Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

George Packer:

We’ve had reactionary politics, especially in the South, but it hasn’t really taken hold at the national level until now, and it’s hard to think of someone running for president and winning by saying, “This country is trash. We have to get rid of the trash.”

Preet Bharara:

That’s George Packer, staff writer at The Atlantic. Making his fifth appearance on Stay Tuned with Preet Packer joins me today to discuss his latest article, “The End of Democratic Delusions,” and to explore how the 2024 election has reshaped our political landscape. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

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Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions.

This question comes in an email from Alice who writes, “I’m sure you will get this question multiple times. Can Donald Trump actually just imprison Liz Cheney or any other random person who displeases him, even if he trumps up charges, intended word selection? Who would arrest her and who would convict her? This all seems like a lot of putrid hot air. We still haven’t seen President Biden impeached as was promised to occur within the first month of his presidency. They don’t have much time left on that one. One still has to commit a crime to be imprisoned. And being disliked by Trump can’t be prosecutable. There aren’t enough courts in the world for that. Thank you for your podcast, Alice.”

Alice, you make a lot of good points and observations and very good rhetorical questions too. I agree with you that as of today in the United States of America, this is still a place where even the leader of the country, the commander-in-chief of the country, can’t point to individuals without basis and have them imprisoned like is actually true in some other countries around the world, many countries in fact. But ultimately, the problem that I see in the near term, and we don’t have to talk about the long term yet, but in the near term is not that someone with no justification or basis or evidence, much less evidence beyond a reasonable doubt will be unfairly and unconstitutionally and unjustly imprisoned like Liz Cheney or someone else in the January 6th Committee or some judge whose rulings Donald Trump disagreed with.

That’s not my endpoint concern at this moment. The concern is on a much lower threshold, not beyond a reasonable doubt, not probable cause, but on a much lower threshold, investigating authorities, the FBI and others can open a very difficult, very debilitating investigations of people on some potential pretense. That’s not necessarily going to happen, although there has been advocacy and rhetoric to the contrary. But that’s I think the immediate concern, not ultimate conviction and imprisonment, but intermediate investigations, harassment, persecution based on nothing other than the fact that a random person displeases him, as you phrase it in your question. Merely to deal with and respond to an address an investigation, it can tie up someone’s time, energy, it can affect their employment possibilities, it can affect their investment opportunities and causes a great deal of stress, which is why investigations should always be premised on good faith and a good predication of some actual provable crime ultimately.

By the way, a couple of other observations just on this issue of whether or not Trump is going to cause people who work for him to engage in these investigations and prosecutions Trump may remember and believe, I think, that the fact that he was prosecuted, whether you think it was just or not, caused him to be in the minds of many of his followers, particularly his base, to become a sort of legal martyr. That seems to have been the political logic, at least when it involved investigation and prosecution of Donald Trump. And some question that he may be having in his own mind, which is not a principled basis at all, it’s not a legal basis at all. But it’s interesting to consider and maybe the people around him who are not in law enforcement may make this point to him. Why would he want to risk making legal or political martyrs out of the people he thinks wronged him?

And just one last point, if someone has committed a crime or there’s suspicion in good faith that someone committed a crime, that person should be investigated, that person should be prosecuted, and if appropriate, that person should be sentenced to prison. And just because it’s the case that someone has been a critic of Donald Trump or has been crosswise with Donald Trump at some point in the future does not mean they have immunity from an investigation and prosecution. I think that’s just an important thing to keep in mind also.

This next question comes in a post on Bluesky, also from Alice. Now I don’t know if it’s the same Alice that asked the other question, but maybe it is, maybe it’s not. But in any event, if it’s the same person, Alice, I think you will have broken a record for having two questions of yours asked and hopefully answered in this broadcast. So anyway, Alice number two’s question is, “Assuming Kash Patel is new FBI chief, what is left of the 10-year rule? If a Democrat wins in 2028, what does she or he do with Kash? Assuming he lasts four years, fire him for cause, as in too political? Chris Wray will be fired for cause as not political enough. #AskPreet.”

So Alice one or Alice two, you have put a finger on and crystallized, I think one of the essential conundrums of Donald Trump and his conduct. It’s the central dilemma of Trump essentially exploding norms and defining deviancy down. So every time he breaks a good and principled norm and gets away with it, he normalizes, in my view, something bad. He does it again and again and again. Now remember, Donald Trump already broke a norm at the beginning of his first term when he fired FBI Director Jim Comey, in my view and the view of many people, on a pretext, even though Jim Comey’s term had not yet been completed. And obviously there was a lot of reaction to that to be sure. There were consequences, Bob Mueller, the special counsel, led an investigation that ensued from that firing. But after a time, things have settled down. And in a way you could say the firing of Jim Comey in some sense a little bit normalized the idea of firing the FBI director because Donald Trump effectively got away with it.

And in this instance, given the political dynamic at the moment, notwithstanding the fact that Trump himself interviewed, selected, nominated, and accepted Chris Wray as FBI director, if he were to fire him again and replace him with Kash Patel, then he would be breaking that 10-year norm again. Except guess what? As I learned a few hours ago before taping this, Donald Trump didn’t have to fire Chris Wray. Chris Wray took the hint and resigned. Now, I’m not sure I would’ve done it that way. In fact, I’m sure I would not have done it that way because I didn’t do it that way when it was my turn in 2017.

But however you slice it, Wray was effectively pushed out of office because even though he had a 10-year term and even though he decided to resign, undoubtedly he would’ve stayed, but for the fact that Donald Trump publicly nominated someone else into that position. And so we get back to your conundrum. If Kash Patel is the kind of FBI director that he’s promising to be and that Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters want him to be, it would be unconscionable and unacceptable for the next Democratic president to keep him on. In fact, it would be unconscionable for a good faith Republican next president to keep Kash Patel on. We’ll wait and see how he does, of course, but based on his rhetoric and his seeming agenda, the outlook is not bright. And then of course people will be able to say, “Look, the Democrats were hypocrites, or that next Republican president was a hypocrite for firing someone whose term wasn’t even up if they criticized Trump’s prior two moves with respect to Comey and Chris Wray.” And I will admit as is increasingly the case, I don’t have an answer to this dilemma.

I was discussing it with a friend of mine who used to serve in the FBI in the last number of days, and we were discussing the fact that Trump’s actions with respect to the two FBI directors in question will have totally diluted the idea of the apolitical long-serving 10-year-termed FBI director. Now, maybe we can get back to that after Trump is gone. That would be the hope because that was the principle under which a 10-year term was imposed on a bipartisan basis. And there’s not a lot of things that are imposed on a bipartisan basis. This was one. But I think, Alice, you may be right, the era of that norm may be gone, at least for a while.

I’ll be right back with my conversation with George Packer.

THE INTERVIEW

Some are calling the 2024 election a turning point in American politics. Atlantic staff writer George Packer joins me to discuss his latest article, “The End of Democratic Delusions.”

George Packer, welcome back to the show.

George Packer:

Always good to be back with you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

So we have a lot to talk about, as always, but you have just posted in the last number of days a thought-provoking article in The Atlantic with a thought-provoking title, which I will recite for folks, “The End of Democratic Delusions.” Did you mean that as an insult? What delusions are we talking about?

George Packer:

I mean, delusions are common and political delusions are especially common because it takes a lot to puncture them, more than-

Preet Bharara:

I feel like when you use the word delusions, it must be followed always with, “of grandeur.” Is that not so?

George Packer:

Or that reality is just what you want it to be and not what it is and it’s just difficult for people. Ideology or political ideas, art, can be so intransigent because we just never expect them to actually be exploded in real life. They exist in this sort of abstract realm where we think that what we want to be is. That’s true of politics everywhere on all sides. Elections are one way in which political delusions get exploded. And I think the November election did that for a couple of things that Democrats have been clinging to for a long time. I think we have to be honest, we have to be a little blunt about what got the Democratic Party into the state that it seems to be. I mean, you can look at the election two ways, and I wrote that piece, Preet, the next day. So in my haze, the morning after, I was thinking, “What have we learned?”

And we still didn’t even know what some of the demographic numbers about the election were, but one thing I learned was that if nearly half of Latino voters voted for Trump, who just a few years ago, most Democrats considered, and maybe even still consider, an absolute anti-Latino bigot because of some of his remarks about immigrants, Mexicans, et cetera. And if a quarter of Black men voted for Trump, despite the fact that after 2016 the election of Trump the first time around was considered absolute proof that we are a white supremacist country full stop, nothing more to be said. That at least we have to consider what the voters are saying about those progressive ideas that people, yes, have been clinging to for some years and even using as a way to understand how to win elections. The formula for Democrats for years was as the country becomes less white, Democrats will do better and better. And at the magical moment when we become that minority majority country, there will be a permanent Democratic majority. It will also include some young people, some college educated professionals, period. And that in essence-

Preet Bharara:

And all they had to do was wait for the demographics to align, right?

George Packer:

That there was political destiny in demography. And it kind of relieves you of the burden of having to actually persuade people of your positions. Obviously that’s a bit of an exaggeration, a bit of a parody of what really goes on in elections, but not completely. And I think this time around it should be absolutely put to rest that demography is destiny, instead treat voters as if they can think for themselves.

Preet Bharara:

So can we take a step back historically in a couple of ways? One, you point out that there was a period of time, you call it the Roosevelt Republic, where FDR, elected to four terms, didn’t serve out the fourth term. By the way, during which time for a long stretch, both the House and the Senate belonged to the Democrats as well.

George Packer:

By huge numbers.

Preet Bharara:

By huge numbers, not close like we have now. So I guess the first point is should it give any comfort to sad and saddened Democrats that the pendulum swings and what looked like forever Democratic government controlling everything other than the Supreme Court, and that’s why you had that court packing gambit at one point, that it ultimately swings and you have the Reagan revolution and nothing persists for too long. The pendulum swings. True or false?

George Packer:

That’s absolutely true, but I think there’s maybe two different pendulums to look at. One is election by election. And it was incredibly unusual that a Democrat won the presidency for 20 years from 1932, FDR’s first win, until ’52 when Eisenhower won. But during that time-

Preet Bharara:

But Truman wasn’t supposed to win, right?

George Packer:

He wasn’t supposed to win.

Preet Bharara:

At 248.

George Packer:

Dewey was supposed to have defeated Truman according to Chicago-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, there was periodical that said that.

George Packer:

Yeah, the Chicago Tribune, which Truman held up gleefully. But the Republicans did take back Congress. And then Eisenhower is in and then Kennedy and Johnson and then Nixon. But I see that period as something more than just one election after another. I called it the Roosevelt Republic because certain ideas dominated the era. And really it was the idea of the social welfare of Americans is the responsibility of the federal government. And it was expanded and expanded again in the sixties by the Great Society. And that there should be equal rights for all citizens, which took a longer time than the welfare state because for Black Americans, for women, for other minority groups, it was the sixties and seventies that saw the beginning of full and equal citizenship.

Preet Bharara:

Right. There was that interval we should mention for completeness, or partial completeness, if that’s a thing, of the Japanese internment.

George Packer:

Yep. Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

So it was a little bit of a mixed picture depending on what year or decade you’re talking about.

George Packer:

No, in terms of minority rights, equal rights, full citizenship, full enjoyment of the benefits of citizenship, that took longer than the New Deal, much longer. But it was part of the same impulse, I think, which was driven by an idea about equality. And that finally ran aground in the seventies with inflation and stagflation and failure of the federal government on many fronts, foreign and domestic, and finally, the Reagan Revolution with his election 1980, which had been a while coming because Barry Goldwater, you could say was sort of the beginning of that in 1964.

Preet Bharara:

Is revolution as we think about it, an overstatement? Or did that catch hold because of the alliteration of it? If Reagan had been named something else, would we not be calling it a revolution?

George Packer:

Right, if it was Goldwater, would it have been the Goldwater gush? I think probably a bit of an overstatement, but not too much because when you think about it-

Preet Bharara:

But it was a popularized term, that’s what people called it,

George Packer:

And it lasted a long time. And in a way it’s still sort of with us. I mean, what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are supposedly going to do when they get their hands on the executive branch is completely in sync with what Reagan wanted. But Reagan’s influence, which some people call Reagan revolution, some people call neoliberalism, which also kind of took hold in the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton, and I would even say under Barack Obama, that has come to an end. And the politician who is most responsible for putting that period into the rearview mirror is Donald Trump. I don’t like saying it, but that’s why I do think we have Roosevelt, Reagan, Trump as three figures who have changed the terms and put new ideas into play. Not that Trump has any ideas, but he has impulses the become ideas.

Preet Bharara:

Well, he has a concept of an idea sometimes.

George Packer:

Yes, the concept, exactly.

Preet Bharara:

But I want to just challenge or give shape to the revolution idea and how far the pendulum swung. And we’re not a couple of historians, but you’re much closer to a historian than I am. So you had the Roosevelt Republic and you had a lot of things that went into place, welfare state, Social Security, the Securities Act that began to regulate the securities industry, which I became familiar with in a much later phase.

George Packer:

Yes, you did

Preet Bharara:

But those things didn’t go away. The fundamental things that we talked about, including many of the fundamental aspects in law of the Great Society, and you can have an argument about whether or not the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act have been watered down and have been mitigated by the other side or by some aspect or offshoot of the Reagan Revolution. Many of the structural things have persisted. So I want to re-ask the question, how much of it was a revolution as opposed to tweaking at the margins?

George Packer:

Well, somewhere between those two is where politics lives, I think. Revolutions are really rare and they’re usually pretty bad. They usually end up full of regret and with people saying… Ask an Iranian, was the revolution, did it make your life better?

But between that and tweaking, there is a kind of change in the parameters. What do people talk about? What are they allowed to talk about? What’s the framework in which policies are hashed out? And there’s just no doubt that when Reagan came along, that changed and suddenly government was seen as a problem by a lot of people, and they began to think maybe government should be smaller. Maybe it should get out of the way more, reduce my taxes, cut regulations. Maybe we need more freedom in our economic lives, both domestically but also globally with trade, with communications. Those ideas were powerful, so powerful that Bill Clinton, who had come into office as a kind of populist Democrat, within a couple of years was saying the era of big government is over because he had to, because he had been repudiated at the polls in 1994, and he just was a shrewd enough politician to see which way the country was going.

And then Barack Obama also came into office as a kind of, if not a populist, certainly a progressive. And almost immediately, as you well know, began to listen to advisors who said, “You cannot go after the banks. You cannot go after Wall Street. It’s going to roil the economy. You cannot bail out all the homeowners. You can bail out the banks, but not the homeowners.” And all of those things were a kind of retrenchment of what people might’ve expected and led to some of the cynicism, some of the sense of the game being rigged that played straight into the emergence of Donald Trump in 2015.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, so you say that we had the Roosevelt Republic followed by the Reagan Revolution, and then we had the Financial Crisis of 2008, and you write in your piece, “The era that followed has lacked a convincing name and a clear identity.” But now I think you’re giving it some identity and some name. But that must always be true, right? It wasn’t really the Roosevelt Republic in 1933, nor was it the Reagan Revolution in January of 1981. It takes some time. Are we being premature? By we, I mean you. Are you being premature in giving this new era a name and even considering it to be an era?

George Packer:

Well, I’m calling it the Trump reaction because I see it as a reactionary politics, which is to say-

Preet Bharara:

There’s no alliteration in that, George. I don’t know if it’s going to last.

George Packer:

No. What can I call it?

Preet Bharara:

The Trump tantrum.

George Packer:

Trump tantrum would be a better one. Okay, we’ll see if that sticks. I don’t know if the Trump reaction can stick.

Preet Bharara:

It can stick for the next 40 minutes, maybe.

George Packer:

We’ll call it that. Well, the reason why I think I feel more comfortable coining it in 2024 than I would’ve in 2016 is because of 2016 and because there was what turns out to have been an interval in 2021 to ’24 of a kind of, you could say Biden restoration, essentially a return to mainstream establishment Democratic Party politics with more of an emphasis on working class jobs and regions that had been left behind by the information economy, but still basically a defense of a lot of the institutions that Trump had been slashing in his tantrum.

Trump’s now back. To me, Preet, it’s an incredible thing that a man who sent his followers to sack the Capitol in order to overturn a democratic election is about to be back in the White House. That’s something I will never be at rest with or get my mind around. But he’s back, which tells me there is a staying power to his, call them ideas, which are reactionary ideas.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, well, he’s gained strength. He came back with a stronger vote. There’s a debate about whether or not it was a landslide. It wasn’t a landslide. There’s I think a more honest debate about what kind of mandate he has, and he, some he won the popular vote. He’s very gleeful about the fact that he won the popular vote. When we get to foreign policy in a little bit more detail shortly, I was going to ask you if you also notice that he’s being received with a little more respect than he was the last time around because leaders understand what happened at the polls here.

But I want to go back to the pendulum question because this I find interesting. I mean, everything I find interesting about you, George, but this in particular. The pendulum, as you point out, has generally swung as between progressive or conservative. FDR, Reagan had features of that. And that makes a lot of sense because the pendulum has two points. But as you write, “This new era is neither progressive…” The era that we’re in. “This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century.” And you go on and describe some of those. So what’s odd to me is how do you think about a new era that’s neither progressive nor conservative? If you had to guess and you didn’t live in the current world, you would say, “Oh, well that’s terrific. Maybe it’s become more centrist.” But it’s not centrist either.

George Packer:

No, far from it.

Preet Bharara:

The pendulum has come unmoored in a way.

George Packer:

I think that Europeans would understand this better than we do because we are becoming more like a European democracy where it’s not crazy to have a right-wing populist nationalist who rejects the whole idea of a diverse country of immigration, of the melting pot, the multiracial democracy, and who is pessimistic about the state of the country and about our position in the world and doesn’t want us to play a leading role in the world. Those ideas were shared by liberals and conservatives, and they’ve been rejected by Trump in a way that you could say seemed more like Marine Le Pen or Silvio Berlusconi or Viktor Orban. I think of it as reactionary, and that’s something unusual in our history.

We’ve had reactionary politics, especially in the South, but it hasn’t really taken hold at the national level until now because the idea that the founding documents are sacred, that Americans are optimistic, that of course we have a mission to be a leader in the world. Of course, we want your tired, poor, and huddled masses to come and make America a better country. Those have really been… they haven’t been observed always, but they’ve been given at least lip service from the beginning. And it’s hard to think of someone running for president and winning by saying, “This country is trash. We have trashed it. We have to get rid of the trash.”

Preet Bharara:

The political gravity and rules of physics have changed.

I’ll be right back with George Packer after this.

Can I do something pedantic for a moment? As I know we all-

George Packer:

Please. No, I love that. Please.

Preet Bharara:

That’s why I love you, George Packer. Could you define what reactionary means? People use that word incorrectly all the time. They think it means reactive. But reactionary does not mean that. What does it mean?

George Packer:

Well, I’m influenced by a friend who’s a great writer, Mark Lilla, who wrote a book about reactionary politics called The Shipwrecked Mind. It’s basically the idea that there was a golden age in which the country was true to itself, and it has been betrayed by elites, by invaders, by people who aren’t real, who are not real Americans. And in order to restore this country to its health, we have to get rid of them. And if that means smashing up some prized institutions, so be it because those institutions have been rotted out by the elites and the invaders. And then we’ll go back to being the country of that golden age long ago in our imaginations because it’s never a real golden age.

Preet Bharara:

So when I’ve been in the room with people who are talking about a press cycle and someone says, “You’re being too reactionary, you have to be proactive,” that is an incorrect use of the word reactionary?

George Packer:

It’s kind of a more common use, I guess. It’s not a political use, it just describes a habit of thought. But what I mean is a kind of politics that is not conservative because it actually wants to smash things up and get rid of traditions because those traditions are seen as having been corrupted by people like you and me. Let’s face it, we’re part of the targets of reactionary politics.

Preet Bharara:

And not just you and me, Liz Cheney, all sorts of institutions. But the funny thing that you also note, others have noted this too, that Democrats have become the party of the establishment and not of the working class, not of the working parties. How did that happen?

George Packer:

That took a long time. I think it started in the early seventies, and interestingly, it started with changes in party rules about how to nominate the Democratic presidential candidate. If you have 60 seconds for me to tell you the story?

Preet Bharara:

It’s a podcast, we’ve got a lot of time.

George Packer:

Okay, let’s do it. In 1968, there was a riot outside the Chicago Convention, and there was a riot inside the Chicago convention between insurgent anti-war delegates who had been for either Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy. And the party establishment, the bosses Richard Daley, who were for Vice President Humphrey after Lyndon Johnson dropped out a few parallels perhaps to 2024. After that, the party decided, we don’t want to go through that again. We’re going to throw a sop to the insurgents just to get them to quiet down. We will now choose our presidential candidates in primaries, not with bosses controlling entire state delegations, but with popularly elected primaries. And the delegates that are chosen will represent demographically the people who participate in the primaries and who support the party, that is by gender, by race, by age.

So they set some quotas which didn’t really hold, but were guidelines for who would go to those conventions and who would choose them. And that ended up putting a lot more power in the hands of the college educated, who were the main activists in the party. And it took power away from essentially the working people, labor unions, people who had allowed their votes to essentially be determined by the party bosses. And that was the beginning of a shift of the inside party from being a working class party of FDR, of the Roosevelt Republic, to being a college educated party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. And then lots of things happened in the years after, but that was sort of the origin of it.

And since then, I would say that the main reason for why it’s become so dominant now is because the Democratic Party has given up some of its passion for making sure that ordinary Americans have a place at the table that is on economic issues, let’s call it economic populism. And has embraced cultural issues that working class Americans either don’t care that much about or actually hostile to, but that educated professionals care a lot about and are willing to spend their time and money on. And donors and activists now, of course, have great power in the Democratic Party, and those are their positions. So I think by 2024, it should not be a surprise that the one group that Kamala Harris won economically was people making over 100,000 and she lost people making under 100,000. And that’s the exact opposite of what the Democratic Party had been through most of the 20th Century.

Preet Bharara:

Right, but there’s an important cognitive dissonance here for members of the establishment like me, I’m not even going to speak for you. As you write in the piece, “Trump’s basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners, the real Americans. And he is…” I have a caveat with respect to what I’m about to say, but, “… he’s populating the cabinet, and his brain trust in particular, with the most elite, most wealthy people who have ever walked the face of earth.” Literally the most wealthy people who’ve ever walked the face of the earth. How they are not elites? I’m not sure.

I do think, by the way, that maybe part of the answer is that there’s a hypocrisy when Democrats talk about billionaires being bad people in some sense, because Democrats have billionaires too. And you had someone during the Democratic National Convention, if I recall correctly, who was inveighing against the scourge of billionaires after a Democratic-elected billionaire had just been at the lectern. So if you want, you can address either one of those, if there’s hypocrisy on the Democratic side with respect to wealth and success and billionaires, but also this revolution or this tantrum or this reaction, whatever you want to call it, is it real or is it just bullshit?

George Packer:

I think there is a fair amount of bullshit to it, and you’ve kind of put your finger, sorry to say, on the bullshit.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’ll get me in trouble.

George Packer:

That’s unpleasant. Yeah, we’re talking about different kinds of elites. When the Republicans talk about elites, when MAGA goes after the elites, they’re talking about professional elites, educated professionals, people in media, in academia, in the professions, people with college degrees or more. Republicans have their own elites. They’re mostly business elites. They’re mostly people who actually make more money than a podcast host or a staff writer. But they somehow try to claim that they’re not really elites because why? Because they are going after the institutions higher education, journalism, law that the other elites occupy and defend. And Trump is the perfect, you could say avatar of this because yes, he may be a billionaire, although we’re not sure about that, but he’s full of resentment of the elites going back to his days as a Queens real estate developer or the son of one.

Preet Bharara:

But he also inhabits, or in him inhabits a contradiction, depending on what you think of elites. This same guy has gigantic apartments. He puts names on the buildings that he owns. He has a gold-plated toilet, but he also eats a Big Mac, right? He also puts ketchup on his steak.

George Packer:

And he has a Queen’s accent.

Preet Bharara:

And he has a Queen’s accent. How does all that work?

George Packer:

Well, he has been a self-styled outsider all his life. God knows, it may go back to actually secretly hating his father. I don’t know. But he has been someone who was ready to disrupt and trash and trample on all of our sensitivities, on our values, on our norms, and get away with it. And here he is getting away with it in really the biggest way imaginable. And I think in his resentments and in his willingness to trash, he sort of releases an energy in people with far less money and far less celebrity who also feel as if society has somehow either left them behind or screwed them over or put other people in place ahead of them who don’t belong there. And so Trump is able to speak for them. When he said in 2016, “I am Your voice,” that really resonated with his followers. It didn’t resonate with people who think of him as a fraud because it sounded more fraudulent. But it’s a powerful message.

And so what I’m saying is you don’t have to be poor to go after the elites. You can be a billionaire and get away with it. But I think the key thing here is Republican elites are economic elites and Democratic elites are cultural elites. And so if politics is played out on the terrain of culture, it’s the Democrats who end up having to defend things that people want to get rid of.

And that’s why that long period of the Reagan Revolution was so terrible for the Democratic Party. Even though the party won presidencies over and over again, they gradually lost the support of all those people making less than $100,000 or $80,000 who saw the party as caring about issues that they didn’t care about and not caring about them. Because even though you could stand up and say, “I’m for paid family medical leave. I’m for a higher minimum wage, I’m for this and that,” if people don’t see a change in their economic lives and in their wellbeing and their optimism about their children’s wellbeing, they don’t care what your policy positions are. And for a lot of reasons, there haven’t been the kind of changes people have wanted for decades now, and that seems in the end to benefit someone like Trump.

Preet Bharara:

So can I ask you about what the legacy of the two well-defined eras that you describe are? So we have FDR, the Roosevelt Republic, and all those things I mentioned, Securities Act, social welfare state, et cetera, and there are many, many more things. Reagan Revolution, an attitude of judgmentalism about government, feeling that government is the problem. But now in 2024, about to be 2025, are there more things that persist even though it was further back in time from the Roosevelt Republic or from the Reagan Revolution?

George Packer:

I remember a sign of a Tea Party supporter back in 2010 at some political rally that said, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” And that is the sum total of the Roosevelt and Reagan eras, keep your government hands off my Medicare. I want my Medicare. I don’t want the government. Now there’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance in that, but it’s the feeling I think a lot of people in the country still have. And Trump knows it. He’s not going after the Social Security and Medicare.

Preet Bharara:

Hold on. So I’m trying to understand because that’s a very wonderful anecdote, but are you saying that, and I don’t know if you’re saying this, that a lot of stuff from the Great Society and the welfare state and the Roosevelt Republic, as you call it, persist and are embraced and are part of America, but the people who fought for those things no longer get any credit for it whatsoever?

George Packer:

Something like that. And just let Elon and Vivek go after those things and see what happens. George Bush tried in 2005 at the peak of his popularity.

Preet Bharara:

I’m always perplexed by this constant, as a political matter, not as necessarily a budget matter, and those things are linked often, but not always. Why is there this pension for trying to undo something that’s the most popular program in the country and that has popularity in part because people view it correctly or incorrectly as something that they’ve earned?

George Packer:

The pension is not among the people who depend on Social Security or on Medicare. The pension is among those Republican elites, both politicians and businessmen and women who, either out of a sense of hard-headed pragmatism or ideological hostility to government, think that it’s just a dead weight on the country, needs to be slimmed down, cut back because we can’t afford the debt we have. And because these programs are antediluvian, they’re outdated. We need something better. We need to privatize them. Remember George W. Bush tried to do that and it didn’t go so well because people actually need them and want them. And that’s why I invite Musk and Ramaswamy to try, because they’re talking about cutting what, $1 trillion or $2 trillion from the federal budget? Where’s that going to come from? It’s going to come from entitlement programs and defense spending. That’s like what, 70% or 80% of the budget?

Preet Bharara:

You end your article by talking about a first term Democrat who was in a divided district in Western Pennsylvania and far outperformed Harris on election night as a Democrat in even the reddest of areas in his district, and he won comfortably. And you write, “What does this prove? Only that politics is best when it’s face-to-face and based on respect, that most people are complicated and even persuadable, and that,” in the next line from the Fitzgerald quote, “one can ‘see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.'” It’s a nice note. Do you believe it?

George Packer:

I wanted to end with something that wasn’t just the Trump reaction because I think we can already see some of the seeds of its undoing before he’s taken office.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, let’s talk about those seeds.

George Packer:

Yeah. Well, I think someone like Chris Deluzio, who’s the Democratic congressman from that district in Western Pennsylvania, has figured out that what his constituents want is for him to fight the fights that will make their lives better, which means taking on corporations, monopolies, New York hedge funds and private equity firms that are stripping whatever’s left of the old industrial economy, the last remnants of it, so that there’s actually nothing left in those areas. He’s taking that on, he’s fighting that. And cultural issues, he kind of doesn’t have a lot to say about, he doesn’t make it a hill to die on because he knows that that’s going to be divisive and it’s probably going to lose people who otherwise would say, “Go get those corporations, Chris.” I think that’s a politics worth studying. It may not work everywhere. There may be versions of it in different places. But in general, I think if the Democrats are going to have a chance to win back the working class that they’ve lost, that’s the formula.

I also wanted to say, yeah, that I can already see how Trump’s second presidency might become more unpopular than the first. They are so hubristic, so gleeful in their triumph right now. I can’t believe the things that I’m hearing and reading every day. They think that they have been elected to do anything they want, that the Democratic Party is absolutely finished, that voters have completely rejected it by 1% and by five votes in Congress.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, exactly.

George Packer:

And that JD Vance will be taking on the cultural and working class issues and Ramaswamy and Musk will be shrinking the government and helping and everyone’s going to be happy. And meanwhile, Donald Trump, who is just a chaos agent, he’s not going to be running the government, and there will be tremendous fights among his nominees, his appointees. And the worst thing will be the loyalists who only do what he tells them to do and can’t think for themselves because you have to be able to think for yourself in government, as you know. So I think there will be a fair amount of mistakes and chaos and worse pretty early on. And suddenly-

Preet Bharara:

Well, because he’s not responding for anything right now in the transition other than putting forward nominations and stating-

George Packer:

And saying, “I want this war ended right now. Before I get there, I want it ended.”

Preet Bharara:

… and saying Mexico is going to pay for it. There’s that famous Mario Cuomo adage, right? I think it’s Mario Cuomo, and you’ll know if I’m right or wrong, “You campaign in poetry and you govern in prose.”

George Packer:

Yeah, that’s Cuomo.

Preet Bharara:

And I’ve been trying to figure out a new version of that for Trump. Can you help me? What would you call it? He campaigns in X, but he governs in Y.

George Packer:

Well, he campaigns in Oz and he governs in the Gangs of New York. I mean, there’s something brutal and chaotic about his governing style and heads roll all the time while he was elected, promising to end all wars and make everybody rich. And people who voted for the price of eggs, but not for stripping Social Security or getting rid of all environmental regulations or attacking labor unions, and that’s a lot of people, that’s probably most people, will be, I think, disillusioned pretty quickly when it turns out that his presidency is mostly about retribution and self-enrichment, which I think is what it’s going to be about.

Preet Bharara:

Hey look, we’ll see how it goes. There are ways in which he can improve his position if he does a good job of cost-cutting, if he does a good job and is perceived as a good job of winnowing down waste in government. If the economy that he’s inheriting from Joe Biden remains strong If the stock market continues to go up. If all those things happen, if we don’t get embroiled in any other wars, if some wars end, his standing may remain the same or even improve a little bit. But there’s all sorts of ways in which it is possible we’ll look back on this moment and say that he had his highest and best political standing during the transition. I guess we’ll have to see.

On a final note, we have checked the archives. I don’t know if you know this, I don’t have a presidential library, but we do have archives. The CAFE archives reveal that we had you on the podcast, we’ve had you on the podcast a number of times, but back in March of 2023, we had you on to discuss various things including a short but I think pointed piece that criticized what you called equity language. I want to just, since it’s been a year and a half since then, and we’ve had an intervening election and people have been talking about these issues of language and what it is to be woke or not woke, et cetera. If you have a thought on an epilogue of that story and where you think the trend of equity language is going? But first remind people what you meant by that.

George Packer:

Well, equity language is certainly not my phrase. It’s a term used by individuals and institutions to describe a vocabulary that is informed by the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And in extreme cases, there are handbooks in which certain terms are considered hostile to equity and they’re banned, or at least people are encouraged not to use them. And you’d be surprised at what kind of ordinary language such as-

Preet Bharara:

Can you remind people of some examples?

George Packer:

Stand, for example.

Preet Bharara:

Stand up for your rights?

George Packer:

Yes. Vibrant, brown bag. Well, I could go on and on.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

George Packer:

So my essay argued not, ah, we should be less woke. I didn’t use that word. I don’t like that word. What I argued was this kind of language makes it harder to see reality, to name it, and therefore to change it if it needs to be changed.

Preet Bharara:

You were actually criticizing that enforced language ideology from a progressive standpoint?

George Packer:

Or from a standpoint of honesty and of being able to see clearly. Because, I mean, Preet, if I am good at anything, it’s writing. I have no other skills. I’m fit for no other profession.

Preet Bharara:

You’re a good podcast guest.

George Packer:

That’s part of writing, I think.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know about that.

George Packer:

I believe in clear language. I believe in clear thinking. I don’t want to disguise my thoughts with a cloud of verbiage that makes it impossible for people to know what I’m really thinking and meaning. But people do that all the time, and not just in politics, but in journalism, in the NGO world. And I was saying we have reached a point now where if you can’t say poor, you have to say disenfranchise and marginalized, it takes a bunch more syllables, then you’re making it harder to see it, to see it.

Preet Bharara:

Yes. The central insight, and I’ve thought about it a lot since because that’s not the standpoint from most criticism of that language usage. But your point, and to rephrase it, is if you sugarcoat the plight of the downtrodden, you are actually hurting the downtrodden. Fair?

George Packer:

Yes, absolutely. And I took a passage from a wonderful book called Behind the Beautiful Forevers. I don’t know if you know that book. It’s about a slum in Mumbai by Katherine Boo. She spent years getting to know the people there and writing their story. So I took a passage from it, a brutal but honest passage and rewrote it in equity language just to show what it does, that it numbs your thinking. So where are we today? I think it’s actually going to be harder for people to argue that it’s harmful to call things what they are, because I do believe that this second Trump election has cleared up a fair amount of nonsense and preciosity on the left about what is good. It’s been rejected. I think it’s been pretty thoroughly rejected.

Now, it’s still embedded in institutions, and those institutions are not going to just change overnight. And in fact, we’ll still see equity language guides coming out, but I think it’s going to be harder to do it. I think the real language issue is going to be on the right. They will have power. They’re going after cultural institutions. They have their own language. It’s not equity language. It’s a kind of MAGA language, and it’s based on insult and vitriol and contempt and degradation. It’s less polysyllabic and academic sounding, but it’s cruder and more nakedly hostile. And you see it all the time on social media and on podcasts and coming out of the mouth of the President-elect. And I’ll be interested to see whether that language, which has become almost standard in a lot of Republican circles now, finally tires out the public enough that people say, “I’m tired of you lowering all of us to your level. I’m tired of you trashing values that we try to teach our children. I want some decency back in the country.”

Preet Bharara:

And I agree with all that, and I applaud that statement, but I wonder if part of the reason that kind of rhetoric finds footing is that it’s not competing with poetry, it’s not competing with eloquence. It’s not competing with the kinds of things that we would hope that are most idealistic and uniting and smart and thoughtful and good-faith politicians, the way they speak. Instead, it’s competing with utterly boring, vanilla, anodyne, establishment nonsense, and the war of rhetoric and style and effectiveness as between those two categories, the boorish side wins. Is that fair?

George Packer:

Yes, especially in a democracy, and the reason is it sounds more like the people talking. It sounds like the way ordinary people talk. And in some cases it is. Most people don’t talk like an equity language guide or an academic paper or cable news host or a political consultant, but most people also have a standard of decency that they kind of want to maintain because they have children, they have families, they have self-respect. And right now, the language of the Republican Party, and the behavior, I mean, let’s not forget how many nominees for the next Trump cabinet have been accused of sexual abuse and all kinds of other things, that is not necessarily the populism that the American people voted for. They may like it as entertainment during a campaign season, but a permanent change to our discourse, to our mental landscape? I still have enough hope and faith in this country that I don’t think it’s going to wear well.

Preet Bharara:

Well it’s also lazy. It’s just very lazy. And ultimately, I think people can see who’s lazy and who’s not, and you get tired of lazy, and you don’t want to reelect lazy. And lazy speech and lazy rhetoric is a sign of a lazy mind, and ultimately I think people reject that.

George Packer:

Amen. I’m with you brother.

Preet Bharara:

George Packer, thanks again for your insight, for your writing and for being on the show. Really appreciate it.

George Packer:

Thank you for having me, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with George Packer continues for members of the Cafe Insider Community. In the bonus for insiders, we discussed the recent overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria.

George Packer:

The Rebels took advantage of a dramatically changed configuration of power in the region.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month. Head to CAFE.com/Insider. Again, that’s CAFE.com/Insider.

BUTTON

Before we end the show this week, I want to take a moment to reflect on your feedback about a discussion I had with Joyce Vance on The CAFE Insider Podcast regarding President Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter. Unsurprisingly, the topic sparked a lot of controversy among the American public, and we received a lot of thoughtful letters from listeners across the political spectrum. As you may have heard on the show, I have fairly mixed feelings about the pardon. As a father, of course I understand it, but I find it disconcerting given President Biden’s repeated vows that he wouldn’t pardon his son. And many people, myself included, on many occasions defended President Biden’s rule-of-law posture with specific reference to those repeated vows.

It seems I’m not alone in grappling with this decision. An AP-NORC poll found that only about two in 10 Americans approved of the pardon, among them, 38% of Democrats, 7% of Republicans, and 12% of independents. Some Democratic lawmakers also expressed disapproval like Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, a former guest of Stay Tuned who said, “President Biden’s decision puts personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes America’s faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all.”

My friend Joyce has a different perspective. She argued that Hunter Biden’s legal troubles wouldn’t have arisen if not for his name, noting that the gun charge, being a drug user in possession of a firearm, is rarely prosecuted, and the tax issues could have been resolved civilly. I responded of course, that at the time Joe Biden repeatedly said he wouldn’t pardon his son, he was aware of those facts. But Joyce also pointed out that Trump’s appointees like Kash Patel for FBI Director raised the stakes, making the pardon necessary to avoid retribution. She added that Biden may have been particularly concerned about Hunter facing cruel treatment in prison. Fair enough.

Our listeners had a range of reactions. Here are a few highlights. Many of you agreed with Joyce. Carol wrote, “I totally agree with Joyce, where President Biden pardoning Hunter. Give me a break, Preet, this is his son who is clearly treated differently than others. Lordy, even Geraldo Rivera agrees. Let’s not give up good passionate sense for a perfect score in past and present communication. I bet Bill Clinton would agree with that.” Gary pointed out, “Had Harris won, there would be no pardon. Given the well-founded observations, opinions that the criminal cases against Hunter were only brought because he was a Biden and the Trump’s team’s promises of retribution starting in January, I think the change of heart and the broad scope of the pardon are justified if unappealing.”

Some listeners justified Biden’s decision by pointing to the erosion of rule of law. Lizanne wrote, “When Biden promised not to pardon his son, he implicitly meant when the rule of law was actually followed. True, he could have made that clearer, however we would be foolish not to acknowledge the reality that for the next four years by their own admission and desire. Those in power will not follow the rule of law. As they plan to not follow the rule of law, Biden had no choice but to make a new decision.”

Others turned their focus on Trump. Francis said, “Trump was elected as a 34 times convicted felon. He’s appointed felons and accused rapists.” And some expressed frustration that we discussed the topic at all. Josh wrote, “No one cares when Trump breaks norms, but the pearl clutching by Democrats when Democrats do it is nuts. The press doesn’t hold Trump accountable because Republicans don’t care. It’s another dog bites man story. Democrats, for some unknown reason by this point, do care and react by getting the vapors.” Warren was more succinct, “After all the BS from Trump, the Biden, pardon is a nothing burger.”

I sincerely appreciate hearing your points of view. I’m proud that we foster a space for civil and respectful debate even when we don’t all agree. So please keep your letters coming. We love to hear what you’re thinking. Write to us as always at Letters@CAFE.com.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, George Packer. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.