"America knows how to destroy regimes but not how to rebuild societies." A haunting George Packer piece about the hubris of the war we've just started. https://theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/trump-iran-war-neoconservatism/686207/
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"America knows how to destroy regimes but not how to rebuild societies." A haunting George Packer piece about the hubris of the war we've just started. https://theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/trump-iran-war-neoconservatism/686207/
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What is life like for someone born in the 21st century?
What is life like for someone born in the 21st century? Your everyday reality is disorienting change—but not the kind that freed Lippmann and his generation to shape their era. Instead, your overwhelming feeling is that the game is rigged against you. You see the old as at best indifferent, if not outright predatory, and lacking the ability or the desire to solve the problems they’ve inflicted on you. The electronic air you breathe crackles with vituperation. Political and media elites hoard status and wealth by keeping you in a perpetual fever of resentment and fury. Meanwhile, tech giants addict you from toddlerhood to devices that alienate you from other people and the natural world, trapping you in a hall of mirrors, until you give up on the idea that truth is even knowable and surrender to the wildest images of unreality. Your sense of your own existence grows fragile, and your job prospects are as precarious as your mental health. Whatever your race or gender, it feels like a liability. The system is a conspiracy against your chance at a decent life.
— George Packer, The College-Educated Working Class (The Atlantic, March 16, 2026)
“Truth” without “accuracy” is merely an “opinion.”
Free speech needs some ground to stand on. It needs a community with enough tolerance and trust for people to refrain from killing one another over ideas.
George Packer, Free Speech Can’t Survive As an Abstraction
Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history. Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction. He was worse than the closest contender, Robert McNamara, and that is not a competition to judge lightly. McNamara’s folly was that of a whole generation of Cold Warriors who believed that Indochina was a vital front in the struggle against communism. His growing realization that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable waste made him more insightful than some of his peers; his decision to keep this realization from the American public made him an unforgivable coward. But Rumsfeld was the chief advocate of every disaster in the years after September 11. Wherever the United States government contemplated a wrong turn, Rumsfeld was there first with his hard smile—squinting, mocking the cautious, shoving his country deeper into a hole. His fatal judgment was equaled only by his absolute self-assurance. He lacked the courage to doubt himself. He lacked the wisdom to change his mind.
George Packer, How Rumsfeld Deserves to Be Remembered
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A whole system of oppression can exist within a single word.
George Packer ("How America Fractured Into Four Parts")
All Art is Propganda |Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell
(C-SPAN Interview with George Packer, 2009)
America’s worst secretary of defense never expressed a quiver of regret.
“Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history. Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction.”
“Rumsfeld was the chief advocate of every disaster in the years after September 11. Wherever the United States government contemplated a wrong turn, Rumsfeld was there first with his hard smile—squinting, mocking the cautious, shoving his country deeper into a hole. His fatal judgment was equaled only by his absolute self-assurance. He lacked the courage to doubt himself. He lacked the wisdom to change his mind.“