Preet Bharara:

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

George Packer:

We are an aging, maybe dying empire, with a democratic heartbeat that was our justification for being an empire. And both of those are in a kind of state of decline and decay. And I worry that if Trump or a Trump alike gets elected next year, that’ll be it.

Preet Bharara:

That’s George Packer. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic. And for the past two decades, he’s been one of the most incisive observers of American culture and politics. I spoke with Packer about our turbulent present, the looming indictment of Donald Trump, a presidential election around the corner, and an ongoing war in Ukraine.

We also discussed and at times gently debated a basic but important question. Should we be optimistic about America’s future? That’s coming up. Stay tuned/

Before I get to your questions, there’s exciting news from Cafe. The new season of Up Against The Mob hosted by Elie Honig is here. You can listen to the first episode now. Just search for and follow Up Against The Mob in your listening app. And now onto your questions.

So folks, I’m recording this on Wednesday, March 29th in the 2:00 PM hour. One question that I have gotten over, and over, and over again is a simple one about timing, and it relates to the Manhattan DA’s office.

Twitter user The Philadelphia Inquirer Pitchbot simply asked when. Twitter user [inaudible 00:01:59] Singh asked very simple question, when? We are all waiting for this.

And Twitter user Mark’s Game Room asked it this way “Is it conceivable that DA Bragg is not close to finishing his investigation, and the speculation about an indictment last week was just a fundraising ploy by Trump?” These are all good questions, and people are understandably anxious and trying to figure out what’s going on, and whether or not there will actually be an indictment.

Now obviously whenever you have a momentous decision like this. And this would be momentous. The indictment of a former president of the United States never happened before. Never came close to happening before other than in the case of Richard Nixon, and that was quickly taken off the table because Gerald Ford pardoned him. So the question of when, as I said, looms large.

My view is based on a lot of outward signs and reporting that was credible, was that as of a couple of weeks ago, the DA Alvin Bragg was close to making a decision, and it looked like the decision was in favor of an indictment. Among other things, Donald Trump was asked if he wanted to come and testify. That’s something you would typically do right at the end, not in the last few weeks or the last couple of months. But I think right at the end, it’s one of the last things that you would do.

There was also credible reporting, and there may have even been some official statements about. The state of security with law enforcement officials trying to make sure that they were going to keep public safety in and around the courthouse in Lower Manhattan, where Donald Trump presumably would’ve been surrendering in the face of an indictment, and booked, and processed in the ordinary courts like any other citizen of the United States who gets charged by the District attorney.

I think those preparations with that degree of detail and those kinds of meetings also would not have been happening unless there was really a decision that was on the cusp of being made to indict Donald Trump.

Then a couple of other things happened and a few more witnesses were put into the grand jury. Another witness this past week was put into the grand jury. David Pecker of the National Enquirer.

It’s hard to know if this is just a glitch, but there was reporting that just came out today as we were anticipating recording this session that suggests that the sitting grand jury will not be hearing anything about Donald Trump for the rest of this week, will not be considering the Donald Trump Stormy Daniels case next week, meaning the week of April 3rd. And then they have been scheduled for a long time for a several week hiatus. That suggests, as the reporting is now indicating, we may not have a decision or an indictment for maybe another month. That’s not what my sense of things was with respect to timing just a couple of weeks ago. Did something change? Was this always the plan? It’s hard to know.

I still think that the likelihood of an indictment is relatively high because of how far the district attorney has come. It may be that they’re just trying to shore things up with additional witnesses. It may be they’re trying to shore things up with respect to legal arguments. As people have noted, some of these things that are being tried or being considered in this indictment, the connecting of a federal campaign violation to a falsification of books and records is something you may want to make sure you have every T cross and every I dotted.

So the speculation about when continues. It doesn’t look like if the reporting is correct that it’ll be in the next couple of weeks. But I will caveat that also to say maybe there was a hiatus planned that can be undone presumably by the district attorney or the court. And we might see an indictment in the next couple of weeks after all.

I guess this is a long way of saying I just don’t know. All the signs did point to an imminent indictment, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s statement that he was going to be charged last Tuesday. There were other indicia of this as well.

Some people are speculating that maybe there’s this back and forth in terms of timing between Alvin Bragg’s decision and the Fulton County Georgia DA’s decision. Some people have speculated that, “Well, obviously you want to be the one that goes first that gets the biggest splash.” Other people have speculated and opined that maybe you want to let the other party go first and see how it goes and assess the reaction, from the public and from the former president.

I guess those things are possible because people are people. I don’t think that’s the case. I think that Alvin Bragg, based on my understanding of him and knowledge of him and knowledge of that office, is that they’re making sure they’re being careful and deliberate and measured in how they bring their own case. And not overly concerned at all about the timing of some other case in some other district. So we’ll just have to do what I always tell people to do. Stay tuned.

I also got this question in an email that begins with I think a very astute and legitimate comment and observation. It comes from listener Kyla who writes, “Thank you for an excellent episode with Vance, McQuade, and Honig. Honig seemed the most skeptical about the wisdom of bringing an indictment, both for legal and political reasons. I too am concerned about the precedent that an indictment would set. A local district attorney charging a former president on a relatively confusing campaign finance technicality. It’s hard to see how this doesn’t come back around to bite us Democrats. And I don’t just mean big D partisan Democrats. I mean those of us who believe in democracy and the rule of law Without the benefit of seeing all the evidence, where do you stand on this?”

So I really appreciate that question. And if you listen to me and Joyce talk about the potential indictment, you know that we discussed this at some length. I’ve been talking about it with my students at NYU Law School. I’ve been talking about it with friends and colleagues, both people who have been prosecutors and people who have never been prosecutors. And I think I can understand both points of view on this.

On the one hand, no one is above the law. Someone has gone to prison for this precise crime, Michael Cohen in the federal system. And obviously if you believe the facts at the heart of the Michael Cohen case, there’s someone more culpable for that conduct who has not yet been charged and not yet gone to prison, and that’s Donald Trump.

On the other hand, it is a gigantic and momentous thing to charge a former president of the United States, and what that does to democracy, and what that will do to public confidence. Particularly if it turns out… And I don’t know that it’ll turn out this way. Particularly if it turns out it’s a complicated case or an unsuccessful case. So I can see both sides of this. Without going on further, you’ll hear that George Packer and I during the course of our interview coming up discuss this as well. I’m curious to hear from other people, where do you stand on this? I’ll be right back with my conversation with George Packer.

The Atlantic’s George Packer often writes about language and speech. He’s out with an USA in the April issue of the magazine called The Moral Case Against Equity Language. In it, he takes aim at the raft of language guides being put out by nonprofits and universities, writing that they quote, “Belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions and argument is no longer desirable.” George Packer, welcome back to the show.

George Packer:

Good to be back with you Preet.

Preet Bharara:

You’re one of a small group of guests who have been repeat guests on the show. This is your third time. How do you feel about that?

George Packer:

I’m honored.

Preet Bharara:

That was a desired answer.

George Packer:

I’ll be honest, I did not know that Preet Bharara would be a star podcaster because your previous life didn’t seem like it had much overlap. Then I went back to our interviews and realized, “No, he’s just a damn good talker.”

Preet Bharara:

That’s how I make a living. That’s how I make a living now, just flapping my gums. So we’re recording this. I have a lot of ground to cover with you. We’re going to talk about the world order. We’re going to talk about domestic politics. We’re going to talk about equity language. I’m interested to talk to you about all those things.

But I should state for our listeners that we’re recording this on the morning of Monday, March 27th. And all the coverage wall to wall, including on our podcasts has been what looks like an imminent indictment of Donald Trump. And it hasn’t happened yet as of this conversation. By the time people listen to our interview, it may have happened. It may not have happened.

So I want you to prognosticate a little bit. Assume that Donald Trump is indicted by the Manhattan DA on the grounds that people are speculating about. You are a keen student of American politics. This is not a legal question. Do you have any worry about how the country digests that?

George Packer:

Yes. I wish it were Fani Willis down in Fulton County, Georgia who was about to indict former President Trump.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s interesting. Why is that?

George Packer:

I think as they say, if you’re going to aim at the king, you better shoot to kill. Not that I’m advocating assassination. I’m advocating a smart-

Preet Bharara:

I think that violates the equity language manual.

George Packer:

It certainly does, but that’s what I’m all about. Vivid language Preet. So my sense is that hush money to a porn star and a novel legal approach to campaign finance law is a weak basis for the first ever indictment of a former president. Whereas importuning the overthrow of election results and a conspiracy to undermine democracy seems like a pretty good basis for such an indictment. And the case in Georgia seems really based in fact, based in recorded conversations, and a pretty tight case. Obviously I want to know your view because this used to be your bread and butter and to some extent still is. What do you think?

Preet Bharara:

George Packer has turned the tables. So I don’t know. I don’t what the indictment is going to look like. I think as a legal matter. I don’t think it’s as novel as people think, what’s going on in the Manhattan DA’s office and what’s being prepared. We can have an argument about which is a more serious crime and which reflects better public understanding of the misdeeds of Donald Trump.

And obviously, this thing that is at the core of Donald Trump’s conduct post 2020 election. Namely the big lie leading up to the insurrection, all this violence. Breeding a new category of politician who just will not accept the peaceful transfer of power. That’s very, very serious. Very egregious.

I don’t think what’s going on in the Manhattan DA’s office is unserious. I mean, someone has already gone to prison. Not for a crime akin to that, but someone has gone to prison for that exact crime. Michael Cohen at the hands of my former office, the Southern District of New York. While it might not be the crime of the century, one could ask the question reasonably, if a private citizen who was not in the White House can go to prison for a crime that he did at the direction of and with the other understanding of individual one, why should individual one get a buy? Because George Packer or others, no offense, think that it just doesn’t stand as strong and weigh as much as some other kind of crime.

If Donald Trump were caught on tape passing a fake check, like hundreds of people in New York and other cities around the country get charged with check kiting, he should get charged. That’s the argument, and that’s the other side.

George Packer:

The argument and it’s sound legally. I absolutely agree from my layman’s perspective. But politically, how sound is it? I mean, look, Trump was right to say that he could go out and shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his strongest supporters wouldn’t care. So Trump could try to overturn an election, could call up officials in Georgia to get them to, “Find me some votes,” and his strong supporters would think that that was the right thing to do. So we cannot make these judgments based on the potential reaction of the MAGA faithful.

Preet Bharara:

But do you think that the MAGA faithful, or not even the MAGA faithful, this other category of person. Republicans who don’t want to run afoul of the MAGA faithful, who have all come to Donald Trump’s aid, including Ron DeSantis, his likely rival for the nomination next time. Do you think they will draw a distinction between the quality of the case brought by the Fulton County DA versus the Manhattan DA?

George Packer:

I don’t know. That’s a pretty tough call because we’re talking about maybe six politicians and two or three different legal cases, including let’s not forget the Justice Department’s case in Washington. The federal case against him. So pretty hard to say.

I would never underestimate the cravenness of leading Republican politicians. They’ve shown that they’re willing to go to any length to keep Trump happy, or at least to keep him from aiming his gun sites at them, and to keep the MAGA faithful from destroying their careers. So quite likely, the distinction would be lost on them.

I’m thinking more about if there’s still such a thing, the fair-minded American voter who may not like Trump very much, but doesn’t want to see a precedent of former presidents getting thrown in jail for things they did before they were elected president the first time. I wouldn’t care if Trump got thrown in jail for the Stormy Daniels hush money. I think it was justice done, but I’m worried about whether this is the case that’s going to set a precedent that says presidents cannot try to overturn elections, which is what I care about more than I care about hush money to a porn star.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I mean, the argument in response, and I’m not carrying anyone’s water here. When you say hush money to a porn star, it sounds like something tawdry and unserious, but it was done in connection with a campaign and was done for the purpose of influencing an election. And when you say it was for conduct that happened before he became president, that alleged affair happened before he was president. But the payments, and more relevantly, the reimbursement of the payments that were falsely categorized at the business, and hidden, and covered up continued well into the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. So I’m not saying that’s the same as trying to undo the peaceful transfer of power. Of course, but it’s not nothing.

Let’s shift from that slightly to the political situation and how you think Donald Trump is doing. As I said, we’re recording this on the 27th, this past weekend in Waco, Texas of all places. Donald Trump held his first rally. I have stopped watching his rallies, even though we sometimes comment on them. Some of the coverage has suggested that the MAGA faithful, that their order for him has waned a little bit. Do you think that’s true, or do you think the other people who went along are a little tired of the drama? How do you describe his standing moment at the moment?

George Packer:

Well, there was a column in the Times today by someone who was actually there, which I was not. David French, who said that it was not Trump leading the MAGA faithful. It was the MAGA faithful essentially commanding Trump, and everyone else who spoke, that they pleased them. In a way, Trump is no longer the leader of a movement. The movement has taken a life of its own. And all these politicians, because this movement is the base of their party, have to kowtow to it. And Trump may be in some ways, not much different.

So the mystique of this strong man, demagogue leader has faded. Because he’s no longer president, because he’s done a lot of stupid things since the presidency as well as during the presidency. Because he’s not quite in the news in the same way. And when he is in the news, it’s usually pretty unflattering.

So perhaps there is a bit of a fade. But there’s no fade in the feelings and the impulses that brought Trump to the presidency. In fact, if anything, it’s stronger and more extreme than seven years ago. And that is a big worry because that still has a strangle hold on one of our two parties.

So in a way, Trump, I’ve felt for a long time that we pay way mu too much attention to him. That his every statement should not be publicized and scrutinized, but we should pay more attention to the people who would vote for him or for someone else who seemed to them to embody Trumpism. Because I think that’s where the action is now not so much with this me Orson Wells figure in Mar-a-Lago.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, so let’s talk about one such person. Ron DeSantis, I’ve asked this of many podcast guests because he may very well be the next president. Some people are more bullish on that, some people are more bearish on that. I think it sometimes depends on what they want to see happen. I’m not sure how clear-eyed anyone’s analysis is. What’s your assessment of Ron DeSantis’ political prowess and his ability to emerge from a crowded primary victorious over Trump?

George Packer:

He’s obviously got a brilliant grip on Florida politics, at least as of last November. And he has decided it’s pretty clear, to be the winner of the MAGA primary. To be the guy who takes that crown away from Trump if anyone can. He’s not playing to moderate Republicans, or to independents, or to people who voted for Trump, but with their noses held. He’s going all in the culture wars. In the bully politics. The politics of derision and contempt. He’s very good at that.

Can he inspire anyone who isn’t already deep in MAGA land and who really is looking more for Trump to come back? That seems like a risky strategy. He’s going head-to-head with Trump to win Trump voters. Rather than to expand the Republican pool, the pool of the Republican nominee to others who went over to Biden in 2020 or who were weak Trump voters. So it seems like a high risk strategy.

And it also aligns with what seems like a kind of doer, and stiff, and unattractive personality, which without the charisma that Trump supposedly had for a lot of Americans. So those two things together seem like a shaky foundation for a winning Republican nomination.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, doesn’t he like kind of a stern scold?

George Packer:

Yeah. When he yelled at those kids for wearing masks to an event of his.

Preet Bharara:

William Goldman, the greatest screenwriter ever to have written screenplays, wrote famously, “Nobody knows anything.” And he was talking of course about Hollywood and the failure to predict what would bomb and what would shine. I feel the same is true in politics.

I remember thinking back in 2016, I don’t know what the conventional wisdom was about who would win the primary. But I remember thinking Rubio had a really great shot, that Rubio was the one. Another Florida man, if you will. And boy was that wrong. Did you have a view in 2015, 2016 before Donald Trump emerged as the leader?

George Packer:

I can say honestly, I saw Trump coming from a long way off.

Preet Bharara:

You did?

George Packer:

I wrote a book called The Unwinding Preet.

Preet Bharara:

I was going to ask you about that.

George Packer:

2013. It did not name Trump as the coming Mussolini of American politics, but it did paint a picture of a country that was ready to be swept away by someone who came in with a lot of conspiracy theories, a lot of ugly talk, a lot of divisiveness. Because the country itself was so divided, and so dispirited, and in such a sour mood. And that was just based on regular reporting. So I didn’t see Trump as a candidate from 2013. But by 2015-

Preet Bharara:

When he came down the escalator, did you think to yourself, this guy’s going to win, or do you think to yourself, this guy is going to do much better than people think?

George Packer:

The latter. I honestly didn’t think he was going to win it, because I read the same polls everyone else reads. And the polls suggested that Hillary Clinton was going to beat him, although it got kind of close toward the end with some help from the Justice Department and the FBI. So no, I didn’t have a calculation that Trump would win by X votes. I had a sense that someone like Trump could win against all the precedent of American politics. The guy who was saying how bad things were, the guy who broke every rule and every norm, the guy who called names, who was openly racist and sexist. Yes, I thought that guy could win.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned The Unwinding, which when you say 2013, it sounds like it was just yesterday. But I realize if you do the actual math, that’s a decade ago. And my question is not very specific, so you can go anywhere you want with it. How are we doing as a country?

I just read recently that for the first time, American life expectancy is going down. We have a huge increase in racist incidents, anti-Semitic violence, anti-Asian violence. All sorts of bad things are happening. Looking back a decade from the time you wrote that book, how are we doing as a country? And as further grist, I’ll point out that in more recent book you wrote, you suggested that Americans have lost the art of self-government.

George Packer:

Right. That was in Last Best Hope, which was two years ago. And the two were related because electing Donald Trump and then living under his rule and his attempted destruction of the federal government. He really did try hard. And I think if he is reelected, he will destroy the federal government and the basis for democratic self-government.

All of that showed that we had come a long way from being able to think clearly, see clearly, talk to each other, solve problems, compromise. All the somewhat bland but essential virtues of democracy, which has become subsumed by cable news, and social media, and who can shout loudest and get the most attention for it. And that’s still going on.

So how are we doing 10 years later after The Unwinding? Badly. Badly. Because the trends that I saw back then have all worsened. Inequality has worsened. Polarization has worsened. The decline of the middle class has worsened. The regional inequality between the coastal cities, and the Rust Belt, and the old industrial areas has worsened.

Not to mention our place in the world Preet. Where after 20 years of losing wars, we suddenly are waking up to a world in which there’s just danger everywhere, and rising powers. And we’re behind the curve. And the Ukraine war and the situation between China and Taiwan are getting the most attention, but it seems to be happening everywhere.

So we are an aging, maybe dying empire with a democratic heartbeat. That was our justification for being an empire. And both of those are in a state of decline and decay. And I worry that if Trump or a Trump alike gets elected next year, that’ll be it. That we don’t have enough margin for error to survive another four years. We’ve barely survived the last four. Every election’s the most important of our lifetime. Here we go again. This one’s the most important of our lifetime. And even if Trump doesn’t become president again, so many trends in American life are heading in that direction.

It’s weird because it’s an ambiguous situation. Lots of things are working well. We have a lot of creativity. We have a lot of entrepreneurship. We have a lot of scientific breakthroughs going on right now. We have artificial intelligence, which scares the hell out of me, but which some people think is the most important human invention ever. There’s a lot of ferment in this country. It’s not as though we’re just stagnating into nothingness.

But the underlying trends that I just named are all heading in the wrong direction. The social trends. That trends that tell us how we’re doing as a country, as a collection of people who have to live with each other and govern ourselves together. All of that seems to me like it has not reversed itself since The Unwinding.

Preet Bharara:

I want to push back with some optimism just for the sake of argument. But first I have a hypothetical question, counterfactual question. And that is, could we view some of this… Obviously the underpinnings for Trump were there. You wrote about it in The Unwinding very presciently.

But Trump barely won. He didn’t win the popular vote. And suppose he had actually fallen flat in the primaries, and a standard Republican issue candidate won like Jeb Bush. And Jeb Bush had become the president, and defeated Hillary Clinton. I know this is a tough question. What do you think the country would be like? Do you think the country would be further along this path to wanting a Donald Trump a burn down the village kind of candidate? Or do you think a sort of moderate, semi-boring, traditional Republican president would’ve calmed the waters?

George Packer:

I guess for that question, I can’t imagine that scenario, because that was not the direction the Republican Party was headed in at all. I think the closer question is what if Hillary Clinton had won? Because that was a close race and it showed a very divided country. And she won popular vote by 3 million.

In that case, I think that we would’ve seen then what we’re seeing now, which is a Republican Party determined to sabotage everything she did. And a Republican electorate more and more prone to disinformation, delusional thinking, conspiracy theories, lies about her because she was a magnet for them. Biden is too vanilla, I think, to attract that kind of thing too much. His son seems to be the focus of most of it. But Hillary would’ve been.

And I think in that case, we would’ve had an attempt by a Clinton administration to push forward from the Obama era into something slightly more progressive in economic and social policy, and a tremendous amount of resistance from the Republican Party and probably a series of wins by the Republican Party in congressional elections afterward. Which went the other way because Trump was in office.

So in some ways, not too different maybe. Not too different from what we’ve got because what I’m talking about is the underlying trends, not who’s in power. And I think journalists sometimes lose sight of the fact that it’s not just Trump, and Clinton, and Biden, and DeSantis. It’s millions of people whose lives are moving in directions that journalists are often unaware of because they don’t talk to them.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s talk about those millions for a second. This is my general pushback. I have a friend who’s very smart. When people describe the specter of polarization and division, he says, “Well in fact, on a lot of important questions. Social, economic, other policy matters, there’s a good bit of consensus.”

That consensus doesn’t translate into policy. For example, a huge percentage of Americans think there should be universal background checks before you purchase a firearm. There happens to be a pretty decent consensus about abortion being available with some restrictions that obviously is not to be because of the Supreme Court.

But on many, many issues, you can get a consensus of 50, 60, 70. And in some cases, 75 or 80% of Americans from both parties and from the middle to agree. What’s your reaction to that argument? And how can it be that if that is true… And maybe you think it’s not true. But if you believe that that’s true, how can we be so polarized? Especially when last observation, the spectrum of American politics, a viable American politics on an ideological spectrum is narrower here than in many other democracies in the world. We don’t have a viable actual communist party. We don’t have parties as way out to the left and the right as some European countries,. And yet, we say that America is more divided than those other places. Discuss.

George Packer:

First of all on that one, that is true. We’ve always been more between the 40 yard lines. That’s changed in the last six or eight years. And now we do have self-declared socialists in national politics who have a real following on the left. And we also have an authoritarian populist who just was our president on the right, which to me was a kind of a European thing. This blood and soil nationalism with a media focus, like a Berlusconi almost. So I think we’ve become more like the European democracies, but there’s still a smaller fragment that socialist. That’s true.

Oi also believe the polls about background checks, and abortion access, and maybe even path to citizenship for immigrants. If people voted on that basis, our politics would be very different. But people don’t. They may have that view when up pollster calls, but they vote on other issues. And maybe not even on issues, but on feelings, and on fears, and on hatreds.

I think it’s called negative polarization or something like that. There’s a political science term for when you’re really just voting because you don’t like the other side. You’re not really voting for your own side. And whatever the other side does, you’re going to be violently opposed to it. That is of just as true a force in our politics as those more reassuring numbers you just cited. And those seem to be the basis for people’s voting behavior more than, “Well, this guy is for background checks, and so am I. So I’m going to ignore the fact that my party tells me he’s a communist who wants to give the country away to the people’s Republic of China.”

Preet Bharara:

If you had to place blame for a predicament on voters or on politicians, which do you pick? Or are they the same thing, because there’s an unmistakable feedback loop between them?

George Packer:

There is that feedback loop, and we do get the politicians we deserve. But I’ve always had this a naive view that elites have some obligation to deserve the privileges that come with being an elite, whether it’s in politics, or business, or the media.

And what’s happened I think in the last 30 years or so is elite behavior has degenerated to the point where it is now okay to say things, to do things, to pit people against each other. If it’s in your interest, if you’ll make money off it, if you’ll get elected off it, if you’ll stay on the air off it. There’s no restraint left. There’s no self-restraint. And this all sounds very Pollyannaish. But I do think if you compare the behavior of elites now to 30 or 40 years ago, it’s sort of shameful what you see

Now shame on the public for being manipulated by them, but shame on the elites for taking the privileges that come with that power and turning it to self-interest, the point where they’re willing to see the country go down the tubes. Because that is truly what it’s about if you are a host on Fox News, or if you’re a member of Congress whose whole purpose is to antagonize the other side in order to raise money and get reelected. Or if you’re a tech mogul who’s created an engine that makes money based on getting people angry at each other on social media. All of those things are examples of how elites have become irresponsible to the point of destructive, without paying a price for it.

Preet Bharara:

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

It’s sort of interesting hearing you talk. This occurred to me. This is a small experiment that I’ve thought about. I’m less active on Twitter than I used to be. I used to be quite active. I just find it not that gratifying anymore. And I basically promote the podcast and amplify some other people who I think are interesting. And every once in a while, I’ll tweet something. But I much prefer expressing my thoughts and ideas talking to you. We do three podcasts a week. Everything on the internet gets misconstrued, especially if it’s in social media.

But my recollection is when I was more active that if I posted a snarky, clever tweet right about Trump or someone else, and it was particularly snarky and clever, it would get a lot of engagement. But on the more rare occasion, if I posted something hopeful… Every once in a while, I would post something about my immigrant family on the 4th of July, and a picture of my family on the last day before they came from India to the United States. That that would get even more engagement.

To me, it tells me that if you are of some talent and not particularly of good faith, that the easiest road to likes or popularity and to audience is to be snarky and a jerk. And if you can do it in a clever fashion, all the better.

But true art and uplifting messages, that’s harder. And it’s harder to come by and takes a lot of work, to do it in a way that’s not saccharin and will be dismissed by both the elites and the general public alike. But if you can do that, then you soar higher. You just do.

George Packer:

It’s interesting, because fiction writers say that the hardest thing to write about is happiness. Of course, Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike. So it’s true because… I don’t know if this is a modern reaction or simply a human reaction. But it immediately spurs you to think, “Come on, you’re hiding something. It can’t be that good.” Or, “There’s something wrong with this picture of this happy immigrant family on their way to the United States. What’s going on behind the scenes?”

We don’t want to be suckers. We don’t want to be naive. There’s almost nothing worse in our culture than believing something nice, and then finding out that you were stupid and wrong, and it was actually shame on you. You got fooled. So maybe that’s part of what’s going on, but I’m glad to hear that your optimum and hopeful tweets got a lot of attention. Keep doing those.

Preet Bharara:

The problem is people’s talents and skills maybe don’t match the difficulty of doing that. So in politics, I still think if you pitted… And maybe you don’t have the right rival. And certainly Hillary Clinton was not this person. If you take Donald Trump and you say he’s the paragon of cynical, overthrow everything kind of politician, and you found his equal of a different nature, the most inspiring counterpart you could find. I don’t know if that’s Obama, or Jack Kennedy, or whoever else, and whatever you think of them, they aim for the inspirational. That the inspiring person of equal talent beats the cynical person. That’s my hypothesis.

George Packer:

Well, Kennedy beat Nixon, unless you think that Cook County threw that election.

Preet Bharara:

No comment on that.

George Packer:

And Obama was elected to two terms with, as he put it, a skinny kid with a funny name. So it does seem possible. But I remember having a conversation with of all people, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and right wing thinker, Trump guy.

Preet Bharara:

The man who caused a run on Silicon Valley Bank?

George Packer:

Yeah, well he’s sort of a behind the scenes guy who has influence over lots of things that are going on, including the turn of the Republican Party. He told me about 10 years ago when I was writing The Unwinding that Republican candidates came asking for money to him in 2012. And MIT Romney said to him, “My message for this election is going to be if we just get rid of Obama, everything’s going to be great.” That’s a paraphrase.

And Thiel said to me that he thought, “You’re not going to win because that’s not where the public is. What the public actually wants to hear is everything is terrible, and we need to burn it all down.” And so Thiel saw something coming that you could call Trump. And that went against every cliche about American politics, which is that you have to be optimistic. You have to tell a sunny story about American democracy, and you have to sound like a mix of Reagan and Kennedy. Turned out for a while at least that’s not then the formula that always wins, and that’s a sign of something gone wrong.

But a really charismatic candidate who can do that, who can be hopeful and unifying without being shallow and naïve. I think there is a place for that person. And in a way, if Joe Biden were more of an orator, he would be that kind of president. But he just isn’t a good speaker. So we don’t really know how he sounds.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned Reagan, and I was wondering… It’s been a while, and I was young. How do we describe Reagan on this spectrum of hopeful, and optimistic, and inspiring, versus fear-mongering? Because there was some of that too. Talk of welfare queen and all of that. Where do you put him on the spectrum?

George Packer:

Well, when I was in my twenties and he was president, I hated him. I thought he was cruel and telling essentially a lie about America, that everything was great if we just would get rid of the government. Which I still think is a terribly destructive view that seized the Republican Party, and in some ways still has its grip on it 40 years later. The libertarian streak of the Republican Party.

But we’ve come a long way since Reagan. And in the hazy glow of looking retrospectively, it’s hard to hate him. I don’t don’t have that feeling about him. I think he was what the country wanted coming out of the seventies, and Vietnam, and the hostage crisis, and stagflation. The country wanted to be told a story about how wonderful everything could be. If we would just close our eyes to this, and cut spending to these wasteful people, and stand up to the Russians, we would be great again. And there is something warm about Reagan’s vision. It was an open vision. He wanted immigration. He wanted people to come from around the world to this country.

Preet Bharara:

How quaint, a Republican talking point.

George Packer:

Yeah. I think he had a line that said, “If the city on the hill is a walled city, the wall has a gate,” or something like that. And that’s impossible to imagine any Republican candidate saying that today.

Preet Bharara:

Last counteract. I’m just fascinated by this idea of which vision wins if you adjust for quality and talent of the messenger. So Reagan, about as talented a politician who has ever come along. That dude won 49 states.

George Packer:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Some people forget the idea that anybody could win 49 states ever again seems far off. But if Reagan were on the scene today or someone like Reagan, sunny and optimistic, but rocked, rib, conservative in many ways. How would that person fare? Or was Reagan just an emblem of his times?

George Packer:

I can’t imagine a Reagan today, and it’s because of the change of time. He was the right man for that moment of America. Not in a state of decline as I think we are now, but in a state of self-questioning, and disturbance over things of Vietnam, and Watergate, and all of that.

There was two directions we could have gone in more. More Jimmy Carter. I will never lie to you. Jimmy Carter was the last American president who didn’t lie to us. He gave speeches from the Oval Office that said we’re consuming too much. We’ve become materialistic and wasteful. We need to turn down our thermostats. No president’s going to talk that way. And that’s because Jimmy Carter lost. We could’ve had more of that, or we could have gone for the Reagan fairytale. And Americans wanted the fairytale, so Reagan won in two landslides.

Today, I don’t think the fairytale works because people have too darker vision, and we’ve gone through too many traumas in the last 20 years. Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Trump, global warming, and on and on. I think that it would seem quaint and out of date if Reagan came along with the same story today.

Preet Bharara:

You wrote in the Last Best Hope, which was published as you said, in June of 2021. “The world’s pity has taken the place of admiration, hostility, awe, envy, fear, affection, and repulsion.” End quote. And somebody in a review of the book said that that might have sounded right in the throes of the attack on the US capitol on January 6th. It now sounds overwrought. Does it sound overwrought to you or not? And in your answer, if there’s any relevance to the American role with respect to the war in Ukraine, would you comment on that also?

George Packer:

Yeah. I think pity is no longer the right word. I wrote that in the middle of the first months of the pandemic, with the election and the insurrection right upon us. And it did seem like an unusually terrible time of chaos and incompetence. The sheer incompetence of our response to the pandemic, with the United States leading the world per capita in deaths with all that we spend on healthcare and all of our advanced research.

So pity seem the right word then. It doesn’t quite seem right now. And I think Ukraine has come some ways in restoring the idea that America can be both a reliable partner to other democracies. And pretty much the bulwark, the arsenal of democracy when it comes to this unbelievably cruel and evil war that Russia has launched against Ukraine.

Without American arms, Ukraine would be under Russian occupation today. There would be an insurgency. There would be a long and bloody struggle, but I think there would be a puppet government in Kyiv without American arms.

So we can say that just at the moment after the shameful way we left Afghanistan, that it seemed as if we were going to be licking our wounds for five or 10 years. Suddenly, Putin comes along and gives a new lease to the idea that America has a role to play, even in military conflicts. As long as we’re not sending our own troops, which is something that Americans are really going to be loathed to do for a long time.

Preet Bharara:

If Ukraine prevails, I think you’ve suggested this. Will we overlearn a lesson?

George Packer:

I don’t think so. I don’t think we’re going to see American weapons and even troops going to every part of the world where there seems to be some kind of new Cold War between democracy and authoritarianism. I think there’s just too much fatigue and too many wounds from the last 20 years

Preet Bharara:

We won’t suddenly become liberal interventionists?

George Packer:

I don’t think so. I think too many lessons have been learned, hard lessons. And even Ukraine is shaky Preet. I mean right now, it seems like the path to the Republican nomination means saying that Ukraine doesn’t matter, and insulting Zelensky the way so many Republican loudmouths are doing right now.

Preet Bharara:

Although Ron DeSantis was on that page. He called it a land dispute.

George Packer:

Territorial dispute.

Preet Bharara:

And he got roundly criticized, and then a few days later said that Putin was a war criminal. What do you think is going on? What’s that dynamic about?

George Packer:

I think he doesn’t know what to think. He hasn’t figured it out. He’s a Florida governor who hasn’t thought much about foreign policy. And when he was talking to Tucker Carlson, he said what made Tucker Carlson happy. There was blowback. He tried to clean it up a little bit. He doesn’t know.

And it’ll be important to see which way he goes on that, because there is growing unhappiness in the Republican base and in some Republicans in Congress. The party is somewhat divided on this. And so which way their nominee goes is going to have a lot to say about which way the war goes if there’s a Republican president.

Preet Bharara:

So I said at the beginning that I wanted to talk to you about a piece that you wrote some weeks ago in the Atlantic called The Moral Case Against Equity Language. And you write a bit about these equity language guides that suggest to people within an organization. I don’t know if they mandate, or suggest, or implore. And they tell people which words are better used than words that maybe traditionally have been used. Can you explain what an equity language guide is, and why there’s a moral case against them?

George Packer:

These are not very widely known, but they’re guides that are being put together mostly by nonprofit organizations. The Sierra Club, the American Cancer Society,

Preet Bharara:

NRA?

George Packer:

The NRA, I don’t think so. The American Parks and Recreation Association. A few universities. Washington. Stanford had one and then they withdrew it. These are essentially dictionaries that have commentary on what words that you might think are perfectly innocuous, but that actually are harmful, and that therefore should not be used by people who are part of those organizations.

Preet Bharara:

Can we use a couple of examples? You write in your piece, “The Sierra Club’s equity language guide discourages using the words stand, Americans, blind, and crazy.” What’s the perceived inappropriateness of stand?

George Packer:

So we have to understand what the purpose of the guides is, what the idea behind them is. And it is to purify language of anything that might suggest bias, or hierarchy, or exclusion.

So they’re part of a new progressivism that believes in a kind of permanent system of oppression in this country. And language is a key battlefield of that system. And so to fight the battle against oppression, against inequity, against exclusion, we have to change the language.

In the case of that Sierra Club guide, which as I said, they had clear cut a whole national park of words. Blind is a stigmatizing word for people without sight. Crazy is a stigmatizing word for people with mental health problems. Stand is exclusive because not everyone has the ability to stand up. And Americans is exclusive because not everyone in this country is a citizen.

And then the list goes on. Urban, hardworking, brown bag, vibrant. And hundreds of others, literally, that seem like part of everyday speech that turn out to be in some ways inequitable, and therefore to be avoided.

So these organizations have put out these guides, and they all sound the same, because they actually all come to some extent from the same original sources that are not put out by those organizations, but by political activists. They all sound the same.

Preet Bharara:

The communities and groups who are supposedly aggrieved by the use of some of these terms, are the members of those communities and groups, the activists who are looking for these language changes or other people?

George Packer:

I think that it’s very small numbers of people behind it. They’re not taking polls. They’re not canvassing neighborhoods. It’s very small and I’d say highly educated people who are members of different groups, who have come together. And by whatever means, I am not privy to their discussions, come up with lists of words. And it’s endless. It keeps happening. It’s happening right now as we speak.

Preet Bharara:

You gave another example of how you’re not supposed to say paralyzed by inaction or something like that in favor of didn’t do something.

George Packer:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Something like that.

George Packer:

The fact that you couldn’t come up with a very cogent alternative is the whole heart of the matter. Which is this language, its whole purpose is to avoid hard truths. To not look too closely at things that are ugly, that make us uncomfortable. It’s to kind of spread an anesthetizing cream over the English language so that nothing will make us uncomfortable.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So what looks on the surface like an argument against this because of the loss of vividness of language, you’re saying something much more than that. Because you call it a moral case against this equity language guide program, that it’s actually counterproductive.

George Packer:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Explain how that is.

George Packer:

First of all, it’s not just the Sierra Club that is affected by. This language, this new language, and I think you can feel it in what you read in the press and in how people talk, is spreading to the mainstream. It becomes part of people’s talk who are in the know, who are already part of the communities that are affected by it. And leading publications, newspapers, magazines, all of it is affected by this. So it has a larger influence than simply on the nonprofits that put out the guides.

What I think is harmful about the guides and about this influence that they’re having is they make it impossible to tell the truth. You can’t name something. You can’t make your reader or your audience see it and feel it. And instead, you find a term like historically marginalized communities instead of the poor. And even the word marginalized by the way, eventually has been ruled out by some organizations. There’s this endless cycle of getting rid of words.

Why? Because every word that is applied to something that makes us uncomfortable, whether it’s poverty, or racism, or oppression, eventually is going to get tainted by that association. And we’re going to have to get rid of it to find a new word that’s even less associated. And then over time, that word under-resourced is going to become associated with poverty. So we’ll have to get rid of under-resourced and find an even more euphemistic, and bland, and abstract term.

And all of this is making it impossible to have a serious, honest conversation about the thing itself. And therefore, to be able to solve the problem. You cannot solve a problem that you can’t name.

Truth is painful. And good writing is painful because it tells the truth. This is all bad writing. Which is not just a problem for journalists or for English teachers. It’s a problem for all of us. Because bad writing, which is to say sloppy, or vague, or imprecise, leads to bad thinking. And bad thinking in turn produces bad policies.

So we think we’ve solved a problem because we’ve come up with a word like marginalized. When in fact, what we’ve done is made the problem harder to solve by not being able to talk about it.

So I actually think if you are for equity, if you are for justice, you’ll reject this language. And you’ll say, “Let’s start using vivid, precise, clear terms in order to be able to know what we’re talking about, and therefore to solve problems.”

Preet Bharara:

How would we have to rewrite the inscription on the Statue of Liberty? Give us your what, not your pool.

George Packer:

We advocate the admission of the marginalized and the disenfranchised of the world to the… Whatever it is, is going to be so forgettable and will not inspire anyone. No one will want to come to the United States based on the rewriting of Emma Lazarus’ poem. So yeah, you’ve named a good one.

Preet Bharara:

Just for emphasis, there will be people on the right who come after issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion for their own reasons. Those are not the arguments that you’re making. You’re making the moral argument in part on the basis of solidarity with those groups who have plights themselves. That this language somehow works an erasure of them that is counterproductive. Is that a fair assessment?

George Packer:

That is a good way to put it. It’s not inclusive. It’s exclusive. So that when a tiny group of people come up with the word Latinx and make it mandatory because it’s gender non-specific, they’re excluding the vast majority of Latino or Hispanic Americans who’d never heard of that word, don’t know how to pronounce it, and would never apply it to themselves.

And actually, there were polls done showing that it was somewhat alienating. And in fact, I think a few of these organizations have pulled back a bit and not insisted on it. Because it turns out not to be a universal term. It’s a term for a tiny and highly educated elite who’ve come up with it, because it makes them feel better about not using gender-specific terms.

Preet Bharara:

So some of these terms that were ushered in have lost favor. People of color, for example. Kind of a bland generalized phrase that has been demoted. Explain why that is.

George Packer:

Yeah. Some of these equity guides say people of color is no longer the preferred term. It was for quite a long time, because what it did was essentially divided the world’s population into white people and non-white people. But instead of non-white, which is a negative, people of color became the positive term. Except that it included everyone from Bogota, to Nairobi, to Soul South Korea. It was such a vast generalization, that it was kind of useless for most purposes.

BIPOC came into wider use in the summer of 2020 during the protests as a replacement for people of color, because it disentangled or disambiguated people of color into Black, indigenous, and people of color. With an order, a proper order of terms. So now BIPOC became favored.

BIPOC I think is not in wide use at all because it was not a word that people found normal. This is not the organic evolution of language. This is more like communiques or orders being handed down from above. Language being changed more from above than from below. And so naturally, it just doesn’t take among most people because it’s not the way they speak. And after BIPOC, I don’t know what’s next. But people of color, it’s still out there, but it’s not what the most learned experts are using.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. And you point out also, “When a university administrator refers to an individual student as diverse, the word has lost contact with anything tangible, which is the point.”

George Packer:

Right. I’m sure you’ve heard someone say, “She’s diverse.”

Preet Bharara:

I thought that meant that she contains multitudes.

George Packer:

Yes. Well, we all do according to Whitman, and I think we do. But those multitudes are not really conveyed by the use of the word diverse today, which actually is more limiting than encompassing. And it does lose contact with reality.

In the piece, I went through the exercise of taking a paragraph from what I think is a great piece of journalism Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, about a slum outside Mumbai, India. Slum, by the way, is not a word that should be used because it’s too evocative. It just is too blunt.

And Kate Boo describes a character in this place in extremely vivid terms, kind of using the language of the people there. The runt leg, the one leg. And I translated it into equity language, talking about people from low income areas or unequal levels of opportunity, whatever the phrases were that I came up with, which were not all that satirical. They were pretty close to what you would find in a lot of current literature.

And showed how the effect was to make you alienated from that place and those people, to make you feel nothing for them, to make you unable to see them and to see their experience. Whereas Kate Boo brought you right into their lives. Now, which of those languages is one that is more likely to lead to justice? To me, the answer’s obvious.

Preet Bharara:

You’ve removed one basis on which a person not familiar with the community or with the plight can empathize with those people if the language is overly bland.

George Packer:

Exactly. And honestly, who’s it serving? Is it serving the people in Kate Boo’s book? I don’t think so. They know they’re poor. They don’t need to have a new word for it. I think it serves people who don’t want to have to think about it too much, but want to feel okay about themselves.

So we find words like justice involved person, which means someone who essentially has been in prison. Because thinking about prison makes us uncomfortable. So we find a term that makes it so abstract, that you hardly even know what’s being said. And we feel more comfortable. But it doesn’t make prison any less brutal.

This is why I think equity language doesn’t have justice on its side. What it has is a feeling that if we just change the words, we’ve solved the problem. But to me, that’s a deeply pessimistic view because it’s as if to say material conditions aren’t real. All that’s real is language. And that’s where a certain amount of overeducated thinking gets you.

Preet Bharara:

But to be clear, two points. One, you’re not saying… Because people will write emails. You’re not saying that being thoughtful about language and being thoughtful about some terms that are pejorative and are hurtful to people, that are really hurtful to people, or that are overly masculine for no reason. So for example, do you have any problem with… This wasn’t in the equity guide, because this has been true for a while to refer, to people as firefighters rather than firemen?

George Packer:

No, of course not. Words should call up images to have any effect. Equity language doesn’t call up an image. It’s like a fog that’s been spread across the thing, so that you can no longer see it. Firefighter, firemen, that doesn’t change that. What it does is makes it something that both genders can be a part. Of course not no.

I’m not saying we should try to insult people. I’m not saying we should call people by names they don’t want. I’m not saying we should use inadvertent insults on a regular basis, even when someone calls them to our attention. None of that.

What I’m saying is the impulse, perhaps the good impulse not to offend with language, has become an impulse not to feel bad. And that impulse doesn’t serve anyone. And in fact, I think is a step backward. We need to clear the fog and write more like Kate Boo. Not that we all need to be great writers. We just all need to see things clearly in order to be able to name them, and in order to be able to talk to each other in a way we understand, with a common language that can lead to some kind of common solutions.

Preet Bharara:

You say flat out in the piece about the motivation here. “The rationale for equity language guides is hard to fault. They seek a world without oppression and injustice. Because achieving this goal is beyond anyone’s power, they turn to what can be controlled and try to purge language until it leaves no one out, and can’t harm those who already suffer.” What’s the reaction been to this piece?

George Packer:

Actually quite positive. Lots of attention and mostly positive. With a few people saying, “You just want to be able to insult people.” Which is a willful misreading of it, because I am quite clear that there is obviously a baseline of respect that is necessary, and decent, and that we should all follow. This is not about open season on pejorative language at all. This is an attempt to pull back on a direction that I see language going in, that I think is compounding itself every day. And that keeps moving farther and farther from reality. And as I said, every time you find a new word, it’s eventually going to get replaced, because it’s going to begin to get the taint of reality on it. And that’s what equity language is trying to avoid.

And in a way, there’s a sort of power involved in being able to say to someone, “That’s no longer okay to say,” and it’s a bit of a blindside. “Well, I just said it yesterday and it was okay.” “Well today it’s not okay, so you can’t say it.” There’s a liturgy you have to learn in order to become fluent in equity language. It’s unnatural. And it’s not sustainable for most people, because most people don’t want to be told that half their vocabulary is out of bounds, and that the vocabulary that was conceived by a very small group of people that they’ll never be able to talk to and argue with, is the only way that you can now talk and still be received into polite society.

Preet Bharara:

George Packer, thanks for being back with us.

George Packer:

Always a pleasure. Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with George Packer continues from members of the CAFE Insider Community. We discussed Packer’s concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence.

George Packer:

There’s a lot to worry about. what robots and outsourcing did to people in industrial jobs, AI could do to people in the knowledge economy who thought that they had found the right path out of the post-industrial age.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

I want to share a story this week that comes out of a high school in Kentucky. As reported by the Washington Post, the Martin County High School boys basketball team was in a tight game against rivals in Pikeville, Kentucky. The team they were playing who seemed to have the upper hand were from a nearby high school. side of the court was that school’s band, who had traveled with the team to play for them and cheer them on. The spirit was palpable.

But the players from Martin County High didn’t have the same support. Though Martin County does have a band, they aren’t able to travel with the basketball team due to budget limitations.

But as the score reached a tie of 64 all, something happened. Music started playing for the Martin County Cardinals. It was coming from the band from Pike County Central High School. Their team was playing next, and so they were just standing by waiting for their turn on the court. But once the members of that band realized one team on the court didn’t have anyone playing for them, they had the idea to step in.

Jason Johnson, Pike Central band director, told the Washington Post, “We began performing a couple of fun tunes. We had a great organic moment of just kids supporting kids.”

And according to the article, the energy in the room immediately changed. 17-year-old Abigail Ratliff said quote, “We just wanted to encourage them and uplift them in a time when they needed it most. It was such a cool experience to get to support someone else.”

At the end of the game, which went into overtime, the Martin County Cardinals took home a big win, 80 to 71. That will send them to the state tournament, the first time the small school will play at that level in 40 years.

What’s more striking is that Pike Central, the band who played the music, is actually a rival of Martin County High School. They often go head-to-head at other sporting matches. But not this time.

I love this story because it shows a moment of real togetherness. These high school students saw an opportunity to help and support other kids who weren’t part of their school, who actually they will compete against in the future. And they took it, because it felt like the right thing to do.

I hope we can all learn a thing or two from these students about how to reach out a helping hand, and how to come together even when you feel like you’re not supposed to. And in a great finish to the story, the bands from Pike Central and from Martin County will be playing together for the state tournament side by side.

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 @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet. 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 Supper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The CAFE team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Sean Walsh, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.