George Packer: The Senate was an odd compromise between the founders a...

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

George Packer

different principles answers

At the heart of the matter is a battle between wish and fear. Fear generally proves stronger than a wish, but it leaves a taste of disappointment on the tongue.

George Packer

disappointment fear heart

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

George Packer

independent party war

This is why mustard gas is such a danger or any weapon of mass destruction is such a dangerous thing because it - it's victims become everyone in the end.

George Packer

mass-destruction weapons victim

The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy.

George Packer

invisibility lines age

Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.

George Packer

jargon self-confidence age

With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.

George Packer

invisible economy internet

There's a great book about that, "The Breaking Point" by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.

George Packer

point-break opinion book

Much of the international unease with the Sochi Games has focused on the threat of terrorism, Putin's domestic repressiveness, and the Russian campaign of anti-gay propaganda.

George Packer

campaigns gay games

I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're there or not, for years to come. It will not be Vietnam; it will not let us go home and lick our wounds.

George Packer

home years thinking

The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the 'Mission Accomplished' declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam's capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S.

George Packer

mistake war thinking

The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.

George Packer

together writing war

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.

George Packer

inequality democracy class

We have all the information in the universe at our fingertips, while our most basic problems go unsolved year after year...All around, we see dazzling technological change, but no progress.

George Packer

technological-change progress years

Like an odorless gas, [inequality] pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of the country's democracy. But it seems impossible to find the source and shut it off.

George Packer

united-states democracy country

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam.

George Packer

war book lying

Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can--immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms--and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers.

George Packer

government class country

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.

George Packer

sap ambitious class

Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party.

George Packer

party broken self

It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was only a fraction of what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another.

George Packer

marine feelings thinking

The Senate was an odd compromise between the founders and the early leaders of the republic who wanted a single house which was based on popular sovereignty representing the people and those founders who wanted two houses, the upper house, the Senate, being the more aristocratic.