Quotes from George Packer

In a meritocracy, actors who act well get good roles. They don't get to be journalists, too - a job that, in a meritocracy, should go to those who do journalism well.

Al Qaeda asks its recruits to establish their bona fides as a condition of membership, even requiring answers to a long questionnaire. But ISIS has democratized and globalized jihad by lowering the entry bar to an eve-of-destruction YouTube pledge of allegiance to the caliphate - and even that could probably be waived.

The base of the party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the rage that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign.

Republicans today have given the country conservatism in the spirit of Sarah Palin, whose ignorance about the world, contempt for expertise, and raw appeals to white identity politics presaged Trump's incendiary campaign.

The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility.

Everything seems set up for success in digital journalism - money, eyeballs, software, brands.

The idea of solving as huge and long-term a problem as inequality - which, for my money, is the biggest single problem we have here at home - just never gets serious concern from both sides.

We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.

No-one can say when the unwinding began, when the coil that held America together in its secure and sometime shifting grip first gave way.

It's essential for the U.S. and Europe to prevent Putin from going farther and reversing the hard-won independence of former Soviet republics.

What's the point of merit that exists only to protect privilege?

A character in Jonathan Franzen's 2010 novel Freedom puts it this way: "If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life.

To save our democracy, we must restructure our economy to make us equal Americans.

The country that always modeled social mobility for the rest of the world has become more class-ridden than recent aristocracies like Austria and Japan.

I'm here to tell you: under-education + lack of faith in the political and economic system that has failed them + Christianity + 40 years of conservatism becoming more and more extreme + right wing talk radio + virtually no mental healthcare + lack of interaction with anyone outside of their race mixed with stereotypes that have become "normalized" + social media + no good jobs + poor health from over-work/dangerous jobs + economic desperation x magical savior = trumpism.

Bush himself came into office with no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that his predecessor had entangled America in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests. Wolfowitz

I hate that 74 million of my compatriots voted to keep in power our worst president, who convinced most of them that the election was stolen. The stab in the back will fester in their minds for years, a threat to the rest of us. But it's too easy to be riveted to that disturbing number and forget the 81 million who voted him out.

Thiel concluded that "greed is far preferable to envy: It is less destructive (I'd rather live in a society where people don't share than in one where they try to take what belongs to everybody else) and it is more honest.

The slow, mismanaged arrival of armored vehicles and bulletproof plates for flak vests was only the most conspicuous demonstration of how the Iraq War, like every war -- just or unjust, won or lost -- became a conspiracy of the old and powerful against the young and dutiful.

We need an activism of cohesion. We need an activism that doesn't separate Americans into like-minded factions but brings Americans together across tribal lines.

Sein Egoismus war eine rationale Reaktion auf die Wirklichkeit, in der er lebte.

He had bought into a lie: go to college, get a good education, get a job with a Fortune 500 company, and you'd be happy. He had done all that and he was miserable. He'd gotten out of his father's house only to find another kind of servitude. He decided to start over and do things his own way. He would become an entrepreneur.

If anything can lower the fever of populism in Real America, which easily spikes into white nationalism, it will be this: the experience of shared responsibility in worker organizations, and improvements in people's daily lives, partly made possible by the help of a government that is manifestly on their side.

Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality and freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which dominant groups subjugate other groups. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power.