George Packer

I think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent.…

— George Packer

Playing to resentment and using a lot of, you know, grand abstract phrases like make America great again is - it just…

— George Packer

The Senate was an odd compromise between the founders and the early leaders of the republic who wanted a single house which…

— George Packer

Too many talented and supremely calculating politicians, including Nixon and Clinton, have destroyed their careers, or come close, by acting in ways…

— George Packer

The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow…

— George Packer

The hollowing out of the heartland was good for Walmart's bottom line: its slogan might have been an amoral maxim attributed to…

— George Packer

“He had bought into a lie: go to college, get a good education, get a job with a Fortune 500 company, and…

— George Packer

Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals…

— George Packer

Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.

— George Packer

The difference between a reporter, a newspaper columnist, a paid speaker, a television personality, a radio talk show host, a blogger, a…

— George Packer

I don't know how we continue to do politics in a democracy if we simply can't listen to one another, if we…

— George Packer

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.

— George Packer

The information age has made Thiel rich, but it has also been a disappointment to him. It hasn't created enough jobs, and…

— George Packer

“Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south…

— George Packer

“Nowhere was the complacency of the establishment, with its blind faith in progress, more evident than in its attitude toward an elite…

— George Packer

I think it's important for Americans to try to understand each other a little better.

— George Packer

Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P.…

— George Packer

“If you were born in 1950 and were in the top ten percent, everything got better for twenty years automatically. Then, after…

— George Packer

Under Bill Clinton we had a roaring economy that looked really good.

— George Packer

Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to…

— George Packer

“The slow, mismanaged arrival of armored vehicles and bulletproof plates for flak vests was only the most conspicuous demonstration of how the…

— George Packer

The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later,…

— George Packer

Like an odorless gas, [inequality] pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of the country's democracy. But it…

— George Packer

I am never going to be able to rest easy in having established a posthumous connection to my father. I'll always be…

— George Packer

Last year, in the year 2008, it just became normal to watch great American institutions crumble, almost dissolve like sand.

— George Packer