George Packer's Blog, page 138

How to Save the Democratic Party

Illustration by Stephen Savage.

The Democrats lost the Presidency on Tuesday, and will continue to be the minority party in both the House and the Senate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the party is in permanent decline. Both major parties have repeatedly come back from major losses. They’ve done so by increasing turnout among the people who already supported them, and by making appeals to voters on the other side. This interactive lets you explore the second of these two pathways to political-coalition building.

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Related:
Donald Trump Brings a New Age of Political Combat
Trump’s Conflict-of-Interest Problem
How I Explained the Election to My Six-Year-Old Daughter

Steve Bannon Will Lead Trump’s White House

“I’m a Leninist,” Steve Bannon told a writer for The Daily Beast, in early 2014. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Brings a New Age of Political Combat
Trump’s Conflict-of-Interest Problem
The Anti-Élite, Post-Fact Worlds of Trump and Rousseau

Donald Trump’s Great Bait and Switch

In her gracious concession speech last Wednesday, Hillary Clinton said of her victorious opponent, Donald Trump, “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.” That’s an admirable sentiment, but it doesn’t mean we can ignore how the President-elect puts together a government. Trump isn’t just another politician, and we shouldn’t pretend he is. Moreover, in 2008, we saw how the decisions taken immediately after the election proved immensely consequential. When President Obama brought in the Robert Rubin crew to run economic policy, he effectively committed himself to a bank bailout that stabilized the financial crisis and put the economy back on the road to growth, but also produced a huge populist backlash, which, as we saw last Tuesday, is still reverberating.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Brings a New Age of Political Combat
Trump’s Conflict-of-Interest Problem
The Anti-Élite, Post-Fact Worlds of Trump and Rousseau

“60 Minutes” with Donald Trump

“We’re losing this country. That’s why I won the election,” President-elect Donald Trump told Lesley Stahl, of “60 Minutes,” in a segment broadcast on Sunday night. “And, by the way,” he added, “I won easily. That was big, big.” The “easily” part is hardly true—Trump’s Electoral College victory was secured by just a couple of hundred thousand votes in key states, but Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, and it had been a wringer of a campaign. “Double-side nasty,” Trump called it, when Stahl asked him how he felt now about his attacks on Clinton. “Do I regret? I mean, I’m sitting here with you now.” To Trump, winning means never having to say you’re sorry.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Brings a New Age of Political Combat
Trump’s Conflict-of-Interest Problem
The Anti-Élite, Post-Fact Worlds of Trump and Rousseau

Conor McGregor at the Garden: The Double-Champ Does What He Wants

On Friday afternoon, twenty-four hours before the grandest mixed-martial-arts event in history, Madison Square Garden was already full of fans who had gathered to watch the athletes weigh in. Actually, this was the second weigh-in of the day—and it wasn’t really a weigh-in at all. The competitors had already stepped onto a scale at a smaller, private weigh-in, which was quiet but consequential: one of them, Kelvin Gastelum, had been too heavy, and his fight against Donald (Cowboy) Cerrone had been cancelled. (These morning weigh-ins, quick and early, are designed to make it easier for athletes on a crash diet to rehydrate, and recover, before the fight.) By contrast, the afternoon weigh-ins were meaningless but loud, and therefore enjoyable, even if the results were already known: drama in the morning, dramatization in the afternoon.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Zephyr Teachout’s Loss and the Fight Against Dark Money
The Problem with Voting Rights in New York
Who Exactly Is Ahmad Khan Rahami?

Is Putin’s Russia Ready for Trump’s America?

Last Wednesday morning, members of the Russian parliament broke into spontaneous applause. “Colleagues three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in U.S. Presidential elections, and just this second Trump began his speech as President-elect,” a Duma deputy named Vyacheslav Nikonov announced. The hall was filled with a long and sustained cheer. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the nationalist buffoon who is a particularly vulgar yet ultimately feckless Russian version of Trump, threw a party with champagne in his Duma office. Not long after, Vladimir Putin sent Trump a telegram of congratulations, saying that he welcomed a “constructive dialogue” with the new U.S. President, based on “principles of equality, mutual respect, and genuine consideration.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Brings a New Age of Political Combat
Trump’s Conflict-of-Interest Problem
The Anti-Élite, Post-Fact Worlds of Trump and Rousseau

China Tries to Make Sense of Donald Trump

Communications between the world’s rising superpower and its existing one were off to a jolly start when China’s state media and Donald Trump, the American President-elect, appeared to contradict each other on whether Chinese President Xi Jinping had contacted Trump in the days following his historic win. According to Xinhua News, China’s state media, Xi sent a congratulatory message to Trump, who had anchored his campaign in part on the threat of a Sino-American trade war and a promise to take U.S. jobs back from the thieving Chinese. (Chinese state television reportedly went further, saying that the two men had spoken on the phone.) According to the Chinese media, Xi had cordial, conciliatory words for America’s soon-to-be forty-fifth President, declaring  Trump that “developing long-term healthy and stable Sino-U.S. relations is in the fundamental interests of the peoples of both countries.” The message may not have made much of an impression: On Friday, the President-elect gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal, which reported, “Mr. Trump said he had spoken with or heard from most foreign leaders except Chinese President Xi Jinping.”

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Related:
How I Explained the Election to My Six-Year-Old Daughter
On Choosing Trump and Being Bad
Trump Confirms That He Just Googled Obamacare

The Alt-Right Hails Its Victorious God-Emperor

I spent much of this fall listening, both online and in person, to the connoisseurs of ugliness who call themselves the alt-right. This is such a new category that no two people agree on precisely what it means or how many people fall within it. Some on the alt-right are committed white nationalists; others are committed neo-monarchists who refer to Donald Trump, buoyantly, as their “god-emperor”; others are chaos agents who are committed to nothing at all. One could argue that, together, these people’s social-media activism made it possible—made it conceivable—for Trump to be elected. On Wednesday, Charles Johnson, an alt-right troll who calls himself a journalist, was sitting on a Brooklyn-bound F train wearing a Make America Great Again hat. “You support a man who is racist, sexist, and homophobic,” a man standing next to him said, accurately. “We won—fuck off,” Johnson said, also accurately.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Media Culpa? The Press and the Election Result
What Trump Needs to Learn About Protests
Losing the Popular Vote Won’t Rein in President Trump

Media Culpa? The Press and the Election Result

Since Tuesday night, there has been a lot of handwringing about how the media, with all its fancy analytics, failed to foresee Donald Trump’s victory. The Times alone has published three articles on this theme, one of which ran under the headline “How Data Failed Us in Calling an Election.” On social media, Trump supporters have been mercilessly haranguing the press for getting it wrong.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Alt-Right Hails Its Victorious God-Emperor
What Trump Needs to Learn About Protests
Losing the Popular Vote Won’t Rein in President Trump

What Trump Needs to Learn About Protests

And so it begins. On Thursday night, after two days during which spontaneous post-election protests broke out across the country—in, among other cities, New York, Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Kansas City, New Orleans, Seattle, and Donald Trump’s future home, Washington, D.C., where only four per cent of the electorate voted for him—President-elect Donald J. Trump reacted with a tweet. It reflected much of what we’ve come to know about him in the past year: “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting, Very unfair!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Alt-Right Hails Its Victorious God-Emperor
Media Culpa? The Press and the Election Result
Losing the Popular Vote Won’t Rein in President Trump