George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest book is The Emergency.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and George Packer discuss authoritarianism in fiction, living humanist values in morally complex times, and how the Democrats can defeat Donald Trump.
Note: This conversation was recorded on October 21, 2025.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I always enjoy reading you, but I have to say that I have never had a chance to go to your back catalogue of novels that you wrote in the 1990s. It was a special pleasure, in preparation for this conversation, to read a novel we’ve talked about for a long time and that I’ve been excited to read. It is now coming out, and I think it is really beautiful, moving, insightful, infuriating, and lovely.
It is obviously a compelling work of fiction, and it’s also a parable of this political moment. What is it about America’s evolution over the last five or ten years that you thought was worth capturing in the form of this parable? What most worries you about this political moment, and why did you think that fiction was the natural form to capture that?
George Packer: I’d been trying to capture it in journalism for more than ten years, maybe for twenty-five years, charting our seemingly relentless decline in some ways. I felt I’d reached diminishing returns with that. Journalism is always going to have a big place in my work and in what we need in this country, but I risked repeating myself and never quite getting below—not the surface, but maybe the second or third depth—to the real depth of things. There were experiences I knew I wasn’t able to convey through nonfiction: the experience of just what it feels like to be alive in America going through this profound crisis, what it feels like to be a parent in a crisis like this, and to be a member of a society that seems to be tearing itself apart.
Although I’ve written about some of that in nonfiction, there’s a real limit to what I could explore. I wanted to explore that feeling as deeply as I could. To do that, I felt I needed to go back to fiction. Even though fiction wasn’t always good to me—those two novels from the ’90s your listeners are not going to know about, very few people do, which is one reason why I turned to journalism after trying my hand at being a novelist—I’ve come back to fiction because I think we need imagination to understand reality and to understand a reality as seemingly unreal as the one we’re living through.
I felt we need more than just an imaginative work; we need a work that doesn’t rely on realism. So this novel is more in the tradition of some of my favorite works: 1984 by George Orwell, Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee, The Plague by Albert Camus, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. They are sometimes called dystopian or sometimes called allegorical, but they are fictions that try to get at the heart of what we’re living through in the present by getting away from the present—by not using the here and now, the familiar names, the familiar issues, the familiar events.
When you can get away from those, you can get closer to the truth. You clear the field for the emotion of it and even for the ideas, in their purest form, to come out because you’re not distracted by the journalistic nature of fiction that tries to write about the present. So I thought I needed to write something like those books that I love reading, and I tried my hand at it with The Emergency.
Mounk: One thing that those books have in common is a kind of warning about what might be around the political corner. They’re driven by fear—by well-founded fear, in some of those cases—of what may be about to happen. So they have a kind of foil. In 1984, it is Stalin’s Soviet Union, with perhaps some minor notes of other political systems as well.
The Handmaid’s Tale, I think, imagines a kind of Christian theocracy being around the corner. Both the strengths and the weaknesses of that book fall partly on whether or not you think that is, in fact, the right fear to have at the moment. Is it fair to say that if those are the fears, then at least one of the central fears of The Emergency is how political movements that claim to be moral, claim to unify us, claim to be trying to create a purer world, can end up deeply backfiring?
Packer: Absolutely. This is an old theme in politics and in literature: the utopian impulse, which is present in The Emergency, both in the city where some of the action takes place and in the countryside where the story goes, is often accompanied by a will to power.
That will to power manifests in different ways—sometimes through violence and ordinary, ugly coercion, and other times through moral pressure, which we’ve certainly lived through and which you and I have talked about a lot in this country. It seems to me that the left in this country uses moral coercion more often, and the right uses the threat of violence, although that is certainly not limited to the right. In both cases, it is always under the guise of making our society better—in fact, making it perfect.
That perfection is the real danger because then you have to eliminate all the elements that are contaminating it and are holding it back from perfection. In The Emergency, it is the young people who are driving this, and that is the key. It is a generational rebellion against the elders, both urban and rural. The young bring that idealistic energy that we need, but they also bring a certain naivete about power and a willingness to trash the norms of the older generation because those norms are tiresome, have failed them, and have left them with the ashes of a civilization. So why not just get rid of it all and start over? That is the driving impulse in the movements that take over in The Emergency.
Mounk: I’m going to try to balance my instinct to get into some of the particular ideas in the book and some of the plot while also avoiding spoilers, because it is an exciting book that works very beautifully as political allegory but also, I think, is just a good read. You don’t want to give away everything. But tell us a little bit about what The Emergency is.
One of the things that strikes me as powerful in this book is the kind of background diagnosis of how an old order, which is recognized to be nonviable, begins to collapse. The empire that falls in The Emergency certainly is not a one-to-one equivalent of the America of 2000 or 2010 or anything like that, but it does feel like an old order that, for all its deep flaws and injustices, also has a certain humanism—a way in which it allows for meaningful lives, manages to sustain the basics of relative prosperity, and upholds a rule of law of sorts.
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You realize at the beginning of the book that this order had, for much longer than the protagonist perhaps fully realized, already started to fall apart—that it had been decaying without people necessarily noticing. It falls away at the beginning of the book, and that collapse is what sets The Emergency in motion.
Tell us a little bit about the extent to which that old order is meant to read as an allegory for our political order. It is quite different in all kinds of ways, but it obviously also feels overripe for the plucking. It feels as though a whole set of rules, norms, and taboos that we thought would reign in our political system suddenly turn out not to have any force anymore. It also turns out that perhaps some of the people who pretended to believe in this order never really did—or at least had ceased to do so.
I was thinking about the extent to which we are meant to see our order as obsolete in the same kind of way that the order preceding The Emergency, the one that gives the novel its title, turns out to have been obsolete in the opening pages of the book.
Packer: It’s the way Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt—gradually and then suddenly. There’s this slow erosion of people’s attachment to the old order, to the old ways, without even knowing that they’re losing it. Then it collapses quite suddenly, almost comically. It’s so sudden and so unprompted. Why has it collapsed? It’s never really clear. What I write is that it died of boredom and loss of faith in itself.
Mounk: Which sounds, of course, like a callback to the last paragraph of the famous essay by Persuasion colleague Francis Fukuyama—that boredom at the end of history may serve to get history going again.
Packer: It does. That’s a good gloss on The Emergency. I do feel that we, in this country—for all of the clash and fever and constant turmoil and ferment—in some ways find it very hard to say why this is happening. What terrible injustices, what risk of extinction, what existential threat is causing us to tear up all the norms, the laws, the Constitution itself? It is, in some ways, incomprehensible to me.
Mounk: I’ve been thinking about the fact that I am now old enough that, for the first time in my adult life, I genuinely and deeply feel like the world has changed fundamentally—not only since I was two or three years old when the Soviet Union still existed, but since I went to university in the year 2000 at the age of eighteen. I think there are few twenty-five-year periods that have seen a similarly significant change, and the ones that have usually included cataclysmic events in the middle.
The world looks very different in 1950 than it did in 1925, but you have World War II in the middle. That is obvious; it is not hard to understand why the world looks different in 1950 than it did in 1925. Of course, there are all kinds of interesting, important, and shocking events that happened between 2000 and 2025—9/11, the Great Recession—but they do not equal the importance of something like World War II. Yet the extent to which the world looks different today than it did twenty-five years ago is perhaps similarly extreme. It is hard to understand.
Packer: I wrote The Unwinding, a nonfiction book, to try to describe and, to some degree, explain this transformation—mostly to describe it. That was in 2013. Some people have said it anticipated the coming of Trump. I did not anticipate the coming of Trump, but the book describes a landscape in which a figure like Trump is quite thinkable. Yet even that book doesn’t fundamentally answer the question of why this successful, prosperous, relatively-united, militarily-immense democracy is in the process of, if not destroying itself, at least weakening and hurting itself.
In a way, I avoided answering that question in The Emergency by simply saying boredom and loss of faith. I think there is an element of that in our country—a loss of faith in our country. Where does that come from? There are many complicated reasons. But the book begins with that as the premise for all that happens afterward. What’s important is what happens afterward: the empire collapses, there is no government, and suddenly the old citizens of the empire have to figure out a way to govern themselves, to run their city or their countryside, their farm.
Over the course of the book, we learn what has replaced the empire. In both cases, it has been replaced by ideology. In the city, it is a utopian vision of the future that includes a kind of non-digital AI, because there is no digital technology in the novel. I wanted to get away from anything that would make it seem too close to our time and situation. When I got too close to our time, I felt the novel weakening. When I allowed myself to invent freely and follow instincts that seemed crazy to me—like the “better humans” who are the non-digital AI—it felt stronger. It felt like I was building a world.
That world is one in which the young have pretty much decided that the old have failed them and do not need to be listened to. But it is really a novel about those older people and their relationship to their children. The main character is a doctor, Hugo Rustin, a respected surgeon and chief of a hospital in the city. He struggles with the new order, which does not respect him or his experience. It feels like an affront. He tries to adjust because he wants to stay close to his daughter—his wife as well, but especially his daughter—who has turned against her father’s values.
He cannot adjust and gets in trouble at the hospital. In a sense, he is disgraced and must figure out a way to reestablish his identity, his values, and his reputation in the eyes of his community and especially his daughter. In a way, it is about a liberal—a man who has lost his place, who no longer has a home politically, within his family, or even in his work. He becomes uprooted and sets out into the countryside with his daughter on a quixotic mission that is ill-considered and risky. That mission drives most of the plot.
Out in the countryside, there is another upheaval taking place, led once again by the young, who are overthrowing their parents and creating their own utopia—a backward-looking, reactionary utopia that is intolerant, misogynistic, and based on physical strength rather than moral virtue. You can see the analogies and the resonances, but the more the novel moves away from one-to-one parallels, the more I think it succeeds both as a novel and as an allegory.
Mounk: I like the degrees of abstraction in the novel. The plot has forward motion and is compelling. It doesn’t feel like an abstract rumination at all. However, because there are no specific place names—it’s not as though this is Washington, D.C., or New York—the names are kept vague. It is simply “the Empire.” There is a certain level of abstraction in the naming conventions of the book. It also lacks the features of modern technology—there’s nobody on Twitter, X, or TikTok, or anything like that.
Packer: Although there is a version of social media, it is physical. It is a crowd of people standing in the main square of the city, all coming to the same idea at the same time. It is essentially mob thinking—the kind of mob thinking we know well from social media and the way it applies pressure on any other thinking individual—but it is not digital; it is in person.
Mounk: I thought about the human microphone in Occupy Wall Street while reading those passages of the book. I don’t know if that inspired it or not, but that was my mental image of it in a way.
Packer: I was at Occupy Wall Street, writing about it quite a lot back then. That experience definitely showed me that you don’t need an iPhone to form a physical mob—one that doesn’t threaten anyone physically but applies a kind of pressure that might be even more unbearable than physical pressure.
Mounk: I think that the allegory does work because it has that level of abstraction, but it is an allegory. I do read a lot of what happens in the city as an allegory on the social justice movement. The way in which the protagonist in his role as a doctor commits an infraction by shouting at a nurse, and then there is this kind of restorative justice circle he is forced into, which is meant to be very kind. The idea is that it is meant to reconcile everybody and for everybody to get along afterward. But actually, it is obviously a very coercive tool that punishes anybody who is not going along with the “spirit of together.” The idea of together is actually deeply divisive and deeply coercive.
It obviously seems to recall some of the excesses of a woke movement over the last ten years. Tell me more about the allegory of what is going on in the countryside. Would it be too simple to say that this is a bizarro world, an Emergency-land, Packer-world version of the MAGA movement?
Packer: Well, it is based on it. You are right that “together,” the ideology of the young in the city, is certainly based on the social justice movement. Although there is no race as a factor, there is no sexual identity as a factor. It is abstracted in that way. What “together” is about is moral perfection and even cognitive perfection, which is where the better humans, the AI figures, come in.
For sure, I am just trying to get more at the deeper impulses. What is it about wokeness? It is that will to perfect everything—perfect language, perfect society, perfect relations between people in society. It is appealing to a young person if they feel that the society they were raised in has collapsed because of the decadence and indifference of their parents. Why wouldn’t they want to start over? When Selva, the daughter of the doctor, tells him, “I just want to take a match and burn the past. Burn it all up,” she is saying, you have failed me. So why should I go along with those humanistic values of yours that you raised me on? They failed.
In the countryside, there is a family of farmers whom the doctor’s family has gotten to know over the years from their regular camping trips to the area near the farm. The doctor, Rustin, and his daughter Selva, on this humanitarian mission they go out on, come to that farm and find that everything has changed. There is no longer the bonhomie, the easy rapport—perhaps condescending, perhaps a little fake—between the urban and rural people that had always been there. Instead, there is tension, suspicion, paranoia, resentment, even conspiracy thinking.
On the farm, the young men have essentially taken over and are in a kind of military training that is a rebuke to the stolid, one-day-at-a-time, just-do-your-chores-and-everything-will-be-fine attitude of the old. There is a little Bronze Age Pervert in there. There is a little Manosphere. There is a worship of the body, of strength, of physical power, and an infatuation with violence. I would say there is a contempt, if not hatred, for girls and women. It is a broad satire. It is not one-to-one. I do not have all the various intellectual strands of MAGA that I have just been reading about in a very good book called Furious Minds by Laura K. Field.
There are no Straussians in my book. There are no national conservatives. But there is a spirit, a feeling of anger, of hatred, of toppling all the old gods, and of real resentment toward the city people who apparently had gotten along fine with the country people, but it turns out that under the surface there was always resentment and a sense that even books and words are a threat—a way to control them, a way to keep them down. What the young men in the rural area want is to get away from words toward something more primal, which is a kind of animalism, a worship of animal power. They take these animal identities, which become a philosophical counterpart to the machine identities in the city of the better humans.
That is certainly where MAGA and wokeness—a word I have always tried to avoid, but sometimes you just cannot help it—come into the intellectual superstructure of the story.
Mounk: It feels like Hugo’s sensibility is, in many ways, what I would take your sensibility to be—a kind of liberal humanist attempt to persevere with dignity through this chaos. Not that I think he is you in every respect, but his voice feels not entirely unlike that of a George Packer I know.
He has two principal relationships. There are all kinds of relationships, of course. One of the two children is too young to have a really complicated relationship with, I would say. But there is the relationship with his wife, who also gets taken up, in certain ways, with the spirit of “together,” and that leads to some tensions in the marriage. Then there is the relationship with his daughter. It feels to me that the relationship with the daughter is somehow more at the heart of the novel than the relationship with his wife.
Talk us through these two conflicts—what they represent, how they are similar and different, and why, if you agree with me, one of those feels more central to the novel, and, I think, to the question of his time, than the other.
Packer: I do agree with you. I think the reason, Yascha, is that I am guilty as charged as somehow akin to Dr. Hugo Rustin, but I wanted to put him and his liberal humanism under maximum pressure and not let it be the guiding principle of the novel, but instead something that comes undone. My son, when he heard I was writing this novel, said to me, “Just don’t make the doctor right about everything. He needs to be wrong about things. Otherwise, it won’t be interesting.” Great advice from a young person. In a way, the novel breaks him, and then he has to come back in some fashion.
It shows that his belief, which is essentially that if we all listen to each other and empathize with each other, we will be able to solve all our problems and live in harmony, is naïve. That is a bit of a caricature, but not too much. It is a liberal view, and it is very much a creed of his. He lives by it. He raises his children by it. He treats his patients by it. The reason the daughter, Selva, is the key character is because she puts the most pressure on it. They have been very close throughout her life. She is fourteen when the novel takes place, and with the collapse of the Empire, her own identity collapses.
All she wanted was to make her father happy and to be a great student. She has excelled at her exams, the all-important exams that determine your future. If you do well on them, you are made for life in your father’s guild. There are these old, medieval-type guilds in the city. If you do badly, you become an “excess burgher,” a kind of superfluous person in the city whose trajectory is probably going to be downhill. It is a vicious meritocracy, not unlike aspects of our own educated society.
The wife, Annabel—their marriage had been happy—but when the emergency comes, she finds herself dissatisfied. She sees all this ferment around her and realizes she is still living the same conventional life as a mother, a wife, a good member of society. She takes on responsibilities in the city, what is called self-org, or self-organization, that threaten him—not because she does anything truly threatening, but because suddenly his wife, who had been his helper, becomes independent and not an appendage. He had always been the family’s outward face toward the city. He knows it is wrong to feel threatened by that, but he cannot help it. He wants her to say, “We are still the same,” and she cannot.
That relationship is under pressure. It does not completely disintegrate, but it shows his limits as a man, a husband, and a member of this city. The daughter, though, is the one who really forces him to ask himself, what have I tried to teach my children, and why has it not worked? What can I say to her now, when in some ways I have been proved wrong about a lot of things? The farther they travel into the countryside, the more she understands what is happening and can keep them from danger, while he is the one who keeps getting it wrong and putting them in danger.
That is a profoundly upsetting thing for a father who has taken his daughter into risky territory. Their relationship is the emotional core—the thing that makes the book quiver, that gives it resonance. Neither of my children is portrayed in this novel. Our dog is somewhat portrayed. My children do not make an appearance, and neither does my wife. The family is blameless. I am the guilty party. But that relationship between father and daughter is what emotionally matters most to me—the thing that makes it vibrate as a novel has to.
Mounk: The relationship between the protagonist and Selva, the daughter, is in many ways the emotional core of the novel, but it does not end with Selva. It ends with a scene between Hugo, the protagonist, and his wife, Annabel. I do not think that reading the last few lines of a novel gives away too much of the plot, so I am going to risk doing so. If you are too worried about having the ending given away, you can skip forward a few seconds, but I do not think it matters.
Their relationship, as you said, has come under strain in various ways. Suffice it to say that things are now not in a very good place in this fictional universe that is integrated in all kinds of ways. But the protagonist and his wife are deciding to go forward with the work of assisting people who are in danger or in need in various ways.
The last lines of the novel are: “There was another knock at the door. They went on looking at each other, and his long acquaintance with her face allowed him to imagine her thoughts. Something was ending, and they were too old to understand. What came after would belong to their children. But they would go on opening the door, and in this way they would live.”
Is it too much to read into this a kind of incantation to humanist liberals—people who may feel that the world is spiraling out of control, that what they thought they could take for granted they no longer can—that perhaps they can never truly understand what is happening in this moment, but that the right response to that is to continue to live by their creed and to live by small-v virtues, like an insistence on opening the door to people of varied kinds and with various ideologies? Or is that too straightforward a reading of this ending?
Packer: I think it’s a good reading, Yascha, thank you. His creed, which he calls “rather self-congratulatory humanism,” has really been pulverized over the course of the novel. So at the end, it is not a grand creed. It does not have a lot of capital-letter abstractions attached to it. It has become quite simple and reduced but may be stronger for that. It is exactly what you say. It is just to follow a decent impulse, to try to keep a connection to other people, to open the door even to people you do not know, even to people who might hate you, and to try to help them.
It is a kind of reduced moral code, but for me, once that is gone, it is over. Then there is no point in fighting for anything. Perhaps, over time, that very simple, reduced impulse can become the basis for a new society. We do not know, because the novel ends with the words that you just read. But I could not end it with utter despair, because we are still alive. I have children, and I still love my country, and I still feel the daily danger of giving up.
Daily danger—what do we do? This is something people constantly ask me, and I am sure you as well. What can we do about all of this? I do not really have a good answer. There are lots of political answers and strategic answers, but the novel is not about that. The moral answer is: go on opening the door and try to live that way. So there is a little affirming flame, a very small, flickering affirming flame, in those last lines.
Mounk: I think we have done what we can to give people a sense of the novel, and all that is left is to go and read it. But what does that mean in Trump’s America—to enter fully out of your fictional world and into our political moment? Faced with the depredations of a Trump administration, faced with the fact that the opposition to it seems to be flailing in many ways, and that perhaps some of the most successful opposition voices, like Gavin Newsom—who now is absolutely favored, according to polls, to win the nomination—seem to be succeeding in part by emulating Trump, not in terms of many of the moral stances and so on, but certainly in terms of some of the style, of aping him on social media and so on.
What does it mean to go on with the small-v virtues of a humanist, of a liberal, in a moment that seems to escape our comprehension and that seems to conspire against every instinct in that? A moment that has humbled, and I think should have humbled, us liberals and us humanists in terms of our failure to capture the imagination of our fellow citizens, to formulate a coherent response to the demands of this political moment. I sympathize with this. I found the ending very moving, in part because, while I am perhaps a few years younger than you and a few years younger than the protagonist in the novel, I too saw myself in him. But what does that mean concretely in our political situation?
Packer: First, I think it is a great mistake to emulate or imitate Trump’s style, because it is not just a style. It is an attitude toward human beings and toward politics, toward the country. The video that Trump released right after the No Kings rallies, with himself as king flying a fighter plane over a city of protesters and dumping an astonishing amount of human excrement all over them, just coating them in it—unfortunately, there is an anticipation of this at the end of The Emergency. I had some deep, maybe only partly conscious, sense that this is where we are headed: toward the enshitification of our society.
Sure enough, Trump is always there ahead of us. He is always ready to go lower, because that is where he lives. He wants everyone down there. That is where he thrives. He does not thrive up in the sunny uplands. Why would we want to join him there? As Mark Twain said about wrestling a pig, “You can’t win, and it amuses the pig no end.” So do not try to out-Trump Trump.
But what else can you do? Is it a sucker’s game to show up at a No Kings rally and be moved by the signs that say, “We’re better than this,” “I love USA,” “Make Orwell fiction again”? That was one sign I saw. I was moved, but I also thought, well, what is all this going to lead to? It is a sort of first step: we are here, we have not disappeared, we have not given up on the country. Decency still exists, but it feels powerless.
I am not a political strategist, Yascha. You are much better at this, much smarter at this. I am sure we agree about a lot of things the opposition could do in terms of policy and also about the limits of that, because I do think we are at a point where policy just does not cut it for most voters. It is all about identity—tribal, political, racial, whatever identity—and we have had that for a while. Now it seems fixed. You cannot promise to bring rural broadband to Arkansas and expect Arkansas to start voting for the Democratic president who brought it to them. It does not work that way anymore.
How do you overcome that? I would say at least begin with those basic human qualities that still unite people. I still think most people want a decent society, do not want violence, do not like the contempt and the vitriol and the hatred that we live with on a daily basis. They want what is good for their neighbor and even for their compatriot, and they are afraid of the direction we are going in. If you can start with that, which is an almost non-political position to begin from, that might lead you to answer the more political questions and even the policy questions about what might reach people who think that you are the enemy—because that is where we are. If we disagree, we are the enemy.
Mounk: I have a two-part answer, one of which is very straightforward, and I am reasonably convinced of it. It is not that original, but it would make a big difference. I think if Democrats want to win the midterms in 2026, and particularly if they want to win the presidential elections in 2028, they need to go into the political center. What Trump is doing is much more dangerous to democracy and morally much worse, but Trump’s Republican Party is way out of the cultural mainstream of the United States. Unfortunately, the Democrats are, on a number of positions, as well. Those positions are not as important, those issues are not as important, but in the minds of many voters, they matter.
I do think that the first political party which manages to go back into the political center—which I think means, on economic terms, believing in capitalism and in the promise of economic growth and private initiative but also believing in a welfare state and in making sure that the rich and big corporations pay their fair share of taxes, while also recognizing that crony capitalism is one of our realities and that we need to fight against it—will win. A political position that, on culture, is patriotic, believes that America as a nation of immigrants is capable of recognizing the contributions people from all over the world have made and are making to the country, wants people to be able to live and let live irrespective of what sexual orientation or gender identity they may have, but that also is able to recognize the importance of having control of your own borders, and that not just bigots or transphobes have concerns about biological males competing in elite-level female sports, and so on and so forth. I think that position is the winning position. If Democrats can go there first, they are going to win in 2028.
Winning in 2028 is really important, given what might happen if Trump’s successors are in power for another four or eight years. Now, I think there is a more fundamental thing, because that will be enough, I think, to win in 2028 with a reasonably charismatic candidate—not a once-in-a-generation candidate—but it is not going to be enough to fundamentally push Trump’s Republican Party out of political contention such that it forces the Republicans to reform and to come back to the drawing table.
For that, I think we need to recognize the way—and this is why the ending of the novel resonated with me—in which we have not understood how the world has changed. The basic narrative that we tell ourselves, the deep story, as someone like Arlie Hochschild might put it, is that we are the future, and the people who are challenging us—whether that is Donald Trump in the United States or Reform in the United Kingdom or the AfD in Germany—are the past. I keep going back to this German word ewiggestriger, which became popular after World War II and referred to the old Nazis, those who were forever of yesteryear. I think we think of our political opponents as ewiggestriger—they are stuck in the past.
In a way, that is a self-exculpatory phrase, because it means we know that we are going to be the future, that we have already won. It is a very triumphalist assumption. I increasingly think that many voters look at us and say, you are the ones speaking the language of the past. You are the ones speaking the language of 2000, not of 2025. For all their flaws, it is actually the populists who sound like today—who feel like they have understood that the old taboos, the old rules, no longer apply. They are the ones living in the present. You are the ones living in the past.
Packer: They’ve also mastered the media of the present rather than clinging to the media of the past.
Mounk: Exactly. I think the more fundamental challenge is how do we once again start to sound like the present or the future? Perhaps there is a hint—the end of the novel spoke to me—but I also thought, and I do not mean that the protagonist of your novel has to solve the problems of Trump’s America or be the guide to how to reinvent ourselves. That is too much to ask of him. But I was a little bit like, no, that is deeply decent, and he is a very winning character for all of his flaws as a result.
Still, I feel like we owe more. We owe, at least in the real world—not in the fictional world—an attempt to reinvent our compass and our language in such a way that we actually give these values a fighting chance.
Packer: Yeah, well, we cannot ask that of poor Hugo Rustin. He has been through a lot by the end of the novel, and it is enough that he is still treating patients in his front room in the middle of a civil war. But of course, we have to ask it of ourselves. I mean, I feel something is ending, and I am too old to understand. I do feel that. That is, in some way, the credo of those last lines.
But that does not mean I can retire and sit on the sidelines and watch another generation try to figure it out, because as long as we are alive, we have an obligation to do that. What you said earlier about moving to the center—I am with you on most of that. Maybe on economics, I push a little more to the left, to the anti-monopoly and to the criticism of crony capitalism, which I know you mentioned, but I would center that.
I think corruption is a powerful concern for ordinary Americans, and Trump manipulated it before becoming the most corrupt president in history. I think a Democrat should really emphasize that Qatari jet and the meme coins that are flowing into Trump’s family bank.
Mounk: I think it is an interesting minor disagreement. I know that is not your main point, but it is worth spelling out. I am not sure I disagree, which is to say that I think both of those things need to be very strong, and they do not actually stand in competition with each other. I think, in the way you speak, you need to make it clear that you believe in our economic system, that you believe in making people richer, and that you believe in giving people opportunity.
You believe not just in raising the minimum wage, but in allowing aspirations to thrive. Too often, Democrats do not sound like that—certainly those on the left of the party, but even those in the middle. At the same time, you need to make it authentic that you are angry at Trump’s corruption and that you are angry at all kinds of other things in our political system, like how hard it is to understand, before you get a treatment from a doctor, how much you are going to have to pay for it, and whether, if you are less economically fortunate than you or me, going through this procedure might compromise your ability to pay rent or not. I think you can be equally forceful about both of those, and the trick is not to put them in competition.
Packer: They should not compete because they are related. Crony capitalism, Trump’s corruption, and the way in which Congress has ensured a tax system that is deeply unfair while gutting the IRS from ever being able to catch rich tax cheats, et cetera, et cetera, are part of what is holding back the aspirations of ordinary people. You do not want to tell people, we are just going to make sure everyone has the same amount, we are going to give you economic security, we are going to make sure that you get your Social Security check and your Medicare. That should be the minimum.
But it should not be the message, because the message has to appeal to people’s aspirations, because we are and always will be a country of strivers. Striving right now is running headlong into—I use the word oligarchy—I would say Trump and the people who were on stage with him at his inauguration are hurting our children, hurting our workers, hurting our economy. That should not be a hard message to pair with the aspirational one.
On cultural issues, you know I agree with you. I think it has been a disaster that the left has dragged the Democratic Party so far on identity issues, on immigration, on language and speech, et cetera. I still would ask you, because you are an expert, do you think those policy changes, without some deeper work at organizing and forming connections in those deep-red areas that Democrats have abandoned—which takes years, it is not about one election, it is not about one message for one election—can swing an election any longer? Maybe those handful of votes that can tip the swing states one way or the other, but not anything decisive. We will still have Trump’s populism, and it will still be a really powerful force.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and George discuss how the Democrats can broaden their appeal, and how to reinvigorate liberalism. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
