George Packer discusses his newest reporting on Donald Trump and American politics.
Democrats have veered into identification politics and away from the pursuits of the working class. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, George Packer joins Jeffrey Goldberg to debate his latest reporting on the Democratic Get together’s illusions and the way forward for American politics.
Donald Trump’s reelection ought to put an finish to 2 progressive illusions, Packer defined final evening: The primary of those illusions is the notion that identification is political future; the second is the speculation that the Democratic Get together has been saved out of energy by a white Republican minority thwarting the favored will by way of means similar to voter suppression or gerrymandering.
“The Democratic Get together has turn out to be the celebration of multinational, of established order, of the establishments,” Packer stated. The celebration has come to prepare itself beneath a framework that the “most simple identification of a citizen is group identification based mostly on race, gender, sexuality.” However in doing so, they’ve “misplaced a lot of abnormal Individuals who don’t see themselves primarily in these phrases, who’re principally working-class … and who was the spine of the Democratic Get together.”
In the meantime, as with the drift of the working class away from Democrats and in direction of Republicans, the nation’s more and more isolationist international stance has additionally been constructing. “We aren’t the unipolar energy that we had been after the top of the Chilly Battle,” Packer stated. “We stood for a sure order, a sure set of values, a sure liberal view of the world, and I believe that would collapse in a short time beneath Trump as a result of he doesn’t imagine in it—in actual fact, he needs to destroy it, and so do the individuals he’s placing into key positions.”
Packer discusses this, in addition to his reporting on conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in Phoenix, Arizona, the nation’s fastest-growing metropolis, with the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Watch the total episode right here.