A conversation with George Packer

On a sweltering summer afternoon, George Packer — staff writer for The New Yorker, former Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, reporter in war-torn Iraq — arrives at the offices of the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the Flatiron District in New York City.

Showing signs of the grind of a just-concluded six-week book tour, Packer smiles gently as he enters the room. His most recent work is The Unwinding: An Inner History of The New America, a biting exposé of the nation covering the past 30 years. He effectively combines profiles of ordinary people and celebrity culture, rural North Carolina and Wall Street, an ambitious young politician turned disillusioned Washington lobbyist and a drug dealer turned international star, all amid a landscape where laws are made and rules are broken.

As he begins to talk, with a calm demeanor and confident tone, Packer's words are laced with the bittersweetness of one who has witnessed a grim reality and, having returned from the journey, tells the account of a grand loss. 

President Obama has made income inequality — a topic you write about in your book — the crux of his speech on more than one occasion, stating that it is his highest priority. Here is a superpower with a shrinking middle class and an increasing divide between rich and poor. Isn't this one of the most dangerous things that could happen to a strong society?

I think people are concerned. The answer is, what are you going to do about it? There are things that could be done. He can't do them. Because another theme of my book is institutional decay and how these older organizations that used to sort of work well and provide some check against this thing that is happening, they have fallen apart. Congress doesn't work. Banks don't work. Schools don't work. What can one man do even if he is the president? He has tried. And he's not much of a fighter. And you would really have to fight hard against a lot of powerful people. I thought Obama was in a position to do some things. I thought 2008 was a turning point in history, with him and the Wall Street crash happening at the same time, but you just learn that those entrenched powers were really entrenched; those decayed institutions were really decayed. They did some things. I don't want to minimize it. There is a health-care bill, and millions of uninsured people are going to sign up for health insurance. It's far short of what I had hoped for.

Dean Price — one of the pillars of your book — is a captivating character. He is an entrepreneur from the Bible Belt, a conservative with a fervent vision for alternative energy.

I met him in January 2010. I was working on a story about Obama and how he was losing support in different places, and Dean suddenly appeared through another source, and as soon as he started talking I wanted to hear him talk more, because he came from a part of the country I didn't know. His family were tobacco farmers. He grew up picking tobacco after school and in summers. He has this vision of rehabilitating all the troubles in the countryside where he lives — where tobacco is dead, textiles are dead, furniture is gone, where there is almost nothing supporting decent life, and he sees how waste oil from restaurants could be made into diesel fuel and put into school buses and how that could create jobs and help the environment.

You went back to visit him several times. It's a big deal to let someone in your life to the extent that he did, especially a reporter.

I got to know him, and this happened with others too — stories he maybe didn't intend to tell or he didn't think first were part of the conversation began to come up — his father, who was this kind of preacher who despised Dean, who was a racist, committed suicide, and this fear of failure that I think he lives with to this day, that did not come out on the phone in the first 30 seconds, but once he began to mention it and I sort of felt, OK, I need to follow up, those were some of our best conversations. I dropped my bucket at the bottom of his well or at least as far down as I could see, and he never asked for a thing.

After writing from Togo and Iraq, why turn your gaze close to home now?

Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that’s the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas. I had begun to feel that parts of America were becoming more foreign to me than Baghdad. When I was growing up there was much more of a sameness — there was obviously McDonald's and Disney, but people watched the same evening news program, people ate basically the same food, it was more of a middle-class country, there were poor people, lots of them, there were some rich people, not as many as there are today. That has changed enormously, in every way you can think of, everywhere. It's all around us, all the time. I noticed that when I did go for reporting to a place like Tampa, Florida, or in the 2008 campaign to rural Ohio. It felt like a foreign country. That disturbed but also interested me.

Is the radio finally silent or do the voices and stories of The Unwinding still occupy your mind?

No, it's not. I wish it were. Events happen, people are still around. The Hartzell family near the end of the book is the emotional core; it's what you get to after all. It's this family that's drowning. They are holding on, but they are still drowning. They were homeless for two or three months this year, for the second time in their lives. All their stuff went into storage. They couldn't find an apartment. They couldn't pay the storage fees. They are about to lose their belongings. The kids' school work, the family photographs — it's all going to be sold off.

You present a fairly brutal picture of the country.

Look at what the Congress is like: nothing can get done; one party is so extreme that it hardly functions like a normal political party. It's more like an insurgent faction that wants to break down the institution. There's a little part of the country out in California — Silicon Valley — which is doing spectacularly well. They hardly know what it's like out there; they are living in a splendid isolation. Globalization has done a lot of this, as it has elsewhere, but so has politics and changes in the culture. Jay-Z is a hero, Sam Walton is a hero — these are not exactly communitarian champions. These are — in some cases, literally; in others, just figuratively — gangster heroes. That's who is worshipped: people who get away with it.

How could this have happened — the waning of the American dream?

We have always been this wild, free-for-all democracy where a lot of people got crushed under the wheels; it has never been a gentle ride in America. We don't have the brakes on things; we don't have the buffers. We are not a close-knit, homogenous society like Denmark. We don't have a strong belief in the state like France. There was this 50-year period — I call it the Roosevelt period — where the middle class was given the center place and given the tools to thrive, and there was this unwritten contract that people had to subscribe to because it seemed to be working for most. Business gave in to labor in some cases because it had to in order to keep the peace. Labor did the same thing. Government was more like an arbiter between them. The two parties worked together all the time — every important bill of the '50s, '60s, '70s had both parties behind it in some way.

In one of my favorite interviews, the Dalai Lama says to Oriana Fallaci in 1968: "In order for a cut on your hand to heal, your body must first of all be aware of that cut, otherwise, how will you tend it and help it heal?" Is America aware of its cut — aware of its decline?

In some factions in this country, even asking it puts you in a position of being outside polite conversation. I don't want to believe it's true, because I think on balance America has been a positive force in the world, especially when it's being true to itself, and will be again if we can recover from this. I don't think that China is going to be sending Peace Corps volunteers to West Africa; they are going to be sending petroleum engineers. Yet you look at all these signs we have been talking about and it's hard to escape: this looks rather long term; it doesn't feel cyclical anymore. It's been a long, 30-year process of wasting our assets and allowing them to atrophy. It takes a positive effort and patience, and we are not very patient, we want the good news.

You say you are a skeptic, not personally religious, suspicious of self-appointed gurus, and when Oprah utters, "According to the laws of the Universe, I am not likely to get mugged, because I am helping people to be all they can be," you say you raise both eyebrows. Shouldn't we take into account that maybe these represent a positive force in some people's lives, and maybe it's all that keeps them going?

I'm not going to dismiss it, but I'm going to hold it up to some questioning because, well, maybe it's not always true. Maybe if you think it, it's still not going to happen; if you want it, it's still not going to happen, because life is hard. "If you think it, you can do it" means everyone is entirely responsible for their own fate. "You just didn't want it enough"—that's a common American saying. Actually, no, I wanted it more than anything and I still couldn't get it, because sometimes life just crushes you. It puts too much of the blame on people who sometimes aren't really blame-worthy.

Changing gears for a moment here — When you look at the Middle East today what do you see?

I see a region that is less and less susceptible to American influence. More and more it's the local powers that are going to affect the outcome, whether it's Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates. I see an old order collapsing in a great heap of rubble and dust, and I don't think we are going to see good things for the people in those countries for some time. In Egypt and Syria you can't expect anything really good for a long time, because it's not just a dictatorship; it's a whole tradition of a repressed population. They are all divided countries: Syria in the obvious sort of sectarian civil war; Egypt, between young, more secular-minded people and Islamists and this old regime that still seems to be around. How to resolve those divisions? We can't do it in this country; Israel can't do it between its secular and orthodox. Sometimes it's a matter of a really good leader; Mandela is an example of that. I don't see that anywhere. Maybe there was a better chance a year and a half ago to support some of the more decent side in Syria; now the rebels are in disarray, the Al Qaeda branch has a military upper hand, the civilians are divided, and Assad is taking advantage of all of this.

What about Iraq and Afghanistan?

Tragedy.

You were for the Iraq war.

I was, because I was against Saddam. I wrote an article before the war that looked at how things might go after the overthrow of Saddam. It was not a pretty picture. It was not sweets and flowers; it was violence and disorder. Here we are 10 years later — nothing good for this country has come of it.

Afghanistan remains a bleak canvas of shattered lives cast under a shadow of unknowingness.

What's going to happen after we are gone, and we are basically gone. Maybe more of the same, maybe a sudden collapse. There is still a lot of money there, and that's propping things up. That's propping the army up; that's propping the government up. Will the Taliban be in Kabul by the end of next year or will it be balkanized into ethnic sectors and have a civil war again? I don't see anything but more tragedy.

These are tragedies built on false promises.

I just met a woman who worked in the State Department in Iraq and I asked her what's the simplest explanation for the fact that we can never begin to fulfill our promise about how much electricity we could get: Bremer every month had to revise the last month’s promise, and it's still true all these years later. And she said [it was] because we didn't listen to the Iraqis; we came in with our ideas.

That's a fairly recurring feature of American wars.

We always go in absolutely convinced of the righteousness of the cause and of our ability to will a good conclusion because our cause is right. I don't know if we have ever fought a war without something like that at the start, but then we lose interest and we get frustrated.

With the economics of publishing continuing to shift, are you worried about the future of journalism?

During the same years when digital media were beginning to break down newspapers, when the loss of advertising was gutting the newsrooms, when all the bad things were happening to old journalism in the last decade, there has been a real golden age of long-form journalism. People want the news about their city; they want to know if the local politicians are corrupt, they want to know what’s happening to jobs, so it's not as though the public has just decided "we want perezhilton.com." I hope and think that somehow, eventually, out of this chaos there will be a new platform. I don't think that high tech has the answer; I don't think that The Huffington Post has the answer; I don't think that Twitter has the answer. We don't have one right now, so we are in this weird middle period before a new model of how to make it work can come up. There are still great things happening in the world of journalism, and there are still readers with questions and appetite for writing, and that tells me it's not going to die.

This interview has been condensed and edited.