(theme music playing) GRAHAM: Good evening everyone, and welcome to "P&P Live" I'm Brad Graham, the co-owner of Politics and Prose along with my wife, Lissa Muscatine.

And here with us this evening is, uh, George Packer to talk with journalist, Frank Foer, about George's new book, "Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal".

Uh, many of you watching are, I'm sure, familiar with George's accomplished work as an author, playwright, and journalist previously for "The New Yorker" and more recently for "The Atlantic".

In his non-fiction books, he's taken on big subjects.

In "Last Best Hope", uh, George, um, uh, meditates on America's divisions, its current instability and what he argues has been the loss here of the art of self-government.

He observes that most of us still want democracy, and he makes a passionate appeal for both creating the conditions for greater equality and practicing the art of self-government.

George will be in conversation with Frank Foer, also a staff writer at "The Atlantic" and most importantly to us here at P&P, a devoted longtime patron of the store.

He's also the author of several books including "How Soccer Explains the World" and "Jewish Jocks" and most recently "World Without Mind" an incisive critique of present day technology.

So, uh, George and, uh, and Frank, take it away.

FOER: Hey, George.

PACKER: Hey, Frank, and Bradley, thank you so much.

FOER: I should just disclose that, uh, you know, I, I talked with you as this book, uh, was kind of unfolding in your head and unfolding on the page.

And, um, you know, as I read this book, I mean, there's so much of, about it that is just this incredible achievement where you've taken, you know, I think we you first told me about this book in maybe November and I, and I don't know when it, the idea percolated, how, how, how much, uh, how much, uh, uh, further back it started percolating in your mind.

But when you read the book, I mean, one of the things that's so incredible about it is that you've done, you've taken events in real time and kind of turned them both into a narrative history of, of this past year that we, we experienced, uh, so, uh, so painfully.

And then you've, you've tried to kind of point the way forward.

You've deployed history and political, um, political, uh, theory to, to kind of, uh, to try to find a way out of this.

And I know that when the prose kind of appears on the page, it has this kind of, this commanding quality.

Um, there's so much craft, the prose is so muscular.

And yet I also know just kind of, uh, through the privileged position of being your friend that kind of it wasn't as if you set out with this clear sense of where it was going, going to land.

So, could you just describe, uh, what it was that you initially set out to atten, that you intended to produce with this book?

What were you trying to do and, um, what was it that you learned as you wrote your way through and you thought your way through the crisis that we're in?

PACKER: That's, uh, a really deep question, Frank, and does betray privileged knowledge which is absolutely good, uh, 'cause we're gonna have a really open and, um, personal conversation about this.

This book came out of dread, despair, a desire for some hope.

The year 2020 was the worst year, um, that I can remember.

I was a kid in 1968 but it didn't affect me in the way that 2020 affected me as an adult, as a parent, as a citizen, as a writer.

Um, so for years I've been thinking and writing about the decay of our democratic institutions, about the divisions between classes and races and regions, um, and the, uh, it, the, the way in which the country seemed to be slowly, slowly deteriorating.

We were on a long arc of decline, really I would say from about 9/11, 2001 onward.

I, I think looking back at, as we approach the 20th anniversary, that seems like the point where, um, a pretty dramatic decline began.

2020 was this shock that forced us to see the degree of the decline and how serious what I call, the underlying conditions, had become.

FOER: Mm-hmm.

PACKER: Um, whether it's economic inequality, racial injustice, governmental sclerosis, political polarization, and a general sort of sense of division and cynicism about a country that just left us with no collective identity and no collective ability to solve a problem as big as a pandemic.

So, tw, so, at first the book came out of just experiencing last year as a series of shocks that culminated with the election.

And I began writing just before election day really, with this sense of dread.

Are we gonna fall into violence?

Uh, if Trump loses, is he gonna try to stage a coup?

Will there be shooting in the streets?

A lot of people were buying guns and ammunition.

It seemed like we might be headed for real civil conflict.

January 6th was that conflict.

It was all of the nightmares kind of put together into one day.

Um, and yet we also came through.

The election succeeded.

More Americans voted than ever.

Uh, it was a smooth election.

There were hardly any glitches, except for the fact that the incumbent refused to accept the results and brought three-quarters of his party with him in that.

Um, so I guess the, the, the impulse was to understand the shocks and the conditions they exposed and then to try to find a way to turn them into a vision that could begin to, certainly not to heal our divisions overnight, or ever.

We're always gonna be divided.

But to make it possible for us to govern ourselves again.

That's sort of the key thing we've, that, that we lost, is the ability simply to govern ourselves.

So I looked back into history while I was beginning to write and read a lot of Tocqueville and Walt Whitman and, uh, Frances Perkins, the Labor Secretary under Roosevelt, Bayard Rustin, the great civil rights figure.

Um, Walter Lippmann, the progressive thinker, just for both inspiration and kind of ideas.

How did they solve, or get through, near-death experiences at least as great as the one that we've been going through?

Civil War, Great Depression, '60s.

Um, I didn't have an answer when I began so this was a high wire act.

An essay really is a test of sort of the mind of the author working through a subject without a fixed idea or a, a fixed destination.

And the drama of an essay is watching this writer work through and try to arrive at some kind of resolution, um, and you can fail spectacularly.

It's like you alone on the stage in a, in a book like this.

There isn't a lot of reporting and research behind it.

It's not that kind of book.

It's a COVID book.

I was trapped inside my room with my thoughts.

And I thought, okay.

Let's take advantage of this necessity and, um, try to set down whatever thoughts I can in order to see if there's a way to synthesize history with politics, with my own life, with our lives today, into some kind of vision that offers something other than the despair I was feeling through most of last year.

FOER: And it's so interesting you mention 9/11 and everything kind of going downhill from, from 9/11.

And I don't think you mention 9/11 in the book.

I could be, I, I, I, uh, I, I, I don't remember.

PACKER: Just a bit in passing, yeah.

FOER: Passing.

But, eh, I mean, when you, when you say that it kind of sets the narrative that you describe, um, that, that you write about the American condition into pretty stark relief because, uh, 9/11 was kind of peak national solidarity.

We were, it was a, it was, it was a moment that was kind of unlike the pandemic.

You describe how the pandemic was this condition that kind of was, was for a week or two gonna tie us together in our solitude but it ended up being the moment where we kind of pulled further apart from one or, from one another.

Whereas, 9/11 for this kind of, for a year to two did have that kind of, that sense of national solidarity.

Um, and then you describe how, um, I mean, the, the core of the problem that you're describing is the inability of Americans to coexist, right?

That that is the thing that, that most threatens our democracy.

And you describe how we've kind of broken into, um, four, four different Americas, four different tribes, and it strikes me that you couldn't have identified those tribes in two, in, in, in, in 2001.

That, like, that, that America kind of, um, came unglued in this, the, the kind of the two decades that followed.

Um, and it, so what, what happened?

PACKER: Well, I, I would put the time frame of unity after 9/11 a little shorter.

FOER: Yeah.

PACKER: Um, maybe a few months.

Uh, and then it became more coerced and fearful than, um, willing and.

FOER: Right.

PACKER: A, a and generous.

But absolutely the attacks, uh, brought out a spontaneous and overwhelming feeling of togetherness in many, if not most, Americans.

And I thought the pandemic, because we're all human and therefore we were all subject to it, it was the most unifying threat, uh, that humanity can face other than maybe climate change.

And yet, it found a way th, into every seam in our body politic.

Every division, every, uh, competing or conflicting idea about what we should do and who we are whether it's political parties or, uh, it, it hit certain ethnic groups harder than others, it hit certain classes harder than others.

We divided by region in how we responded to it.

9/11 took longer and was a kind of slow motion disillusionment, I'd say.

Certainly, um, I talk about the Iraq War a fair amount in the book, in, in, in one passage where I describe how the Iraq War and the financial crisis together were these two massive elite failures.

FOER: Mm-hmm.

PACKER: That left the ordinary Americans holding the bag.

Whether they were military in Iraq and Afghanistan sent to fight wars that turned out to be unwinnable, um, and in the case of Iraq, unnecessary, or the financial crisis where people lost their homes, their jobs, their retirement accounts.

Um, and bankers got away free and kept their jobs and kept their fortunes.

And it, it, those two things made so specially I think younger Americans profoundly cynical about the two parties.

FOER: Mm-hmm.

PACKER: The elites who control them.

The media which seemed to have deceived them about things, banks and corporations, all the big institutions came under, uh, a lot of suspicion and have never regained their authority I'd say since the, those two big, uh, shocks of Iraq and the financial crisis.

So I don't know why I didn't put it together in writing the book that this is a 20 year period.

Maybe there was too much going on last year for me to look ahead to the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and to think, "Ah."

In a way, the shock of 9/11 and the shock of the pandemic are like bookends, um, on a period of continual shocks that broke down our sense of, of both our own competence and ability to lead and to govern ourselves and also our sense of belonging to the same country, uh, as our fellow citizens.

FOER: Right, well that dissolution that you're describing of, um, I mean, it, "The Unwinding" if you will, of like a certain, um, of, of kind of a com, it's, it's an unwinding of a common reality, right?

That, that when you describe, um, the problem, you're not describing div, you're not describing divisions among ethnic groups, uh, you're not describing class divisions although those are both overlaid into, um, your, your taxonomy of America, but what you're describing is essentially four narratives about who we are.

Uh.. PACKER: Right.

That, that's an important point.

I wanna add to that before you ask a question.

This, my taxonomy is not an ethnography.

It's not a portrait of all the groups of America.

It's a, an analysis of the four dominant narratives of the last, say, 40 years.

So by definition, they're the dominant narratives.

They leave people out.

They leave out the experience of a lot of people.

And I hope at the end of the book I sketch my own tentative fifth narrative that includes the people left out by those four.

So it isn't an attempt to portray America.

"The Unwinding" was more of that through different characters and stories and regions.

This is an analysis of the, the four leading ways our politics and culture have been construed in our adult lives.

FOER: Well so, just focus on the, the use of the term, narrative, to describe these divisions.

I mean, why, why narrative and what does it reveal about us that, um, like, the, that what divides us can most, um, aggressively are our narratives?

PACKER: Right.

I, I draw this phrase, moral identity, from, uh, the philosopher, Richard Rorty, uh, who talks about how in, in our history and any country's history there's always competing versions of what the country is about, what it should aim to be, what it should strive for.

There's never one.

We've never had consensus.

Uh, it's always conflict among these competing versions of what the country should be.

Um, in my earlier life in the '60s and early '70s, there were two fairly clear ones.

The Democratic party stood for the fair shake.

The Republican party stood for getting ahead.

One was about social solidarity and one was about individual, uh, aspiration.

And even if that's a bit schematic, I think most Americans could sort of identify with one party or the other especially after the Democratic party gave up its commitment to Jim Crow and, uh, embraced the Civil Rights Movement.

Um, obviously a lot of people are, still feel marginalized in that America.

But those two parties were the, the reigning choices of moral identity and that can, that was really throughout most of the 20th Century until I would say the '70s when things really changed.

And since the '70s those narratives have fractured, um, and in the book I describe the four ways in which they fractured.

The first and really the most influential in our time has been what I call Free America which is the, um, anti-government, pro-business, anti-tax, anti-regulation America of Ronald Reagan which kinda set the terms for politics really for 30 or 40 years, maybe until the Joe Biden era.

Um, it's the orthodoxy of the Republican party.

Um, and it promised that as if we would get government out of our lives, our lives would be more free and more prosperous.

The freedom it offered was a freedom, uh, uh, to be free of, of obstacles.

FOER: Mm-hmm.

PACKER: A kind of negative what, as Abraham Lincoln calls negative liberty.

Freedom from things, from constraints.

It did free, uh, people up economically, but it did not create prosperity or at least it created a really warped prosperity with a lot of it flowing to the top, a new plutocracy, a new gilded age, um, corporate monopolies consolidating, uh, and crushing smaller businesses.

And the working class and especially labor unions, um, gradually withering away and the industrial working class becoming the, the class, the working class of the service economy without, um, without benefits, without a union, without, uh, stability, and really without status.

They be, the working class became a kind of under-class in the economy of Free America.

So whole regions hollowed out.

This is a lot of what "The Unwinding" was about.

Um, and by 2008, Free America's promises were broken and something new would have to take its place because it couldn't, it kept repeating the same mantra like a cargo cult without showering the gifts upon the, the populace.

The second narrative, and it follows chronologically as well, is Smart America which I think of as the America of the Clintons, of the professionals, the, the credentialed meritocrats who went to the best colleges and entered the professions and really are the maybe the biggest success story of, of this period because they become this powerful influential class that benefits from all the things of modern life, um, both culturally, with health, with the arts, uh, and with, um, economic stability.

And have become in a sense a, a new aristocracy because although meritocracy implies you rise as far as your talents can take you.

Um, in our case, it has hardened into a class into which you're born so that your ticket is punched really depending on what family you're born into and they're gonna do what they have to, to make sure you stay within that class and it's passed on to your children.

PACKER: So Smart America begins with a kind of wonderful vision of openness and, and fluidity and diversity and, and everyone is welcome to get an education and succeed.

But it really ends with, um, uh, a kind of new class system that is, breeds resentment among those who can't make it in.

The third is the rebellion against Free America.

And I call it Real America which is a phrase Sarah Palin used in 2008.

It, she meant the, the white Christian heartland.

She meant the, the Americans that she said who make, who raise our food and fight our wars and are good, patriotic Americans.

We know who she meant.

She meant the people, except the people construed as white, small town rural Christian.

That led straight to Trump.

And Real America, I think is the, the narrative of the Trump years.

It's nativist, it's xenophobic, it's racist, and in many cases, and it, um, it sees the country as threatened by non-Real Americans, whether they're foreigners, non-white Americans, or elites like us on the coasts.

It's a rebellion against Free America and in a way it took over the base of the Republican party even while the orthodoxy of Free America continued to dominate the upper levels of the, of the party, the elites.

PACKER: And then finally, Just America, which is maybe the, one of the most potent today and has emerged really dramatically in the last few years I think of it as a generational revolt against Smart America by the next generation, the Millennials, against the Meritocracy whose promises turned out to be sort of hollow and which had a, a vision of our incremental perfection that is false.

Just America doesn't see us as an ever-improving democracy with imperfections that we're constantly weeding out which was sorta Barack Obama's version of America.

No, Just America sees us as a, a hierarchical society in which certain groups oppress other groups and always have and may, and maybe always will.

And it's the burden of Americans today to expose that relentlessly in order to get rid of the illusion that we're actually, uh, a more perf, a more perfect union, or on the way to being a more perfect union.

It's a rebellion from below against the, um, Smart America.

So there's two groups on either side of the political divide in conflict with each other.

Free and Real on one side, Smart and Just on the other.

Um, this leaves out a lot of people, but these are the ones that I think have seized the political and cultural, uh, microphone and dominate right now.

FOER: Is it fair to say, so, um, Free America and Smart America were kind of grounded in classical liberalism?

Like, you know, you talk about similarities that both are capitalists, kind of at their core they both champion certain ideas of, of freedom.

Um, and then the successor ideology is to those which are kind of replacing them over time.

Real America and Smart Amer and Just America, in some ways have, um, have, have rejected classical liberalism and that's what makes it so hard for our politics to kind of contain them and that's the challenge that they both pose to democracy?

Is that... PACKER: Yes.

You're absolutely right.

Whether they're philosophically, uh, aware of it, self-conscious about it, or whether it's simply the instincts.

There's a great line from D. H. Lawrence.

"The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next."

And in a, in a way, certain ideas, um, some of them in, you know, academic, and others more just in the air, uh, have become instincts for younger Americans and they are exactly as you say.

To, to distrust or even reject the enlightenment values that you and I grew up just taking for granted.

Uh, individual freedom and equality.

Um, objectivity and science and reason, as supreme values.

Uh, a suspicious of, um, of authority and of ideas that are, that depend on the authority of your identity or the authority of your skin color, or the authority of, um, or simply power.

Uh, we, we grew up believing that ideas were more powerful than power itself, that ideas in the, in a, in a democratic world would compete and lead us to a better place because we, you know, people would have to listen to one another and bad ideas or ideas that failed would be rejected.

Um, it's pluralist.

It says there's lots of different ideas and no single one has a monopoly on the truth.

Um, and it's ameliorist.

It believes that we're getting better, that we can improve, that the human mind is capable of, um, of guiding human destiny.

And I'd say you're right that Real and Just America both are very suspicious of, if not outright hostile to those liberal values.

They both have illiberal strains in them.

Trump is nothing but illiberal, obviously.

He rejects all of the, the values of the enlightenment, um, and of democracy.

It's kind of shocking that someone got as far as he did essentially by trashing democracy on a daily basis.

It's shocking 'cause we had assumed that democracy was the, the bottom line, the sine qua non.

But it, it actually is much more fragile and up for grabs than I ever imagined.

Um, and Just America in its way is also has an illiberal strain in insisting on an absolute moral clarity about good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust.

And an in, intolerance for certain kinds of, um, of, of questioning and of nuance and complexity.

It doesn't really want, it doesn't embrace complexity.

It embraces a simple view and is suspicious of talk of progress, um, and of talk of equality.

It's replaced the word equality with the word equity which has a very different meaning.

So someone of our, I'm a bit older than you, Frank.

Maybe I should speak for myself, not you.

But someone of my generation really has to try hard to understand where these new narratives come from.

They must come from a failure that my generation is part of.

Um, but I also wanna resist them 'cause I, as much as I believe in radical reform in this country, there's certain values that I can't give up on.

FOER: Well just, I mean, on that point, I think it's worth just dwelling a beat longer because I mean there are certain similarities to kind of your narrative and the Just America narrative, right?

That it's, it's not, there's clearly a gulf but that, you know, when you, when, when, uh, you talk about the role that race has had in the, in American history and kind of who we are today, um, you, you argue that it's kind an, it's, it's almost an in, inescapable real part of that reality.

PACKER: It is.

It is, yeah.

FOER: That it is, right?

PACKER: Yeah.

FOER: And that's not that far apart from talking about white supremacy and systemic racism.

So just, just delineate the gulf that separates your view.

PACKER: Right.

FOER: From the Just America view.

PACKER: I'll give you an example.

Maybe it's better to be concrete.

So not too long ago, um, the editor of "The Journal of the American Medical Association" was essentially canceled.

He was forced out of his position, not for anything he had said or done, but because on the JAMA podcast, someone else, one of their guests had questioned, or had suggested that socioeconomic factors are more important in, uh, keeping people disadvantaged or oppressed than structural racism.

FOER: Mm-hmm.

PACKER: So this, this line of thought got both the guests and the editor pushed out of JAMA, um, and to me, that's a, that's a red line because this is a question.

It's not, there, there's not absolute answer to that.

It's a legitimate question, how to weigh class versus race, socioeconomics versus structural racism and bias and the legacy of slavery and segregation.

It's not a, it's not answered.

It's a question.

And if we can't ask the question and discuss it, first of all, we've really shut down the ability to exchange ideas in a liberal society.

And second, we're not gonna get to the right answers because people are afraid to speak, they're afraid of citing any data that might get them into trouble.

I see this all over the place these days.

Um, they're afraid of Twitter.

Uh, terrified of Twitter.

So that's an atmosphere that I don't like and that I don't wanna live in.

If Just America were about exploring the past, bringing up the buried past like the Tulsa Massacre which Biden went to speak about, uh, couple, a couple of weeks ago which I thought was a great thing.

Um, making Juneteenth a national holiday as the Senate seems ready to do, um, and using all the tools of government to create more equality in this country, um, to close the wealth gap, to close the education gap, then I would be a Just American without any question.

But I see it taking a different turn toward, uh, the regulation of speech and thought toward a kinda monolithic group think that sees us entirely as members of identity groups rather than as individuals in an increasingly fluid and mixed society where those identity groups might have less and less relevance than they've ever had before.

Then it's neither philosophically nor politically nor in terms of actual results going to succeed.

Um, and, uh, so I think it's taken a, a turn down a blind alley that I, I really regret 'cause I want it to be the movement for justice that we need in this country and, um, and I, in my book I go back into the history of three figures who I think had ideas about social change that we can learn from because they don't make those mistakes.

They have a more generous, a more capacious, a more liberal, um, approach to seeking justice.

FOER: Is, so this phrase, the art of, of, uh, self-government which is the thing that you, you kind of, you, you yearn for.

Um, did that exist when, I mean, you, you know, in any, at any point in your life do you feel like Americans practiced the art of self-government successfully?

And, and, and, and, and, and, like, as you answer that, try to just elucidate.

PACKER: Yeah.

FOER: What it is and, you know, as I listen to you, like, in the emphasis on liberalism, I wonder, is the art of self-government just being kind of somebody who holds liberal values and practices them.

PACKER: Mm.

FOER: In democratic life?

PACKER: Well if by that we mean philosophically liberal.

FOER: Yeah.

PACKER: Um, I think, yeah.

I think liberalism and self-government are inextricable.

Any, any effort at self-government that gets rid of liberalism, that imposes, um, fixed ideas and authority and erases the individual and erases the, um, the, the ability to, to, to think freely and to experiment with thought and to try to arrive at solutions through that experiment, that's, that is not gonna stay a democracy.

It's gonna become an authoritarian country and, in some ways, that began to happen under Trump.

Like, so any time you look at the past you risk a really dangerous kinda nostalgia.

Um, for example, let's take the year 1968.

A lot of bad things happened that year and a lot had been going on in America that was bad throughout our history which '68, in some ways, was like a explosion coming at, at the end of it, especially racism, um, segregation, injustice.

But that year, two bills were passed by Congress, one for gun control and one for fair housing, that were probably the last acts of the Great Society and of, maybe even of, um, liberal politics until the Affordable Care Act.

Um, they passed with massive bipartisan support.

So what was it about that time that meant that every important bill had bipartisan support, including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act?

Um, obviously Republicans began to play the race card at, with a Southern strategy around this time.

But still, if you look at the votes in Congress, it's kinda remarkable how much cooperation there was.

It was kind of like a matter of course.

They didn't see any benefit as politicians in going on TV and simply trashing the other side and owning the Libs.

Um, something has changed since then.

Something in our media culture, something in our political culture, where now to get ahead in politics and in media, you establish a brand, you, your brand is about you not an institution and not a cause, and you play it for all its worth.

You almost always, by, um, finding your crowd who's on your side and making them happy by going after a different crowd and, uh, or a different, uh, so a member of a different crowd, that's just one example of how we've lost this ability to listen to each other, to argue without having to kill each other, to treat each other like human beings even with profound disagreements.

Um, that doesn't mean Joe Biden shaking hands with Strom Thurmond.

I'm not talking about overlooking the profound evils that were happening at that time and that are happening at this time.

I just mean an ability to, um, see that we do have some common destiny and therefore, that we have to actually live with each other.

I think a lot of Americans no longer feel like they can live with each other.

So they've separated into, in, into separate neighborhoods and separate, uh, parties, separate, um, separate mental worlds, the separate Twitter, uh, followings that don't allow for any, um, yeah, for, for, for that cross-pollination that I think is part of self-government.

FOER: You know, one thing I, I thought of, I mean, there's the, eh, I guess maybe, um, there's so many ways in which what you've described is bleak.

We're at this, the, and, and we feel this all the time, this sense that we live in distinct realities and that they've become something unbridgeable about that.

But still, you know, uh, when you compare America to other countries, um, I mean, I guess it's maybe kind of, um, fitting that so many of our differences would kind of fit into this kind of, the realm of ideas, uh, as opposed to, um, kind of class warfare or racial or, or, you know, or ethnic, uh, uh, warfare.

PACKER: Mm.

FOER: Does it give you hope at some level that if the problem is one of ideas, ideas at least mutable, right?

That ideas, ideas.

PACKER: Yeah, yeah.

FOER: People can be persuaded.

There can be alternatives offered.

There are ways to find, um, uh, kind of overlaps between different ideas that allow for coexistence.

PACKER: Right.

That's a great point.

I mean, if race or religion or education or income are destiny, then we're doomed.

Because we're fixed in one group, eh, set against the other groups.

Um, but Whitman said that the thing that really holds America together is neither pecuniary interests nor, um, material pursuit, but the fervent and tremendous idea.

And what is that idea?

I mean, for Whitman, it really was the idea of equal citizens governing themselves.

So in my book, the two key terms are equality and self-government.

Why equality?

First of all, it's the first important word in the Declaration of Independence.

It is not just an ideal but a passion.

This is Tocqueville who noted that the thing that really identifies Americans as different from Europeans is our passion for equality, our desire, insatiable, ardent, he called it.

To be equal, to get to do what others do, to be on the same level, to have the same opportunities.

It doesn't mean equal results because that's, can never be in a free society.

But certainly not to be born and die in a permanently subordinate class.

FOER: Mm-hmm.

PACKER: Obviously at Tocqueville's time, there was a permanently subordinate class.

In fact, there were several.

Um, there were black Americans, there were women, and there were others.

That doesn't mean the passion wasn't real.

It just means it wasn't realized for everyone.

And I think in some ways our history has been a series of conflicts over equality.

And what I see as at the root of so many of our divisions today and of the fracturing into these four narratives, is the fact that we've been unable to make our multi-everything democracy here in the 20th, 21st Century, an equal America, an America in which there really is equal opportunity, equal status for groups whether across racial lines, across class lines.

Um, and it's been, we've been growing more unequal for years and years now.

And it has created a kind of bitter competition for status and for resources that has, has driven us apart.

So I think my answer, you know, as tentative as it is, is two-fold.

One, we have to create conditions of equality.

Mostly through government intervention, by breaking up monopolies, by empowering workers, by rebuilding the safety net.

Um, by making education more equal instead of, uh, so just massively unequal that your zip code determines your fate.

But on the other hand, we also have to acquire the art of self-government.

To learn again how to come together and solve problems as a free people.

Those two are connected because I think without that move toward equality, we don't feel like common, you know, equal citizens and so we lose the art of self-government.

Um, and I think with material conditions moving us closer to equality, we would also be able, we wouldn't agree on things, but we would, the temperature would go down.

It wouldn't be so vitriolic.

We would be able to listen a little bit better and to maybe begin to, to act together in the face of something as big as a pandemic.

FOER: One of the things I appreciate in the book is that Trump, while like a figure in the, a figure in the narrative, someone you skewer, um, thoroughly and, uh, delightfully, it, he does, he looms over it, but he's not the central character in the story.

Um, but one of the great hopes that I think a lot of people had is that Trump's disappearance from the scene would cause the culture to, to heal, that there'd be this reversion to a pre-Trumpian status quo, things would be better.

And, um, you know, I, I just wanna get your sense of kinda where we're at.

One of, and I, I just wanted to add one other thing.

PACKER: Yeah.

FOER: Uh, which is that, uh, Biden, you have, we are own, we are our own last best hope.

I, I misquoted you there, um.

PACKER: That's, that is exactly what I wrote, yeah.

FOER: Okay.

That line, uh, was very similar to a line that Joe Biden used in a speech that he gave in March where he was talking about the pandemic which is that, he said the government is us.

PACKER: Mm-hmm.

FOER: And that felt to me, um, you know, like in some ways it was, it was, it was, it was channeling you.

It wasn't precisely you but it, I, I, I saw the overlap in, um, uh, your argument just, uh, the sense of, uh, the yearning for cohesion, yearning for national purpose, uh, through government.

So, where are we at now?

PACKER: Yeah.

Well, I think Trump's near disappearance from our heads has been a blessed relief.

It's made life a lot more sane just day-to-day.

I don't feel this sense of, um, dread and rage and pain and despair that I felt all those years.

And I think a lot of other Americans, too.

Even maybe some of his supporters 'cause he had them whipped up into a state of continual rage that was answerable.

It was never going to be solved because he didn't want it to be solved.

FOER: Right.

PACKER: He wanted it to stay burning hot.

So that has really lowered some of the, yeah, some of the pain level.

But he, it's magical thinking to, to imagine that he's, you know, his disappearance and maybe his non-campaign in two, 2024 is going to, um, be the, the bridge that, across which we can walk because the, the conflicts are still there.

They, they're still deep.

And the sources of them are still deep.

I think Joe Biden, whether by, and Frank, I wanna hear what you think 'cause you're the one writing a book about this but, Joe Biden, um, by some quirk of history turns out to be the president we really needed.

He doesn't belong to any of the four narratives.

I think he is almost bolder than those narratives.

He reminds me of the Truman years, the years of the labor business consensus or of, you know, the strength of the labor movement.

Or the Roosevelt years where government was on the side of the common people.

That's Biden's outlook and he is through his policies and maybe more because his policies are having a hard time, but through his rhetoric and his example, he is bringing Equal America which is my narrative, my attempt at a, at a better vision.

He's bringing it a little closer to reality.

I think he wants to make people's lives better, materially better, safer, stabler, less of a battle for survival, um, through government intervention in their lives.

And he also wants to make our rhetoric, our public discourse, um, more respectful, more human, less like Twitter.

I doubt if he looks at Twitter, and I hope he doesn't.

Um, so Biden, you know, uh, I, I want him to survive and succeed and it's a battle every day in Washington and we get riveted to the, the filibuster and to, um, obstructionism et cetera, which are all hugely important.

But I think he's at least pointed in the right direction.

He's showing us a way that it could be better and he is, he, he doesn't use the phrase, Equal America, but I think that's what he stands for.

FOER: I think it's interesting that you described, um, the problem, uh, you, the alternatives on the table as being we can kind of conquer one it, we can conquer the other side or essentially resign ourselves to, uh, the dissolution of the republic.

And I think that he, he represents, uh, neither side of that table.

Like, he has not gone for th, the idea of trying to conquer the other side.

He's somebody who believes in persuasion.

And I think that he's tried to find ways to, um, uh, to acknowledge some of the narratives that you've described without, um, and to kind of borrow from, borrow from maybe the best of them, um, but he doesn't, he's not of either of these, any of the tribes that you mention.

PACKER: Yeah.

And, and I think there's a real limit to persuasion right now.

I don't think that most people are simply open to hearing the other side and then thinking soberly about it and maybe being brought around.

We're too dug in.

But I do think dir, you know, direct, you know, exhorting, berating, uh, you know, pounding on it is not going to change much.

But changing material conditions and just the kind of language that's in the air, the discourse, those can slowly bring us around in a way that giving a single speech, um, that says this is the right way, and this is the wrong way, will, will, will not do because most people right now are not capable of being persuaded.

FOER: So let's run through some of these questions.

Um, Robert asks, "Your idea of resurrecting a more equal America sounds like the European idea of social democracy.

Most social, social democratic parties in Europe are doing very poorly at the ballot box.

Uh, how could this be sold to the American voter in a more successful way compared to the problems that European political parties experience?"

PACKER: Absolutely right.

Um, French socialists, the Labor Party in Britain, the German Social Democrats, they're all doing badly.

Um, and they're doing badly partly because, um, they seem to represent sclerotic, um, ossified failed institutions, the establishment in those countries, and they don't seem to have an answer for economic stagnation and decline.

Um, and also because of identity politics.

Some of the same things that we, uh, that plague us.

Um, the yellow vests are great example of identity politics in France.

Um, pounding on the, the walls of the establishment.

I think in this country it's a bit different because there is a Democratic party that seems like a decayed establishment party.

And that might have been why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.

But the critique of, or the, the, the, the narrative that says we suffer from too much inequality, our corporations are too powerful, the rich don't pay enough in taxes, um, workers need more power, those are popular positions.

Those are not associated with a corrupt and discredited establishment.

Those are positions that a lot of Americans support across party lines.

Um, and across class lines.

They're issues on which, for example, a white and non-white working class can find some common ground.

So I think if politicians are able to find that language, which is more of a populous language but not the kind of populism Trump perfected, um, it has a chance of, of taking hold here and not, not simply being identified with, uh, the elites who wanna tell you how to live your life or line their own pockets.

FOER: Uh, Krista asks, "It sounds like you're suggesting that Just America is too dogmatic.

What are some ways we can encourage less dogmatism among Just America without compromising commitment to social justice?"

PACKER: Uh, that's a great question.

I mean I find that frontal attacks, criticism, um, usually doesn't work.

People, um, feel, you know, attacked, maybe misunderstood, um, and, and misunderstand in turn.

So simply shaking a finger at young Americans and saying, "You need to get back in touch with your fathers' and mothers' liberal values," is not, is not gonna do it.

It's a bit like the '60s.

I mean in a way, don't you think, Frank, the Boomers and the Millennials have a lot more in common than either of them wants to, to see?

Um, they each are these big influential generations that kinda thought they were remaking the world and that the old people needed to get outta the way.

So we have been through this before.

Um, I think maybe one way is simply to, as we say, center voices that don't, um, follow the patterns we expect each group to have.

There are lots and lots of Americans who, whose identities vary, um, and who hold views that seem at odds with what we media elites expect them to think.

For example, uh, in New York City right now there's a big mayor's race going on and there's also a, a crime wave as there, as there is in most American cities.

The crime wave is hitting black neighborhoods hardest and Latino neighborhoods hardest.

Black and Latino voters who some Just Americans imagine are entirely progressive on issues like crime or education, um, don't want defunding.

They certainly want reform, but they have rejected defunding and seem to be supporting the most pro-police candidate in the race, Eric Adams.

Um, on education, the majority don't want to see standardized tests abolished.

They don't wanna see, um, the specialized high schools, um, erased and, and simply have equity be the only standard for admission.

Um, they may want better schools, certainly better elementary schools which is where the problem, which is truly, uh, a blight, the problem of racially unfair education begins in elementary school.

But getting rid of tests is not a popular way to get rid of, um, racial disparities in education.

So maybe just to remind people that not everyone of a certain group thinks the same.

And not everyone thinks the same as you.

FOER: I think one thing that, uh, that you model, in your book, uh, which is that, um, you take something like Critical Race Theory which, um, you know, has become the subject of attacks from, from Republican politicians, and gets critiqued by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're talking about.

Critical Race Theory is synonymous with every diversity program, with Juneteenth, celebrating Juneteenth, with, with whatever.

It's just everything that they don't like.

PACKER: Everything, everything they don't like, yeah.

FOER: And I think it's, it's actually important, especially as kind of, um, you know, oldsters to kind of to, to actually try to understand and engage.

And this is what you, you preach for both, uh, for, for Real America and for Just America, and I think that you, you model in the book is that you need to try to understand more deeply because that is the, that is what the liberal temperament and the act, the art of self-government demands.

PACKER: Yeah.

I hope you're right about the book.

That's, uh, that's high praise.

I mean, I know that my own character can be prone to not listening, to making a quick judgment if something rubs me the wrong way, or even seems like its personally attacking me.

We're, I think we're all a bit that way.

FOER: Of course.

PACKER: It's really important to absorb the personal attack or the thing that offends my values or my sense of how things should be, and then set it aside.

Take it in.

You're gonna feel it.

But then set it aside because if you can't, to some degree, I mean, Obama gave a series of speeches about this at the very end of his presidency that were somewhat overlooked.

You can't live inside someone else's skin for a little bit and see the world through their eyes.

Um, and he's said that to every audience, black students at Howard University, white police officers in Dallas, I think.

No matter what audience, he told them you have to be able to live inside the skin of people who are not like you long enough to see the world as they see it and then you might begin to understand even if you still don't agree.

That's liberalism.

I mean, he's, he was modeling liberalism maybe better than any figure of our lifetime it's just that we didn't maybe have it in us to, um, to hear him or to follow his example.

But I hope my book makes a contribution to, to the same effort.

GRAHAM: Thank you, Frank.

Great, great moderating and, and George, um, your, your four narratives about America are such a useful construct for, for understanding where we are today.

And hopefully will help us figure out how to, uh, to get to a better place and, and arrive at a, at a more Equal America.

Uh, you know, we, we each made different uses of the isolation and disruption of the, of the pandemic, uh, but you clearly were very thoughtful and productive during your time, uh, hiding from the virus.

So, it's, um, you know, glad to see that, uh, the crisis didn't leave you with writer's block.

PACKER: It was a way to avoid going insane, Bradley.

GRAHAM: Right.

PACKER: Frank, thank you for great questions and for being such a good friend and reader and, uh, comrade of mine.

FOER: Thank you for, uh, helping make sense of the most flummoxing, painful year in, uh, in such a, in such a brilliant and human way.

GRAHAM: From all of here at Politics and Prose, stay well and well read.

NARRATOR: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose book store locations or online at politics-prose.com.

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