Welcome back. I'm Chuck Todd and you're listening to the Chuck Todd cast. My next guest is George Packard.

Many of you know him well, been reading him for years. Currently, he's a staff writer at the Atlantic.

He's authored several books, including The Unwinding, which won the National Book Award in 2013.

Well, he's back with a new book. It's called Last Best Hope, America in Crisis and Renewal.

It's a bit of a critical look at what you might call America as a failed state. George Packard, welcome to the Todd cast.

I've been thinking about, we're obviously those of us that cover American politics in some form on any form, whatever your angle is.

I think we all look at the state of the democracy and think, oh gosh.

But I wonder if we are at the stage of where the other day I was speaking to a group called Planet Forward about the coverage of climate change.

And about the one positive aspect on climate change now is we're no longer arguing about if it exists.

We're arguing about how to deal with it. So it's a step forward.

Where are we on this idea that America is in crisis? Do you think we are at the point where there is collective agreement?

Or do you think we're still in this stage where you still have to convince people we've got a problem?

No, I think most Americans feel that we're in a crisis. We've been in one for a while.

Last year, Chuck was a crisis year if there ever was one. I mean, the year began with impeachment in which the facts were clear,

but the parties voted along their tribal lines. The worst pandemic in a century, the worst government responds to a pandemic, maybe ever.

Protest, violence, counterviolence, the threat of political violence, storms and wildfires, and then an election in which the loser, President Trump, declared that it was a fraud and sent 20,000 Americans to attack the Capitol as Congress was voting to certify the winner.

I mean, that's a crisis. And it showed, for me, it showed the underlying conditions that have caused the crisis.

They kind of were all revealed in their full seriousness, like a medical condition that shows itself in a really serious illness.

And we could not ignore them any longer, even if we put up a lot of efforts to do so.

Well, 2020 was an MRI. It was the America's MRI. And I appreciate the fact that you're picking up on the phrase, cold civil war too.

Because I feel like that that's what we're in. And I've been obsessed with trying to look back at the period between Jackson and Lincoln and figure out what we did wrong.

Because what's fascinating then is that plenty of the American elite knew we had a problem. We just didn't know how to resolve it.

...