George Packer is a smart guy. Here's an excerpt from an interview with him, about his recent book, The Great Unwinding:
That says it all, really. Everything I've been trying to say about where we are, where the current iteration of the formerly useful Republican party has led us, and left us. They, and their disinformation-rich media conglomerates. Mr Packer (and I, among lots of others) sees it as a problem. Those Rs, though, their disingenuous mouthpieces, and, depressingly beyond description, their targeted audience, see it as mission accomplished.In the introduction of the book you write unwindings and rewindings in American history, periods when the institutions that bring Americans together fall apart and then new ones are built. Do you think now that these issues are being discussed so widely that we’re poised for a rewinding?I think millions of people simultaneously becoming aware of a wrong state of affairs, a bad social arrangement, does not immediately translate into tools to remedy it. First of all, we don’t have the structures that traditionally have repaired or averted threats to our democracy — which is what I think this is. We don’t have a functioning Congress. We don’t have a public school system that gives citizens what they need to be active citizens. We don’t have a court system that understands that equality remains an elusive goal. We don’t have a media that knows how to focus on something like this in a way that actually informs people, gives them the information they need.
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