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I think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent. And now it's in the single digits, so it plummeted. And with the plummeting of unions came the weakening of an organized working-class voice in politics.

George Packer

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George Packer
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 13
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Clara
California
Single
Percentages
Came
Sector
Class
Employed
Politics
Organized
Plummeting
Working
Unions
Plummeted
Voice
Private
Digits
Think
Americans
Weakening
Thinking
Percent
Percentage

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We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.
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Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.
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Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
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Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.
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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.
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Politics should seize the imagination.
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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.
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We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.
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Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
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I am reading The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers and Redeployment by Phil Klay . Both Powers and Klay are Iraq War vets. Klay's stories are remarkable.
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I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.
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I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.
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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.
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This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.
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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.
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You don`t have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.
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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.
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American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.
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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.
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I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir Goodbye to All That, and a civilian memoir Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain .
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