George Packer

George Packer, as a writer and journalist, has been exploring for decades the question of why the liberal democratic order — which appeared to have triumphed after the Cold War — has been weakened from within. In The Unwinding: Thirty Years of American Decline (2013), he described the economic, social and institutional upheaval in America; in Our Man (2019), he explored the end of the American era of self-assured global power through a portrait of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke; and in Last Best Hope (2021), he seeks to understand why American democracy has lost its sense of community and self-governance. Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Alongside his journalistic work, he also writes plays and novels, most recently the brilliant novel The Emergency (2025).