and instead had led to winners and losers that were really fairly extreme.
To an ownership class, an investment class, a corporate class that was doing better and better, and it seemed that no matter whether it was recession or boom, whether it was a Republican or Democrat in the White House, the rich kept getting richer. And the hollowing out of many communities that had depended on either industry or agriculture, like Dean Price’s Western North Carolina, falling further and further behind, again, no matter the state of the economy or of our politics. And this was obviously connected to globalization, technological change, the replacement of the industrial economy by the information economy. But in the end, the Reagan recipe did not produce the shining city on the hill. And in each of the four narratives, there’s the promise, there’s the appeal, and then there’s the failure.
The second, I call “Smart America”. That’s essentially the America I grew up in and live in. That is the America of the educated professional class of the meritocrats, as they’re called. And I think Bill and Hillary Clinton are probably, and Barack Obama, are the evangels of Smart America, and the examples of Smart America because they all came from humble beginnings, and through education and intelligence and ambition and energy and talent, they rose to the heights.
Meritocracy sounds like a fair system because it says you will advance as far as your talents and efforts can take you, and to the best, to the most energetic, to the smartest go the rewards. The problem with meritocracy has been that it has become a kind of class system rather than a system of equal opportunity. As social mobility has declined, as your birth becomes more and more the determinant of your destiny in this country, and our rates of social mobility, which used to far exceed Europe’s are now below Europe’s. So, the American dream of rising and the passing on to the next generation have not been achieved in the last two decades.
Meritocracy has become a form of aristocracy, where educated professionals pass on to their children all the advantages, the connections. They speak 10,000 words a day, they play Beethoven to three-year-olds, they get them into the right preschool, they have the right test prep tutors, they get them into the right US News and World Report rated colleges and into the right professions — generally, law, finance, medicine, media. This has become an aristocratic system in which these advantages are passed on from generation to generation. You are born a meritocrat today. You don’t become one.
And the chances of a poor American getting into a top Ivy League college are no better today than they were in 1954, after all the efforts, all the opening of those colleges to a more diverse group of candidates. So, Smart America has also failed on its promise, and because of those failures, the other two narratives, Real and Just America are expressions of disillusionment and of alienation from the promise of American life, from the optimistic narratives.
“Real America” is a phrase Sara Palin used in 2008, on a campaign stop very near Dean Price’s hometown in North Carolina. It was actually to a group of donors and what I’ve learned watching politics over the years is candidates only tell the truth to their donors. Hillary Clinton talked about deplorables to her donors. Mitt Romney talked about the 47% takers to his donors. Barack Obama talked about guns and religion to his donors. Sara Palin talked about the Real America to her donors. And what she meant, I think, was the kind of people who were in that region and basically, she meant white Christian working people, and she described them as the patriotic hardworking people who grow our food and teach our children and fight our wars.
And she was distinguishing them from people in the cities, from people on the coasts, from Smart Americans, elites, who somehow are less real, somehow are less the kind of people who are the heart and backbone of the country. So, it was a sort of divisive phrase that, I think, captured a picture of who is American and who has less of a claim. And for me, Sara Palin was John the Baptist to Donald Trump. She led the way. She created a kind of identity for a new politics. It was really not Reaganism any longer. It did not speak the language of endless opportunity based on entrepreneurial activity.
It was more pessimistic. It was about America in decline, America being taken over by immigrants, by the wrong kind of people, and the need for to get back to an America that was the Real America. And that, I think, became Trump’s potent argument for why Hillary Clinton should be rejected by the American people. She had failed the Real Americans.
The last of the narratives I called “Just America”, and those were the young people in the streets last summer. Those are… It’s a generational rebellion against me, against my generation, the boomers, against the parents, the Smart Americans who promised that if you work hard and go to the right school you’ll have a good life.
And younger people today look at the country and say, “This is not a just country. In fact, we’ve been born in injustice. We, in some ways, were conceived in original sin, the sin of slavery. And we have made very little progress and we will not make progress until we confront the darkness at the heart of America and somehow extirpate it.” So, like Real America, Just America is a more pessimistic narrative that seems to have the upper hand because so many Americans today feel that the country is in decline and had become disenchanted with the promises of 1776 and 1863. And so, Just America, I think of as a kind of generational rebellion.
And in many ways, Just and Real America which are, of course, politically at odds, if not at war with each other, have things in common. They tend toward the extremes. They tend to reject ordinary politics as being somehow corrupt and worthless. And they moralize politics. They want politics to be public morality, the public version of what they think of as morality, which is actually how Robespierre defined politics, public morality, which led to the guillotine. So, there’s a kind of retributive and punitive quality on both sides of that divide and those narratives have, I think, led us to a pretty dangerous impasse where we can’t talk to each other any longer across lines of ideology and identity.
Albert Mohler:
I appreciate you taking the time to lay that out.
George Packer:
I’m sorry it took me so long.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I kind of expected that it would. That’s unusual for this kind of conversation, but I wanted to get that much out in order to come back and, first of all, say that your typological projects there in making the classifications, I think, is helpful simply because we’re all trying to understand the country. We’re all trying to understand the fissures in this country. As a theologian and Christian thinker, I’m looking at the fissures along the lines of just basic world view and theological assessment and assumptions, what presuppositions are driving. It’s been also what moral urgencies are behind different arguments in the United States.
I don’t know when you’re born, but I was born in 1959 but I do know because of one of your books.
George Packer:
Albert Mohler:
There you go. I do know because of one of your books that we voted both in our first presidential election in 1980 and I just learned that we cancel each other out. But I …
George Packer:
But you ended up winning.
Albert Mohler:
By a landslide, but that’s just a part of the American story. I worked for Ronald Reagan in 1976 when I was 16 as a high school organizer. I tell people I was one of the officers of high school students for Ronald Reagan but that was not a mass movement. But nonetheless, I was very much …
George Packer:
It was an insurgency.
Albert Mohler:
It deliberately and celebratedly. I was really looking for ideas and what I believed were the right ideas. And Ronald Reagan was running a campaign of ideas. It got right down to the level of what we were talking about, even where the volunteers are stuffing envelopes. It was a genuine, far more, I think, than either the Republican establishment has ever understood, and many on the Left, in the media, have understood. It was really a very idea-driven, what we would say would be a principle-driven political movement.
Now, by the time Ronald Reagan gained the nomination in 1980, it was not exactly what it was in 1976. Because by 1980, and when the general election came, he was running against Jimmy Carter rather than Gerald Ford. But your description of Free America also includes, I think it’s very interesting, you would put Burkean conservatives, and I raise my hand there, and traditional Christian churches and institutions and groups in that Free America. And that just points to the fact that every one of these collectives includes people who are there awkwardly. So, for instance, even though your Free America’s based upon a libertarian dream, and of course, with the free markets at the very center of that.
An awful lot of the conservative concern at that time was the state of the culture and the direction of the culture. And so, an awful lot of the people who you would now put in real America were people who, if they had been alive 40 years ago in 1980, would have been in what you call Free America, but they’re very frustrated with the Republican establishment as much as with the Democratic establishment.
George Packer:
Exactly. I mean I don’t think the narrative of real America had emerged in 1980. That’s why I think there’s been a sequence. These have evolved through history. They aren’t permanent. And in `fact, I should add that there’s always competing narratives, there’s always competing ideas of what the country is, but I think these narratives have reached a dangerous point in which they cannot allow for the existence of the other. They see each other as existential threats.
Albert Mohler:
It’s increasingly a zero sum game.
George Packer:
Yeah, it’s a zero sum game. It’s a fight for scarce status, scarce resources, scarce power. But you’re absolutely right, that in 1980, Free America appealed to all kinds of people whether they were blue-collared Democrats in Wayne County, in Macomb County, Michigan, or whether they were the rising Sunbelt and middle American evangelicals, or whether they were California self-employed businessmen, or whether they were corporate executives on the East Coast. Freedom was the underlying principle and it may have meant different things to different people. To an evangelical Christian, it might have meant freedom from the government’s interference in how they raise their children or how they educate their children. But I think those tensions were there from the beginning.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. FDR, President Roosevelt, referred to the forgotten American and claimed to speak on their behalf. Ronald Reagan did the same thing, but Ronald Reagan said that the forgotten American’s actually a 60-year-old white guy who got off work and came home, was watch the evening news, sitting in a Naugahyde recliner in Milwaukee. And I think that the re-alignment of American politics has a very great deal to do with the fact that those were forgotten Americans.
George Packer:
I guess one question that maybe we should talk about is, what was it that led that man and, let’s call it the white working class, to abandon the Democratic Party and go to the Republican Party? Because that is sort of the most important political demographic move of our lifetime, I think. It has really changed how politics works, and there are several possible reasons. The Left says racism, sexism, xenophobia, hostility to modern secular life to cities, all that. I say it has to do more with the evaporation of a whole way of life, which really depended on jobs for people who didn’t have college degrees, good jobs.
And when those jobs disappeared, an amazingly devastating event that essentially got very little attention from the federal government. There was no industrial policy to try to re-orient millions of people toward a life that could sustain them. I think the Democratic Party became a party that no longer had anything to offer to people who had been its base, the blue-collar union Democratic-voting American. And the Republican Party, which I don’t think had anything to offer them on the economic front either, at least took their values seriously and didn’t speak about clinging to guns and religion. And so, if the government’s going to do nothing for me, I’m at least going to vote for the party that doesn’t look down on me. That’s, that’s the …
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, let me offer an alternative.
George Packer:
Yeah, go ahead.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, actually maybe several points of alternative, but for the sake of the time I’ll keep them brief. I think what, and you will know this very well, you’ve covered all of this in your writings. I wonder about the chronology though of the massive economic dislocation because I would argue a lot of that came later than, say, the late 1970s when Detroit was actually doing extremely well, for instance. And then, by the time you get to the end of the ’80s you see something coming but only in the ’90s does it take much formal shape.
But if you go back to, say, the last half of the 20th century, you would have an enormous number of labor union members who clearly voted, for instance, in 1968, for Richard Nixon, who addressed himself as ‘the silent majority’. But the point I want to make is this, that that that consensus during the Cold War, in which the labor unions and both of the political parties clearly saw the enemy as Soviet communism, and so it was a commitment to this American democratic (little d) project. An awful lot of those guys sitting in Naugahyde recliners in Milwaukee came to the conclusion that the Democratic Party was the enemy of that project. Or, at least the ascendant elites were the enemy of that project, weren’t speaking for them. And so, they were looking for who would speak to what they thought of.
And that’s why when you say Real America came later, I get that, but Ronald Reagan’s messaging like Morning in America and the rest, that was speaking, I was very much a part of that, was speaking to that sense that the American project is being subverted by one side in this cultural context. And if not consistently, at least is overwhelmingly more supported, they saw, by the other. Does that make sense?
George Packer:
Now, I’m going to argue with you because if that guy in the Naugahyde recliner was in Birmingham, Alabama, and maybe in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to me, it’s inarguable that the Civil Rights Movement had something to do with the fact that he became a Republican. It happened overnight between 1960 and ’64, when the whole solid South flipped and became either … It became essentially Gold Water Republicans and then were pretty much gone for the duration with maybe a little blip for Jimmy Carter because he was a Southerner himself.
So, I don’t see how you can leave the rise of a multi-everything, as I call it, democracy out of the picture of how this class, Northern and Southern, migrated across party lines.
Albert Mohler:
I don’t deny, I don’t deny this part. Yeah.
George Packer:
I guess what you should say is, it’s a complex multi-causal phenomenon. No single thing explains it, yeah.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I don’t doubt that that’s a part of the equation. I don’t doubt that. And by the way, I was in Birmingham at that time, not in Milwaukee. I went to college in Birmingham, Alabama.
George Packer:
Where?
Albert Mohler:
Sanford University.
George Packer:
Okay. My mother went to Birmingham Southern, she’s from Birmingham.
Albert Mohler:
In-town rival, God bless her. And your grandfather had been a member of Congress?
George Packer:
Yeah, he represented Birmingham in Congress for 22 years and he was an interesting, not to change the subject, but it may have some relevance, he was an interesting figure because he was a, as he called it, a Jeffersonian Democrat, which to him meant in simple terms, on the side of the common man, the ordinary guy, which meant miners, farmers, and steelworkers. And those were his constituents and those were the Democrats who are now voting their children and grandchildren for Reagan and for Trump. So, that’s part of the migration.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah.
George Packer:
But not long ago they were voting for George Huddleston, my grandfather, who was called “The Little Bolshevik” by the Birmingham News, because he was such an ardent pro-labor Democrat. So, that’s, in a nutshell that’s the history.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, and the two of us, that’s why a conversation like this is a lot of fun, the two of come from very different worlds. One of my strongest friends in my life and work has been Albert Lee Smith, who I guess had your grandfather’s seat in Congress later as a Reagan Republican.
George Packer:
That’s right.
Albert Mohler:
So, it’s a very interesting situation. I will tell you, I want to be intellectually honest, you can’t remove race from this equation, I wouldn’t dare to. But I can tell you that, in the world I inhabited, there was no overt use of any kind of racial argument or racial symbolism. Now, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, I understand text and subtext. I’m not saying that it was thereby safe to say that race was not an issue. I can just say that the animating concerns of the world in which I lived were the larger direction of the culture-related issues like abortion, sexuality issues, but just the larger sense that the culture was no longer under any kind of continuing project.
For sake of time, I want to ask you, I want to get to Smart America, and I’m happy for you to go anywhere you want to go here, but with Smart America, when you talk about meritocracy, what I struggle with is, and again, we come from very different places because I’m a big believer in meritocracy. I don’t believe it’s a perfect system, but I’m a big believer in it because I think number one, it’s inevitable in some sense, even among the people who say they’re trying to undo meritocracy. The very fact that they get to be giving the speech means there’s a meritocracy somewhere.
George Packer:
And they may well just be preserving their own place in it by denouncing it.
Albert Mohler:
Could, could be. And honestly, it could be. But I think your parents are both professors at Stanford.
George Packer:
No, my father died a long time ago, but he was and my mother is now 96 …
Albert Mohler:
Oh well.
George Packer:
… and she was, but yeah, she’s still among us. So, yeah, I come from an academic family.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I’m sure you’re proud of that, and I think that’s remarkable. And so, I take nothing away from that. I simply want to say that when I think of meritocracy, I think about the fact that I was a first generation college graduate. And I’m president of an institution where the largest percentage of undergraduate students are first time college students in their families. And so, I kind of represent the fact that in hope and in the investment of my life, an awful lot of it’s in this sense that I want more people to benefit by a meritocratic system whereby people like me, who had a grocery store manager for a father, can end up being president of an academic institution.
George Packer:
I’m all for it. I’m all for it. I’m just concerned that to sneak into it and to get through it has become more and more difficult, because the competition is stiff and there’s a whole … I live in a world in which families are constantly maneuvering to secure the best places for their kids in the belief that anything else is failure and a steep fall down into the class of people who shop at Walmart. So, that is, for me, a betrayal of meritocracy, not the real thing. And so, I’m criticizing my own class. It may be the harshest criticism in my book is reserved for my own class.
Albert Mohler:
No, I get that and I respect that. I really respect you as a writer and thinker. I just want to say that an awful lot of America is not, in terms of the structure of meritocracy, worried about how many Suzuki lessons they can fit in and all the rest in order to get into, their kid into, the Dalton School, in order to go to the St. Paul School, or to get to Yale.
George Packer:
Yeah, but it goes deeper than that. Don’t you worry that the numbers, the statistics on who leaves their hometown versus who stays, on who goes to college and who doesn’t, on whether that’s passed on generation to generation, have shown a kind of stagnation, and as I said, a freezing of our mobility rather than a loosening of it to make it more fluid. I’m all for a fluid social system.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah.
George Packer:
We have become a much more stratified one in the last 40 or 50 years, which is, I think, one of the main themes of my book and one of the main causes of our discontents. And so, I’m not …
Albert Mohler:
I’m trying to figure out if that’s right.
George Packer:
Yeah. Ah.
Albert Mohler:
I’m just trying to figure out if that’s right. And I …
George Packer:
I’ll send you some numbers when we’re done.
Albert Mohler:
No, thank you. And look, I think I’m pretty familiar with the numbers, but always glad to receive more. But again, I grew up in a house in which I was, I could say barely middle class. My father had a very good job with a very good company. But I grew up in a house in Florida without air conditioning, 900 square feet, was the big house, with four kids. And so, I look back and say, “Well, read from the way an awful lot of econometrics would be done now, that would be described as an incredibly underprivileged background.” And I would rather have had air conditioning during those years.
But I just want to say, look, again, when I deal with this issue, I just want to say, I want more people in it but I don’t want to destroy what I think has been the main engine for reversing the rigid class structures of the past in which I would not be a part of this conversation. I want more people to be represented there, but I haven’t had seen another engine in world history that has produced so much prosperity and freedom and access.
George Packer:
Well, I think your own experiences is remarkable and admirable but don’t draw entirely on what you were able to do, especially in your generation, in our generation. We grew up in a country that was still, I would call it, a middle class democracy, the post-war middle class democracy in which there was an understanding between labor and business and government, that all three had an important role to play in broadening prosperity to all Americans. It was a mixed economy in which labor unions played a part, business played a part, but business didn’t dominate. It recognized limits. And government had an essential role in ensuring equal opportunity and some sense of fairness.
And I think … You may disagree, but I think the story of the last 50 years has been the breakdown of that contract, that unwritten contract, and it’s been replaced by a more, I would say, Darwinian social order that has left us with haves and have nots that didn’t exist in such stratified rigid terms half a century ago. Today, if you’d leave any major city and go into the countryside a few dozen miles, you’re going to start running into poverty and despair and unemployment, and college, high school dropouts and opioid addiction, everywhere across this country. That’s not just a general moral, it cannot be a moral failure of a whole generation, it has something to do with the failure of the economy to continue to extend opportunity.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. No, I think you worked very hard to actually rightly report on the people that you write about, for instance, in the Unwinding, and when you describe the nation. I just want to say, I don’t live in New York. I live in Louisville, Kentucky. And I spend almost all of my time with the people that are often described in the terms … I live … Fifteen minutes from my house, I’m right in the midst of the flyover country, and church of the people aren’t even on the screen. But I do look at this and say, what I see on the left, and by that, I don’t mean that disparagingly, just descriptively.
What I see on the left is the fact that when you told the story about, even so the people in the Unwinding, I think as a Christian theologian, I can say there are structures of creation that, if weakened, such as marriage in the family, then children, I’d say the biggest issue is not the giant economic forces. I don’t deny those, but I have to say the greatest strength, I believe, and health poured into the life of children is when the family structure and the neighborhood structure is very much intact.
George Packer:
I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more, but I think the moral and social cohesion that you’re describing is intimately connected to the economic and social foundation of a community, which is why in my world the divorce rate is minimal.
Albert Mohler:
Right.
George Packer:
People think of the cities and of modern cosmopolitan people as passing through marriages all. No, people stay together. They eat their dinners together. They read to their children at night.
Albert Mohler:
Pour themselves into their children.
George Packer:
They pour themselves, it’s almost obscene how much time parents in my world spend on their children. Whereas, in a lot of parts of the country, there’s no common dinner table. To your point, there is no church on Sunday because that institution has lost hold of more and more people. There is no union. There is no local newspaper. All the institutions that sustain what I think of as a viable middle class Democratic life in this country have unwound. That was the theme of the Unwinding. In Last Best Hope, I’ve tried to explain, as I see it, why that’s happened and what we can do to try to make the country coherent again, and a better life for most Americans. So …
Albert Mohler:
Well, the other, the other …
George Packer:
… I’m not sure we disagree about all of that.
Albert Mohler:
No, I’m sure we don’t disagree about all of it, otherwise, there wouldn’t be any purpose to the conversation.
George Packer:
That’s true.
Albert Mohler:
And I found that, again, I found your book incredibly interesting. And just for the sake of time, I just have to move on from Smart America to say, look, I think a part of where the Left and the Right in this country now share an enormous amount of common concern, is about the inordinate power of the digital empires and Silicon Valley. And so, it’s interesting, I looked at just the three major national papers today and almost every one of them will have articles just day by day on, you got a Republican member of Congress, a Democratic member of Congress both saying, “We need curbs on this or that.”
You may disagree about what needs to be done but there’s a common perception that this digital revolution has come at an enormous cost.
George Packer:
Yeah, I was writing about it 11 years ago and I was called a Luddite by the technology reporter of the New York Times because I looked at Twitter and I said, “Twitter is crack for media addicts. It’s going to make them incapable. People in media will become incapable of thinking, arguing, writing. They will simply be tweeting.” And that has come to pass for a lot of people in my industry. And it’s had this destructive effect on our discourse and on our politics because we no longer really are interested in answering each other, in thinking hard about a viewpoint we don’t like, and coming up with a counter argument, of essentially having the conversation that you and I are having right now.
So, it’s a rare thing and I wish there were more forums for it. I wish … My idea is, if we had national service in this country, Americans of every background would have to get to know one another in a way they never do now, because our lives are in silos, in bubbles.
Albert Mohler:
Right.
George Packer:
And even if there’s just a few minor environmental projects or infrastructure projects, or if it’s military service, whatever it is, it would be a good experience because Americans would have to get to know one another again and realize that this is not …
Albert Mohler:
I strongly agree that would be a good thing.
George Packer:
… this is not the enemy, this is my countrymen or countrywomen.
Albert Mohler:
Just to try to summarize here, at least, I hope I do so accurately, and maybe I do so from inside in this case, at least some in what you describe as Free America, say that Reagan era, Reagan revolution, became disenchanted even with the Republican Party and with even some free market, certainly free trade kind of agreements, and resorted to what you call Real America, which is driven by a lot of resentments. No one can deny that. It’s driven by a lot of resentments in a sense that everything’s broken, and the sense in which on the right, the only way to fix this is maybe to break it more and hope that something better comes out of it.
Real America is a continuing thing. I just, I guess, I wonder where in your mind Burkean conservatives and traditional evangelical Protestant Christians, conservative Catholics for that matter, where do you see us falling now? Where are we? Tell me my address.
George Packer:
Well, some of you have become never Trumpers. I’d say the more traditional Burkean conservatives are more likely to take that route and to say, “This is not conservatism. This is something much more destructive and much more anti-traditional, anti-institutional.” Donald Trump does not talk about self-government, he doesn’t talk about the Constitution. He talks about, “I alone can fix it and I am the voice of the people.” He’s a populist. And a Burkean conservative looks at a populist and sees a dictator. So, I think for some, that has been the direction, but they’re homeless. They’re homeless.
I’m a bit homeless too, so I actually feel quite a lot of sympathy for the never Trump Republicans. I think the polls show that evangelical Protestants have become Trump’s strongest supporters, and it seems that the man can’t do anything to antagonize a lot of them. There are a few of them, people like Michael Gerson and Peter Wayner, writers like that, who stopped calling themselves evangelical because they think it now means essentially Trumpist. But it is, to me, one of the really hard to understand … I understand it, but just really hard to rationalize how a movement based on moral principles in the 1980s, with the early New Right, has become a cult of a highly immoral and destructive figure like Trump.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I would say that’s reductionistic.
George Packer:
But that’s just me, that’s just me.
Albert Mohler:
It’s all right, it’s honest, but I think that’s reductionistic because I think the classical conservatives are … and Michael Gerson and Peter Wayner, and I know them, but we’re in a very different place here.
George Packer:
I know, they’ve been very critical of people like you, maybe even of you personally.
Albert Mohler:
Maybe even of me personally, yes.
George Packer:
Right. Right.
Albert Mohler:
So, I will simply say that I am not a never Trumper. And so, where’s the Burkean conservatism? Well, I think it’s in … And by the way, I say that, I don’t just use it as a metaphor. I’ve been steeped in Edmond Burke since I was about 18. For one thing, I can’t just bring him from the 18th Century to the present in a clean way, but I would say that his observations of the danger of the French Revolution are what many, I think, genuine, kind of organic conservatives like those I hang around with, would simply say, “We’re in a situation in which the Left, if in control, will undo any ability to try to recover from this, the toxin’s coming from the Left.”
And many of those you describe in Just America, they will make recovery impossible, and it is a binary. Again, that’s why I don’t understand some people who say, they just won’t get … And especially people who have been deeply involved in politics, in something like the Bush Administration, which in present, Bush is very kind to me, but it’s just hard to understand now how all the sudden there’s a list to things that are politically unacceptable. It looks pretty convenient to me.
George Packer:
Well, I don’t know. I think … I interviewed Charles Morey during the 2016 campaign and I remember he said quite directly, “I’ve suddenly found that my world has fallen apart, and all kinds of people who I thought believe the same things that I believe, turned out they didn’t believe them at all.” And what he was talking about were Libertarians and Madisonians and maybe Burkeans who suddenly didn’t seem to mind that a kind of authoritarian-sounding figure who didn’t seem to have any interest in the institutions and principles of self-government, including the separation of powers, including some of the core principles of the Constitution, suddenly he was okay by them.
So, you’ve lost Morey, you’ve lost a few evangelicals like Wayner and Gerson. You’ve lost people who aren’t necessarily Libertarian or Christian conservative but who are ordinary Republicans, suburban Republicans, who just couldn’t bear the rhetoric and the vulgarity and the appeals to xenophobia and bigotry that seemed to come so naturally from Trump. And they’ve become unwilling Democrats, let’s say, temporary, it’s a marriage of convenience. And at the same time, and this is a very interesting thing that Just America cannot get its mind around, there’s a whole number of black and Latino-Americans, working class, who moved over to Trump in 2020, which shows that identity is not political destiny. And the coming majority and minority America is not necessarily a country in which Democrats are going to win elections without trying. So, I think there are more things in Heaven and Earth than I dreamt of in our philosophy.
Albert Mohler:
No, I get that and I want to move.
George Packer:
Sure.
Albert Mohler:
I don’t mean to interrupt you; I want to move to Just America. I just want to say one other thing. I’ve been inside the campaigns, that where I lived most of life, but I’ve been there. And so, it’s interesting in almost every one of these campaigns for the presidency, since 1980, let’s just say, has been, “You have to vote for me. Just look at the thread of the other guy …
George Packer:
Right.
Albert Mohler:
… or the other candidate.”
George Packer:
Right.
Albert Mohler:
And I just want to tell you, in all intellectual candor and moral candor, that is the argument that I think produced Donald Trump in 2016, and came close in terms of the big picture, in 2020.
And I’ll just say, and I’m not arguing with you the politics at this point, but I’ll just say that the first, say, six to seven months of the Biden Administration have not undermined that argument.
George Packer:
Do you think of Barack Obama in 2008 as appealing on the same grounds? I don’t think he ever spoke that way.
Albert Mohler:
In 2008?
George Packer:
Yeah, the first Obama campaign …
Albert Mohler:
Yeah.
George Packer:
… when he was elected.
Albert Mohler:
No, but he certainly did of the party, he certainly did of the party. He did not demonize John McCain. So, I should … That’s a good clarification, sometimes it’s the other party. But …
George Packer:
He was all about unity and there are no red States there are no blue States. That was Obama’s, and it was a lie, but it was a very appealing lie that we kind of wanted to hear at that time.
Albert Mohler:
And I will say there’s something to that, but he ended up being the candidate who I think was most condescending and dismissive of many of the people he at least asked to vote for him. And in terms of explaining Donald Trump, you also have to add Barack Obama, and it’s the politics. I don’t believe that it was primarily driven by race at all. I think had Barack Obama been less committed to things such as same sex marriage, less identified with the knowledge class and dismissive of people who didn’t agree with him as being morally unworthy, I think it would have been quite different.
George Packer:
I don’t know if we have enough time for me to argue back, but I disagree. I was in Southwestern Virginia during the mid-term election of 2010 and I remember talking to a woman at a polling place who was just spitting mad about Obama. I said, “Well, what’s wrong with him?” She said, “The way he talks, the way he dresses. He doesn’t dress properly. He desecrates the Oval Office by the way he dresses and the way he talks.” I was thinking, who are we talking about? He’s the man of great dignity. He speaks well. He doesn’t use bad language. He’s committed to his marriage and his children. What do you mean? All I could think was, you mean he’s black, don’t you? I didn’t say that, cause there was no need to, but I think that’s what she was getting at.
But anyway, we should maybe get to Just America because there’s a lot to say about that.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I also understand in your reporting you’re going to talk to a lot of interesting people, but Barack Obama, so far as I know, the only … You may remember, he got into a fashion controversy, not amongst conservatives, when he wore a tan suit, which they said was, so many people said it was undignified.
George Packer:
Oh, right, the tan suit, undignified. Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I don’t think that’s what she was talking about.
George Packer:
No.
Albert Mohler:
All right, Just America. This is the America a lot of Americans are trying to figure out right now.
George Packer:
And it’s the world of, not my children cause they’re too young and, in fact, their generation might well rebel against the rebellion because it’s so oppressive. Just America is a generational uprising against, I think, Smart America for the most part, because that’s their parents. They’re rebelling against their parents and against the leaders of institutions, whether it’s universities, newspapers and magazines, arts organizations, and the Democratic Party who they think are sluggish and impure in their pursuit of justice. The key word is justice. And Just America has a dim view of America, as a country founded in injustice.
Of course, founded in slavery—1619 is the founding year of the country. And so, this narrative has a kind of impatience to the point of frenzied opposition to anything that smacks of compromise, gradualism, ambiguity, complexity, the things that I think are kind of important if you really want to get anything done in politics, almost inevitable. It is an illiberal narrative. It rejects some of the values that I think are at the heart of enlightenment liberalism, whether it’s objectivity or due process or the idea of individual freedom and equality. It thinks in terms of groups, in terms of hierarchies of oppression, and in terms of … It has an almost instinctive desire to suppress what it finds to be incompatible with justice, not to argue with it, but to suppress it. And so, in my world, whether it’s journalism or academia, it has become a very powerful and almost doctrinaire narrative that, I think, really threatening to some of the values that I think are important for democracy.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I think, and I say this as a compliment, I think you’ve written the best once paragraph, summary of critical theory. It’s on page 121 in your book, and you write that, “Critical theory upends the universal values of the enlightenment, objectivity, rationality, science, equality, and freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which dominant group subjugate other groups. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power. Unlike orthodox Marxism, critical theory is concerned with language and identity more than with material conditions. In place of objective reality, critical theorists place subjectivity at the center of analysis to show how supposedly universal terms exclude oppressed groups and help the powerful rule over them. Critical theorists argue the enlightenment, including the American founding, carried the seeds of modern racism and imperialism.” I cannot think of a finer one paragraph. I actually cited you in an address I gave recently.
And as a theologian, I’ve been following critical theory since, again, I was very, very young, an undergraduate, when I had a basically a Marcusian as a professor. But the question is, how in the world did this happen? You’re the only person I know who’s kind of dated it. You say that it jumped from the academy into the mainstream of American political discourse, I think you say 2014?
George Packer:
Yeah, obviously, that’s a little arbitrary because these things don’t happen overnight.
Albert Mohler:
Sure.
George Packer:
But so many things began right around 2014 to show how these ideas, which there’s a great quote from D. H. Lawrence, “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next.” So that what a group of professors and philosophers teach in the 1980s and ’90s become almost just the unconscious assumptions and biases of their students, and even people who’ve never been in a college classroom. That’s why when people on the Left say, “Well, critical race theory, you’re talking about high school. No one is teaching Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell in high school.” That’s true, but they may be teaching …
Albert Mohler:
Well, that was true.
George Packer:
Yeah, they may be teaching according to the assumptions that came out of those ideas, and I make a connection to the ’70s. I think you were right, the Reagan movement was a movement of ideas. Milton Friedman said, “We put ideas into circulation in order to wait for the moment when the politically implausible becomes the politically inevitable.” And I think just as ideas informed Free America, ideas inform Just America, too. They have had a powerful effect. How did it jump from the academy to the culture? I would say disappointment in Obama, on the part of younger people, who thought that he was going to bring in the millennium. And instead, the usual one step forward two steps back of politics. Disenchantment with all the institutions we’ve been talking about because of the financial crisis, the great recession, and the endless wars and a kind of generational muscle flexing. The boomers are now the enemies of the millennials, but the boomers did the same thing. They thought they were the first generation to walk the earth, that everyone else before them had been benighted. Millennials who are large as in number at cohort, and strong, and self-confident have in some ways followed in the footsteps of their parents.
And finally, technology, social media, digital media have allowed people who ordinarily would not have much of a voice in our culture, to have a very strong voice. People who are unknown but who can create a group online, and that group can then have a really strong say in what you can say and what you can’t say, and what happens to people who run afoul of that. So, all of those factors seemed to converge around that year 2014, and suddenly, the New York Times is using language it had never used before. White supremacy becomes a common term, whereas, before 2014 or there abouts, it only referred to the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council.
So, there was a huge change in culture on the Left which is where the Left has always dominated culture while the Right has dominated our politics, I would argue, in my lifetime. Now, that culture is coming into politics. It’s become almost a calling card if you want to have a career in the Democratic Party. It’s difficult not to use that language and not to signal to those ideas, if you want to have a future.
Albert Mohler:
Now, if I were a Liberal, or of the Left, so I’m a traditional, I guess you could say this comes more from a English speaking thought than anything else, on the Right, and that is that there are liberals and conservatives but to the left of liberals is the Left, and to the right of conservatives is the Right, which is a larger collective. It includes some people who are not conservative at all.
George Packer:
Right.
Albert Mohler:
But I see your Just America is very much the Left, and it does, too, in terms of its basically Marxist analysis and all the rest. And it is, I say, the greatest surprise intellectually of my lifetime, has been the critical theory could jump from the academy, where it was stuck for 60 years. And now, it’s a mainstream conversation, and I understand what you say about Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell and others not being taught in schools, but now they are. Now, they’re footnoted in schools. And the biggest problem I see with critical theory, speaking from Right, and not just the Right but a conservative position, and as a Christian theologian is, there’s no bottom to that argument. There is no end to it. It is like a universal acid that just continues to burn because it assumes that whatever structure is in place is by definition unjust.
George Packer:
I think that’s quite perceptive and it gets at what’s politically limited about it. It has such a pessimistic and critical view of everything. It subjects everything to criticism. What is being built? I know there were many young people in the streets last summer who believe they were building things and wanted to change things for the better. And I hope they can because a lot needed and needs to be changed, including in law enforcement and the criminal justice system. But they were hamstrung by the ideas and the language which made it impossible to build, impossible to do more than criticize.
And in fact, I think one of the tragedies of last summer was what could have been a movement for reform. And reform where it’s needed among poor people in the cities, in deprived areas, became a kind of a revolution of consciousness in the professional class, where a lot of elite schools and universities and publications went through a very public self-mortification in order to show that they had been redeemed. And it does have this religious quality.
There’s a good article in The Atlantic right now called The New Puritanism by Anne Applebaum, about all of this. That was a turn into a dead end. Politically it’s a dead end because that is not the way most Americans think. And it’s certainly going to isolate you as a party into the educated class, and you’re going to lose more and more people in the working class who think that Defund the Police is not a slogan they can get behind. So, yeah, it’s been a movement for justice that has almost aborted itself, has stopped itself in its tracks. And yet, those ideas are powerful because they give you a sense of having figured out the world.
Albert Mohler:
Right, which is what we’re all looking for.
George Packer:
Right. Like Libertarianism, like Marxism, like Freudianism, like Christianity, it is a system that explains things and that once you are inside it, everything makes sense. And you don’t have to deal with contradictions and exceptions and counter arguments. In fact, you can’t tolerate them so that you stifle them by saying false consciousness, you’re one of them. You’re … So anyway, I think it’s been a real mistake for the Left and as much as it’s a part of the Democratic Party, I think it’s going to lead to electoral defeat.
Albert Mohler:
As a Christian theologian, by the way, I believe God made us to be meaning-seeking constantly and looking for an understanding of the world. And that’s part of the reason why these conversations, I think, for me, are invaluable. I really appreciate the time you’ve given us. I will say about this, just thinking about Just America for just a moment, when I was in college and then in the 1980s, I was very interested in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, horrified by it, kind of the way Burke was horrified by the French Revolution.
And yet, one of the things that struck me is that one of the things that happened in Maoism and in the Cultural Revolution in particular was that eventually you only became the friend of the people by declaring yourself to be the enemy. In other words, everybody has … eventually, you have to admit all your sins against the revolution. And that’s where, I want to say, that’s why there’s critical theory and intersectionality. The problem is, you may be oppressed today, you’re the oppressor tomorrow at 3:00 PM. And so, without an objective understanding of human good and human dignity, and even you might say a plausible conception of the good society, I don’t see where we go from here. But that just makes this conversation all the more interesting to me.
George Packer:
Well, one last point, Al, if I may.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Please.
George Packer:
I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that Real America and Just America are kin. They are … They’ve come up at the same period of disenchantment with traditional American ideas of progress and of opportunity. And they are kin in their way of thinking, because just as Just America has a rigid idea of group identity determining everything about you, Real America has aligned itself with a single person. No matter what he says or does, so that now a candidate for the Senate in Oklahoma is challenging a very conservative incumbent on the grounds of what? Election security, because supposedly the election was stolen. And that is the only test of whether you’re a true Republican.
So, for that to become real America’s dogma is just as dangerous to democracy as for Just America to say, “We cast you out because you use language that just yesterday all of us used.” And they mirror each other, I think, in that way. I had to get that in, sorry.
Albert Mohler:
I would love to have the opportunity to come back on all of that a bit, but I want to agree with you at one point of what you said there. I taught an undergraduate class. I had a phenomenal time doing it, on ideas and ideologies of Modern Age. And it surprised me, these very committed young Christians, basically 18 to 22 years old, the one ideology that they felt was effecting their generation more than any other was Nihilism. And I think that is actually the temptation of both what you call Real America and Just America. It is to just give up on the project of truth, and just resign to the inevitability is just power.
George Packer:
It’s all power. I think you’ve said it perfectly. That is the end point of both of these narratives and that’s why they’re taking us in a direction I don’t want to go.
Albert Mohler:
Well, nor do I. I’ll say that as a Christian. Nihilism, I think I can understand may well be, as these young people seem to think, the greatest danger that they’re likely to face. George Packer, thank you so much.
George Packer:
Thank you, Dr. Mohler.
Albert Mohler:
For joining me for Thinking in Public.
George Packer:
I enjoyed it. Thanks so much.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, George Packer, for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find well more than 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com, under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.