Offline with Jon Favreau - What Comes After Trump?

Episode Date: December 20, 2025

What does 21st century authoritarianism look like in the United States? Author and Atlantic staff writer George Packer joins Offline to talk about America’s zombie democracy, who could be the most dangerous MAGA heir, and how Democrats should be fighting for the country. For our last episode of 2025, George and Jon connect the dots between Trump, polarization, oligarchs, AI, social media, Charlie Kirk and more.   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity, the company that bought land on the U.S. Mexico border to stop Trump's wall, sued Elon Musk for $15 million for trespassing on that land, used profits from red states to fund abortion access, and paid people to give a shit about the 2024 election. Did they really? I was going to say, first I thought that was a joke. How about that? Good for them. Cards Against Humanity is one of the only company stupid enough to stand up to Donald Trump. Pretty stupid right here. They don't profit from their political stunts. So if you want them to be able to be able to. to afford a good lawyer, consider buying one of their new games, like Cards Against Humanity Tales, a book of fill-in-the-blank stories

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to figure out how to buy their stuff. Anyway, Cards Against Humanity apologizes for interrupting your podcast with their bullshit. We're just this big, distracted, divided, commercially minded, busy, noisy country. And it takes a lot to break through the noise of our lives so that we can actually see clearly. I think there's a human temptation just to say, well, how bad can it. be. It's never happened before.

I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from our last offline guest of 2025, author and journalist George Packer. One of the big themes of the show this year has been the future of American democracy in a world where so many forces, technological and otherwise, have made it so much harder to sustain. And I couldn't think of a person who's written more eloquently and brilliantly about the topic than George Packer. He wrote a piece for The Atlantic a few months ago called America's Zombie Democracy that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. And he's returned to fiction with his latest book that's also about this topic, The Emergency. It's one of my favorite discussions we've had, but before we get to it, I want to set it up with some thoughts I had

about the year we just survived. In politics, as in life, things change gradually, then suddenly. Donald Trump began 2025 at the peak of his political strength. He was more popular than he'd ever been, more powerful than he'd ever been. No other president in recent memory has had such free reign to implement their vision for the country. Trump had a Republican Congress ready to do whatever he asked, a Supreme Court that had just granted him immunity, businesses, law firms, media outlets, and colleges that capitulated to his demands. He installed loyalists that gave him direct control of the military, law and foreign, enforcement and just about everything else. Trump got his tariffs, his big bill, his deportation

force with a budget the size of most armies. He still whines about Jerome Powell and a few court rulings he didn't like. But 2025 has been the golden age of Trumpism, MAGA in its purest form. And guess what? Most Americans don't like it. Most people don't think the president is doing a good job. They don't think he's doing a good job managing the economy. They don't think he's doing a good job managing the government or immigration or a relationship with the rest of the world? That's what most people tell pollsters. That's why most people voted against the president's party in this year's elections, including a not insignificant number of Trump voters. I'm not saying Trump is imploding in magazine shambles, even if our YouTube titles might suggest otherwise, but things are not going

great for them. Trump is still quite popular with Republicans, but the cracks are starting to show. The guy lost Marjorie Taylor Green. The House has revolted over everything from healthcare to the Epstein files. A bunch of state legislators in Indiana just told him to fuck off on redistricting. And it doesn't seem like he's losing sleep over any of it. He obviously cares a lot more about his home renovation projects than the debate over whether MAGA should make a play for the fans of Nick Fuentes and the I-Love Hitler group chat. And the president's certainly not interested in even acknowledging most people's biggest concern, let alone actually doing something to make life more affordable. Now, obviously, economic conditions could improve. People's feelings about their own financial

situation can change. What's much harder to change is Trump not really giving a shit. And even if he did, a year from now, the first 2028 presidential candidates will be preparing to launch their campaigns. And for the first time in more than a decade, Donald Trump won't be one of them. I'm not trying to get anyone too excited or even suggest that there's finally light at the end of the tunnel. We just don't know. We can't know. And right now, three more years with Trump in the White House feels like an eternity. I also worry that a politically weakened Trump will be a more dangerous Trump, that the potential for him to cause damage on a much bigger scale than we've seen so far is high. An unpopular American president still wields more power than anyone else on the planet.

But again, we don't know what will happen. What we do know is that, at least on the right, the debate about what comes after Trump has already begun. The early frontrunner, J.D. Vance, doesn't yet have a policy agenda or a campaign message, but he does have a very clear vision of America, based on the idea that for some of us to win, others have to lose. That here in one of the largest, wealthiest democracies on earth, life must be a kind of. constant battle over scarce resources, and that the people with the strongest claim on those resources are the people whose relatives have been here the longest. If you're not one of those people, you either have to leave or shut up and be thankful that you get to stay. And if you are

one of those people, you need a government that can protect you from different groups of outsiders who are always threatening to take and destroy what's rightfully yours. Stephen Miller said it best. America is for Americans and Americans only. What he left out is that the people who get to define what it means to be an American are the people who look and talk and think like him. Of course, this country was founded for the very purpose of breaking free from that kind of rigid hierarchy and zero-sum thinking. But almost 250 years later, Lincoln's argument that America is dedicated to the proposition that we're all created equal is far from settled. it never has been.

Generations of Americans have to keep making it and renewing it and fighting for it to be true. And if we're being honest, the Democratic Party hasn't done that in a very long time. Midterm elections are a referendum on the party in power, and it's very possible, even likely, that 2026 will turn on the simple question of whether or not people are happy with how Donald Trump and the Republicans are running Washington. It's also true that what people want most from their leaders right now is a recognition that living in America has become too hard and expensive. So Democrat should, of course, focus their campaigns and their policies on how to best change that. But there's a difference between supporting a policy proposal and believing that a politician can deliver on it.

And that reluctance to believe that a better country is still possible. That well-earned cynicism that's devolving into nihilism, especially among younger, Americans. That's at the core of what the Democrats who want to be president have to address. The Vance's and Millers who want to stay in power have their answer. Keep us in charge, go live your lives, and we'll protect people like you from people like them. So what's our answer? Why should people trust us to be in charge? What kind of country do we want to be? Over the last year, not many people have actually challenged Donald Trump to his face. There's the occasional tough question from the few real journalists who are still allowed to cover the administration.

He won't meet with many Democrats, and when he does, they either try to play nice or get brutally trolled after they leave the Oval. In this term, especially, he's surrounded by only the most sycophantic loyalists who tend to shield him from the reality that exists just outside the White House gates. And so the only sustained moment of confrontation that anyone has had with Trump all year took place on the day after he was inaugurated. It's when he and Vance and their families had to sit quietly at a prayer service in the National Cathedral and listen to a sermon from the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Reverend Marion Edgar Buddy. The coverage after the service focused on her final plea to the president, where she asked him to have mercy on the people in America who were scared by Trump's election,

especially immigrants, as well as gay, lesbian, and transgendered children. It was a plea that enraged the president and vice president. But they looked agitated and uncomfortable throughout the sermon, which was nothing more, in the words of Reverend Buddy, but a prayer for unity as a nation. She went on to say this. Unity is not partisan. Rather, unity is a way of being with one another,

that it encompasses and respects our differences that teaches us to hold multiple perspectives and life experiences as valid and worthy of respect that enables us in our communities and in the halls of power to genuinely care for one another even when we disagree. I'm a person of faith, surrounded by people of faith. And with God's help, I believe that unity in this country is possible. Not perfectly, for we are imperfect people and an imperfect union. But sufficient enough to keep us all believing in and working to realize the ideals of the United States of America, ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence with its assertion of innate human equality,

and dignity. Reverend Buddy is the one person all year who looked Trump and Vance in the eye and made the argument for that other America. The one that we've never fully realized, but never stopped fighting for either. And now, as we head into this experiment's 250th year, and let ourselves start to imagine

the end of the Trump era of American politics, my prayer is that we realize the only way to get to the other side is by confidently and courageously making that argument too. And now, for more about what that argument might sound like in 2026, here's my conversation with George Packer. George Packer, welcome to offline. Good to be with you, John.

So I'm a big fan of your writing, and I've wanted to have you on for a while because I'm constantly wrestling with questions about what America has become what we used to be, what we could be. And I feel like you always have something very smart and poignant to say about that. The piece that's really stayed with me recently is the one you wrote for the Atlantic back in September titled America's zombie democracy that begins with this sentence, we are living in an authoritarian state. For people who haven't read it, why do you think that? I just went through all the sort of boxes of things that could check the power of the

leader. So it's not authoritarian in the sense that we have jackbooted troops marching through the streets. The offices of the Atlantic are not being raided. Our computers aren't being smashed. So it doesn't look like what you might call 20th century authoritarianism. It looks more like 21st century authoritarianism, which is a sort of veneer of democracy and of freedom, but gradually an erosion of all the ways in which the citizenry and the institutions can check the power of the leader. And if you go through them, Congress, no, because the Republican Party has become a tool of cult of personality. And since September there's been a little movement on that and maybe we should talk about that, but only by comparison with the utter todeism that was

going on before. The Justice Department has become a tool of the president's own whims and grievances, doing favors for friends and punishing enemies. The military is becoming more and more partisan with speeches by the president and by Hegsef, treating the militaries if it's part of the Republican Party and part of the administration's political outlook. The courts, I mean, the lower courts have been fighting hard, but so far I don't see much. sign that the Supreme Court is willing to challenge the president on the really important cases that come before, the ones that have to do with executive power. And the public has been in some ways paralyzed. Again, I wrote this before the November elections and that

showed a sign of public dissatisfaction with the president and his party. But we don't see the kind of demonstrations and mass discontent that you would expect of Americans when they watch their 250-year-old democracy slowly or not so slowly erode. In fact, Trump has done in 10 months what it took Victor Orban 10 years to do in terms of co-opting media corporations, co-opting law firms, co-opting some, not all universities. Anyway, those are all the institutions that should be applying pressure on an out-of-control leader. And so far, at least, I think they've done a poor job of it if they've tried at all. So when I began to go through all that, I thought, this is what authoritarianism looks like.

We just have to get out of our heads the images we have from the 20th century because it's a different kind now. I've wrestled with this, you know, throughout the Trump era, especially last year and into this first year of the second Trump term, why do you think for most people who are not news and political junkies like you and I and probably a lot of the people listening to this, why doesn't it feel like we are living in an authoritarian state? And what is the value in trying to get people to feel like we're living in an authoritarian state as a way to alarm them into action? I think it doesn't feel like it because most Americans are lucky enough not to encounter it in their personal lives. Most Americans are not undocumented immigrants who might be swept up off the street or show up to a court appointment and get taken away by ICE.

Most Americans are not getting sued by the president because they're publishing things that he doesn't like. So it's, we're just this big, distracted, divided, commercially minded, busy, noisy country. And it takes a lot to break through the noise of our lives so that we can actually see clearly those things that I talked about a minute ago. If they're not hitting you in the face, I think this. a human temptation just to say, well, how bad can it be? It's never happened before. It's very hard to imagine something that has never happened happening. So you just assume the thing that has always happened will go on happening until it hits you in the face. And the, you know, high

electricity prices are not enough to tell people this is authoritarianism. That seems more like just maybe bad management or corporate malfeasance, and we're used to those. So we don't think that this is necessarily anything new. I mean, human beings just want to get along with their lives and not have to think too hard about these big abstractions called democracy, authoritarianism, rule of law institutions. It's just not the way we're wired unless that's our job like you and me. Well, to that point about, you know, rising electricity prices, the political advice is always to, you know, try to convince people that, in fact, he has managed the economy poorly, that their lives would be better materially if we threw out some of these Republicans and ultimately Donald Trump and had the other party back in power. and, you know, I've done enough focus groups myself, and you sit with people. Of course, people are not talking about threats to democracy.

They are talking about their financial struggles, and maybe the safety of their communities. Maybe there's some discussion about politics just being broken and awful and everyone's corrupt, right? That's as far as you get. And I understand that that advice to discuss people's economic well-being, and I do think it's the, it's the right political tactic. The stuff that keeps me up at night is what we were just talking about and what you've written about in your piece. And it's weird for me to think that, like, we are sliding into authoritarianism, but that

the way out of it is to just try to eke out an election based on talking to people about affordability. And I can't tell if the whole discussion about authoritarianism is something that those of us in politics and media talk about and worry about together, but doesn't necessarily matter beyond that to most people? I don't think it's quite that bleak. I mean, the No King's rallies, the last one, I guess it was mid-October,

drew something like seven million Americans to the streets, all over the country. And I happen to be visiting our son at a small town college, and this town couldn't have had more than, I don't know, 30,000 residents. And there must have been 3,000 people in the streets. So the fact that it's happening across the country, not just in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Chicago, tells me that there's a broad, it's not majority, but a broad popular unease that is enough to get 7 million people.

to come out on a Saturday, and who knows how many more they sort of speak for, but who aren't coming out. I don't want to overdo the, you know, we're just a herd of sheep who can't be bothered to pay any attention to the fact that the Constitution is being trashed on a daily basis. I don't think it's that bad, but it's very hard to know how to oppose it. What do you do? I've been asked that over and over. I'm sure you are too, John. What should we do? Aside from voting or, in my case, writing, in your case, writing and speaking, what should we do? And most people don't have a thing to do. There isn't a kind of clear structure or instrument that they can pick up in order to resist the erosion of democracy. It's too big for that. But as for whether the price of your electric bill and your groceries is the way to get elected,

it seems pretty clear that it is and your health care costs, which is about to become a much bigger one. Last year's presidential election sort of taught us that if one side is saying we have to save our democracy, a lot of people think, well, our democracy isn't working because of X, Y, and Z in my life. And it hasn't worked for a long time. So why is this the issue? Why should saving democracy be the thing I vote on when democracy hasn't done anything for me lately? So there's a kind of hollowness to the big abstract language we use that doesn't speak to the thing that is hitting someone on the most personal level. And the other side thinks that democracy is in danger too, weirdly enough. I mean, the polls showed that Trump supporters were just as concerned about democracy as Harris supporters. They were just concerned for the opposite reasons. So in itself, it just doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that if you're in the politics

business, which I'm not, you want to make your message because it just doesn't have a clear effect that's going to favor your candidate. Offline is brought you by Naked One. Wine between the kids and work in this podcast, I have very little time to prep for the holidays. Thankfully, a shipment from Naked Wines ticks off at least one thing on my to-do list. Yeah, drink while shopping. Naked Wines is a wine club that directly connects you to the world's best independent winemakers so you can get world-class wine delivered straight to your door.

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Yeah, I got to say. So look, there's a wine store down the street from her office that I used to go to all the time. And Hannah used to make fun of me because nine out of ten times she would hate whatever I bought. So like the hit rate, it's like not a guarantee. You're getting something you like. Naked wines, I brought home six, I think. I loved all of them. They were all great. It was like just hit after hit after hit. So highly recommend it. Whatever, whatever they're doing their algorithm, it's working. It's doing it. They're doing a great job. Naked wines has been around for 15 years and backs over 90 independent winemakers around the world to make the wine you love to drink. Now is the time to join the naked wines community. Head to Nakedwines.com slash offline. Click enter

voucher and put in my code offline for both the code and password for $100 off your first order. That's six bottles for only $39.99 with shipping included. That's $100 off your first six bottles at nakedwines.com slash offline and use the code and password offline for six bottles of wine for $39.99. Well, the point you just made about people feeling like, okay, well, democracy hasn't really been working for me, you know, has made me think of how we got to this place. And, you know, people have been saying some version of, you know, Trump is the symptom, not the cause for, you know, a decade now. And what would you identify as the cause of why people feel like democracy hasn't been working? And really, like, what made the world's oldest, wealthiest democracy

susceptible to authoritarianism? That is the big question. And I've been trying to figure it out for well over a decade. I wrote a book in 2013 called The Unwinding that it was kind of a big panoramic narrative rather than a polemic or an analysis. But it essentially showed a landscape on which someone like Trump was very thinkable. And a couple years later there he was because of the level of alienation, the cynicism about the elites, about business. business elites, government elites, media elites, the loneliness, the fact that Americans seem to be cut off from one another, the lack of any institutional sort of foundation for people's lives to support or maintain a middle class life. I was in kind of left behind parts of the country

and was seeing that everywhere. This was really the post financial crisis years. So it was Obama's first term. And while Obama, as you know, John, was struggling to pass legislation that could address these things, it just didn't seem to be reaching people and making them feel as if, yeah, this is going to change my life and he cares. Instead, it felt very far away and slow. So I would say there are three reasons. And they go back to the 70s, some of them. the end of the industrial economy and the rise of the knowledge economy, which created categories of winners and losers that were more extreme than anything we'd seen since before the Great Depression. So college degree, that's the big dividing line. If you're

comfortable with symbols, with words, with computers, you have a future in this country. If you're in a rural area, in a small town, in an industrial town, if your industry is leaving, if you've been working with your hands all your life, if you didn't go to college or even finished high school, decade after decade, your chances are bleaker and bleaker. So we all know that story. My book kind of portrayed it in the lives of ordinary people. The second is cultural change, dramatic cultural change, beginning, I would say, with, the 60s, in the late 60s, the change in immigration laws that brought in large numbers of people from the global south, in a phrase, changes in family, in rights, in sexual mores, in identity

groups, which gave some people a place at the table for the first time. So not bad, good, but over time, the speed of it, the scale of it made other people feel as if their America was disappearing and that they were somehow not counted, not respected. And then the third is more recent and it's social media, which has, because of the greed and wickedness of the tech oligarchs, to be blunt about it, has driven us to our worst selves because that's what keeps us glued to the to the screen and that's what you know amplifies the the most extreme and you know hateful voices and um those three things together created a kind of cold civil war that is sort of a class war between the educated less educated urban rural it's sort of a

generational war by the way this is what i don't know if we're going to get to talk about it but this is what my new novel is all about. It is about class and generational conflict, but in an allegorical story, the emergency. So those are the three factors they've all played a part. I don't know how to weigh them. But one thing I'm sure of is when Trump was elected in 2016 and progressives decided that he was elected because America is a white supremacist country, full stop, that was a big mistake because it was analytically insufficient, didn't explain too many things, and it was politically stupid because it alienated people who might have been persuadable. And it turned out that we are not a country divided into identity groups that vote according to their race or

gender. In fact, especially on race, it's become more and more fluid as the last couple of elections have shown. So that's a long answer, but you ask me the hard question. It is. It's the hard question. It's the one I think about all the time. I think the answers are vitally important because they sort of show us the potential way out. On this show, we talk about the social media technology aspect all the time. That's why I started the show. And, you know, I have come to think that the the, our screens and the algorithmically driven social media platforms, they're incentivizing habits that are antithetical to a functioning democracy. And what really stuck with me in your piece in the Atlantic was, you know, you, you quote to Tocqueville, talking about the habits of the

heart, right? American democracy is not just our constitution and our laws and our institutions, but it's like, it's what we value and it's how we behave. And you mentioned, John Dewey's belief that democracy isn't just a system of government but a way of life. And it made me think that because democracy depends on these sort of individual values, and I think the Tockville says, you know, the emotional capacity for restraint and responsibility and tolerance, then sort of making an argument for why we should have democracy and why we should have a functioning democracy, seems like it requires talking about some of these cultural values and behaviors that have always sustained democracy. And what I'm getting at

here is I do think even though I just said it's the right political advice for people to talk about, you know, the economy and cost of living and people's material concerns, I don't know that we solve the larger problem without actually making the argument for why this is a better way of life for people. And I think you're right. And those may be two different activities that go on at the same time, running campaigns and arguing to the whole country and not to the 51% that you need in order to get elected. And maybe not even just an argument, although that, but also a practice, a kind of way of

treating one another and talking. to one another, that we have to learn again, that we almost have to be put into rooms with one another in order to re-acquire those habits of the heart. Tocqueville wrote that they are not natural. They're nothing that we're really born with. Democracy in many ways is not natural. And throughout human history, it's been a blip. it's been a kind of brief little interlude in long periods of authoritarianism. And I don't want to

think that our little interlude is coming to an end. But to prevent that, I think we have to practice it. And how do you practice it? I don't have a whole map or a plan for this. I hope someone does. And some people talk about it a lot. But we need. to face to face, not just on screens and cameras, but face to face, talk to people who we think we have very little in common with and figure out how we can talk to each other. That doesn't mean we like each other or agree with each other. It just means the basic recognition of the humanity of the other is something we've lost. And it shows every time, you know, Trump gets up to say something about Rob Reiner, and that licenses all the other wannabes

to try to compete in the moral collapse, as if getting as low as you can is the way to show that you're on top. Well, we've gone very far. If you compare the language we use, the discourse to 10, 15 years ago, there's been a real degradation. And it's, I think we have to almost start again and recognize that we have a problem and take the 12 steps that someone should lay out to becoming recovering authoritarians and learn how to be Democrats again. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all in one website platform designed to elevate your online presence. and drive your success. Squarespace provides all the tools you need to promote and get paid for your services in one platform. Whether you offer consultations, events, or other experiences, Squarespace can help

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Head to Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com. com slash offline to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com slash offline. Are you at all hopeful that the backlash against screens and social media that we've been seeing the last few years will sort of keep growing and help us change our habits? I am hopeful. My daughter is in ninth grade and her school has taken the phones away at the start of the day and gives them back at the end. And that's a new thing. And I've heard no complaints. And I hope it allows her and her classmates to focus more and to talk to each other more.

But then, John, there's this thing coming called AI, which is like a tsunami. You know, if social media was like a bunch of choppy waves that nearly drowned us, here comes this tsunami. And it's, People ask, you know, is it going to be good or bad for us? Well, of course there will be ways in which it's good for us. But you can't have lived through the social media decade or decade and a half and be sanguine about what a much bigger intrusion of technology into our lives is going to do. Because it's not just a mouthpiece. It's not just a way for us to algorithmically yell at each other. It replaces us in so many different sectors and features. fields. And what is that going to do to our humanity and to our ability to live together? I heard Sam Altman say to Joe Rogan, wouldn't it be awesome if we had an AI president? And he began to imagine what that AI president could do and how he could drill down into every single citizen and know exactly what they wanted. Then somehow the mathematical total of all those drillings down would give the president the right policy. And I'm just thinking it's a nightmare. I mean, admittedly, Altman then kind of backed off it, said maybe there'd be some

problems with it. But you could tell that for him, this was a sort of tempting vision of the future. Even back in the heyday of Silicon Valley, the early social media years, when, you know, we were friendly with them in the in the obama white house i was always struck by the view from tech leaders that government was a nuisance and that there's no real problem in society that government could actually solve better than just a good technological solution and there was always sort of like a looking down at government and that like that's messy and slow and bureaucratic and we're just going to we're going to disrupt our way out of this problem and that was I mean like I was feeling that in what 2009 2010 that has grown exponentially going way into

the social media age and now with the advent of AI and you know Sam Altman's comment that you just mentioned made me think that what do you think it is about these the folks who work in tech and especially these tech leaders who they embrace this vision of like an AI president or AI driven leadership, but they really either dismiss or don't have a lot of faith in sort of democratic institutions. That's a good question. And by the way, maybe 12 years ago, I interviewed the lieutenant governor of California, whose name was Gavin Newsom, because he had just published a book about how to improve government through technology. And he was... Citizenville, right? That was, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly. I mean,

I mean, he's a very fluent speaker, and he had all the lines down. He's got different lines now. They're all about our common humanity. But back then, it was all about the machines and how the machines could solve these problems. So, yeah, it was the Democrats as well as the Republican, maybe even more because the Democrats were so close to Silicon Valley. And a lot of your colleagues at the Obama White House ended up going to Silicon Valley. What is it about Silicon Valley?

Well, I grew up there, but it was not called that. It was, I'm old enough to precede Silicon Valley. Once it came, you just felt a combination of utopianism, you know, that kind of countercultural, beloved community they were creating that was really part of the origins of it. Certainly the zeitgeist that was around Apple. the incredible success and money that it's produced. And they're, you know, these are engineers. They're impatient with human flaws and messiness.

They want a elegant solution to every problem, including the problem of how to govern ourselves. And this is something actually, when I was writing about Silicon Valley, that Ben Horowitz, partner of Mark Andreessen said to me, he said, there's a, kind of similarity of Marxists and libertarians, because what they both have is a perfect system that explains everything, in which if you do it right, everything will work for the best. And so, of course, in that divide, they're libertarians, and libertarians think of government as this pathetic, developmentally delayed problem child that is just constantly getting in the way and needs to just be put in the corner so that the smart people can do their thing.

And now it's, I think that thinking is much stronger because it's become so partisan. The most powerful people in Silicon Valley have decided that the party of government, the Democratic Party, is this stupid and wicked organization that needs to be put in the corner so that they can save the world and make a lot of money and defeat China in the AI race and everything else. So I think they have a messianic sense of their own mission, and now they're driven by a really spiteful partisan bias that says any government intrusion. I used to hear they were willing to accept some regulation 10 years ago, 15 years ago. It wasn't like they thought all regulation was bad. Mark Andreessen said it's going to come.

We have to accept some of it. Now, Mark Andreessen and others see regulation as being suicide. So those ingredients, I mean, they're so successful and they're so isolated from the country. They live in such a splendid kingdom that it's hard for. them to imagine what could be the problem. Well, and I think the reason they're so excited about AI is that AI is sort of the embodiment of this philosophy towards government and other people, which is, you know, you point out that it's trying to replace us. And even with these chatbots right now, they're trying to eliminate the friction of interacting with other human beings, the

consciousness, right? Like the idea that you're going to have a conversation with someone and you might disagree and they might not tell you everything you're thinking is great and everything you're doing is great and you might not be able to find the answer you're looking for immediately and you might have to settle for some sacrifice and some disappointment once in a while. And I can see how tempting that is, right, for people to just sort of disappear into those, into our, you know, relationships with our chatbots. They're going to just make everything easier for us. I think that could actually just make all of our problems in the country much worse.

Far worse. Far worse. That's just right. Again, a big theme of the emergency. There is a sense of exhaustion with being human. It's hard. It's burdensome. And if we've now invented these machines, I see AI as sort of the successor just to the internet connected device, which also provides a way not to have to deal with the messiness of other human beings and how annoying they can be and how hard it is to get them to do what you want. Instead, if you're online with them, you just talk at them or you find the right people in your chat room and we all agree with each other and all the others are stupid and you feel like a kind of elect group, which is how maybe Clubhouse was when it got started a few years ago. So AI is a huge advance, but I see it as sort of a continuation of

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Zbiotics is back with 100% money back guarantee, so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com slash offline and use the code offline at checkout for 15% off. You sort of describe modern authoritarian regimes, and I think this would be true of the Trump regime, that they're not as driven as the old authoritarian regimes by the kind of sort of intense ideology that people will fight and die for. And, you know, in some ways, you know, I've thought that Trumpism does feel more like, you know, what Neil Postman warned us about in, you know, amusing ourselves to death. It's entertainment, performance, you know, leaves us passive and indifferent.

But then I've been thinking a lot about lately, like, what comes after Trump, and which is already being fiercely contested on the right. And I don't know if you read Vivek Ramoswami's New York Times piece this week, but he directly took on the blood and soil nationalism that J.D. Vance has embraced. And I know you've probably read the Claremont speech. My staff jokes to me because I've-The Claremont speech was very important. I've asked like every guest about the Claremont speech. They always were like, oh, when is he going to get to it?

But I thought it was interesting that at least Vivek was trying to contest. that. But the J.D. Vance version of power in America seems much more ideological and radicalizing. And what do you make of people's potential appetite for that kind of thing, knowing that there is this sort of desire for indifference in passivity, but that I feel like J.D. Vance's heritage Americans requires a little more fight from people. It is ideological. He's a thinker. He's a reader. You know, he went from being a kind of Hitchens, atheist, Einrand libertarian to coming under the influence of Peter Thiel and Donald Trump and his own political ambitions and ended up as a pretty far-right maga populist. And that's how he became vice president. It was a good career move.

But he also likes to think of himself as still having one foot in the tech camp. He likes to I think he kind of unites the populace and the techno-futurists because he worked in very briefly, very briefly in Silicon Valley. But he has essentially placed his bet on what they call national conservatism, which is at its heart fundamentally anti-democratic because it requires a degree of executive power. and kind of trampling on individual rights, free speech, due process, equal rights, and you could say objective empirical truth that I think of is sort of the basis of liberal democracy. It's anti-liberal democracy because what it wants is to take a country that really is a multicultural country from all over the world and turn it into something that in their fantasy it should be and used to be. And that's such a huge warping of what kind of country we are.

If you just look around, if you go to the store, if you watch a movie, that it has to be done coercively, has to be done by taking away, as I saw in the paper today, the citizenship of people who you think, were somehow naturalized in the wrong way. That seems to appeal, especially to younger people. That's the worry, just as the illiberalism of the left that I fought against for years seemed to be coming from the young, from like the younger staff of magazines and universities and nonprofits,

the much more extreme liberalism of the right is coming from the followers of Bronze Age Pervert and raw egg nationalist and Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.

And it seems to offer something more exciting than just good old-fashioned MAGA offered. Trump didn't ask anything of people. He didn't say, you know, give me your support and together we will build this and destroy that and go to war with this and take over that and become a great world empire, which is essentially what the totalitarians of the 20th century did. No,

it is entertainment. It is more Aldous Huxley than George Orwell, I would say. It's more brave new world, and that's because we're not a totalitarian-type country. We are more a country whose greatest risk is that we will amuse ourselves to death. And so people would walk away from Trump rallies before they were over because they were bored and had something else to do. And that just did not show a level of commitment than you would expect from a great authoritarian state. Whereas I do think young people, especially young men with a sense of isolation and meaninglessness, I've been to Charlie Kirk conferences. I went to one in Phoenix a couple of years ago for Turning Point USA.

And he was thrilling 13,000 young people, mostly young men, with his sort of calls to action because young people want to be told you can do something. it's going to be a great adventure. And so I don't think J.D. Vance has the rhetorical or charismatic power to get millions of people to throw themselves at his feet. Charlie Kirk might have, if he were running for president, if he had not been tragically killed, and if he were running for president, I think he could, with his mix of Christianity, nationalism and kind of self-improvement could have gotten quite a galvanized support among

the young. But I do worry that they are looking for it. They're looking for some leader to tell them, here's the great cause. And it's going to make you sacrifice. It's going to make you suffer. You'll have to go through some terrible things. But at the other end will be a world that you can only dream of. That's an exciting thing for young people.

hear. Do you think that the pro-democracy side needs an equally exciting mission for people, especially young people, to get people participating, excited, paying attention? It's a great question, John, and a kind of core question about liberal democracy. I think Francis Fukuyama at the end of his misunderstood essay, the end of history, said the problem with the victorious liberal democracy is that people are going to to get bored for just these reasons, because people actually want more than just a good time, more than just the right number of calories and a wide array of streaming video. They actually have higher and deeper aspiration.

So what does liberal democracy offer or what can it offer that can compete with what is essentially a kind of fascist appeal coming from the right? Not that these are fascists. They're not. They're actually not as serious as the fascists were. But so they're less than fascists. It's an insult. But they have an aspiration to lead in that kind of way.

So what can liberal Democrats offer? You know, does free speech and due process get people to the barricades? you know, is the rule of law, what will make young men and young women get up at four in the morning and go out and train and canvas and whatever. I don't have a good answer. I do think an exhaustion with how low we've sunk, just as young people today are now trying to get rid of their phones. This is a, you probably hear about this. It's a new movement. I see it in my, to some extent in my own kids, I see it in. campuses, just as they are finally saying, how could you have conducted this experiment on this?

It's been terrible. We're going to try to save ourselves. It may be that the moral collapse, which starts with our highest leaders, might so disillusioned young people, that they will look for some leader who says, can we start with common decency? can we start with treating each other like human beings? Can we stop with the vile discourse? That might actually, it won't excite people to work 20 hours a day, although it might some, but it will at least appeal to that sense

that there is something higher. There's something higher than just winning or losing elections or winning or losing fights on social media. what do you think do you have an answer to your own question i want to ask you about the emergency but before we get there i think a lot about the last best hope which is an essay that you wrote that you turned into a short book um and i've gone back to it several times over the last couple years because of this very conversation that we were just having because i think about your conclusion that the most compelling narrative to sustain american democracy

has to be rooted in a commitment to equality, back to the Declaration, back to Lincoln. And I wonder if you think that, you know, equal America still has a chance against zombie democracy. Ah, that's a very potent way to put it. I think so. I think right now Trump is giving it new life because his America is so unbelievably unequal and his favors and his corruption are so blatant and so in favor of the 0.01% that although Americans normally don't go for a politics of class resentment were much more likely to be appealed to by a politics of

race resentment or educational resentment. It's there waiting to be used. And I think a successful politician will know how to use it, but will not use it by appealing to the same degree of bitterness and resentment and ugliness that Trump has appealed to in order to turn working class Americans against more upper middle class Americans or educated Americans. Instead, it should be done with a sense of hope and a sense of commonality. You know, maybe there will be a little class of people who won't be included in Equal America and they will be the 0.01%. I'm okay with that. They've had it good. They can handle that. But I think part of Sanders' problem, although his class focus has been powerful, it's always

seemed like it's being addressed to a different country, like not a country of people who are aspiring to rise, but instead to a country where there's fixed classes and they've always hated each other and they'll always hate each other. So I think it can be, I think equal America can be a powerful narrative, but it has to to be a narrative that's hopeful and that appeals to common values. Yeah. I mean, to answer your question about how I think about this is, I think there's been a lot of advice that Democrats need to reclaim patriotism. And I agree with that, though, I think when some people say reclaim patriotism, they're talking about, like, you know,

talk about how much you love America and the flag and those are the symbols of patriotism. And, you know, I the most the most patriotic speech I ever heard was the first time I heard Barack Obama at the 2004 convention when I was not working for him at the time and that was a patriotism rooted in the founding ideals of the country that we have never quite live up to but have always pushed us forward and right now the J.D. Vance's of the world are contesting those very ideals, right? I mean, like the Declaration, maybe we shouldn't go by the Declaration, you know, maybe this is, and I think that gives Democrats an opportunity to step into the breach and say,

no, no, we are going to make an argument for the America that Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration, that Lincoln talked about at Gettysburg, and that at our best moments, in this country, we have come close to realizing. And, like, I just think wrapping ourselves in the ideals of this country is maybe the only thing that can sort of connect an extremely diverse, disparate country that has become, you know, divided and detached from one another. Amen, brother. I'm with you.

But let's be honest, it will mean that the left of the Democratic Party and, and let's say the academic left and other powerful activists' corners of the party are going to have to realize that by creating a picture of a country fundamentally sinful, fundamentally hypocritical, and a history of betraying those ideals makes it impossible to do what you just said. My feeling is if America is the America that the academic left thinks, then we've lost nothing under Trump. He's just exposed it. So what's your argument against Trump?

You don't have one because he's just proving that you were right. Instead, without falling into the trap of, you know, the celebration of American history as a continuous story of success, of course not. No, we're grownups. But people have to believe in something. They have to be given a vision that makes them proud, that makes them proud to be American, which is not something you would hear at a Democratic convention. The DNC still, at its conventions, is a series of identity caucuses. That's how the schedule is divided.

If you look at the like the three or four days, that is not my vision of equal America, because mine like yours goes back to the first words of the Declaration. but also has a strong component of equal opportunity, not just equal rights under law, but equal opportunity, which means, among many other things, having some power over the tech companies that seem to be taking our children away from us. So all of that is just a wide open field that the Republicans have abandoned. I also think that that view of America as, you know, a fundamentally sinful place that has just, you know, oppressed people for for centuries, it sort of robs all of those different identities and marginalized groups of agency

and sort of ignores that it is those Americans over the course of the last 200 years that have actually done the work to make most of the progress for themselves and for the country. And I do think that's sort of the way out of it to recognize, to both recognize the great diversity of the country and the fact that, you know, we haven't been equal America for the last 200 years, that there have been, you know, so many moments in history, including this one, where some people are, you know, seen as the other and put down and disadvantaged. But the promise of the country is that even when you've been subjugated and oppressed, it's possible to fight for, you know, that better version of the country that you believe in and those rights for yourself? Absolutely. Absolutely. There has to be a sense of agency. And there has to be a sense of, yes, diversity, but diversity toward what end? It should not be an end in itself. It should be a form of inclusion that allows for greater unity. But if unity is not the end,

then we're actually kind of the mirror image of the right, because the right also is practicing identity politics. It's just of a particularly sinister kind, white Christian identity politics. But in the end, it has the same effect of leaving us separate from each other and eventually hating each other. Yeah. So your latest book is a return to fiction. It's a political fable about a lot of what we have been talking about called The Emergency. Why did you want to write it. And also, when you were writing it, what were you most hoping that people took away from it? So I love fiction. I always wanted to be a novelist. After those first two novels in my 30s, I decided maybe I'm actually more of a journalist and spent 25 years at the New Yorker in the Atlantic. But, you know,

John, after the 2020 election on January 6th and writing The Last Best Hope, I felt like I had said what I had to say. And we in journalism were just saying the same thing over and over. There was this sort of political and media stagnation, like the same arguments, the same language. The language had kind of gone dead on me. And as a writer, I need living language in order to be able to communicate with you. And I began to imagine a story. This came out of the pandemic when I was driving. back and forth between New York City and a place in farm country, a couple of hours north

of the city, where my family had kind of retreated during the pandemic. And I began to feel the immense distance that just those two and a half hours left in me between this kind of hollowed-out city. And at that point, it had become a bit unfriendly rural area because we were coming from the city and maybe carrying the plague with us. I started to think, what if there were checkpoints on the Taconic Parkway? What would that be like? And the checkpoints were not friendly checkpoints, but we're looking for things and wanted to know what you were doing there. And why did you leave your city? And that all began to put in mind a story about an empire that collapses out of boredom. It dies of boredom. And in the

vacuum, these movements of young people emerge, new political ideas and formations. And in the city, it's a sort of utopian, egalitarian movement. And in the countryside, it's more like male power and physical strength and even violence. So the burgers in the city are moving in one direction. The yeoman and the countryside are moving sort of in an opposite direction, but in both cases, the young are responding to the failure of this empire by trying to create something new. And the main plot is about a family in the city, a doctor, his wife, and their two kids. And what happens to the family as a result of this? Essentially, the division in society also becomes a division in the family between the doctor and his daughter, his teenage

daughter who gets caught up in this new movement and which he finds in some ways frightening and seems alien to him like he doesn't know what place it holds for a middle-aged doctor so all of this is set in no named time or place and there are none of the landmarks of our time and place there's no digital technology there's no trump figure there's no political parties so So I wanted to get away from all of that. Why? Not to escape, but to try to go deeper into not the news of what it's like to see America in this crisis, but the feeling of it. What does it feel like for a father, for a daughter, for someone, for a farmer in the countryside?

So there's, I think by getting rid of the kind of the signposts of 2025 America, it made it possible for me to explore more deeply the emotions and the sort of larger philosophical questions that we should all be wrestling with. I couldn't agree more that that is a great way to get people thinking about that because I think there is something in the feeling of what this is that everyone has sensed over the last. several years that is sometimes difficult to articulate and certainly not reflected in the public debates that we have. So I'm really looking forward to reading that. I've been reading too many nonfiction books this year. And so I'm going to dive into the emergency for the two weeks that I have off finally. Let me know your thoughts. I'd love to hear them. But I do think fiction has a kind of clarifying cleansing effect on our minds if we can just pull ourselves out of the minute to minute updates on our phones.

It's necessary. So thank you. George Packer, thank you so much for joining offline and for all of your writing and wonderful thoughts on this country and what it could be. So I really appreciate that. I appreciate your work too, John, going way back to the 2000s, early 2000s, and good luck to you in the work you're doing.

Thanks. Take care. One quick note before we go, and just so you all know, we are going to be dark for two weeks while we all finally take a vacation. if anyone can remember what that's like. But before we do that, if you're not sure what to get your friends or family this year, a couple days left, go ahead and skip the socks. Give them a friend of the pod subscription.

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