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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. You know it's the rare magazine article that needs a table of contents. The new one in The Atlantic by George Packer just about does. I'm told it's around 25,000 words. It's divided into nine sections. I saw that if I were to print it, which I didn't, it would print at 115 pages. It includes an epilogue, and it takes on the ambitious task of describing the state and future of the United States through one of its major cities. The city is Phoenix. The title of the article is, The Most American City: Searching for America's Future in Phoenix, Arizona.

We're having George Packer in the context of our climate story of the week because Phoenix sits at the intersection of Americans running to live there because of its climate, but then experiencing some of the most extreme effects of climate change gaining ground on them once they get there. Phoenix has been in the national headlines already this season for a triple digit heat wave. Last year, the city set its latest heat record with 54 days of temperatures more than 110 degrees.

In addition to his writings in The Atlantic, George Packer is the author of many influential books including The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq from back in 2005, I think that's the first time he was on the show, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America from 2013, in the context of the financial crisis in the Great Recession and Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal published in 2021, putting the pandemic and January 6th in historical and social context. George, thanks for joining us with a big picture you're trying to paint with this big article and welcome back to WNYC.

George Packer: Hey, it's great to be back with you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to why you think Phoenix does represent the US as a whole, but one way you contrast Phoenix to other American cities is that in places like New York or Chicago, we may have our problems, but we don't wonder how long our cities will continue to exist. Is the angst that existential in Phoenix?

George Packer: There's a strange mix in Phoenix of incredible boosterism and confidence and pride. It's so fast growing and all these tech companies are moving out there and people are moving all the time. It's a magnet for Californians and people in the Midwest. Every now and then when I started going out there last year, about this time, I noticed that people would then say, "I sometimes wonder if we're always going to have this place and maybe another civilization is going to stumble on the ruins of our houses and our solar panels and wonder what this piece of metal was for." That's not something I hear New Yorker's say, and it suggested that there's a not doomsdayism, but a sense of the artificiality of it.

Here it is. There's 5 million people in the desert in this valley where there is a huge problem of water and heat and yet, there's also this tremendous growth. I think they recognize that the key word sustainability is just always a question. It may further this feeling that there was a civilization of Hohokam Indians in that very valley that had a really sophisticated canal system for 1,000 years and then suddenly, sometime in the middle of the 15th century, they disappeared. You can still see the ruins of some of those canals around Phoenix. That might haunt the place a little bit with a memory of there having once been another civilization that's no longer there.

Brian Lehrer: Yet, despite that specificity and that uniqueness, you then write, "Phoenix is a guide to our future because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country." How do you mean the word vanishing there and Phoenix as a representative of something that's going on all over the country?

George Packer: I don't mean physical disappearance, obviously. That would be more apocalyptic than my imagination is capable of. I do mean a fear that our social bonds are fraying so much that we don't know if our democracy is going to make it. This is not something I grew up thinking, it's something that's come on recently, and that if that happens, if our democracy somehow collapses or is replaced by something else or if there's simply a chronic level of chaos and even violence, then what does that mean for the rest of our society. You feel that in Phoenix because extremism is intense there. It seems as if the heat, the desert, the newness of the place, all of that contributes to this feeling of temporariness and the bonds just may not be strong enough to hold it all together politically.

Brian Lehrer: We'll come back to the democracy challenges and Phoenix as an ultimate swing state in the 2024 elections and the extremism that you see, but did I get it close to correct in the intro that Phoenix sits at the intersection of Americans running to live there because of its climate or maybe more accurate, its weather, a lot of retired people from the Midwest with enough money, for example, like retired people from the Northeast move to Florida, but then experiencing some of the most extreme effects of climate once they do?

George Packer: You got it exactly right. When you ask people, "Why do you live here," they say, "Look around. First of all, it is beautiful. The Sonoran Desert, the Granite Mountains that surround Phoenix are stunning, the sunsets, the sunrises and the weather, if you're there between, let's say, October and April, is pretty spectacular. Some people said to me, "It's worth having a few rough months when we get all those other beautiful months and anyway, we stay inside. We get in our car, we drive to our office, we drive to work, we drive home. It's like being in a really bad winter in the north or the east. You just don't go outside."

Of course, there's some people who can't live in air conditioning all the time. Last year, 645 people were killed by heat-related causes in Maricopa County, which is a staggering number and a lot of other people are made sick and miserable by the heat. There is a pride in not giving into it the way Minnesotans don't give in to the cold, but it's pretty intense. It's hard to imagine putting up with four months of it as it gets worse and worse. You mentioned, here we are in early June and it's already over 110 degrees in Phoenix.

Brian Lehrer: You cite who's the most vulnerable among those 645 heat-related deaths last summer. They came mostly among the elderly, the homeless, the isolated and the drug addiction. Certainly that collection of victims tells us something about who consumes and who feels the effects of the hubris of American consumption downstream, no?

George Packer: Absolutely. I spent quite a lot of time in this one area of downtown Phoenix where there's a large homeless campus with all sorts of services as well as shelters. It had become an encampment where people who couldn't get a bed or didn't want a bed, but wanted to be near it for services, set up tents. It was many, many blocks of tents that looked like a shanty in a very poor city in a very poor country. Gradually, the city cleared them out in a way that was actually more humane than you might have expected, but still, there are thousands of homeless people.

There's thousands long waitlist for housing. There's a housing crisis. Just as you were talking about the one in New York, there's a housing crisis in Phoenix. There's not nearly enough being built for all the people who are moving there, and then the rents are skyrocketing, so people are becoming homeless. If you're homeless in the summer in Phoenix, and I talked to a lot of people who were, it is just survival from hour to hour. How do you stay out of the most intense heat? How do you find a cooling center, a library, someplace to go, something to drink and how do you keep your body from going up to 105 degrees?

I went to an emergency room and talked to a doctor there who said, "Yes, people are coming in all the time with their body temperature up around 105, 106, 107," which is heatstroke and which can be fatal and have long-term damage. It is a constant crisis that the city has tried to grapple with in all sorts of ways, but it just keeps getting hotter out there and the housing crisis keeps getting worse.

Brian Lehrer: For people who've never experienced that heat, I've been to Phoenix for exactly one day when it was 114 one time.

George Packer: Well, then you know.

Brian Lehrer: I was visiting a friend of mine, and I was at his office, and I said, "Well, gee, I like summer and I've never experienced this before. I'm going to go take a walk to that ice cream parlor a few blocks away and come back." He said, "Don't do it. You're not going to be comfortable at all." He freaked me out and I didn't do it. I couldn't hardly get into my car at that time because the handles and the steering wheel were just too hot to the touch. That's just a tiny little example of what it's like, even for somebody like me who was just passing through and had as many comforts as I needed in that context.

You cite a projection that if Phoenix were to experience a several-day blackout during the summer, it could kill about 13,000 people if that air conditioning suddenly disappeared. What do you see climate politics as being like in Phoenix? Is it broadly considered a local crisis caused by a national and global consumption crisis, or like in Florida under Ron DeSantis, is there more denial or conflict over that?

George Packer: The way that I studied the climate crisis in Phoenix was largely through the water crisis, because that's part of. It's not just the heat, it's the drying up of the Colorado River, which is the source of a good deal of the water. Not all of it, but a good deal of the water for the valley that Phoenix is the heart of. It's also a crisis all over Arizona in the disappearance of groundwater due to drought and to overpumping, especially by big agribusinesses that come in from other states and even other countries and drop 2,500-foot wells and start pumping water for alfalfa and pecans and other water-heavy crops.

Suddenly folks in their double wide out in the middle of nowhere find that their well has gone dry. That is a really interesting both climate crisis issue and political issue, because the only answer to that, as far as I could tell, is regulation. The Phoenix area is heavily regulated in terms of water use, as are the other main urban parts of Arizona, but rural Arizona is unregulated, which is why agribusinesses go out and pump water that's free. It's causing tremendous hardship to some of these rural communities where mostly very conservative people are beginning to question their Republican legislators who refuse to pass bills that, to me, seem like common sense that would start regulating groundwater in rural areas.

There's a kind of water is not quite a MAGA versus anti-MAGA issue. It isn't quite a red-blue culture war issue, thank goodness, because if it becomes one, then of course there will be no solution at all. It's still a local issue. If you live in Phoenix, it's one thing. If you live in an exurb of Phoenix, it's another. If you live in Cochise County, way down by the Mexican border, it's another. What it is doing is breaking up some of the hard lines between partisan politicians and their constituents who simply want their well to have water in it.

Brian Lehrer: That's interesting, because I thought you were going to say the opposite, that it is polarizing people into culture war camps, Green New Deal versus Drill, Baby, Drill, things like that. Maybe this next question that I was wanting to ask you isn't relevant based on the answer that you did give, but I wonder if you see the results of the European elections this past weekend as a reflection of what's happening here. You could answer this in the context of America as a whole, not just Phoenix and Arizona. though you said even there, they're resistant in the Republican legislature to passing what might be more forward-looking water rules.

More success in Europe for what's being described as far-right parties, largely over immigration and climate, and the European green parties, you've probably seen this, took the biggest hits, and it's being broadly reported that even in Europe, which has led the way in climate concern and policy, there's a popular backlash taking place against policies that people are experiencing as too personally costly and therefore maybe more than what's needed to avoid catastrophic warming in the future.

George Packer: Interestingly, in Arizona, as far as I can tell, the two biggest issues this election are not climate issues. They are immigration and abortion. Immigration, because obviously, it's a border state, and there's been a tremendous influx of migrants crossing the Arizona border. They don't stay in Arizona, by the way. I went to the border, I talked to migrants, I talked to some of them in Phoenix at shelters, and they're on their way somewhere else. They're going to get a bus to Fresno or a plane to Dayton. It's not as though Arizona is experiencing what New York City has experienced in the last year or so, but the border itself is very much a kind of livewire and affects the politics of the whole state.

There's a very slight Republican majority in the legislature and they have passed a bill to create a statewide initiative that would go back to the Joe Arpaio days and allow for the deportation of every undocumented person in Arizona, which is a lot of people and a lot of the social fabric of the state. That issue is the Republican's wedge issue. The Democrats are looking at abortion because there was a pre-statehood law, 1864, that the Arizona Supreme Court just recently voted is still the law of the land that bans pretty much every abortion. That brought the issue right, front, and center to the campaign.

You would think that climate would be one of the two or three main issues, given the heat, given the water crisis. It's not. How do you explain that? It's as if water is so basic and heat is so basic, that it's not salient. It's too ubiquitous and familiar to be a hot-button culture war issue. I think it could become one, but it's not one yet. As I say, that's a good thing, because culture war issues have a way of never being resolved and only becoming more and more divisive.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe it's like our individual personalities. The things that are the most us, we can't even see about ourselves sometimes.

George Packer: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Because they are so us. We're going to continue in a minute with George Packer from The Atlantic with his epic new article, The Most American City: Searching for America's future in Phoenix, Arizona. When we come back, we're going to get more into the broad democracy culture war, right versus left, aspects of this and more of the national perspective rather than what's going on in and around Phoenix in particular.

He attended a MAGA-style rally and has some reporting from that. I'm going to play a Trump clip from 100-degree Las Vegas on Sunday, which I think George is probably going to want to comment on in the context of his article. Listeners, who has questions or thoughts for George Packer? 212-433-WNYC. Anyone listening in or with ties to the Phoenix area, how would you describe the existential challenge there from rapid growth plus climate change? 212-433-WNYC. Call or text.

How much would you describe it as a bellwether if you're out there for the political or even just the environmental future of the whole United States? 212-433-9692. If you're in or have ties to the Phoenix area or anyone else, you may call 212-433-WNYC. Call or text 212-433-9692. Part two. The national view with George Packer right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with George Packer from The Atlantic and his article, The Most American City: Searching for America's future in Phoenix, Arizona. I'm told it's the second-longest cover story that The Atlantic has ever had. Before we take some phone calls, let me get you to expand from the local Phoenix area, challenges that we've been discussing so far in your article, too. I guess even this starts in Phoenix. You write the growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence.

Why did you couple the climate crisis with our crisis of democracy in that framing sentence near the beginning of your piece?

George Packer: Because I think you can't solve one without solving the other. There is no way to deal with a problem as huge as climate unless we deal with a problem as huge as, first of all, will our democracy last, and second, can our democracy function? Can we make decisions and solve problems together as a country at all going forward? If we can't, if we're forever doomed to polarization, division, and dysfunction, then we're not going to solve those gigantic problems.

You feel it in Phoenix. We can get to the rest of the country in a second, but, because the Arizona Republican Party has made election denialism its heartbeat. You cannot get anywhere as a leader of the Arizona Republican Party unless you make a career out of claiming that the 2020 and the 2022 elections were rigged. It's also the headquarters of Turning Point USA, which is the Trump youth organization.

I went to their annual convention in December, and it was a pretty sobering experience, Brian, to sit in the Phoenix Convention Center with 14,000 people and hear just the utter hatred and negativity coming from the stage. Whenever I felt the audience's attention drift, one of the speakers, and it was the all-star cast of right-wing speakers, they would then punch it up a little bit more. Let's find someone else we can ridicule. Let's find some other issue, some other code word that's going to get people riled up. It was pure hatred and lies.

It's a powerful, rich organization that has a huge influence among young conservatives, especially in the Phoenix area where Charlie Kirk has headquartered it. They have been part of this effort to take the old Arizona Republican Party of Barry Goldwater and John McCain and turn it into Donald Trump's Republican Party and get rid of all the old dinosaurs. I write about one named Rusty Bowers, who was the speaker of the house, a conservative Republican who refused to declare the election rigged in 2020 and saw his career destroyed. That kind of exchange--

Brian Lehrer: People who remember the January 6th congressional hearings will remember Rusty Bowers as a hero of American democracy for refusing to cave to those in his party who were pressuring him to falsify the election results.

George Packer: He's an absolute hero. My politics and his differ quite a bit, but you can't help admiring his principles and the fact that he is willing to suffer for them, because his political career was destroyed because he stood up to Trump and Giuliani when they called him and said, "You need to find the evidence that this election was rigged and give it to Trump." He refused.

Brian Lehrer: Rusty Bowers is, I know chapter one of the nine chapters of your Atlantic article.

George Packer: In my little booklet.

Brian Lehrer: I want to play a clip, and you set this up perfectly talking about the Turning Point USA rally, of Trump that I know you'll find relevant from Sunday in Las Vegas, where it was also a hundred degrees. This clip is getting a lot of attention for how fully Trump is leaning into celebrating the January 6th rioters as part of his campaign, who he now calls the J6 Warriors. Listen.

Donald Trump: Those J6 Warriors, they were warriors, but they were really more than anything else, they're victims of what happened. All they were doing is protesting a rigged election. That's what they were doing.

Brian Lehrer: Trump on Sunday, and in the context of your article, George, how do you hear Trump, rather than trying to downplay or distance himself from January 6th violence and the debunked stolen election claims, seeming to embrace both things increasingly, even calling these rioters warriors as well as victims as part of the heart of his campaign. He thinks this is going to get him elected.

George Packer: I guess, in a way, it's completely familiar from Trump's playbook. You take your weakness and turn it into a strength. You double down. You attack where they're attacking you. What struck me at the Turning Point Convention, I had not quite realized just how much January 6th had become a part of the MAGA grievance and reversed into not something to downplay or to make some mumbling apology for, but to claim was another example of the two-tier justice system and the corrupt government, the corrupt Biden family going after honest Americans for their free speech.

That was a universal feeling I heard at that convention and among far right Republicans in the Phoenix area. I began to expect it. It had become simply another piece of untruth that had become the truth and there is nothing to be done with that. I had this feeling of you're surrounded by lies. Everyone around you believes them because it's convenient to believe them and no argument, no reasoning, no evidence is going to do anything about it.

That's an overwhelming feeling. It's a feeling of living in a culture, in a society where there is no way to talk to each other. There's no place to stand together and begin an argument, because there's a shroud of lies over everything. We're going to hear more and more of that as the campaign goes along. I don't know that it's going to persuade any swing voters, but it's certainly going to rile up his base.

Brian Lehrer: Steve on Staten Island, born and raised in Phoenix. Steve, you're on WNYC with George Packer from The Atlantic. Hello?

Steve: Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Hello.

Steve: I was just doing some dishes. Hi, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we can hear you.

Steve: I'm sorry. I was born in Phoenix. I moved to Brooklyn when I was 24, but very hot in the summers, as you know. When I was a kid it was very wide open. You could ride your bike just north of Scottsdale, and it was just complete desert. The amount of growth has just been incredible the last 40 years. What scares me is, I'll just give you one example of the delusion that I've experienced there lately. We were taking an Uber from the airport to my parents' house last year. The driver was an immigrant. He'd been in Phoenix two years. He was just so proud of his new city and I mentioned the water situation.

He had no problem with it because he knew that dowsing rods would be the answer.

Brian Lehrer: What's a dowsing rod?

Steve: Dowsing rods are these things that you use to find water. Totally bogus. Dowsing rods.

Brian Lehrer: Like a divining rod?

Steve: Like what?

Brian Lehrer: Like find water in the ground?

Steve: Yes. I think they're called dowsing rods. People actually believe this stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think there's a political overlay of that, Steve, where they're more likely to believe in things that aren't real in certain political quarters, and it's growing out there?

Steve: I hate to say yes, but yes, you're right. I have friends and family out there still. More than half of them, yes, they believe in dowsing rods and they all happen to be big Trump supporters. It could be a coincidence. I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Steve, thank you for your call. I appreciate it. One more, David in Chatham, who says he's a New Yorker. That's Chatham, New Jersey, I believe. Yet you told our screener you're a New Yorker who lived in Phoenix, right?

David: Yes, that's right. Can you hear me, Brian?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we hear you fine.

David: Okay, great. I spent a couple of years back in my 30s, I'm in my 60s now, and I spent my whole life either living in Manhattan or being a commuter to Manhattan. Before I ask Mr. Packer my question, I just wanted to describe for people who haven't been to Phoenix, my concern is about how the architecture of the city is hyperfocused on forcing almost, more than anywhere I've been, people to live a vehicular life.

I've also been fortunate enough to visit the South of Spain, Andalusia, which also is a desert. In fact, all the spaghetti westerns and classic American cinema was shot down there. That's how similar it is. Those medieval cities that were built for desert temperatures are architected for it. They're narrow streets, and they're designed so that you can drape transparent tapestries or blankets over the narrow walkways so people can walk and shade is managed as carefully as the water.

It is shocking, if you go to Phoenix they've built the city on, and you can see this quite clearly on Google, at the major arteries are one-mile grid, one-mile blocks, and every 10th of a mile they're secondary or tertiary streets that break off but they don't form a 10th of a mile grid because as soon as you make a turn on these side streets, it turns into a labyrinth. That's deliberate because they wanted their residential areas to be quiet with no through traffic, and that's had a horrible secondary effect that during commuter hours this one-mile grid becomes a one-mile parking lot.

Brian Lehrer: David I'm going to leave it there for time but thank you for painting that picture. George in our last minute and a half or so, do you recommend any solutions not so much for Phoenix but to the national fracturing that you write about. I'll note that you are a critic of the left as well as the right. You don't emphasize it as much in this article as in some of your earlier writings this year, but at one point you write Americans Today are mobilized by culture and identity, not material conditions, by belonging to a tribe whether at a pride march or a biker rally.

People in the progressive camp will object to that framing on ground such as it's a false equivalency to say tribes like biker rallies and pride marchers, because pride marchers are for the rights of a historically marginalized and hated group and they need to do that. How do you weave it back together since you're so concerned with that in multiple books and articles of yours?

George Packer: That's a huge question, and there is no single answer. I would say, begin by trying to talk to people across that divide. It's hard, it's unpleasant, you might immediately decide there's nothing to talk about, but I made a point in Phoenix of having conversations with Trump supporters, because I just wanted to understand people who I found to be decent people. How are you for this guy? How can you be for this guy?

Two hours later, I didn't have a real answer because maybe there is no answer, but at least the talking had some kind of effect of making it less likely that we're simply going to hate each other and stop talking to each other. Find forums for that, find ways to do that, and find issues to do that. That's why I kept coming back to water because there are some issues that really are unsolvable, and there's no middle ground but there are other issues that are common and deeply human. You can't get more basic than water.

When I talk to rural folks in Southern Arizona with whom I have nothing in common politically, and heard their problems about wells drying up and how they were beginning to think maybe my state rep who's a far-right Republican doesn't have my interest at heart. I realize that certain things are so basic like a dry well, that no disinformation can shake the truth from your mind. That's maybe a starting point at least for how the country can understand things that affect all of us and begin to deal with them.

Doesn't mean don't talk about those other things, but it may mean don't emphasize them so much, don't take the drug of partisanship every day online and on cable TV so that it makes you incapable of realizing there still are common interests. There still are common values, because you begin to think there aren't when you're on the internet and on cable TV every day. Instead actually have a human face-to-face conversation, and then you begin to understand that maybe it's not completely hopeless. Does that sound too pollyannaish Brian? I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: It sounds like a difficult task, one that we are engaged in trying to participate in on this show, and that faces a lot of headwinds, and some issues have to be divisive. Some issues you have to win or you have to lose, Samuel Alito said the other day, but people have to be able to talk to each other and figure out where those points of common ground are. I certainly agree with you on that. The article by George Packer in The Atlantic is called The Most American City: Searching for America's Future in Phoenix, Arizona. Thank you very much.

George Packer: Thanks for having me.

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