George Packer on Patriotism, Democratic Values, and Turning to Fiction

GEORGE PACKER:

What fiction does is allows you to go deeper and explore the things that are universal, that are not just about the Trump era or the midterms, but that are about be human. And I'm thinking about that a lot these days as the nature of it. What it means to be human in the age of AI and of Trump keeps shifting under my feet.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today I'm joined by journalist and author George Packer. As a staff writer at The Atlantic, George has spent years writing about American politics, foreign policy and national life, with an unusual clarity and moral seriousness. But his latest book, The Emergency is a novel — it's a dark fable about a collapsing empire and what that kind of upheaval does to families, institutions, and even the human spirit. That tension between politics and deeper human truths run throughout this conversation. We begin with patriotism, what it means, what distinguishes it from nationalism, and whether Americans still share a common set of values strong enough to hold us together. George argues that patriotism must be rooted not in tribe or blood, but in our founding ideals and constitutional order. From there, we talk about the contradictions of the founders, the weakening of democratic institutions, and the limits of shared facts.

But we also talk about how to stay sane and fully human in such a moment through books, through family, through fiction, and through the discipline of imagining the lives of others. It's a serious and searching conversation, and I'm grateful to share it with you. Here's my conversation with George Packer.

GEORGE PACKER:

There was a poll that came out asking Democrats and Republicans how they felt about their country, whether they were proud to be American. Over the last 25 years, the number of Republicans who've said, "I am proud, I'm very proud," has remained at a pretty constant level. Whereas the number of Democrats has dipped and gone back up depending on what's happening in the country, who's president.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

The cyclical nature of their patriotism is really not patriotism so much as is their politics.

GEORGE PACKER:

Yes, that's right. And they conflate their politics with their feeling about the country and about being American and maybe express some discomfort or even shame with being American. Maybe there's some, among Republicans, some abiding attachment to symbols of Americanness, to an American identity, just to the word itself. Whereas for Democrats, it may have more to do with the values they think the country represents.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Which brings up something that I've noticed on the left, which is when we talk about the founding fathers now on the left, it usually comes with a series of critiques. They were racist, they were sexist. That sort of precedes the everything else, the all men are created equal. Well, they weren't really created equal, is immediately followed. I'm curious how you think about the balance between those two things.

GEORGE PACKER:

It's a real battle and a battle within myself because it is truly an astounding contradiction that the author of the declaration owned human beings. Every time I think of it in those kind of graphic terms, it's shocking.

And yet when I read Jefferson, I think what a lucky thing that this was one of the people present at the founding who thought like this and wrote like this. It's, I think, a healthy turn in American history writing that you really can't think about these great men any longer without reckoning with those huge blind spots. And yet the left has really undermined itself by making that kind of the most important defining quality. Although they own slaves, they created a free Republic. That's how I would put it. But the left would say, although they created a free Republic, they own slaves. The emphasis falls in the other place, and that's been a mistake.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Yes.

GEORGE PACKER:

However, I would add that if we define patriotism by how you behave and how you think, it's pretty hard for me to look at the Republican Party right now and say that that's a patriotic party. I'd say it's one of the least patriotic parties at any moment in my lifetime. So the number who say, "I love my country, I love my flag," doesn't necessarily tell you how patriotic they are.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Republicans are identifying as patriotic, yet what you're suggesting is they're supporting policies that are juxtaposed to the ideals of the country.

GEORGE PACKER:

Yes, that's right. Nationalism is aggressive. It's exclusive. And I embrace patriotism and I distrust nationalism. And I would say that the patriotism of today's Republican Party is nationalist. It's not that kind of love that you feel because it's your family. I would compare patriotism to love of your own family. You don't like everything about them. In fact, you know them well enough to know all of their weaknesses, but you're not going to turn them away. That's my feeling about my country.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

But nationalism has a component of blood to it as well, doesn't it? There's a ethnic component as well, which is an important distinction.

GEORGE PACKER:

I think that's right. Which is why in the '30s, the surge of nationalisms in Europe were dangerous because they meant certain people qualified as German or Italian and other people were lesser or not. And that is happening today in this country. The phrase I hear from the right is "heritage Americans." And I think when you say "blood," they don't use that word because it would be a little bit-

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Too on the nose.

GEORGE PACKER:

Two on the nose, but heritage is essentially the same thing.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

So that's nationalism. The other side of that is patriotism. And patriotism is more rooted in a shared set of ideals.

GEORGE PACKER:

I think in this country, yeah. I'm not sure that's true everywhere, but I don't think you can really affirm your American identity without the founding documents because without them, we are just a lot of fragmentary individuals who don't have much of a shared history, who don't have a shared religion or ethnicity, who come from all over the world. What is it that unites us as Americans? It's all men are created equal. It's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and it's the structure of the Constitution without which we don't have a republic. So I think to be an American patriot, you have to believe in those values, embodied in those documents, or else there's no Americanness. There's just 330 million individuals.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

There's an idea in democratic circles that MAGA exists in a different information ecosystem that is just not fact-based. And I've always struggled with that argument because it discounts the view of the other side as just simply misinformed. But the thinking — the way it went, was that if we could just establish agree upon a shared set of facts, we could have a reasonable conversations about solutions. But it reminds me of the Mark Twain quote, lies, damn lies, and statistics. The problem is not facts. It's that people are using their facts, the ones that bolster their arguments on both sides of the aisle. And it's really an issue of context and values. And so what I think we lack isn't a shared set of facts, but a shared set of values, a way to say when a line has been crossed. Does that resonate with you?

GEORGE PACKER:

It resonates. I'm not quite ready to give up on shared facts. The disappearance of common facts has been a terrible thing because it means we have no beginning point from which to argue, except maybe what you're saying is, how about beginning with values? And there, it's funny because I know Trump supporters who would never tolerate in their own children lying, bullying, greed, boasting, vanity, abuse of others, and yet they tolerate it in their leader. And so you would say, "Well, they have the same values I do because I don't tolerate those things either." And yet when it comes to politics, it's as if personal values just disappear because it's almost tribal — "well, he's my tribal leader, so of course I'm going to tolerate those things. He's the guy who's — we've put our faith in because he's going to make everything right and he doesn't have to be perfect." You hear that over and over? Who cares what Trump does in his private life or with his tweets? Well, I'm sorry, but it's actually not just his private life. It's the way he's governing the country and it's the policies too are cruel and mendacious. But once you're in the realm of politics, values just start to dissolve and it becomes neither fact-based nor value-based, but it's nationalist, it's my tribe, it's my team.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

But this feels like a modern phenomenon. And let me give you an example of what I'm thinking about: corruption. So you have the Trump administration, the Trump children seemingly enriching themselves, and rather than having a conversation about corruption being bad, we end up having a conversation about Hunter Biden. And if he enriched himself, and both sides seem to give it a pass when it's their guy that's in control. And we can argue about the orders of magnitude of corruption, but instead we should just be saying, "You shouldn't be corrupt. This is anti-American. This is anti-Democratic. We stand for leaders of high moral character, and we should be able to point that out instead of getting caught in these what about- ism arguments that stem from our othering of the opposition."

GEORGE PACKER:

Right. That would be wonderful, what you've just described. That's my ideal too. But it seems that there are other things that are more important, which is to say winning and not just winning, but humiliating the loser, solidarity with one's own gang. I've been to, for example, I spent several hours at a Turning Point USA convention in Phoenix.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Oh, good for you, for going. Yeah.

GEORGE PACKER:

Yeah. This was for a very long 25,000 word Atlantic piece. There was no positive vision. There was no ideal, no universal values, only the values that my side wins with. And if bringing up the what about- ism of Hunter Biden wins that argument, or at least diffuses the obvious argument about Trump's corruption, then it's better. It's better to do that than to say we agree. Corruption is absolutely wrong and poisonous to our democracy.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Doesn't this all root back though to this idea of a shared some commonality that the underlying ideology is otherism. It's us versus some segment of the American population, and therefore you can really be team-oriented with that mindset. But if the team is the United States, if there is some commonality that comes first, doesn't that otherism dissipate, lose its power?

GEORGE PACKER:

Yeah, obviously it can then be directed at foreigners or at another country, but I think if it's founded on the better angels of our nature, if it's founded on the values and the founding documents, then it will not lead to the evils of nationalism. It will inspire patriotism, love of the people who share the country, which we're so far from that you almost dare not speak of it. It sounds sort of ludicrous, but the shared values that you're describing are probably the last foundation of unity that we have. I've spent many years, Ted, arguing with the left about the need for shared values and the need for patriotism, and let's try to understand why some of our fellow Americans are voting for this guy. I wrote about it for years and years, and now I've run out of the desire to try to understand. There's, I would say, a large minority of our compatriots who care more about whether it's making money, whether it's disliking this or that minority, this or that institution, higher education, the media, whatever, their animus is stronger than their belief in democracy.

And once we're there, for me, there's no more conversation.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Do you think they think that democracy has worked for them in the last, say, two decades?

GEORGE PACKER:

No. What it meant to Trump supporters was our democracy is being invaded by foreigners who want to destroy it and us, or maybe, and democracy hasn't worked because democracies produce this self-satisfied elite that doesn't care about us and that's left us behind and that is continuing to enrich itself and feather its own nest. And so what we all have needed is a strong person to come in and set things right. Even if that takes us away from democracy, even if what we need is a Caesar or a monarch, then so be it because it hasn't worked.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Do you feel like the federal government in particular over the last few decades has been working in the best interests of the American people or in the best interest of money?

GEORGE PACKER:

Money.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Pretty clearly, right?

GEORGE PACKER:

For sure. For sure. And it's been with presidents of both parties and with all kinds of policies.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

There's an interesting study out of the Yale School of Climate Communication that there are two observations that they've made, which is one, the smarter and more educated you are, the harder it is to convince you with facts about climate change. That if you're on the side of, if you think climate change is a hoax or you think it's exaggerated, really your intelligence and education enable you to form arguments against their facts and you become more embedded, not less embedded. The other one was that the more you have climate-related disasters, the more resistant people become to climate change, counterintuitively.

GEORGE PACKER:

That is mind blowing. What explains it?

TED ROOSEVELT V:

People get scared. The human mind is trying to protect your fragile psyche from a very scary thing, which is this sort of existential crisis on this planet.

GEORGE PACKER:

I see. I see.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

I'm not quite sure that the path to trying to bring us together is ever going to be on these shared facts, on these shared understandings. It has to go back to these shared values. We have to reestablish what it is that we universally agree on and value in order to move forward.

GEORGE PACKER:

I mean, I think you're right, and yet I'm imagining a conversation across the partisan lines in which each side claims that it is standing up for those values and has all sorts of reasons why they can claim that because values are by definition amorphous than facts.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Sure.

GEORGE PACKER:

So you could kind of mold facts into values, mold your own conduct into values that someone else might look at quite differently. I wrote a piece that hasn't been published yet that sort of looks at two different historical periods as lenses for our own. Are there a series of events that historians will look back and say this, you can connect these events and see that the country's about to have a rupture. But the other period is the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. What were the dominant concerns? They were the curse of bigness. They were monopolies. They were mass immigration, labor unrest, technological upheaval, cultural change, dramatically fast. All of that is the same thing we've got today. So why don't we have a politics that leads to a reform era from the populist through the progressives to the New Deal? Why isn't that happening now?

And so the people who might be able to see a common interest in reform in breaking up big tech corporations, in protecting ordinary people from the power of tech and money, that common interest is constantly distracted by the red-blue war. So I don't know, do you have an answer for me? Where is the Teddy Roosevelt, the Woodrow Wilson, the Franklin Roosevelt, the reform movement?

TED ROOSEVELT V:

I don't have a person in mind, but I do think it is a massive lane that somebody hopefully will step into. It brings me back to this question I've had throughout this entire conversation. You sort of started with a lot of empathy for the other side, but now you really have a difficult time listening to them. And you wrote a great article about Yale professors leaving the country when Trump was elected again, and you said, "We are not at this moment where you should be abandoning this country, that you have to find kind of a path forward." Do you feel like we are now closer to that moment where there isn't a clear path forward that you don't have empathy anymore, that there are just a segment of the population that is beyond redemption?

GEORGE PACKER:

Well, you never want to hear yourself saying that. I certainly feel it. I mean, most human beings in this country remain sane, I would say, and most people are tired. They just don't know how to get out of this trap. But if you look at the structures of the country, the institutions that are supposed to protect us from tyranny, the story of the past year has been that they're weakening or even they're failing, whether it's agencies of the federal government that are supposed to have independence from-

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Department of Justice, right?

GEORGE PACKER:

The Department of Justice is the biggest. I worry about the Department of Defense. A Congress has ceased to function. The Supreme Court, I really don't have a whole lot of faith in when it comes to the big issues that Trump cares about. The media has caved in on some crucial moments when it needed to stand up. Corporations and the CEOs who run them, big law firms, they have all shown a lesson that history really has already taught us, which is you may say that democracy matters, but when the crunch comes, some other concern might well matter more, whether it's your salary, your job, your reputation, your ambition. So that worries me a lot.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

George, I'm curious how you manage your mental health. And the reason I ask the question is I find that I have to balance to some degree my outrage on the news, on the day-to-day news with my own life.

GEORGE PACKER:

Yeah. Well, I think that's how you do it. I mean, everyone has their own private passions. Mine are my children, my reading. I'm in a book group, four couples. We've been doing it for 10 years now, actually the entire span of the Trump era. We have a dinner, we rotate the dinner, and the food is somehow related to the book we've read. What we're reading are the great novels, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, The Age of Innocence, some 20th century, but nothing written after 1960. We're just trying to move well away from this era. And it's something I'm holding onto for dear life. I don't want this book group ever to end because it's the sort of thing that keeps me sane and happy. It's essential not to be drowning in the news all the time because it's there in the internet age, every microsecond, every nanosecond that you want it and you'll sort of poison yourself, you'll become news poisoned.

So I guess people have their own passions. Those are two of mine.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Have you found in reading some of these books that the themes of humanity are pretty universal and that this moment in time, does it give you a sense of scope and time that gives you comfort that is not wholly unique?

GEORGE PACKER:

Yes. There's always a sort of status competition. There's always power hunger. There's always tension between the movement of history and then your own private life and the difficulty of finding a connection or a balance between them. At the same time, I think we are living through — as at the beginning of the 20th century, we are living through a dramatic change in what it feels like to be human. I published a novel a couple months ago —

TED ROOSEVELT V:

I was just about to ask.

GEORGE PACKER:

Yeah, called The Emergency, and it's a political fable. It's about a collapsed empire and what that does to families and to a society. So there's no time or place named, and it feels far away. But in taking you far away and in making the world strange, my aim is to get you to see our world more clearly and in a way fresher than the news allows you to. We get so numb to the same language, the same stories, the same people. This is like, I hope a cleansing of the senses. It puts you in a totally strange new world, and yet the feeling I want to convey is what does it feel like to be alive today? What does it feel like to be trying to hold onto your children while understanding that somehow they've moved in a direction that's left you behind, that history has moved in a direction that seems to be leaving you behind, that you don't understand.

The world you grew up with, which you assumed would always be there, is disappearing. And you don't want to be the person who refuses to accept that, but you also don't want to throw out all the values that you grew up with and that you want to pass on to your children. So in a way that writing that novel was both a relief and an escape. I was continuing to work for The Atlantic as a journalist, but I was also, every morning with the internet turned off, I was in that other world and that was a wonderful thing. And yet in the end, you can't escape your own time and fate. And so that's the nature of this novel that I've written, The Emergency.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

How do you choose between writing a novel and being a journalist to say what you feel like needs to be said?

GEORGE PACKER:

Well, I mean, I'm basically a journalist. I don't think my main or my best pitch is fiction, but I think I do know how to write fiction. And I wrote this novel because I had said what I could say with journalism, and that produced a bit of a crisis of faith maybe in facts on my part, which also coincided during the pandemic with a kind of vibration on a lower frequency, an imagined story, characters, a landscape based on the Hudson Valley of New York State, but take us completely into another realm. And that's a fictional vibration. It's the desire to create something out of nothing in order to get deeper, to get it at the deeper truths because journalism is a great and essential activity. But I think what fiction does is allows you to go deeper and explore the things that are universal, that are not just about the Trump era or the midterms, but that are about being human. And I'm thinking about that a lot these days as the nature of it, what it means to be human in the age of AI and of Trump keeps shifting under my feet.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Let me ask you one more quick question because we ask everybody on the podcast, which is, what does it mean to you to be a good citizen?

GEORGE PACKER:

I mean, my first thought is to participate, to be active, to be informed, to be educated. And I think our schools have lost that mission of educating us for citizenship. But I guess after our conversation, I would want to make sure not to stay at that level, but to say maybe on a deeper level, to listen, to imagine the situation of others, to put yourself in someone else's skin, which is also what it means to be a good writer. So in a way, the two are drawn similar demands and values, but those are hard things to ask of anyone. But I think once you've lost that, once you no longer think of them as a human being like you, but instead they've become an avatar, a meme, some internet icon, then it's easy to dehumanize them and to degrade them. So hold on to the sense of a common humanity, which is very grand, but very basic.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

I love it. George, thank you so much.

GEORGE PACKER:

Oh, I enjoyed it a lot. It's been a great conversation and I'm grateful for it. Thank you.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

George, it was so great to hash out some of this with you. It's critical to talk about patriotism and the state of our country in a reasonable way with an open mind, and I appreciate your willingness to do that. So thank you. Listeners, please pick up a copy of George Packer's latest novel, The Emergency, and follow his work on The Atlantic, particularly their special coverage of America 250. Finally, it may not always be easy, but remember these words President Biden spoke shortly before he left office: "You can't love your country only when you win." Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.