I want to turn to a subject that doesn't give you particular hope at the moment, which is the immediate future of the Democratic Party.

You've been very critical of the Democrats for veering into identity politics and away from the interest of the working class, of working people.

Here's what you wrote recently in The Atlantic.

The triumph of the Trump reaction, which is what you call this whole political moment we're in, the triumph of the Trump reaction should put an end to two progressive illusions that have considerably strengthened it.

One is the notion that identity is political destiny.

For a long time, the Democratic Party regarded demographic change in America, the coming minority majority, as a consoling promise during interim Republican victories.

As the country turned less white, it would inevitably turn more blue.

Not true.

And, by the way, you mentioned a second illusion about majoritarianism, which you say by this theory, the Democratic Party is kept out of power by a white Republican minority that thwarts the popular will through voter suppression, gerrymandering, judicial legislating, filibuster, the composition of the Senate and Electoral College.

By this thinking, the ultimate obstacle to the American promise is the Constitution itself.

That doesn't sound like a winning cause, particularly.

GEORGE PACKER: Especially now that we're hearing about some Republican legislators who want a second constitutional convention and who are pushing for it because they want to turn the Constitution into Project 2025.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, why did Kamala Harris lose in the framework of what you're writing here?

GEORGE PACKER: There are other things outside the framework, I think, that had a lot to do with it, inflation, the border, Joe Biden waiting far too long to do what he should have done all along, and then Kamala Harris being installed by party elites instead of nominated by a democratic process, so all of that.

But I think the larger problem is the Democratic Party has become the party of the establishment, of the status quo, of the institutions, which is not the worst thing to be.

They need defending, but they also need reforming.

And not along the lines that the party has been pursuing, which has been basically to believe that the most basic identity of a citizen is group identity based on race, gender, sexuality.

And that is how the party's organized itself.

It's how it's seen its constituents, how it's come to various positions on cultural issues.

And I think in doing so, it has lost a large number of ordinary Americans who don't see themselves primarily in those terms, who are mostly working class, middle class, and who used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party.

If you look at the party 50 years ago and today, it's almost done a reversal with the Republicans losing its working class base and inheriting college-educated professionals who used to be the Republican Party's base.

And that, to some prognosticators, seemed like a good direction to go in and it has turned out not to because there are a lot of non-college educated Americans of all races and they are moving toward the Republican Party.

And that is not a winning strategy.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Something that's really notable in the last round was that the elites, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, surprised to the point of being shocked that black people, black men in particular, Hispanic men in particular, would vote for somebody, Donald Trump, who has said outrageous, offensive, racist things about those groups.

What are you taking from that?

What are you taking from both that reality and also the surprise of the elites?

GEORGE PACKER: Yes.

Well, they shouldn't be that surprised because this has been a trend over the last few election cycles.

So, you have to pretty much wipe your mind of the memory of those demographic numbers from the last couple of elections to think that this couldn't happen.

It's been happening for a while.

It really happened this year.

Because if you look at, say, where I live, New York, the borough where Harris' numbers went up over Biden's in 2020 was Manhattan, the most white borough, the group over $100,000 income, so in other words, well to do white people, whereas in Queens and the Bronx, where it's a nonwhite majority, Trump improved his numbers.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Asian also, by the way.

GEORGE PACKER: Asian, Hispanic, black.

So, I was standing in a giant crowd outside Madison Square Garden right before the election, trying to get in to hear the final Trump, yes, the big New York rally where all kinds of crazy things were being said.

I couldn't get in.

There were too many people.

But I had a maybe more interesting experience was I standing in a group of three guys who were Trinidadian immigrants who lived in Flatbush, which is a very black and Latino part of Brooklyn, immigrant part of Brooklyn.

They were wearing full MAGA regalia.

And I said, why are you here?

Why are you for him?

The price of eggs, we're not respected around the world, and that stuff he says, we just don't listen to it.

We don't take it that seriously.

And, by the way, there are a lot of people like us in Flatbush.

They just don't wear the MAGA hats, but they're there.

They were right.

And they have to be listened to and taken seriously and not told you have false consciousness, you're voting against your interests, all the things that Democrats have said about people like that.

How about hearing what they say and then thinking, how can we appeal to them without betraying our values?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Do you think the Democrats are going to reform in order to beat the next Republican?

GEORGE PACKER: I don't think so.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Why?

GEORGE PACKER: I think it'll take longer than that, because, first of all, I don't see the immediate aftermath of the election moving in that direction.

I don't see a kind of party-wide sense we have to do something different, which is what happened after '88, when, for the third straight time, a Republican wiped out a Democrat for president, and because these are entrenched ways of thinking and ways of organizing the party.

And they can't be uprooted quickly.

There are interest groups whose entire purpose, not just financial but idealistic, is to push the party in the direction that I think has cornered it in a way that makes it less and less popular with the broad American public.

And they're not going to go away either.

The donors, who are the financial backbone, may not feel the economic pressures that ordinary people do and may be more concerned with the cultural issues.

So -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: A million bucks buys a lot of eggs?

GEORGE PACKER: Yes, it does.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's my slogan.

GEORGE PACKER: I think that could be a good one for 2028, if anyone wants to grab it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

I'm going to do something terrible to you now.

We have like about a minute and a half, but I want to ask you about America's role in the world.

You're going to have, basically by the time I finished talking, a minute to answer whether the next Trump administration is going to bring an end to the 80-year period of the post-war liberal order that America has undertaken.

Obviously, you have a lot of experience covering foreign policy and America's adventures and misadventures and attempts, idealistic attempts to remake the world.

Give me a minute on how isolationist and how post-NATO, to put it in shorthand, we're going to see this administration.

GEORGE PACKER: Well, like the drift toward of the working class for the Republican Party, this has also been going on for a while.

If you look at how many wars have broken out, the Biden administration has pretty much been unable to work its will on in the last few years.

It's clear that we are not the unipolar power that we were after the end of the Cold War, but we still stood for something.

And that something actually was important.

Of course, we violated it.

Of course, we're hypocrites, like any great power, but we stood for a certain order, a certain set of values, a certain liberal view of the world.

And I think that could collapse very quickly under Trump because he doesn't believe in it.

In fact, he wants to destroy it and so do the people who he's putting into key positions.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, we'll have you back next year to see how that's going, but I'm really glad that you joined me tonight.

Unfortunately, we do need to leave it there.