Luke Ford

George Packer (b. 1960) is an American journalist, essayist, novelist, and author whose career chronicles the weakening of American institutions, the limits of American power abroad, and the social cost of economic change at home. Over four decades he has built a body of work that sits between journalism, history, and social criticism. He belongs among the leading practitioners of narrative journalism in the United States, though the label undersells him. His subject is not the news. His subject is what happens to ordinary lives when large institutions make large decisions, and what happens to a republic when the institutions that organize common life lose the trust of the people they serve.

Packer is born in Santa Clara, California, into an accomplished academic family. His father, Herbert L. Packer (1925-1972), ranks among the major legal scholars of his generation at Stanford, author of The Limits of the Criminal Sanction. His mother, Nancy Packer (b. 1925), teaches and writes fiction at Stanford. His sister, Ann Packer (b. 1959), becomes a novelist. The defining event of his childhood arrives when his father, debilitated by a stroke suffered during the campus turmoil of the late 1960s, dies by suicide. Packer is twelve. The death leaves a permanent mark on his temperament as a writer. Questions of moral responsibility, institutional failure, personal character, and human limitation recur across everything he writes. The wound also shapes his stance toward politics. He inherits his family’s liberalism, but he inherits it as a man who watched liberal institutions fail to protect his own father, and the inheritance comes with grief attached.

He graduates from Yale University in 1982 and joins the Peace Corps, spending two years teaching in Togo. The experience produces his first book, The Village of Waiting (1988), and establishes the themes that define his career: skepticism toward ideological certainty, sympathy for ordinary people caught inside large systems, and fascination with the gap between political aspiration and social reality. The young American arrives in West Africa with development theory in his head and leaves with a tragic education. The book reads as memoir but works as a study in the limits of Western expertise.

His political formation runs through the democratic left. He writes for Dissent, works construction in Boston, publishes two novels, The Half Man (1991) and Central Square (1998), and produces a family memoir, Blood of the Liberals (2000), that traces three generations of American liberalism through his grandfather, an Alabama populist congressman, and his father, a Cold War liberal academic. The memoir wins the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and announces the question that organizes the rest of his career: why does American liberalism keep failing the people it claims to serve, and what survives of it after each failure.

Reporting moves him away from the ideological frameworks of his youth. Through the 1990s he covers Africa, reporting on civil war, state collapse, and humanitarian crisis in places like Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. He concentrates on civilians navigating violence rather than on diplomats and political elites. These years build the method that becomes his hallmark: patient observation, long immersion, and a preference for understanding institutions through the experience of individuals. What emerges might be called tragic liberalism. He remains committed to liberal democracy while growing skeptical of grand theory, technocratic confidence, and moral absolutism. He emphasizes contingency, institutional competence, and the unintended consequences of political action.

Iraq becomes the defining foreign-policy subject of his career. Unlike many liberal journalists, Packer supports the removal of Saddam Hussein (1937-2006), persuaded in part by Iraqi exiles like Kanan Makiya that democratic reconstruction is possible and morally justified. His reporting after the invasion destroys that hope. The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005) becomes an influential account of the war and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The book refuses the comfortable explanations. Packer declines to portray the war as simple deception or imperial ambition. Instead he shows how idealism, bureaucratic dysfunction, strategic incompetence, and ideological certainty combine to produce disaster. The book carries a confessional undertone. Its author supported the war, and the reporting reads as an act of public accounting. His play Betrayed (2008), drawn from his reporting on Iraqi interpreters abandoned by the American government, extends the moral inquiry to the stage.

He joins The New Yorker in 2003 and spends fifteen years there producing long-form journalism on Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, Lagos, Silicon Valley, and Washington. During this period he becomes a serious interpreter of globalization and institutional change, combining the techniques of literary journalism with the analytical concerns of a historian.

His major domestic work appears in 2013. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America wins the National Book Award for Nonfiction and stands as his masterpiece. The book seeks to explain the transformation of American society from the late 1970s through the aftermath of the financial crisis. Packer rejects conventional political history and builds a mosaic narrative of biographies, profiles, documentary collages, and social observation, a structure that echoes the U.S.A. trilogy of John Dos Passos (1896-1970). Through the lives of a North Carolina entrepreneur, an Ohio factory worker turned organizer, a disillusioned Washington insider, and celebrity portraits ranging from Newt Gingrich to Oprah Winfrey, Packer argues that the institutions that once organized American life, the unions, the parties, the local banks, the newspapers, the churches, have hollowed out, leaving citizens isolated and exposed to organized money. The book anticipates the debates over populism, inequality, and social fragmentation that erupt three years later. Readers return to it after 2016 as prophecy.

Institutional distrust becomes his recurring theme. He argues that Americans inhabit separate moral worlds, each with its own narratives, loyalties, and sources of legitimacy. The argument reaches full expression in Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (2021), where he divides the country into four rival national narratives: Free America, the libertarian gospel of the Reagan coalition; Smart America, the meritocratic creed of the professional class; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, the identity-centered radicalism of the young left. He criticizes all four and argues for a renewed civic nationalism grounded in equal citizenship and democratic institutions. The framework enters the broader political vocabulary, cited by writers across the spectrum.

In 2018 he leaves The New Yorker for The Atlantic, where his essays turn toward domestic institutional crisis: elite education, meritocracy, the condition of journalism, the Democratic Party, and the widening distance between professional-class institutions and working-class Americans. He argues that the professional-managerial class has converted educational and occupational success into a hereditary system, producing resentment among the excluded. His essay on the pandemic year, “We Are Living in a Failed State,” ranks among the most read pieces The Atlantic publishes in 2020.

The American collapse in Afghanistan gives his career a grim symmetry. His Atlantic reporting on the 2021 withdrawal from Kabul, gathered around the long piece “The Betrayal,” concentrates on the Afghan interpreters, aides, and partners abandoned in the evacuation. He treats the withdrawal as a moral failure as much as a strategic one. The Assassins’ Gate examined the consequences of overconfidence in launching a war. The Afghanistan reporting examines the consequences of indifference in ending one. The two bodies of work bracket two decades of American power and find the same flaw at both ends: a government that makes commitments to vulnerable people and walks away from them.

Between these projects he writes biography. Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (2019) uses the life of diplomat Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010) to chart the rise and decline of the postwar foreign-policy establishment. The book breaks with biographical convention. Packer writes in an intimate, voiced first person, addressing the reader like a man telling a story at a dinner table, and he renders Holbrooke as monstrous and magnificent at once: vain, grasping, cruel to subordinates, and possessed of an idealism the country no longer produces. The book wins the Hitchens Prize and a place among the notable political biographies of its decade.

Packer occupies an odd position in American letters. He defends expertise and institutions as essential to democratic life while arguing that institutions corrupt themselves when they escape accountability. He criticizes nationalism but distrusts rootless cosmopolitanism. He supports liberal democracy while doubting many assumptions of the liberal class that staffs it. Populists find him too establishment. The establishment finds him too harsh about itself. He has made a career inside elite publications while writing, again and again, that the elite has failed.

As a stylist he descends from George Orwell (1903-1950), John Hersey (1914-1993), and Joan Didion (1934-2021). His prose stays restrained, patient, and analytical. He rarely reaches for rhetorical flourish. He accumulates detail until historical patterns emerge on their own. The central unit of his analysis is neither the institution nor the ideology but the individual life through which larger forces become visible: the Togolese villager, the Iraqi interpreter, the laid-off Ohio worker, the doomed diplomat, the dead father.

Across subjects as scattered as West African villages, the Iraq War, deindustrialization, meritocracy, and polarization, Packer pursues one question: what happens when the institutions that sustain common civic life lose legitimacy. His answer carries a tragic realism. Institutions fail, and their failures wound real people. Yet their collapse produces something worse. He wishes to prevent it. He writes as a man who has seen both, in Freetown and Baghdad and Youngstown and, first of all, in his own home.

Watergate and Cultural Trauma

Jeffrey Alexander (b. 1947) argues that events do not traumatize societies. Trauma is a socially mediated attribution, a claim made by carrier groups who tell a wider audience that something sacred has been profaned, that the wound reaches the core of collective identity, that someone bears responsibility, and that reparation must follow. The claim succeeds or fails on the skill of the claim makers and the receptivity of the audience, not on the body count. Nanking produced 300,000 corpses and almost no collective trauma. Watergate produced zero corpses and the deepest peacetime crisis in American history. Read through this frame, George Packer stops looking like a reporter who documents American decline. He becomes a carrier group of one, a man who has spent forty years performing trauma work.

Alexander borrows the carrier group concept from Max Weber (1864-1920). Carrier groups hold ideal and material interests, occupy positions in the social structure, and possess discursive talent for meaning making in the public sphere. Packer fits every clause. His ideal interest is the renewal of liberal institutions. His material interest runs through the prestige economy of The New Yorker and The Atlantic, which pay him to make meaning for the professional class. His structural position gives him access to the institutional arenas where, in Alexander’s scheme, trauma claims get processed: mass media above all, with the aesthetic arena close behind, since his books work through narrative identification and catharsis rather than argument. His discursive talent is the accumulation of detail until a moral pattern emerges. Alexander says the trauma process resembles a speech act with speaker, audience, and situation. Packer has spent his career as the speaker, addressing an audience he knows is fragmented, in situations he does not control.

Now run his major works through the four representations Alexander says every successful trauma narrative must supply: the nature of the pain, the nature of the victim, the relation of the victim to the wider audience, and the attribution of responsibility.

The Assassins’ Gate is a trauma claim about Iraq, and it answers all four questions. The pain is a war launched on ideological certainty and managed with criminal incompetence. The victims are Iraqis who believed American promises and American soldiers spent by planners who refused to plan. The relation to the audience runs through Packer’s own complicity, since he supported the war, and his confession invites the liberal reader into shared responsibility, the move Alexander describes as expanding the circle of the we, taking the suffering of others on board. The perpetrators are named: an administration, a set of ideologues, a bureaucracy that punished knowledge. By Alexander’s criteria the claim achieved illocutionary success within its originating collectivity. Educated liberal America accepted Iraq as trauma, and Packer’s book became part of the canonical representation. But the trauma process stalled at the institutional arenas. No commission sat. No legal judgment fixed responsibility. No televised ritual forced perpetrators to account for themselves under oath. The carrier group made its claim in the aesthetic and media arenas and could not move the claim into the legal and governmental ones. Iraq became a trauma for half the audience and a noble effort betrayed by execution for the other half, two rival classifications that never collapsed into one master narrative.

The Watergate essay explains why this stall matters, and it gives the sharpest tool for reading Packer’s domestic work. Alexander shows that Watergate began as a profane event, “just politics” to 75 percent of the country, and became sacred through a two-year process of generalization, in Talcott Parsons’s sense: public attention climbed from the level of goals to the level of norms and finally to the level of values, where the event registered as a threat to the sacred center of the republic. Five conditions made the climb possible. Sufficient consensus. A perceived threat to the center. Institutional social controls willing to act. Autonomous elites forming countercenters. And ritual processes of symbolic interpretation, above all the televised Senate hearings, which created liminal sacred time where senators could voice civic pieties that on any normal day might draw hoots, and the country received them as truth. The hearings worked because polarization had cooled. The 1960s were over. Critical universalism had detached from the left and become available to the center.

Packer’s late career is a long encounter with the absence of those five conditions. The Unwinding describes thirty years of institutional failure: factories closing, banks looting, parties hollowing, a financial crisis that destroyed trillions in household wealth. By Alexander’s distinction, these are massive social system disruptions that never became cultural trauma for the nation as a whole. Institutions failed to perform, and the failures stayed profane. No generalization occurred. The financial crisis produced no Ervin committee, no liminal hearing, no rite of expulsion. Bankers kept their bonuses and their standing. The pain entered group consciousness as grievance, fragmented by region and class and party, never as a master narrative of shared suffering with agreed victims and agreed perpetrators. Packer’s mosaic method is an attempt to do with literary form what the society would not do with ritual: he supplies the nature of the pain through Tampa foreclosures and Youngstown shutdowns, the victims through Dean Price and Tammy Thomas, the relation to the audience through novelistic identification, and the responsibility through portraits of Newt Gingrich, Robert Rubin, and organized money. The book is a one-man trauma process conducted in the aesthetic arena because every other arena refused the case.

Alexander’s borrowing from Kai Erikson (b. 1931) deepens the fit. Erikson distinguishes individual trauma, the sudden blow, from collective trauma, the slow realization that community no longer exists as a source of support, that the tissue of social life has been damaged. Collective trauma lacks the suddenness the word implies. It works its way in. The Unwinding is that sentence extended to 430 pages. The title itself names Erikson’s gradual realization. Packer grasped, before reading any sociology, that the deepest American wound had no date, no explosion, no single morning everyone remembers, and that this formlessness is exactly what kept it from becoming a recognized national trauma. A wound without a date resists ritual. There is no anniversary to mark, no hearing to convene, no perpetrator to swear in.

Last Best Hope then reads as Packer discovering Alexander’s first condition and despairing of it. The four Americas are four rival systems of cultural classification, each with its own sacred values, its own pollution categories, its own victims and perpetrators. Free America says the trauma is regulation and decline of liberty. Real America says the trauma is elites and immigrants destroying a way of life. Just America says the trauma is the unhealed crime of racial domination. Smart America barely admits trauma at all, since the meritocracy has been good to it. Alexander writes that carrier groups must first persuade their own collectivity and then broaden the claim to the society at large. In Packer’s America the second step has become impossible. Every trauma claim saturates its originating group and dies at the border. January 6 makes the cleanest contrast with Watergate. The five conditions assembled in 1973 and could not assemble in 2021. No consensus that the event polluted the center. Social controls acted, courts convicted hundreds, and a House committee even staged televised hearings with high production values, conscious echoes of Ervin. The ritual form was achieved and the ritual failed, because ritual without prior consensus produces only a broadcast to the already convinced. Half the audience experienced sacred time. The other half saw a witch hunt, the exact defense Nixon’s men attempted and could not sustain in 1973. Their successors sustained it. Alexander ends his Watergate essay with the line that scandals are not born but made. Packer’s subject is a country that has lost the capacity to make them.

The Kabul reporting shows Packer running the full trauma process one more time, deliberately. “The Betrayal” supplies pain, the abandonment of Afghans who served American forces; victims with names and faces, rendered in the valued qualities Alexander says the audience must recognize as its own, loyalty, courage, faith in American promises; a relation to the audience built on the sacred value of keeping faith with those who keep faith with you; and responsibility distributed across four administrations, with the indifference of the Biden evacuation at the center. The claim demands reparation in the most literal sense, visas and evacuation. Here the carrier group achieved partial, measurable success. The Special Immigrant Visa question entered the media and governmental arenas, advocacy coalitions formed, and processing expanded. By Alexander’s standard this is what a trauma process accomplishes when it works: it extends solidarity, defines new moral responsibility, and redirects political action. The circle of the we widened just enough to include some thousands of Afghans. Then routinization set in, attention moved, and the spiral of signification flattened, exactly on schedule.

One more turn of the frame, against Packer this time. Alexander builds his theory on the rejection of what he calls the naturalistic fallacy, the lay belief that events traumatize by their inherent force, that facts speak. Packer is a naturalist to the bone. His whole method rests on the conviction that patient accumulation of fact produces moral recognition in the reader, that the suffering in Youngstown or Kabul, once shown, compels. Alexander’s Watergate data refute the method. The facts of Watergate were public before the 1972 election and moved no one; Nixon won forty-nine states with the burglary on the record. The context changed, not the facts. Packer keeps writing as if better, fuller, more honest representation might generalize the audience, and his late books register growing bafflement that it does not. Alexander supplies the explanation Packer’s own framework lacks: representation succeeds only inside favorable structural conditions, consensus, autonomous elites, functioning arenas, and no quantity of reporting substitutes for them. The carrier group cannot speak a fragmented audience into wholeness. Packer senses this, which is why Last Best Hope shifts from narration to exhortation. But exhortation is just a louder speech act aimed at the same fractured public.

Packer’s career divides into one success and a series of instructive failures. The success: Iraq, where his claim helped fix the dominant representation of the war for the institutions that write history, even without legal or governmental closure. The failures are not failures of craft. They are demonstrations of the theory. The unwinding never became a national trauma because slow wounds resist signification. The financial crisis never generalized because elites protected the center instead of forming countercenters. January 6 ritualized without consensus and so ritualized in vain. Packer stands in the position of a Sam Ervin (1896-1885) with no committee, no subpoena, no sacred chamber, only prose, performing the trauma process in the single arena still open to him and discovering its limits. Alexander would say he is doing necessary work all the same. By constructing trauma claims, carrier groups keep open the possibility that solidarity might extend, that responsibility might someday be taken on board. The claims sit in the culture like Nuremberg’s statutes sat in the law, waiting for conditions to change. Whether American conditions will change is a question neither the theorist nor the journalist can answer. Packer writes as though the answer must come, because the alternative is that the spiral of signification has stopped for good. Packer writes as though the answer must come, because the alternative is that the spiral of signification has stopped for good, and a society that can no longer make scandals can no longer make repairs.

The Set

George Packer (b. 1960) sits at the center of a social world that joins New York magazine journalism to Washington foreign policy and to the remnant of the anti-totalitarian literary left. The set has a geography. Its members live in Brooklyn brownstones and Upper West Side apartments and Northwest Washington rowhouses. They work at The New Yorker and The Atlantic. They publish books with Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Knopf. They summer in places where other writers summer. They meet at the Council on Foreign Relations, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, at the American Academy in Berlin, the institution Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010) built and Packer memorialized in Our Man.

The set has a lineage, and the lineage does most of the work. Its members trace themselves to George Orwell (1903-1950), to Albert Camus (1913-1960), to Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), to Irving Howe (1920-1993) and the Dissent circle Howe founded. Packer served on Dissent’s editorial board and edited two volumes of Orwell’s essays. The lineage runs through the liberal hawks who gathered around the Iraq war: Paul Berman (b. 1949), Leon Wieseltier (b. 1952), Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), Michael Ignatieff (b. 1947), Kanan Makiya (b. 1949). It runs through the New Yorker of David Remnick (b. 1958), where Packer spent fifteen years among Dexter Filkins (b. 1961), Steve Coll (b. 1958), Lawrence Wright (b. 1947), Jane Mayer (b. 1955), William Finnegan (b. 1952), Philip Gourevitch (b. 1961), and Katherine Boo (b. 1964). It runs now through the Atlantic of Jeffrey Goldberg (b. 1965), where Packer writes alongside Anne Applebaum (b. 1964) and David Frum (b. 1960). It touches the post-2020 heterodox network: Yascha Mounk (b. 1982) and Persuasion, Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) and American Purpose, Wieseltier and Liberties, Thomas Chatterton Williams (b. 1981) and the Harper’s Letter, which Packer signed. Mark Lilla (b. 1956) and Michael Walzer (b. 1935) supply the academic wing. Samantha Power (b. 1970) supplies the bridge to government, as Holbrooke once did. Packer’s wife, the writer Laura Secor, covers Iran; his sister, Ann Packer (b. 1959), writes fiction; his parents, Herbert Packer (1925-1972) and Nancy Packer (b. 1925), taught at Stanford; his grandfather George Huddleston (1869-1960) served Alabama in Congress as a populist Democrat. Packer wrote the family into Blood of the Liberals, and the family history doubles as the set’s history: liberalism inherited, tested, broken, and repaired across generations.

What they value comes down to seriousness. The set treats moral seriousness as the master virtue and frivolity as the master vice. Seriousness means you go to the place you write about. Packer went to Togo with the Peace Corps, to Iraq for The Assassins’ Gate, to Tampa and Youngstown for The Unwinding. Filkins went to Fallujah. Finnegan went everywhere. The set distrusts the writer who opines from the desk and reveres the writer who comes back from the field with notebooks. They value plain prose as a moral discipline, the Orwell doctrine that clear language and honest thought require each other. They value the long book over the hot take, the five-year project over the news cycle. They value the dissident: Václav Havel (1936-2011), Adam Michnik (b. 1946), the writer who pays for his sentences. They value independence from party and movement while remaining engaged, the position Camus held and lost friends over. They distrust theory, academia, and any prose that needs a glossary. They believe America is a proposition worth defending, flawed, unfinished, and still the last best hope, which is the title Packer chose for his 2021 book without apparent irony.

The hero system runs on witness. The immortal figure in this world is the engaged writer who saw the thing himself and told the truth about it at cost to his standing. Orwell in Catalonia is the founding image. The hero goes against his own side when his own side lies. Hitchens broke with the left over Iraq and the set still argues about whether that was the heroic act or the cautionary tale, and the argument is itself a ritual of the tribe. Holbrooke serves as the hero of American power, the man who believed the United States could stop a genocide and sometimes did, monstrous in his ambition and redeemed by Dayton. Packer’s portrait of him reads as the set’s self-portrait: idealism and ego fused so tight you cannot pull them apart. Below the heroes of action stand the heroes of the desk who earned their place through decades of reporting, and below them the keepers of the flame, the editors. Remnick canonizes. Goldberg canonizes. A New Yorker byline confers a kind of clerical status, and the National Book Award, which The Unwinding won in 2013, confers tenure. Immortality in this world means the book that outlasts you, the Orwell shelf, the work still assigned forty years on. The set member writes for the future reader who will judge whether he saw clearly when seeing clearly was hard.

The status games follow from the hero system. Access ranks first: the war zone, the secret prison, the principal who returns your calls. Filkins gains status from Afghanistan, Coll from Pakistan, Applebaum from Eastern Europe, Power from the Situation Room. Second comes the big book, delivered every four or five years, reviewed on the front of the The New York Times Book Review, debated in the The New York Review of Books. Third comes the prize circuit: the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, the Hitchens Prize, which Packer won in 2019 and used to deliver “The Enemies of Writing,” a speech that doubled as the set’s creed. Fourth, and most distinctive, comes the status earned by taking fire from both flanks. A member who angers the Trumpist right scores points. A member who also angers the identitarian left scores more, because that fire proves independence rather than tribal service. Packer’s Atlantic essays on his children’s New York City schools and on the four Americas worked as status plays of this kind, and the attacks they drew from the left functioned as confirmation. The set keeps a ledger on Iraq. Support for the war remains the great stain, and the games around it reward confession performed at the right depth. Packer’s ambivalence in The Assassins’ Gate, his slow public reckoning, set the template: you may have been wrong, but you must have been wrong for serious reasons, after going there, and you must account for it in print. Berman never confessed and lost altitude. Hitchens died unrepentant and became a contested saint. The younger heterodox writers play a parallel game, gaining entry to the set by absorbing attacks from their generational peers, which the elders read as dues paid.

The normative claims sort into a short list. Writers should report before they opine. Institutions, however corrupted, deserve repair rather than demolition, and the burden of proof falls on the demolisher. Free expression outranks emotional safety, and the open letter of July 2020 stated this as doctrine. Identity politics fragments the civic whole; the set holds that a democratic nation needs a shared story, and that “Just America,” Packer’s name for the young progressive narrative, supplies grievance without a story of common life. America carries obligations abroad; retreat is a choice with victims. Equality means dignity for the White machinist in Youngstown and the Black entrepreneur in Tampa alike, and The Unwinding made the case by braiding their lives into one national decline. Prose should be plain because obscurity shelters lies. The writer owes loyalty to the truth over the team, and a writer who checks his sentences against his coalition has already failed.

The essentialist claims sit beneath the norms. The set believes in a durable American character, self-making and restless, that institutions can channel but never abolish; the four Americas of Packer’s taxonomy are presented as narratives but treated as natures. It believes totalitarianism is a permanent human temptation rather than a closed historical chapter, which is why Applebaum’s warnings and Fukuyama’s revisions command attention here. It believes character shows in prose, that a man’s sentences reveal his honesty the way his gait reveals his health, an Orwellian essentialism the set never questions. It believes elites grow insulated by nature of their position and that insulation breeds decadence, the thesis of The Unwinding. And it believes the writer constitutes a distinct human type, born to watch from the edge of the room, so that the threats named in “The Enemies of Writing” amount to threats against a species.

The moral grammar assigns sin and virtue with consistency. The cardinal sins: frivolity, careerism dressed as conviction, ideological capture, the sacrifice of a true sentence to a useful one, and complicity, the set’s favorite indictment, meaning silence purchased with comfort. The cardinal virtues: courage, candor, the willingness to break ranks, and stamina, the decade given to the unglamorous subject. Redemption comes through confession in print, as the Iraq ledger shows, and through return to the field. Excommunication is rare and slow; the set prefers the demotion, the quiet downgrade from peer to case study. Its key honorific is “serious.” Its key dismissal is “fashionable.” Its sacred word is “decency,” carried over from Orwell, meaning the ordinary moral sense of ordinary people, which the set invokes against both the seminar and the mob. And its deepest commandment, the one that organizes all the others, holds that the man who saw it himself and wrote it plainly has done the one thing that cannot be taken from him, whatever the century does next.

The Voice

George Packer speaks the way he writes. Most writers sound looser in conversation than on the page. Packer compresses. His spoken sentences carry the same architecture as his prose: a declarative claim, a qualification, then a concrete instance that grounds the abstraction. Listen to him on Ezra Klein‘s show or at the 92nd Street Y and you hear a man composing paragraphs in real time, complete with topic sentences.

His voice sits in a low middle register, unhurried, with a faint flatness that reads as Midwestern though he grew up in Palo Alto. He pauses before answering. The pauses run long enough to feel like risk in a broadcast medium, and they signal that he refuses to fill air with placeholder language. When he does begin, he often starts with “Well” or “I think,” then drops into a fully formed argument. The hesitation is front-loaded. Once he commits to a sentence he finishes it.

His diction draws from two registers and he moves between them without strain. One register is the plain Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of the reporter: jobs, towns, factories, men, debt, shame. The other is the vocabulary of the political theorist: legitimacy, social contract, narrative, institutions, decline. The second register comes from his parents, both Stanford academics, and from his long apprenticeship to Orwell, whose essays he edited in two volumes. He uses the theoretical words sparingly and almost always cashes them out in a story about a person. Ask him about institutional decay and within a minute he will tell you about Dean Price or Tammy Thomas from The Unwinding.

Rhetoric is where he gets interesting. Packer argues through narrative accumulation rather than syllogism. In speech as in print, he builds a case by stacking portraits until the pattern declares itself. He distrusts the pundit’s move of leading with the thesis. When an interviewer pushes him toward a hot take, he resists by complicating: “It’s more tangled than that,” or “I saw something different on the ground.” This earns him a reputation for judiciousness and also for evasiveness, since the narrative method lets him imply judgments he never quite states. His Iraq war writing showed the cost of that habit. He supported the invasion through a fog of qualified sympathy for the liberal hawks, and when it collapsed, The Assassins’ Gate read as reckoning and as alibi at once.

He has a confessional streak that surfaces in speech more than in print. He will say “I got that wrong” about Iraq, and he says it with a kind of practiced sorrow that has itself become part of his persona. The mea culpa is sincere and also rhetorical. It buys him standing to criticize others’ certainties. Humility functions as his ethos appeal, the way bombast functions for a Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011).

His pacing is slow by media standards. He resists interruption with silence rather than volume. When a co-panelist talks over him he waits, then resumes his sentence at the exact clause where he left it, which quietly humiliates the interrupter. He rarely raises his voice. His anger comes out as iciness and as a tightening of diction; the sentences get shorter and the words get plainer when he is most contemptuous, as in his attacks on what he calls “Just America” and its language codes.

He has one notable tic: the long historical analogy delivered as a set piece. The Weimar comparison, the 1930s comparison, the late Roman comparison. He sets these up with “I keep thinking about” and then runs ninety seconds without pause. These are rehearsed, drawn from whatever book he is writing, and they reveal that his conversation is an extension of his drafting process. He tests paragraphs on audiences.

The overall effect is gravity earned through restraint. He sounds like a man who has seen things and thought about them, and who would rather under-claim than over-claim. The weakness of the manner mirrors the weakness of the prose: a moral seriousness so sustained that it can shade into sonority, decline announced in tones of decline, the elegist who needs the funeral.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

If Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right, George Packer becomes a man whose reporting refutes his politics.
Look at what Packer documents. The Unwinding tracks the collapse of the structures that held American lives together: the factory, the union, the local bank, the party machine, the church. His subjects in Youngstown and Tampa do not suffer from a shortage of rights. They suffer from the loss of the groups that gave their lives shape. Dean Price loses his rural economy. Tammy Thomas loses industrial Youngstown. The book is a 400-page demonstration of Mearsheimer’s premise that humans are social beings first and that stripping away the group leaves them helpless, whatever rights they retain on paper.
Then look at what Packer prescribes. In Last Best Hope he calls for a renewed “Equal America” built on shared democratic citizenship, civic faith, and a reformed liberalism. The cure is a better version of the creed. He wants Americans to believe again in the universal promise of the founding documents. He treats the four Americas he describes, Free, Smart, Real, and Just, as rival narratives that argument and renewal might reconcile.
Mearsheimer’s framework says this gets the causation backward. If socialization beats reason, and if people acquire their moral codes through group attachment before their critical faculties mature, then Packer’s four Americas are not competing narratives open to persuasion. They are tribes. Smart America and Just America did not reason their way to their positions any more than Real America did. Each absorbed its code from its surrounding society. Packer’s hope that a better national story might knit them together assumes that reason can override the value infusion, which is the one thing Mearsheimer says it cannot do at scale.
It also reframes Packer’s own position. He writes as a man of Smart America who has grown estranged from it, and he believes his estrangement comes from independent thought. Mearsheimer suggests a different reading: Packer absorbed the moral universe of late twentieth century liberal journalism, the Peace Corps, the Atlantic and New Yorker worlds, and his criticisms of Just America are the reflexes of an older liberal tribe defending its code against a younger one. His sense of standing outside the tribes is itself a tribal marker. Smart America of his generation prizes the stance of the independent observer.
The deepest cut concerns Packer’s foreign policy writing. Our Man (2019), his Holbrooke biography, is elegiac about the American mission abroad. He mourns the passing of an era when the United States tried to remake other societies. Mearsheimer’s argument in The Great Delusion says that mission failed because nationalism, the political expression of our tribal nature, defeats liberal universalism every time it tries to cross a border. Iraqis and Afghans did not want inalienable rights delivered by foreigners more than they wanted their own groups to rule themselves. Packer half knows this. Our Man is full of the evidence. But he frames the failure as hubris and bad execution, a tragedy of flawed men, rather than as the predictable result of a false theory of human nature.
So the answer is: Packer survives as a reporter and dies as a theorist. His eye for the texture of social collapse is exactly what Mearsheimer’s framework predicts a good observer might see. His remedies, civic renewal through narrative, faith in the creed, the recovery of a shared liberal story, ask atomized people to do the one thing Mearsheimer says they cannot do, which is reason their way into solidarity. Solidarity comes first or it does not come. Packer keeps writing prescriptions for a patient whose disease his own books diagnose as incurable by those means.
There is a counter. Packer might respond that America is the test case where Mearsheimer’s rule bends, a nation whose tribe formed around a creed rather than blood, so renewing the creed is renewing the tribe. Mearsheimer might answer that the creed only worked when it rode on top of thick particular attachments, Protestant, local, ethnic, that have since dissolved, and that a creed without a tribe beneath it is just words.

Hero System

He waits before he answers. The stage at the 92nd Street Y holds two chairs, a low table, a glass of water he does not touch. The crowd came in from the Upper West Side, canvas totes and reading glasses, New Yorker subscribers who renew without reading the notice. The interviewer asks about Iraq. Packer lets the silence run. Three seconds. Four. In a broadcast medium a pause that long counts as risk, and the risk is the point, because a man who fills the air with placeholder words has shown he does not weigh them. Then he says he got it wrong. He says it with a sorrow he has practiced, and the room warms to him. The confession is the thing they came for. They forgive him because the forgiving is the rite, and the rite is older than Packer and older than the war.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argues that every culture hands its members a hero system, a set of rules for earning the feeling that a life counts against the plain fact of death. The system tells a man what a hero is, what a wasted life looks like, and how he might buy a portion of permanence before the end. Otto Rank (1884-1939), whom Becker reads closely, set two fears against each other: the fear of standing alone, separate and exposed, and the fear of dissolving into the group and vanishing as a self. A hero system holds both fears at bay. It promises a man he can stand out and still belong, that he can earn a name and remain a member.

Sacred values are the tokens the system trades in. The word means what the system says it means, and it holds its worth only inside the walls that mint it. Witness. Seriousness. Decency. Each sounds like a single thing, a virtue any honest man could recognize. Carry it across the border into another hero system and it splits into pieces that do not fit back together. Packer has built a long career on three or four such words, and he writes as though their meaning sits in the dictionary, available to anyone of good faith. It does not. The meaning sits in the system, and the systems are at war.

Witness

Packer’s witness begins with the body in the place. He goes to Togo with the Peace Corps and comes back with The Village of Waiting (1988). He goes to Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast and writes the civilians instead of the diplomats. He goes to Baghdad after the invasion he had supported and writes The Assassins’ Gate as reckoning and alibi at once. He goes to Youngstown and Tampa for The Unwinding and braids Tammy Thomas and Dean Price into a history of the country. He goes to Lagos. He goes to Kabul for “The Betrayal” and writes the interpreters left on the tarmac. The founding image of his world is George Orwell (1903-1950) in a Catalonian trench, the writer whose authority comes from having been shot. Witness, in this system, means presence verified by cost, and the truth a man brings back outranks the truth a man works out at his desk.

Carry the word to a corpsman in Helmand and it changes under your hand. He saw more than Packer ever will. He saw it through the sight line of a man trying to keep another man’s blood inside his body. His witness is not a credential he spends. It is a wound he carries, and the unit honors the man who never speaks of it, who files nothing, who lets the seeing stay sealed. To narrate would cheapen the dead. In Packer’s system the unwritten observation is a waste. In the corpsman’s system the written one can be a betrayal.

Carry it to a Pentecostal pastor in a storefront church off the Lagos expressway, the kind of street Packer walked for his Nigeria reporting. To witness, for him, is to testify to a thing he did not see with his eyes and knows in his spirit, an empty tomb two thousand years gone. The value sits in souls turned, not in accuracy. A witness who hedged, who said the resurrection was tangled and more complicated on the ground, would have failed the office. Packer’s whole craft runs on the hedge, the qualification, the refusal of the clean claim. The pastor’s runs on the claim a man stakes his life on without having been there.

Carry it to a courtroom in Camden, a sworn witness in the box. Here witness means the fact and nothing wrapped around it. The oath fixes the value and cross-examination tests it. A witness who supplies pattern, who reaches for motive, who builds the larger meaning out of accumulated detail, gets struck from the record and impeached for it. Packer’s method, the pattern that rises on its own from a hundred small portraits, is the one thing the court forbids a witness to do. What earns him the National Book Award would get him excluded as testimony.

Carry it last to Primo Levi (1919-1987) and Elie Wiesel (1928-2016). Their witness is a debt owed downward to the dead, and silence is the second killing. They write not to inform a fragmented public but to keep faith with men who cannot speak. The reader is incidental. The dead are the audience.

Packer’s witness fuses these. He takes the reporter’s verified presence, the survivor’s debt to the unheard, and the preacher’s compulsion to tell, and he presents the fusion as one virtue with one name. Inside his system it reads as a single thing, and the singleness is what gives his work its moral weight and his stage manner its gravity. Step outside the walls and the coin breaks into four pieces that buy different goods in different shops, and some of them will not change hands at all.

Seriousness

Seriousness is Packer’s master virtue, frivolity his master vice. Seriousness means the five-year book over the hot take, the field over the desk, the plain sentence over the clever one. His Hitchens Prize speech, “The Enemies of Writing,” reads as the creed of the serious man, and the word he reaches for when he praises a colleague is serious, the word he reaches for when he buries one is fashionable. To be serious is to refuse the reward the moment offers and to write instead for a reader forty years out who will judge whether you saw clearly when seeing clearly cost something.

Set the word in front of an Orthodox Talmudist in a Lakewood study hall and it turns again. His seriousness is the argument that never closes, the page turned and re-turned for fifteen centuries, the question sharper than the answer. A man earns standing not by a finished book but by a strong objection raised against a dead sage. The wit lives inside the seriousness, the pilpul that cuts. Packer’s seriousness wants resolution, a master narrative the country might share. The Talmudist’s wants the dispute preserved, both opinions recorded, the matter left open for the next generation to fight. The serious man, here, is the one who keeps the question alive, not the one who settles it.

Set it in front of an experimental physicist and seriousness means it replicates. The p-value, the error bar, the result another lab can reproduce in the dark without knowing what it should find. Narrative is the enemy, because a beautiful story moves people whether or not it holds, and the worth of a story that moves people but does not replicate is less than zero, since it spreads. Packer’s method, the meaning that declares itself from the mosaic, is to the physicist the cardinal seduction, the unfalsifiable pattern the human eye supplies because it cannot bear to see none. What looks like seriousness to the editor looks like its opposite to the man at the bench.

Set it in front of a stand-up comedian working a late set in a basement club. Seriousness on that stage is death. He earns his significance by refusing gravity, by the bit, by timing measured in quarter seconds. And yet he is more serious about the craft than any essayist, drilling the same ninety seconds for a year, and the comic who lets the audience see his seriousness dies on his feet. So the word inverts: the surface must stay light and the discipline beneath must be total, and the man who announces his seriousness has already failed. Packer announces his with the long pause and the practiced sorrow. In the club that pause would draw heckling and the sorrow would draw pity, and pity is the end of the act.

Becker explains why the word will not hold still. Seriousness is a stance against death, and men beat death by different routes. Packer beats it with the durable sentence, the book still assigned when he is gone, which is the only permanence his system offers and the reason the long project ranks above the quick one. The Talmudist beats it by joining a conversation that began before him and continues after, so that he never finishes and never has to. The physicist beats it by adding a true line to a structure no single life built. The comic beats it by the laugh, the one immortality that dies the instant it is born and so must be earned again every night. Each route names a different thing serious, and each names the others frivolous.

Decency

Packer takes decency from Orwell whole. It means the ordinary moral sense of ordinary people, the thing a man can consult beneath his ideology if he is honest, and Orwell and Packer after him invoke it against the seminar on one side and the mob on the other. The decent man knows cruelty when he sees it without a theory to license the cruelty. The Unwinding rests on the claim that a White machinist in Youngstown and a Black entrepreneur in Tampa hold the same decency under their different lives, and that a country might be rebuilt on what they share.

A Confucian official hears the word and means li. Decency is propriety, the bow at the right depth, the elder served first, the rite that holds a society together because each man keeps his place in it. The indecent man is the one who treats his father as a friend, who flattens the order that makes a life legible. Decency here is not a sense beneath the code. It is the code, learned over a lifetime, and the man who appeals past it to a raw moral instinct has confused the animal with the civilized.

A Pashtun elder hears it and means nang and melmastia and badal, honor and the guest protected to the death and the wrong repaid. The guest in your home is safe though armies come for him, and the insult to your house is answered though it takes a generation. To forgive a killing can be the indecent act, the one that shames your line. Packer’s decency would counsel mercy and the broken cycle. The elder’s decency commands the debt be paid.

A libertarian engineer in a South Bay startup hears it and means non-coercion. Decency is leaving a man alone, the consent form, the opt-out. The indecent act is the imposition, the mandate, the rule written by people who will not live under it. Packer wants institutions repaired and obligations honored across the whole. The engineer hears obligation across the whole as the indecency itself, the many reaching into the life of the one.

A hospice nurse hears it at three in the morning and means none of this. Decency is the body washed, the mouth swabbed, the dying man not left alone in the dark. It has no quarrel with prose and no politics. It lives in a single room and ends with the morning shift, and it would find the whole argument about national narratives a strange thing to call decency at all.

Beneath Packer’s word sits a claim about human nature, that under the codes there runs a common decency any honest man can reach. The Confucian and the Pashtun answer that there is no under, that decency is the particular code itself, and that the man who appeals to a moral sense beneath all codes is appealing to his own and calling it the human. This is the seam where Packer the reporter and Packer the prophet come apart. His books document people formed all the way down by the groups that made them, men who lost not their rights but the worlds that gave their lives shape. His remedy asks those same men to consult a decency the books suggest they do not share.

The Inheritance

Becker would not start with the books. He would start with the boy. Packer is twelve when his father, Herbert Packer (1925-1972), a major legal scholar at Stanford, broken by a stroke suffered in the campus turmoil of the late sixties, takes his own life. The boy watches the institutions his family trusted, the university, the liberal order, the apparatus of reasoned reform, fail to hold his father up, and then watches his father go. A man does not choose the wound that organizes him. He chooses what to build over it.

Packer builds the durable sentence. The institutions failed his father and the institutions can fail again, but the book sits on a shelf beyond their reach, and the work still read in forty years is the one permanence that does not depend on any institution staying honest. His immortality is denominated in serious witness, in having gone to the place and seen the thing and set it down plainly for a reader he trusts will still be the kind of man who reads. That is the bid. The terror underneath it is the boy’s terror, that the structures meant to protect a life will not, and that a man is left exposed and alone, which is Rank’s first fear given a date and a house in Palo Alto.

Here is the cruelty his own work names without quite turning on himself. The audience that honors serious witness has shrunk to one fragment among the four Americas he mapped in Last Best Hope. Free America does not want the long book. Real America does not read The Atlantic. Just America reads him as the voice of the order it means to retire. Smart America still keeps the faith, and Smart America is the one country he writes from and against. So the coin he minted, true witness rendered in plain prose at cost, spends at full value only inside the collectivity that already shares his hero system, and that collectivity is no longer the nation. It is a neighborhood. He performs the rite of the carrier group, the confession on the stage, the reckoning in print, for a temple whose congregation thins each year while the man at the lectern keeps faith with a future reader the demographics may not deliver.

That is the figure on the stage at the 92nd Street Y. The pause, the water glass, the practiced sorrow over Iraq, the room that warms to the man because the forgiving is the rite. He earns his portion of permanence the only way his system allows, by the sentence that might outlast him, and he serves the system that made him because a man does not get to choose his hero system any more than he gets to choose his father. He only gets to serve it well. Packer serves his with a discipline that approaches the religious, going to the place, weighing the word, writing the true sentence for the reader of 2070, and the open question, the one neither Becker nor Packer can answer, is whether that reader will hold the same word sacred, or whether witness and seriousness and decency will have split by then into coins no single country still accepts.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

David Pinsof names a story that intellectuals tell about the world. Everything wrong with it comes from people failing to understand. Polarization, bigotry, war, inequality, unhappiness, all of it reduces to a fixable error in someone’s head, and the people whose trade is understanding turn out to be the people who might save us. The story flatters the teller. It hands the writer the most important job in the world and lets him keep it while he does nothing but write. Pinsof’s answer is that there has been no misunderstanding. People understand what they have an incentive to understand. Stupidity is strategic. The trouble is not bad beliefs but bad motives, and the cynical truth gets dressed in idealistic clothes because cynicism reads as mean and idealism signals that the writer is a sweetheart.

George Packer’s diagnosis is the misunderstanding myth in its mature form. Americans inhabit separate moral worlds, he says, each with its own narratives and loyalties and sources of legitimacy. The institutions that once organized common life have lost the trust of the people they served. Last Best Hope sorts the country into four rival stories, Free America, Smart America, Real America, Just America, and prescribes a fifth and better one, a renewed civic nationalism grounded in equal citizenship and shared democratic faith. The cure is a story the whole country might tell about itself. The premise under the cure holds that the four Americas are narratives, and that argument and renewal might reconcile them, which is to say that the country suffers from a failure to understand the common project and might be talked back into it.

Pinsof puts the blade in at the premise. The four Americas are not stories waiting for a better story. They are coalitions locked in zero-sum competition over the coercive apparatus of the state, the thing that taxes men and jails them. Real America and Just America do not misunderstand each other. They understand each other well and want incompatible things, and each wants the other to lose, because the prize, control of the state, cannot be shared. Packer’s renewal narrative asks rivals to talk their way into solidarity, which is the move competitors in a high-stakes contest will never make, because the contest is the reason they hold their positions in the first place. A shared story does not dissolve a fight over the gun. It becomes another weapon in it.

Packer argues by narrative accumulation. He stacks portrait on portrait, the Youngstown organizer, the North Carolina entrepreneur, the Washington insider, until the moral pattern rises on its own, and the reader is meant to finish the book and see. Pinsof’s question is what the seeing buys. The reader who closes The Unwinding moved by Tammy Thomas and Dean Price has no more incentive to repair the country than he had before, and the men who hollowed it out were not confused. Robert Rubin (b. 1938) understood deregulation. Newt Gingrich (b. 1943) understood what scorched-earth opposition bought him in money and power. The bankers kept their bonuses and their standing because they had played the game well, not because anyone had failed to explain the game to them. Packer documents winners and files them as symptoms of a misunderstanding, when the winners understood their incentives to the molecule.

Iraq is the richest case. Packer supported the war, persuaded by exiles like Kanan Makiya (b. 1949) that democratic reconstruction might work and might be just. The Assassins’ Gate explains the catastrophe that followed as a tangle of idealism, bureaucratic dysfunction, strategic incompetence, and ideological certainty, a tragedy of flawed men who meant well and erred. Read through Pinsof, that account is the misunderstanding myth applied upward, to elites. It preserves the premise that the architects meant well and got the facts wrong, when the hawks who launched the war gained status and position and access, and the cost of their error fell on Iraqis and on the soldiers planners refused to plan for. Packer’s own line, the practiced “I got it wrong,” frames his support as an epistemic slip, a thing he failed to understand, rather than a motive he might now prefer not to own, the wish to stand among the serious men who back the hard call. The confession is savvy. It buys him standing to doubt other men’s certainties for the rest of his career, and he has spent the standing well.

His tragic liberalism is the myth in a minor key. Packer thinks reporting cured him of grand theory and technocratic confidence, that he traded the optimism of his youth for contingency and limits and the unintended consequence. He gave up the cheerful version of the misunderstanding myth and kept its skeleton. He still locates the wound in separate moral worlds and absent shared stories. The only thing that darkened is the prognosis. The misunderstanding got harder to clear, sadder, more likely to end in collapse, and the writer who once hoped to fix it now mourns that it might not be fixed. The mourning is the same faith wearing black.

Packer writes in the register of moral seriousness, of decency, of the last best hope offered without irony, and the register does work. Idealism reads as warmth. The stance he prizes, the independent observer above the tribes, the man who breaks with his own side when his own side lies, is a coalition marker of the professional class that honors exactly that pose, and the pose confers standing inside it. His sharpest attacks land on Just America, the young progressive narrative, and Pinsof’s reading of that aim is rival derogation. The young progressives in the prestige economy of the magazines and the universities are Packer’s nearest competitors, not his distant enemies. They threaten his standing in the only hierarchy he occupies far more than any populist in Youngstown ever could. Men compete hardest with the rivals closest to them in the order, and Packer’s fiercest fire goes not to Free America, which never read him, but to the cohort one rung down in his own house.

Packer chronicles decline and prescribes renewal, and the pairing installs the serious chronicler as the figure the republic cannot do without. The Unwinding got reread after 2016 as prophecy, and the prophet is the man who saw it coming. A country whose disease is lost legitimacy and broken narrative needs, above all other men, the one who narrates and restores legitimacy. The diagnosis and the diagnostician arrive together, and the diagnosis is the kind that makes the diagnostician indispensable.

There is a counter, and Packer might press it. He never claimed pure misunderstanding, he might say. His books are full of interests, organized money, the looting, the capture of the meritocracy by men who turned success into a hereditary estate. He knows the bankers were not confused. This is fair, and it is the strongest thing in his defense. He sees the motives. The myth survives in the remedy anyway, because after he names the interests he prescribes as though naming them might melt them, as though a better civic story might move men who act on incentives the story does not reach. He sees the motives in the diagnosis and writes for the beliefs in the cure. The last chapter of book after book makes the same turn, from a clear-eyed account of what men were getting to a hope that they might be talked into wanting something else.

The world Packer mourns does not want the repair he offers. The men who broke it were not broken. They were winning, and the readers he moves have no incentive to move. He keeps studying the hole with great care, and the study is honest, and the hole is real. The error sits in the last sentence of every book, the place where he treats a contest of motives as a failure of understanding and casts himself, the serious man who sees clearly, as the one who might clear it up. The only misunderstanding is his faith that there was one.

‘Bullshit Advice’

David Pinsof argues that advice pretends to help and mostly grooms. Primates pick the dirt from each other’s fur, and the picking once served hygiene, but the flow of grooming now tracks the alliance map and the rank order, so you predict who grooms whom better from the politics of the troop than from whose fur is dirtiest. Advice runs the same way. It can help when the giver holds expertise about your situation and a stake in your success, and almost nobody who advises you holds either, so most advice is good-sounding rather than good. Pinsof notes that thinkpieces end on a crescendo of it, a call to action that is hollow and ritual, the writer reaching across the page to groom the reader. He then refuses the crescendo. Pick your own fleas, he says, and stops.

George Packer cannot stop. The crescendo is his vocation.

Two kinds of grooming run through his work, and the frame pulls them apart. The reporting is the grooming that cleans. He goes to Youngstown and brings back Tammy Thomas, goes to Tampa and brings back the foreclosure files, goes to Baghdad and Kabul and brings back what the planners refused to see. This is hygiene. It removes real dirt, the comfortable lies a reader carried before he opened the book. Then comes the last chapter, the turn from what is to what must be done, and the second grooming begins, the ritual kind, the call to renew the creed. The tell is in the shape of his career. The Unwinding, his masterpiece, barely prescribes. It piles portrait on portrait and lets the reader sit in the wreckage without a program. Last Best Hope, the weaker book, ends in a full crescendo, a renewed civic nationalism built on equal citizenship and shared democratic faith. The more Packer grooms, the worse the book. The frame predicts this. The cleaning was the value. The advice was the flea-picking.

Run the checklist against the prescription. Pinsof’s first test is expertise about your situation. Packer is a reporter and an essayist, not a constitutional designer or a scholar of how torn nations reknit, and no such scholar exists, because no one knows how to talk three hundred million people across four hostile Americas into a common story. We take the advice anyway, the way we take Einstein (1879-1955) on happiness, because Packer won the status contest. The National Book Award, the New Yorker years, the Atlantic masthead, these are the credentials that license the counsel, and they have nothing to do with knowing how to mend a republic. The prize is the right to advise, not the proof that the advice works.

The second test is whether the advice can be followed. Packer tells the country to believe again in the creed, to recover its civic faith, to tell a better story about itself. Belief is not a lever a man pulls. Faith arrives or it does not, the way an emotion arrives, and you can no more will yourself into civic faith than you can will yourself happy with who you are. The prescription joins the long list of counsel that cannot be obeyed because the thing commanded lies outside the will. And it is a single dose for a varied patient. A shared national story is good advice for a country that already shares its premises and useless advice for one whose factions want each other beaten, which is the country Packer himself describes three hundred pages earlier. He spends the book proving that the four Americas hold incompatible faiths, then prescribes faith.

We never check the track record. Pinsof’s sharpest point about advice is that we do not ask how often it worked for people in our situation. Nobody asks what the crescendo has ever accomplished, whether a single polarized nation in history reunited because a serious writer at the end of a serious book called for renewal. The call is vapor. Renewed civic nationalism grounded in equal citizenship names no act a reader performs on Tuesday morning. It sits beside live life to the fullest and keep moving forward, a slogan that feels like guidance and entails no behavior. And Packer never tells the reader the one thing the reader might need, which is to distrust the liberal instincts that produced the failures the book catalogs. The advice flatters the instincts it should question. It always points the reader further in the direction he was already facing.

Now the functions, which is where the grooming shows its alliance map. The first is superiority. Advice carries the subtext that the giver stands above the taker, and Packer’s prescription carries it doubled, because he is the seer who diagnosed the unwinding before 2016 and now returns to supply the cure. I saw it coming and I see the way out, and you, reader, need me for both. The second is the circle jerk, the mutual flattery Pinsof describes. The prescription presumes the reader has beautiful goals, the saving of democracy, the repair of the common life, and boundless capacity to pursue them, and it casts the reader’s enemies, the populists and the language police, as haters who wreck for the joy of wrecking. The Atlantic subscriber closes Last Best Hope feeling chosen, a member of the decent remnant who might yet save the country if the others would listen. He flatters Packer by buying the book and Packer flatters him by handing him a halo.

The third function is rationalization, and the vagueness is the giveaway, because vague counsel bends to a pre-existing agenda where sharp counsel resists it. Defend liberal democracy, renew the creed, hold the center: these legitimize what the professional-class reader wanted to do regardless, which is to keep faith with the institutions that house and pay and honor him, and to feel like the responsible adult in a room of children. The advice does not redirect him. It absolves him. The fourth function is loyalty, advice as military aid. To prescribe a renewed civic nationalism against Real America’s blood-and-soil story and Just America’s identity story is to ship arms to a side, the side of the chastened liberal center, and the shipment signals membership. The open letter of July 2020 ran on the same circuit, counsel to the culture about how it ought to handle speech, and the counsel doubled as a flag planted in a coalition. Sign here and we know which troop you groom for.

So the prediction holds. You forecast the flow of Packer’s advice better from the alliance structure than from any record of what heals nations. His prescriptions move toward the readers who share his game and away from the factions that threaten his standing, which is what grooming does, lower-ranking primates tending the higher, allies tending allies, the dirt a secondary concern. And the reading class grooms him back. The prizes, the fellowships, the place on the syllabus, these are the troop returning the favor, picking the fleas of the man who picks theirs. Last Best Hope entered the political vocabulary not because its cure works but because its four-Americas map gave readers a clean tool for the only task they cared about, naming their tribe and locating their enemies. The taxonomy spread as a grooming instrument, a way to say which America I belong to and which America those people belong to. The diagnosis got adopted as a weapon. The prescription got applauded and ignored.

A man might object that this asks the impossible, that a citizen owes his country a vision, that to lay out the decline and offer no repair is the counsel of despair, and that some calls to action have moved men to act. The objection is fair and the answer lives inside the frame. Yes, advice sometimes helps, as grooming sometimes cleans. But you still predict the flow from the politics, not the hygiene, and a man with no expertise in rebuilding nations and no stake in whether you recover your faith is grooming you, however fine his sentences. Packer draws his salary whether or not the republic renews. The Atlantic holds its market share whether or not the reader believes again. Nothing in his incentives binds him to the reader’s actual success, which is Pinsof’s whole test for whether counsel is good or merely good-sounding, and so the vision, lovely as it reads, is the flea-picking by another name.

This is why Packer cannot end where Pinsof ends. To diagnose the decline and then decline to prescribe is to forfeit the office of the public seer and become a mere depressive with good access. The hope is the grooming, and the grooming is what raises him from chronicler to leader, the man whose word the country might heed. So every book turns at the end toward the creed, the renewal, the last best hope offered without irony, because the turn is the thing that keeps him a figure rather than a witness. And the irony the frame leaves on the table is that his finest book is the one that refused the turn, that sat in the unwinding and groomed no one, and handed the reader the dirt and walked away.

The Receipts: George Packer and the Signal That Hides as Courage

David Pinsof argues that signaling runs under most of what men do. We judge each other on everything, we care more than we admit how the judging comes out, and we read minds well enough to know in advance how a room will score us, so we shape our words and faces to the room as surely as a dropped stone falls. He then cuts the field in two. An offensive signal says I am superior, smarter, nobler, more devoted than you. A defensive signal says I am not inferior, not dumb, not mean, not a bad person, not the man you are about to push to the bottom. Most signaling, he says, is defensive, because bad outcomes pull harder than good ones, and the drop to the bottom of the ladder is the thing the nervous animal works hardest to avoid. The complication is that the best defense is good offense. In a witch hunt it does not suffice to say I am not a witch. A man might have to add that he hates witches and his neighbor is one.

George Packer is a study in the last move.

Start with the receipts. Pinsof pictures a man called to the stand to defend his character, reaching into his pocket: here, look, here are the receipts, I really do give to charity. Packer has spent forty years producing receipts. The Village of Waiting is a receipt from Togo. The Assassins’ Gate is a receipt from Baghdad. The Unwinding is a stack of receipts from Youngstown and Tampa. Our Man is a receipt from the rooms where American power decided things. Each book carries the same notation at the bottom: I went there, I saw it myself, I paid for what I know. Pinsof would call this the most expensive defensive signal a writer can buy, because a man cannot fake having gone, and the unfakeable signal is the one that holds up under cross-examination. The reporting is real. That is the point. The cost is what makes it work.

What does the signal defend against. In Packer’s world the deepest shame is the one his own creed names: frivolity, careerism dressed as conviction, the true sentence sold for a useful one, and above all complicity, the silence a comfortable man buys. To go to the place is to purchase insurance against every one of these. The man on the tarmac in Kabul is not the man who phoned it in. The years of work answer the charge of glibness before the charge is filed. Pinsof’s “what will people think” filter runs in Packer at the level of the career itself, screening out the cheap option, the desk pundit’s quick take, because some part of him is always imagining the room that would convict him of it.

The confession

Iraq is where defense turns into offense, and where the turn is hardest to see because it wears the face of courage. Packer supported the war. When it collapsed he wrote a book about the collapse and said, on stages for twenty years after, that he got it wrong.

Read flat, the confession is a defensive signal. I am not a warmonger. I am not the kind of man who backs a catastrophe and walks away whistling. I am not unaccountable. It protects him from the worst verdict his tribe can pass, complicity in a war that killed hundreds of thousands. But “I am not complicit” is the witch-hunt floor, and the floor is not enough. So The Assassins’ Gate adds the offense. It names the guilty, the administration, the ideologues, the bureaucracy that punished knowledge, and it positions its author as the man honest enough to reckon while lesser men stayed quiet or stayed sure. The confession buys standing. It earns him the right, spent freely ever since, to doubt other men’s certainties from a position of demonstrated humility. Pinsof has the exact maneuver: the offender passes off his offense as defense, I was not trying to outdo you, I was only feeling bad about myself, and the veil lets the offending continue. Packer’s “I got it wrong” reads as the smallest, most sympathetic of defensive signals, and functions as one of the most reliable status engines in American letters.

The cleaner case is the language war. Packer attacks Just America, the young progressive narrative, its codes, its policing of speech. He signed the open letter of July 2020 that made free expression a doctrine against the mob. The defensive content is plain to any reader of the room he writes in. The terror for a liberal man of his generation and standing, around 2020, is being revealed as a fossil, a soft bigot, a man on the wrong side of the only history his colleagues are tracking, and then dropped. “I am not a reactionary” is the floor. The floor is not enough. So he goes on offense: he becomes the principled defender of liberal values against an illiberal generation, and the attacks that come back from the left confirm the posture rather than wounding it. A defensive coalition, please do not cancel us, gets performed as an offensive virtue, we are the brave ones who still believe in open debate. I am not a witch becomes I hunt them.

The inversion

Pinsof says men disguise offense as defense because defense is more sympathetic and offense gets you disliked. In most rooms that holds. In Packer’s room the incentive runs the other way. The literary-intellectual prestige economy does not reward the careful accountant who merely avoids error. It crowns the brave dissenter who breaks with his own side at cost, the Orwell who went to Catalonia, the Hitchens who walked out on the left. In that economy courage outranks accountability, and a man who looks only defensive looks low. Defensive signaling, Pinsof notes, is a cue of low status, which is why men hide it. Packer does not hide his by concealing it. He hides it by converting it. He takes the fear, do not let them call me complicit, frivolous, captured, a bad man, and refines it upward into displayed courage, the reckoning, the lonely true sentence, the stand against the tribe. The defense disappears not into darkness but into a medal.

Pinsof shows that moral discourse runs mostly on the fear of being a bad person, not the wish to be holier than thou, and points to Peter Singer (b. 1946) and the drowning child, a scenario that lands because it tells you that you are bad, not that you might be good. Packer’s whole moral vocabulary is built on the same fear and aimed at the same nerve. Decency, his Orwell word, is the appeal to the ordinary moral sense against both the seminar and the mob, and as a signal it says I am a decent man, not a monster, not captured by either side. The fear of being the indecent one drives the prose. The plain style serves the same defense. Plainness signals honesty, nothing up the sleeve, no glossary needed to hide a lie, and it inoculates a man who writes for the most elite readers in the country against the charge of being an out-of-touch elite. The long pause on the public stage, the refusal to fill the air, signals a man who weighs his words and shames the one who does not. Each of these is a wall before it is a banner.

Packer might say the frame proves too much, that going to Iraq and Youngstown at real cost, the decade given to the unglamorous book, the interpreters he tried to get out of Kabul, cannot be flattened into peacocking, and that some men do tell the truth at cost because it is true. The answer sits inside Pinsof’s own argument. A costly signal is still a signal, and the cost is the credibility. The reporting can be true and the signal can be real in the same motion. Going to the place is the most expensive defensive signal a writer owns, the one no rival can fake, which is the reason it confers the standing it does. That the work is honest does not lift it out of the frame. The honesty is what makes the frame run.

So picture him on the stand, where Pinsof puts all of us. The receipts come out of the pocket one at a time, Togo, Baghdad, Youngstown, Kabul. The plain sentences answer the charge of vanity. The confession answers the charge of complicity, and answers it so well it becomes a virtue. The pause answers the charge of glibness before the prosecutor can speak. The man is defending his character against the single verdict his world reserves for the damned, the verdict of the unserious, comfortable, complicit bystander, and he defends it by going on offense, by becoming the bravest accuser in the room. The courage is not fake. The reporting is not fake. What hides under both, where Pinsof says it always hides, is the older and plainer signal of a frightened animal in a judging crowd: please, whatever you decide about the others, do not decide that I was one of the bad ones.

Thomas Byrne Edsall (b. August 22, 1941) is an American journalist, author, and academic who has spent more than five decades explaining the structural forces that shape American politics. He writes about political realignment, racial conflict, economic inequality, demographic change, and partisan polarization, and he builds a working bridge between academic social science and daily political reporting. His work shifted attention in political journalism away from personalities and campaign tactics and toward coalitions, institutions, incentives, and long-term social change.

Edsall works as reporter, historian, political analyst, and translator of academic research at the same time. One question runs through his entire career: why do voters align themselves with particular political coalitions, and how do those coalitions change over time?

Born in Massachusetts, Edsall attended Brown University before earning a degree in political science from Boston University in 1966. He entered journalism during a turbulent period in modern American history, when the civil rights movement, urban unrest, antiwar activism, and the restructuring of the postwar economy were transforming the political landscape.

His intellectual framework took shape during fourteen years at The Baltimore Sun, where he worked from 1967 to 1981. Covering labor politics, municipal government, and social conflict, Edsall watched the New Deal coalition that had dominated American politics since Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945) come apart piece by piece. He paid close attention to the tensions emerging between organized labor and the expanding civil rights agenda.

His reporting on steelworkers at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant and members of Baltimore’s building-trades unions exposed growing resentment among many White working-class Democrats. Federal mandates on integration, affirmative action, school desegregation, and equal-employment policy collided with existing systems of union seniority and neighborhood stability. Edsall recognized earlier than most national observers that racial and economic interests were pulling segments of the Democratic coalition in different directions.

These years became the empirical foundation for his later work. The themes that define his career, race, class, coalition politics, and political realignment, emerged from this reporting rather than from academic theory. He learned politics on the shop floor and in the union hall before he learned it from the regression table.

When Edsall joined The Washington Post in 1981, he entered national political journalism at the start of the Reagan era. Over the next quarter-century he covered presidential campaigns, Congress, tax policy, lobbying, labor politics, welfare reform, and the growth of modern conservatism. He reported on every presidential election from 1968 onward and became known for combining traditional reporting with demographic and institutional analysis.

An important contribution from this period was his examination of campaign finance as an organizational system. Where other reporters treated money as a source of corruption, Edsall analyzed how political funding created durable structures of influence. He became an early national reporter on the rise of Political Action Committees, soft money networks, business lobbying organizations, and donor infrastructure.

His first major book, The New Politics of Inequality (1984), argued that widening economic inequality was reshaping the American political system. The book traced how business interests organized themselves during the 1970s and early 1980s to counter labor unions and influence public policy. Edsall showed that the Reagan revolution rested on more than ideological appeal. It drew strength from sophisticated organizational and financial networks built over the previous decade.

His most influential work arrived in 1991 with Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, written with his wife, the journalist Mary D. Edsall. The book became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and remains an essential account of late twentieth-century political realignment.

The Edsalls argued that the Democratic coalition fractured under the combined pressure of three developments: racial conflict, the expansion of rights-based politics, and tax resentment.

First, the rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s expanded legal protections for racial minorities, criminal defendants, welfare recipients, and other groups. These changes delivered major victories for equality and civil liberties. They also alienated many culturally conservative White voters who came to feel that the Democratic Party no longer spoke for them.

Second, inflation during the 1970s pushed many middle-income Americans into higher tax brackets through bracket creep. Tax reduction ceased to be a corporate or upper-class concern. It became a populist issue for millions of working- and middle-class voters who saw their tax payments as funding programs that benefited others more than themselves.

Republican strategists, the Edsalls argued, linked these grievances into a unified political narrative that connected race, welfare, taxation, crime, and government spending. The resulting coalition reshaped American politics for decades.

The central insight of Edsall’s work holds that political coalitions rarely organize around a single issue. Successful parties construct alliances by linking economic interests, cultural concerns, demographic identities, and moral narratives into coherent political projects. Race, taxes, and rights did not operate as separate issues in the elections of the 1970s and 1980s. They fused into one story about who pays and who benefits.

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, Edsall kept examining the organizational foundations of political power. In Building Red America (2006), he analyzed the growth of conservative institutions: think tanks, advocacy groups, donor networks, media organizations, and grassroots movements. He looked past political leaders and emphasized organizational capacity and long-term strategic planning. Movements win, in his account, when they build durable machinery, and the right built better machinery than the left for a generation.

After leaving The Washington Post in 2006, Edsall entered a second phase of his career that blended journalism and academia. He joined Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism as the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism. There he encouraged students to integrate political science, economics, sociology, psychology, and history into their reporting.

He also expanded his role as a public intellectual. In 2011 he began writing a weekly column for The New York Times that became a model of opinion journalism rooted in social-science research rather than partisan commentary.

Unlike most newspaper columnists, Edsall builds few arguments around personal opinion alone. His essays synthesize academic papers, survey data, demographic research, election studies, and interviews with scholars. Many columns function less as conventional opinion pieces than as extended reviews of emerging research in political science, sociology, economics, and psychology. He often quotes a dozen scholars in a single column, sets their findings against one another, and lets the reader watch the field argue with itself.

Through these columns he became a principal interpreter of academic social science for a general audience. His work draws on scholars who study polarization, identity formation, voting behavior, inequality, and institutional change.

Several themes dominate his later writing.

One is educational stratification. Edsall argues that the diploma divide has become a major cleavage in contemporary American politics. College-educated voters move toward the Democratic Party while voters without four-year degrees shift toward the Republican Party. The parties now sort by credential as much as by income, and this sorting rearranges the geography, culture, and moral language of both coalitions.

A second recurring theme is affective polarization. Drawing on contemporary political science, Edsall explores how partisan identity now functions as a social identity. Political opponents appear to each other less as people who hold mistaken views and more as members of rival tribes. Partisanship shapes whom Americans marry, where they live, and whom they trust.

A third theme is status anxiety. Edsall examines how demographic change, immigration, globalization, and cultural transformation generate perceptions of status loss among historically dominant groups. He treats these perceptions as important drivers of modern political behavior, and he returns to them again and again as he tries to explain the populist turn in both parties.

He also writes about the tensions created by meritocracy and elite sorting. As educational and professional elites concentrate in particular institutions, regions, and social networks, resentment toward those elites becomes a powerful political force. The meritocracy produces winners who cluster together, marry each other, and pass advantage to their children, and it produces losers who know it.

His 2012 book The Age of Austerity extended these concerns. The book argued that slower economic growth and fiscal constraints were intensifying competition among social groups and pushing American politics toward zero-sum conflict. Under such conditions, political fights become struggles over allocation rather than expansion. When the pie stops growing, the knives come out.

Throughout his career Edsall has stood between journalism and academia, at home in both and captive of neither. Admirers praise his ability to synthesize large bodies of social-scientific research and translate them into accessible political analysis. They regard him as a journalist who connects daily political developments to deeper structural trends.

Critics from both the left and the right challenge aspects of his work. Some progressive critics argue that his emphasis on White working-class backlash risks treating opposition to civil rights or welfare programs as an inevitable structural response rather than as a political outcome cultivated by elites and institutions. Some conservatives contend that his reliance on mainstream academic frameworks encourages explanations centered on status anxiety, demographic fear, or psychological reaction while giving short weight to ideological conviction, constitutional principle, or philosophical commitment.

Even his critics acknowledge his influence. Few journalists have done more to integrate political science into public discourse. Long before data-driven political analysis became fashionable, Edsall was studying voting patterns, coalition structures, demographic shifts, and institutional incentives.

Seen in historical perspective, his lasting contribution lies in helping create a style of political journalism that treats politics as a system rather than a spectacle. He explains how race, class, taxation, culture, inequality, demographics, institutions, and psychology interact to produce political outcomes. Through books, reporting, teaching, and commentary, he has become an essential chronicler of the forces that transformed American politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Alliance Theory

Thomas Byrne Edsall spent fifty years documenting what David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie G. Haselton later theorized. Their paper “Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems” argues that political beliefs do not flow from values. They flow from alliance structures. Partisans choose allies based on similarity, transitivity, and interdependence, then generate patchwork narratives to support those allies in conflict. The narratives come after the alliances. Edsall built his career on the same insight before the theory had a name.
Consider what Alliance Theory treats as its paradigm case. Pinsof and his coauthors argue that the American alliance structure is a historical accident. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 drew racially conservative Southerners into the Republican Party. The pro-life evangelical movement of the 1970s fused Christian traditionalism with business conservatism, a pairing that emerged from no philosophical analysis and exists in few other countries. These are the realignments Edsall covered as they happened. Chain Reaction, the 1991 book he wrote with Mary D. Edsall, gives the granular history that Alliance Theory cites at the level of summary. Where the psychologists assert that alliances shifted, Edsall shows the shop stewards, the precinct returns, and the direct-mail consultants who shifted them.
Start with Sparrows Point. Edsall covered Bethlehem Steel workers and Baltimore building-trades men in the late 1960s and 1970s, and what he found reads like field data for the theory. These White union Democrats belonged to a coalition built on interdependence. The party delivered wages, pensions, and seniority systems, and the workers delivered votes. Then the party formed a new alliance with Black workers and their advocates, and federal mandates on integration and equal employment cut into the seniority systems that constituted the old bargain. In Pinsof’s terms, the transitivity of the coalition broke. The union men discovered that their ally had allied with their rival. The enemy of my friend forced a choice, and over twenty years millions of them chose to leave.
Watch the attributional pattern in what Edsall recorded. The steelworkers did not attribute their stalled wages and declining neighborhoods to automation, foreign competition, or their own decisions. They attributed their losses to external interference: federal judges, welfare programs, affirmative action. Alliance Theory predicts this. Worse-off people attribute their disadvantages to external causes, and they extend the same courtesy to their allies. Edsall heard the external attributions in the union halls of Baltimore four decades before survey researchers measured them in working-class White respondents who blame immigration, globalization, and reverse discrimination for their position.
Chain Reaction then shows the propaganda layer that Alliance Theory predicts must follow any realignment. The book’s central claim holds that Republican strategists linked race, welfare, taxes, crime, and government spending into a single narrative. Read through Pinsof, that narrative is not an ideology. It is a coordination device. It told the new coalition who its allies were (taxpayers, homeowners, the hardworking) and who its rivals were (welfare recipients, criminals, the bureaucrats who served them), and it wrapped the alliance in moral language about desert and responsibility. The moral language varied as needed. The same coalition that preached personal responsibility for the poor demanded protection for displaced steelworkers. Alliance Theory says the inconsistency is the signature of the form. Belief systems are collections of ad hoc justifications for heterogeneous alliances, and the more heterogeneous the allies, the more inconsistent the beliefs.
Edsall’s tax analysis fits the interdependence criterion with the same snugness. Bracket creep in the 1970s pushed middle-income voters into higher brackets, and they came to see their tax payments as transfers to another coalition’s clients. Interdependence ran in reverse. The voters concluded they were providing benefits to rivals rather than receiving benefits from allies, and they revolted. Pinsof writes that people support parties that advance their personal and group interests, creating interdependence with co-partisans. Edsall documented the moment when millions of Americans recalculated that interdependence and found it pointing the wrong way.
His later themes extend the mapping. The diploma divide that dominates his Times columns matches the elite split that Alliance Theory builds into its account of the current structure. Pinsof and his coauthors argue that expanding college enrollment produced an intellectual elite of knowledge workers while corporate consolidation enriched a business elite, and the two elites became status rivals. The upper class split on status while the lower class split on ethnicity, weakening the old link between class and party. Edsall tracks the same fracture from the journalistic side: professors, journalists, and professionals moving into one coalition, executives and small-business owners anchoring the other, each elite recruiting a different slice of the working class. His columns on educational sorting describe the recruitment in progress.
Affective polarization, his second great theme, restates the theory’s account of super-alliances. Two mega-coalitions have coalesced that stack partisan, religious, ethnic, regional, and cultural memberships. Once the stacking occurs, every conflict activates the whole alliance, and rivals appear as tribes rather than as people with mistaken views. Edsall reports the survey findings. Alliance Theory supplies the engine: humans evolved to track allies and rivals, and when all social identities point the same direction, the tracking system runs hot.
His third theme, status anxiety, sits less comfortably in the frame, and the friction instructs. Edsall often explains the populist turn through perceived status loss among historically dominant groups. Alliance Theory can absorb this as external attribution by the losers of globalization. But the theory also suggests a sharper reading of the explanation. Status anxiety, as a frame, attributes rival behavior to psychological reaction rather than to interest or judgment. It casts the other coalition’s voters as frightened men misreading their situation. Pinsof would call this an attributional bias applied to rivals: their politics flow from internal defect, ours from reasoned response. The academic literature Edsall draws on comes from scholars who belong, almost to a man, to the intellectual-elite coalition, and the frames they produce tend to flatter it. Conservative critics of Edsall have said this for years in cruder terms. Alliance Theory gives their complaint a formal structure.
This raises the question the frame demands: what alliance work does Edsall’s own career perform? His trajectory traces the migration his columns describe. He began among union men in Baltimore, moved to The Washington Post at the peak of its institutional power, and finished as a Columbia professor and Times columnist, quoting political scientists to an audience of the educated. He left the world of the building trades and joined the world of the knowledge workers, and his product, the translation of academic research for coalition readers, serves the intellectual elite’s claim to authority. The column tells Times readers that their side’s beliefs rest on data. That is mobilization, in Pinsof’s sense, however scrupulous the execution.
Yet Edsall makes an awkward propagandist, and the awkwardness measures him. He spends much of his column space telling his coalition what it does not want to hear. He warns Democrats that their cultural positions repel working-class voters. He credits Republican strategists with skill rather than mere malice. He quotes scholars who find that liberals dislike their rivals as intensely as conservatives dislike theirs, the symmetry finding at the heart of Alliance Theory. A pure coalition advocate suppresses such material. Edsall features it. The theory can still absorb this: a coalition benefits from one designated bearer of bad news, because accurate intelligence about rival strength helps allies win. On this reading Edsall serves his alliance as scout rather than cheerleader. The role still belongs to the alliance.
The deepest convergence between the journalist and the theory concerns the direction of causation. Edsall’s whole body of work shows beliefs trailing coalitions. The union men did not read Burke and become conservative. They watched their alliance break and then acquired the narrative that explained their new loyalties. The evangelicals did not derive supply-side economics from Scripture. They joined a coalition that included the Chamber of Commerce and learned to speak its language. Chain Reaction narrates values rhetoric arriving after alliance shifts, election after election. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton claim this sequence as their core prediction. Edsall’s archive is the longest-running confirmation in American journalism.
One difference remains, and it marks the boundary between the reporter and the theorist. Edsall sometimes grants values independent force. He treats the rights revolution as a moral achievement that produced backlash, which implies that some actors pursued principle and paid for it. Alliance Theory dissolves such claims. Principles are outputs, never inputs; the rights revolution was itself coalition warfare wrapped in moral language. Edsall never goes that far. He keeps a residue of the older view that ideas move men. Whether this residue reflects his judgment or his coalition’s self-image, the frame cannot say from inside. It can only note that the man who documented fifty years of beliefs following alliances still holds back from the conclusion his own evidence presses on him: that his beliefs, and his readers’ beliefs, follow the same law.

The Voice and the Set

Thomas Edsall writes like a man who distrusts his own eloquence. He builds his columns out of other people’s sentences. He emails a question to a dozen political scientists, prints their answers at length, and threads them together with spare connective tissue. The method makes him less a stylist than a switchboard, and that self-effacement is the style. Where other Times columnists perform, Edsall assembles. The reader hears Theda Skocpol (b. 1947), Ryan Enos, and Frances Lee before he hears Edsall, and Edsall wants it that way.
Theda Skocpol (b. 1947), Ryan Enos, and Frances Lee represent three distinct generations and methodologies within contemporary American political science, yet their structural world centers on the same baseline institutions: the department meeting, the peer-reviewed journal, and the dataset. The geography of this set runs through the historical architecture of Harvard University, the quantitative labs of the midwest, and the policy-adjacent corridors of Princeton and Washington. Its members do not write to change the minds of voters; they write to alter the frameworks of their peers, using institutional prestige and methodological precision as their primary tools of persuasion.
Skocpol stands as the set’s senior matriarch, an elder who built her reputation by challenging the behavioral orthodoxies of the 1970s. Her method is historical sociology, an approach that treats the state not as a passive reflection of societal inputs but as an autonomous actor with its own interests and capacities. In States and Social Revolutions (1979), she analyzed the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions to prove that structural crises within states, rather than mere ideological movements, determine historical outcomes. Her later work shifted inward to the American state, tracing the origins of social policy in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (1992) and later documenting the mobilization of the right in her study of the Tea Party movement. Her career established a specific model of academic authority: long-form historical analysis paired with aggressive institutional leadership, including her tenure as dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Enos represents the quantitative and behavioral turn that followed, a world where political behavior is analyzed through the lens of geography, demography, and field experiments. Based at Harvard, his work examines how spatial context shapes political psychology. In The Space Between Us (2017), Enos used geographic data and field experiments to demonstrate how racial segregation and spatial proximity to outgroups alter political attitudes, voting behavior, and social cohesion. His method relies on things Skocpol’s early work did not: laboratory precision, randomized interventions, and massive spatial datasets. The authority he claims is the authority of the lab coat, where structural patterns are verified through statistical inference rather than historical narrative.
Lee occupies the institutionalist center, focusing her research on the mechanics of Congress and the structural drivers of partisan conflict. Currently a professor at Princeton, her work strips away the romanticism of legislative compromise to reveal the cold incentives of party competition. In Insecure Majorities (2016), she argued that the contemporary era of razor-thin congressional majorities has fundamentally altered legislative behavior. When control of the House or Senate is permanently up for grabs, parties prioritize messaging and partisan differentiation over governance, converting the legislative process into a perpetual campaign. Her method combines deep institutional knowledge with rigorous data tracking of roll-call votes and committee behavior.
What this set values is validity, causal identification, and institutional reach. They value the research design that can isolate a variable and the archive that can back a structural claim. Within their world, a theoretical breakthrough that shifts the citation index outranks any amount of popular media commentary, and public-facing writing is tolerated only when backed by a deep shelf of peer-reviewed data. They value autonomy from the political campaigns they study, maintaining an analytical distance that treats partisan fervor as data rather than conviction. Above all, they value the seminar table—the room where arguments are tested through forensic criticism and where reputations are maintained through the visible mastery of the literature.
The hero system of the academic set promises a specific type of immortality: the foundational concept that attaches your name to a syllabus for forty years. To have your book become a required text in graduate seminars across the country is the highest degree of canonization. Skocpol’s “bringing the state back in” is an immortality formula of this kind. Below the conceptual breakthrough sits the dataset that becomes standard infrastructure for other researchers, and below that sits the presidency of the American Political Science Association, an honor Skocpol achieved in 2002. The set’s heroes are those who stood up to methodological orthodoxy or who built new departments from scratch. Its secular saints are the authors of the “big books”—the texts that do not merely report findings but reset the boundaries of what is considered knowable.
The status games are quiet, archival, and relentless. Position tracks institutional affiliation first, and a chair at an Ivy League university or an elite private institution carries an invisible weight that no amount of public fame can match. The second game is the peer-review audit, played at hiring and tenure season, where entries are judged by their placement in the top-tier journals: the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. The third game is the citation count, a numerical scoreboard tracked through Google Scholar that measures a scholar’s structural footprint. The fourth game is the grant economy, where securing funding from the National Science Foundation or major foundations signals organizational dominance. Modesty is mandatory and institutionalized; an academic must present his findings as the humble result of data and design, and any scholar who claims personal genius or operates with overt showmanship loses standing among his peers.
The normative claims are confident and procedural. Objective analysis is possible and necessary, and the researcher must separate his personal politics from his empirical findings. Peer review is the sacred gatekeeper of truth, and work published outside its boundaries carries no authority. Institutions possess structural logics that shape human behavior regardless of individual intentions, and a political analysis that focuses entirely on personality or rhetoric is dismissed as superficial. The public interest is served not by advocacy, but by providing rigorous, verified knowledge about how power and governance actually operate.
The essentialist claims run beneath the methodology. The set believes in the born researcher—the type identifiable by a specific kind of intellectual stamina, a tolerance for coding errors, and an obsession with the archive. It believes institutions have durable natures that persist across historical eras, which is why Lee can read the dynamics of the 19th-century Congress into the 21st, and why Skocpol views state capacity as a long-term historical inheritance. It treats demographic and geographic categories as fixed inputs that yield predictable psychological outputs under pressure, an assumption that anchors Enos’s behavioral experiments.
The moral grammar organizes academic life with the clarity of a code. The mortal sins are data fabrication, plagiarism, and the ideological capture that distorts a research design to achieve a desired political outcome. The venial sins are the sloppy footnote, the missed citation, and the premature press release that shortcuts the peer-review process. Sins of the world are the anti-intellectual populist campaigns that threaten academic freedom and the bureaucratic overreach that chokes research in administration. Absolution comes through the erratum notice or the replication study that corrects the record, and redemption is offered to the scholar who responds to criticism by gathering more data. Purity talk pervades the department: a design is “clean” or “noisy,” an identification strategy is “robust” or “weak,” a finding is “significant” or “spurious.” The deepest rule of the grammar separates the scholar from the text. You may dissect a colleague’s life work over a two-hour seminar, showing its data to be flawed and its conclusions unfounded, but you must thank him for his presentation, take him to dinner afterward, and keep your voice level throughout. The set regards that cold civility as the boundary line between academic critique and personal conflict, a rule that preserves the university as an island of structural authority.
Edsall’s diction comes from the social sciences. He writes “racial resentment,” “negative partisanship,” “educational polarization,” “out-group hostility.” He treats these terms as tools rather than jargon, and he uses them without apology or definition padding. When he reaches for his own words, they run plain and blunt: voters “defect,” coalitions “crack,” parties “bleed” support. He keeps a reporter’s vocabulary under an academic’s subject matter. The mix gives his columns their texture. The quoted professors supply the abstraction, and Edsall supplies the verbs.
His sentence architecture differs from his Post reporting days. The columns favor long, subordinated sentences that stack qualifications, then snap shut with a short declarative line. He opens with a question more often than a claim. “Has the Democratic Party lost the working class for good?” The question structures the column as an inquiry rather than an argument, which lets him hold his own view back until the final paragraphs. When the view arrives, it tends toward pessimism delivered flat. No hand-wringing, no uplift. He ends columns on sentences that read like verdicts a judge regrets having to issue.
His rhetoric works through accumulation. He persuades by weight of testimony rather than by wit or aphorism. A typical column quotes eight to fifteen scholars, often at block length, and the cumulative effect resembles a deposition more than an essay. Critics call this clotted. Admirers call it honest. Either way it inverts the usual columnist’s bargain, where the writer’s personality carries the argument. Edsall’s personality shows in his curation, in which questions he asks and which answers he prints, and in a career-long preoccupation with the points where race, class, and party grind against each other.
He prefers email interviews, which suits both his method and his temperament. Email gives him exact quotes, time-stamped, that no one can dispute later, and it lets careful academics write careful answers. The choice tells you something about his epistemology. He wants the record clean.
His speaking manner matches the prose. In interviews and panel appearances he talks in a low, gravelly register, halting, with pauses while he searches for the accurate word rather than the impressive one. He mumbles at times. He self-deprecates about his age and his predictions. He answers questions he was not asked when the asked question strikes him as the wrong one. He shows no performer’s instinct, no radio polish, and audiences read the roughness as credibility. A man who sounded smoother might seem to be selling something. Edsall sounds like he is reporting back from somewhere he did not enjoy visiting, and that has been his persona for fifty years: the bearer of unwelcome demographic news, delivered without flourish, sourced to the hilt.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

If Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right, Thomas Edsall becomes a strange figure: a man who has spent twenty years documenting Mearsheimer’s anthropology while refusing to accept it.
Consider what Edsall does. Every week he emails political scientists and psychologists, and every week they tell him some version of the same thing. Voters reason backward from group loyalty. Partisanship functions like ethnic identity. Policy preferences follow tribal attachment rather than produce it. Motivated reasoning beats deliberation. Racial and religious identity predict the vote better than economic interest. This is Mearsheimer’s picture of man, confirmed in study after study, column after column. Edsall has built the largest popular archive of evidence for the social, tribal, socialized human being in American journalism.
Yet the columns keep registering surprise. Each finding arrives as a fresh anomaly, a troubling new wrinkle, a challenge for Democrats. If Mearsheimer is right, nothing in this archive is anomalous. The anomaly is the baseline Edsall measures it against: the liberal individual who weighs arguments, updates on evidence, and votes his interests. Edsall keeps reporting the death of that creature without holding a funeral. The surprise is the tell. A man who accepted the social anthropology might stop being surprised.
The implications run deeper for his framing of the White working class. Edsall often reaches for pathology scales, racial resentment batteries, authoritarianism indexes. These instruments presume the autonomous liberal individual as the healthy norm and code group loyalty as deviation. Mearsheimer’s view inverts this. In-group preference, attachment to one’s society, willingness to sacrifice for fellow members, suspicion of outsiders: these are the human default, the survival strategy of the species. What the studies Edsall quotes call resentment, Mearsheimer might call ordinary group behavior under status threat. The moral coding flips. The pathology lives in the expectation that people should behave like atomized rights-bearers, since no one ever has.
His strategic advice suffers the same problem. The classic Edsall column ends by asking whether Democrats can win these voters back, usually through some mix of economic policy and rhetorical adjustment. If socialization and innate sentiment dominate reason, persuasion through argument and policy detail addresses the weakest of the three faculties. You cannot argue a man out of an identity he was infused with before he could think. The Democratic strategist’s faith in the well-crafted appeal is the liberal delusion brought home from foreign policy and applied to Ohio.
There is also the matter of Edsall himself. His method treats the academy as reason’s clearinghouse. He emails the professors, the professors cite the regressions, and the regressions stand in for thought. But on Mearsheimer’s account the academy is a society like any other, with its own long childhood, its own value infusion, its own sentiments dressed as conclusions. Edsall’s trust in his sources is a tribal practice. He defers to his clerisy the way a parishioner defers to his priest, and the deference feels like rationality from the inside, which is exactly what Mearsheimer’s account predicts it should feel like.
The irony is that early Edsall knew all this. Chain Reaction (1991), written with his wife Mary, treated American politics as group conflict over race, rights, and taxes, and it holds up because it never pretended voters were philosophers. If Mearsheimer is right, Edsall’s first major book got the anthropology correct, and the subsequent decades of columns amount to a long negotiation between what his data shows and what his commitments require. The data is Mearsheimerian. The hope is liberal. The column is the seam where they grind against each other, week after week, and that grinding might be the real subject of his life’s work.