Post-Pandemic Order with The Atlantic’s George Packer

Out of Order

In a new essay for The Atlantic, titled “We Are Living in a Failed State,” veteran writer George Packer observes: “If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.”

In this episode, Packer joins Derek Chollet to discuss what the pandemic has revealed about an already-broken America and why instead of being “the great leveler,” it has resulted in a deepening of existing fault lines—a trend that Packer predicts will continue as the November elections approach.