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George Packer

Wednesday 21st of January 2026

Afghanistan War More Americans cared about the country than the Biden administration had accounted for in its political calculations. Most of these Americans were in their 30s or 40s — the generation that came of age with the 9/11 wars, now reaching a calamitous end. Helping Afghans escape would become a way to avoid succumbing to a sense of waste and despair and helpless rage. citation George Packer, Atlantic Monthly, March 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War “The State Department always insists that we we have to play by the rules,” Representative [Tom] Malinowski, who once served in it, told me. The department celebrates Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who forged passports to save Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. “But if any State Department employee tried to pull what Raoul Wallenberg did, he'd be fired in three seconds.” This was the thinking of the period before the August evacuation. “And then, for two glorious weeks, we threw out the rules.” Now the department is back to its risk-averse, pre-August thinking, with an obstacle for every human need. “Bureaucracy is killing more people than the Taliban,” Mary Beth Goodman, the State Department official, told me. citation George Packer, Atlantic Monthly, March 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War The VA augmented its mental-health hotline in case Afghanistan veterans began to see their interpreters beheaded on social media. citation George Packer, Atlantic Monthly, March 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Anti-intellectualism The triumph of popular democracy brought an anti-intellectual bias to American politics that never entirely disappeared. Self-government didn't require any special learning, just the native wisdom of the people. “Even in its earliest days,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, “the egalitarian impulse in America was linked with a distrust for what in its germinal form may be called political specialization and in its later forms expertise.” Hostility to aristocracy widened into a general suspicion of educated sophisticates. The more learned citizens were actually less fit to lead; the best politicians came from the ordinary people and stayed true to them. George Packer, The Atlantic, July/August 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Citizenship In a 2019 survey, only 40 percent of Americans were able to pass the test that all applicants for U.S. citizenship must take, which asks questions like “Who did the United States fight in World War II?” and  “We elect a President for how many years?” The only state in which a majority passed was Vermont. George Packer, Atlantic Monthly, March 10, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Conservatives Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. George Packer, The Atlantic, June 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face. George Packer, The Atlantic, June 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills — a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public —  had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity - to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. George Packer, The Atlantic, June 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Democracy But the threat we face is a new one; it requires new thinking. Through most of American history, both parties, while excluding large numbers of Americans from the franchise, basically accepted the choice of the electorate — and that is no longer true.  The supreme danger now is not that voters in urban counties will have a harder time  finding a drop box, or that some states will  shorten the mail-ballot application window. The danger is that the express will of the American people could be overthrown. George Packer, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Democracy  There is no easy way to stop a major party that’s intent on destroying democracy. The demonic energy with which Trump  repeats his lies, and Bannon harangues his  audience, and Republican politicians around the country try to seize every lever of election machinery — this relentless drive for power by American authoritarians is the major threat that America confronts. The Constitution doesn't have an answer. No help will come from Republican leaders; if Romney and Susan Collins are all that stand between the republic and its foes, we’re doomed. George Packer, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Democratic Party In the early 1970s, the party became the home of educated professionals, nonwhite voters, and the shrinking unionized working class. The more the party identified with the winners of the new economy, the easier it became for the Republican Party to pull away white workers by appealing to cultural values. Bill and Hillary Clinton spoke about equipping workers to rise into the professional class through education and training. Their assumption was that all Americans could do what they did and be like them. George Packer, The Atlantic, July/August 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Identity politics But in identity politics, equality  refers to groups, not individuals, and demands action to redress disparate outcomes among groups — in other words, equity,  which often amounts to new forms of discrimination. George Packer, The Atlantic, July/August 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Meritocracy After seven decades of meritocracy, it's as unlikely for a lower-class child to be admitted to a top Ivy League university as it was in 1954. George Packer, Last Best Hope  [2021] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Meritocracy  After the 1970s, meritocracy began to look more and more like Young’s dark satire. A system intended to give each new generation an equal chance to rise created a new hereditary class structure. Educated professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with less and less chance of seeing their children move up. George Packer, The Atlantic, July/August 2021 [Michael Young was the author of The Rise of the Meritocracy ] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Patriotism Smart Americans are uneasy with patriotism.  It’s an unpleasant relic of a more primitive time, like cigarette smoke or dog racing. It stirs emotions that can have ugly consequences.  The winners in Smart America — connected by airplane, internet, and investments to the rest of the globe — have lost the capacity and the need for a national identity, which is why they can't grasp its importance for others. … The … problem is that abandoning patriotism to other narratives guarantees that the worst of them will claim it. George Packer, The Atlantic, July/August 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Reading Mirrors are ultimately isolating; young readers also need windows, even if the view is unfamiliar, even if it’s disturbing. The ability to enter a world that's far away in time or place; to grapple with characters whose stories might initially seem to have nothing to do with your life; to gradually sense that their emotions, troubles, revelations are also yours — this connection through language to universal human experience and thought is the reward of great literature, a source of empathy and wisdom. George Packer, Atlantic Monthly, March 10, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Snapshot Barr and Trump are pursuing very different projects – the one a crusade to align government with his idea of religious authority, the other a venal quest for self-aggrandizement. But they serve each other's purpose by collaborating to destroy the independence of anything – federal agencies, the public servants who work in them, even the other branches of government – that could restrain the president. William Barr and Donald Trump portrayed by George Packer, The Atlantic, April 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Snapshot He made conflicts of interest is business model. Jared Kushner portrayed by George Packer © 2020 Kwiple.com
Snapshot She was Donald Trump's John the Baptist. Sarah Palin portrayed by George Packer © 2020 Kwiple.com
Snapshot  If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end. Donald Trump portrayed by George Packer © 2016 Kwiple.com
Snapshot Throughout his adult life, Trump has been hostile to Black people, contemptuous of women, vicious about immigrants from poor countries, and cruel toward the weak. He's an equal-opportunity bigot. Donald Trump portrayed by George Packer © 2021 Kwiple.com
State of the union c All four of the narratives I've described emerged from America's failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid. … They all anoint winners and losers. … I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them. George Packer, The Atlantic, July/August 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
State of the union But a way forward that tries to make us Equal Americans, all with the same rights and opportunities — the only basis for shared citizenship and self-government — is a road that connects our past and our future. George Packer, “How America Fractured Into Four Parts,” The Atlantic, July/August 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trumpism … the most reliable predictor for who was a Trump voter wasn't race  but the combination of race and education. Among white people, 38 percent of college graduates voted for Trump, compared with 64 percent without college degrees. This margin —the great gap between Smart America and Real America — was the decisive one. It made 2016 different from previous elections, and the trend only intensified in 2020. George Packer, The Atlantic, July/August 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
 
Trumpism The worst fate of the press in a second Trump term would be neither legal jeopardy nor financial ruin. It would be irrelevance. --> George Packer, The Atlantic, January/February 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com