I have children and I still love my country and I still feel the daily danger of giving up.

Daily danger.

What do we do?

I mean, this is something people constantly ask me and I'm sure you, what can we do about all of this? And I don't

really have a good answer. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. My guest today is George Packer.

George, of course, is a very well-known writer and former podcast guest.

He is a winner of a National Book Award and a staff writer at the Atlantic, but he's here to talk about a slightly unusual departure for him.

Or perhaps a return to form, because George actually started out his writing life as a

novelist, and he has just published a lovely novel called The Emergency. We talk about literary

allegories, how to understand this political moment, the polarization of American society, the way in which things seem to be

falling apart through the lens of victory. And then in the second half of conversation,

we talk about some of the more bread and butter political issues, how to make sense of Trump's

assault on the American Republic and the struggles

of Democrats to find a coherent response.

Are we condemned to see society polarize further and further?

Is our society going to fall apart in the way in which the society

George describes in his novel seems to be falling apart? Or can we somehow hold it together? Can

the centrifugal forces win out over the central fugal ones? In the last part of the conversation, we talk about

some of the broader trends on the left, the Brahmanization of the left, which seems to make it

the case that the best predictor of voting for left-wing parties now is being highly educated

and making a more than average income. Whether or not left-wing parties can go back to actually speaking in the voice of ordinary

people and whether perhaps we might have some reasons for optimism.

...