Al Franken and George Packer on challenges to democracy

Al Franken interviews George Packer on “democratic delusions.”¹ The interview is based on Packer’s article, “The End of Democratic Delusions” in the current (Jan. 2025) issue of the Atlantic Monthly.²

Packer is a good journalist. But he also falls for the journalistic temptation to make generalizations about the general background of present politics that are so broad they don’t actually mean much. From his Atlantic piece:

This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the “browning” of the American people. Trump’s basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners—the real Americans.

This is all familiar stuff. But in the first half of the 20^th century, the world experienced the “dizzying change” of two world wars of unprecedented destructiveness and the spread of radio, talking movies, and television (“transition from an industrial to an information economy”?). The Great Depression in the US – preceded by severe times for rural economies in the 1920s - also made the “growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland” obvious back then, too. There were protests and strikes and race riots and demonstrations. And – shocking as it may be! – back in the 1930s and 1940s there were divorces happening and there were even – yes - gays and lesbians, interracial love affairs, and various kinds of fooling around that didn’t fit conservative preachers’ model of the “traditional family.”

These kinds of broad observations are helpful in making people think beyond the “horserace” aspects of political campaigns and the politicians’ talking points of the moment. But the kinds of shifts and crises that cause and define major changes in voting behavior and social polarization are made up of concrete events and responses to them by various elements of the public, political parties and movements, and media treatment of them. Since 2000, we’ve seen major corporate corruption issues (remember Enron?) and the whole foreign policy shift around “9/11, the “war on terror,” and the Iraq War, in particular. The 2008 financial crisis brought a new evidence of corporate dysfunction and financial rip-offs that hurt lots of people - and a very sad example from the Obama Administration of granting wide-ranging impunity to the perpetrators of a very damaging financial crisis.

There was also a long-term trend of genuine radical right movements like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers that both Democratic and Republican officials failed to take sufficiently seriously as a threat to democracy and the rule of law.³ In the case of the Republicans, they started practicing a kind of polarization that was divisive but not constructive.⁴ Polarization is a necessary part of democracy and isn’t a bad thing in itself. But anti-democracy movements also rely on a specifically destructive (and violent) form of polarization. And cultish Christian fundamentalism became a more potent factor in US politics than it has even been, from radical antiabortionists to the bizarre phenomenon of anti-Semitic Christian Zionists like the Christians United for Israel group.

The specific shifts in the information environment brought about by the proliferation of cable news channels like FOX News and today’s online information context, facilitated by changes in laws regulating media, have created new opportunities for anti-democracy agitation and organization. It’s not that the far right wasn’t organizing before, since 1789 or so. But today’s Internet has created unprecedented opportunities for creating narrow “information bubbles.” And also opportunities for puncturing them if democracy advocates choose to act on them.

Packer also relies on the vague concept that Trumpista voters are worried about Other People (racial minorities, women, immigrants) who they see as having “cut in front of us,” the “us” being mostly regular white American men. This is the analogy that Arlie Russell Hochschild used in her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which provides what we could safely called a very generous – and credulous - description of conservative Louisiana white folks’ political attitudes.

Jennifer Silva’s We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (2019) provides a far more careful and critical-minded analysis of a similar demographic.⁵

Packer in the Franken interview also repeats one of the less useful truisms that mainstream reporters use to describe the American electorate, the one that equates “working class” with not having a college degree and people with college degrees as all lumped together into a professional-managerial class, or whatever. Packer refers to “the party of the high-school educated, that is to say, the working class.”

This is just plain lazy. Any reasonable structural definition of “working class” in the US and Europe would look at what categories of workers were legally eligible to unionize. Since the decline of industrial unions in the US – now being partially reversed by union organizing – some of the most important and influential unions have been those which include groups like nurses and other healthcare workers, public employees, and teachers. Many in those groups have bachelor’s degrees or higher. Yes, even many of those Starbucks baristas whose organizing efforts have been much in the news the last few years have college degrees. And there are also people like plumbers and electricians who also have either bachelor’s degrees or community college degrees.

So to define “working class” in the US or Europe as “the high-school educated” is really more misleading than helpful in understanding political alignments.

Liberal democracy as campaign issue in 2024

“In the United States, there is a significant minority of people who would like liberal democracy to go up in flames,” the German sociologist Oliver Nachtwey observes (correctly).⁶ Kamala Harris and the Democrats made preserving liberal democracy from the threat of Trumpism a key theme of their 2024 campaign. It was also a favorite of “resistance liberal” figures like commentators on MSNBC. And with abortion rights, the Democrats were able to connect that issue effectively to the larger theme of fighting for democracy and women’s rights.

In his Atlantic article, Packer writes about reactionary politics, “Although reaction has dominated local or regional (mainly southern) politics, it’s something new in our national politics - which explains why Trump has been misunderstood and written off at every turn.”

Taking just the post-Second World War period up until 2016, could be taken as a reasonable evaluation: if we ignore McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Douglas MacArthur and his fans, the John Birch Society, the Republican Presidential campaign of 1964, George Wallace’s campaigns for President, J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, the violent reaction by Ku Klux Klan types against the civil rights movement, Tricky Dick Nixon and his Plumbers, the strong presence in national politics of the China Lobby for the Chiang Kai-shek regime, the Christian Right and the antiabortion movement, the Contras and the Iran-Contra arms scandal, Rush Limbaugh and FOX News and Glenn Beck and Alex Jones – why, gosh, other than that, there has was barely a trace of reactionary politics on the national scene until Donald Trump rode down the famous escalator in 2015 to announce his Presidential campaign!

Because to establishment journalists and pundits like George Packer, all that stuff along with the Reagan Revolution and the Gingrich Revolution was just normal, good ole-boy-politics. And once they were confronted with the crass reality of Trump and his cult followers, Packer and other mainstream journalists did indeed misunderstand and write off much of what they were seeing. Things like the geyser of dark money in US politics which the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision amplified so intensely didn’t strike most of them of a particularly radical thing.

So since they haven’t bothered to pay attention to the actual radical right movement and their deep connections with the Republican Party, they were astonished to find what they saw in the Trump voters who had previously supported Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan, and the war in Iraq, and the Cheney-Bush torture program:

They want a strongman with the stomach to trample on the liberal pieties of the elites who sold them out.

This is why so many voters are willing to tolerate— in some cases, celebrate— Trump’s vile language and behavior; his love affairs with foreign dictators; his readiness to toss aside norms, laws, the Constitution itself. Asked by pollsters if they’re concerned about the state of democracy, these voters answer yes—not because they fear its demise, but because it has already failed them. They don’t think Trump will destroy democracy; he’ll restore it to the people. (Packer)

If you have lived in a world in which Rush Limbaugh and New World Order conspiracy theories were taken as just cute sideshows to what today’s Trumpistas were thinking about politics, you would understandably be shocked, I tell you, shocked! to find out that there was serious sleazebag rightwing politics going on in this establishment!!

In fact, some of those predecessor factors to which Packer wasn’t paying sufficient attention had been developing rightwing populist pitches against “Hollywood elites,” mean libruls, unpatriotic Democrats, public schools and public school teachers as a danger to children, lazy welfare queens, virtuous “makers” vs. parasitical “takers,” smug intellectuals (pointy-headed intellectuals riding bicycles was George Wallace’s version), the Liberal Media, black-helicopter conspiracy theories, thuggish sadistic Latino gangs pouring across the border, scary Black people and young Black “superpredators,” and dangerous leftwing theories promoting tolerance whose collective name morphed from Political Correctness to Critical Race Theory and now “wokeness.”

“Wokeness” is a particular favorite of mine because that means conservatives are promoting Asleepness as the obvious alternative.

In the rightwing populist version of The People vs. the Elite, the Elite is not made up of hereditary billionaires, or greedy banks and mortgage lenders, or predatory private-equity firms, or corporations who underpay their workers, cheat their customers, and bribe politicians on a grand scale. No, for them the Elite is composed of liberal movie stars and school teachers and Taylor Swift.

And The People of rightwing populism are not engaged citizens participating in liberal democracy, but the white people, the Makers (not-the-Takers), the small businessperson trying to run a wedding consultancy who is pestered by same-sex couples, and salt-of-the-earth geniuses like Elon Musk who just wants to git gubmint off their backs, the good Christians who just want to ban trans people and Muslims and to not have to pay any taxes to the godless gubmint.

A Herrenvolk democracy, in other words. One where the right people get to vote and the inferior masses get suppressed, ignored, imprisoned, or deported. So when Trump promotes lies about Democrats importing “illegal immigrants” and registering them to vote, the Trumpistas can take that as defending the real democracy of the right (and white) people against all these contemptible Libs who believe in wimmin’s rights and black people voting and such things. A “democracy” of the deserving according to the standards of white Christian nationalists and not including the undesirables.

Or, if you’ve somehow been ignoring all these trends that have been out there for decades, then it’s understandably surprising and disturbing to see what looks like a confused mass of ordinary voters who are totally bewildered by everything that’s going in the world and in 2016 and again in 2024 inexplicably fell for a carnival barker who appealed to racial hatreds and grim prejudices, incites people to violence, and who says he wants to be a dictator.

Packer has some plausible though vague predictions about how Trump will screw things up as President. But his prescription for the Democrats in the current situation is the same one that ConservaDems and stodgy journalists have been repeating since at least 1968 or so: kick out the hippies and pot-smokers and stop worrying about all this civil-rights stuff and icky talk about about non-traditional gender roles and instead focus on talking to reg’lar white folks:

The Democratic Party has to undertake the necessary self-scrutiny that starts with the errors of Biden, Harris, and their inner circle, but that extends to the party’s long drift away from the most pressing concerns of ordinary Americans, toward the eccentric obsessions of its donors and activists.

And journalists? Packer says they should continue being the intrepid defenders of truth and enlightenment they, uh, always are? As he puts, the establishment press should keep “doing what we’ve done in every age: expose the lies and graft of oligarchs and plutocrats, and tell the stories of people who can’t speak for themselves.”

Here’s the thing: if we had lived in a world for the past 30 or 40 or 50 years where most journalists did just that, would we have had the Iraq War? Would Republicans have been able to install a remarkably corrupt and radical-right majority on the Supreme Court? Would Trumpism be the currently dominant political trend nationally in the US right now?

As a tribute to our plucky, intrepid establishment journalists who spend their waking hours exposing “the lies and graft of oligarchs and plutocrats,” I’ll close with the immortal words of the then-CEO of legacy media network CBS, Les Moonves, from December 2015, when he said of Trump’s campaign:

Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? This is pretty amazing…. Who would have thought that this circus would come to town?

But, you know—it may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.

So what can I say? It’s—you know, the money’s rolling in, and this is fun. [my emphasis] ⁷

In case you’re wondering whatever happened to good ole Les, Wikipedia has this update:

In September 2018, Moonves stepped down as chairman of CBS after multiple women brought forth sexual assault allegations against him. Moonves allegedly destroyed evidence of his sexual misconduct.

According to various media reports, Moonves has amassed a net worth of over US$800 million through compensation from CBS. Moonves earned $68.4 million in 2017, combined with stock options of the media company, worth over $100 million.⁸

1. The Atlantic's George Packer on the End of Democratic Delusions. Al Franken YouTube channel 12/22/2024. (Accessed: 2024-22-12).

2. Packer, George (2025): The End of Democratic Delusions. Atlantic Monthly January 2025 issued (published online 12/02/2024). <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/trump-reelection-voter-demographic-change/680752/>

3. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein provided an excellent framework for understanding this development in American politics in: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012).

4. No one has done a better job of describing this problem over the last three decades than David Neiwert in his books and reporting. See Rick Perlstein’s interview with him: The Election Story Nobody Wants to Talk About. The American Prospect 08/28/2024. <https://prospect.org/politics/2024-08-28-election-story-nobody-talks-about-neiwert-qa/> (Accessed: 2024-22-12).

5. I discussed Silva’s analysis in: Jennifer Silva study on working-class voters in Pennsylvania. Contradicciones 02/11/2021. <https://brucemillerca.blogspot.com/2021/02/jennifer-silva-study-on-working-class.html>

6. Nachtwey, Oliver (2024): „Sie wollen die Demokratie in Flammen aufgehen sehen“. Spiegel 2024:47, 18. My translation from German.

7. Naureckas, Jim (2016): The Trump Campaign: Bad for America, but Good for CBS 03/01/2024. https://fair.org/home/the-trump-campaign-bad-for-america-but-good-for-cbs/ (Accessed: 2024-22-12).

8. Les Moonves. Wikipedia 12/20/2024. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Les_Moonves&oldid=1264048502> (Accessed: 2024-22-12).