George Packer: Phoenix, the Most American City

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Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It's Juneteenth. We have a lovely roundup of some primary source journals from that day on the Bulwark website.

Speaker 3 So I hope you go check that out. Today on the podcast, I'm welcoming back.
Fourth time, I thank George Packer, staff writer at the Atlantic.

Speaker 3 He wrote the cover story for the magazine's big summer issue, Phoenix is a Vision of America's Future.

Speaker 3 He's the author of 10 books, including Last Best Hope, which I hope we got a little time for at the end. How are you doing, man?

Speaker 4 I'm good. How are you?

Speaker 3 I'm doing great. I binged on all your old Charlie interviews yesterday, and I'm overwhelmed with content to discuss with you.

Speaker 3 And also, we have like an apparent mutual, is affection the right word, infatuation, interest in Phoenix. Like we're in the same places at the same time based on this cover story a few times.

Speaker 3 You know, we were both hanging out with the young, young fascists at America Fest and we popped around a couple of the same cities. So I concur with your thesis.
It's an interesting subject. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's a confluence of issues.

Speaker 3 I think as I read the piece, it's climate, which is related to water, which is related to the housing crisis and homelessness, which is all related to our political extremism.

Speaker 3 How did you decide to package that all up for the piece?

Speaker 4 Well, that was the challenge. I was told to go find a place in America that would be a kind of microcosm for the big issues in this election and facing the country.
And my editor, Scott Stossel,

Speaker 4 said Phoenix. I didn't know why he said that.
I was skeptical. I've actually never spent any time there before last year.

Speaker 4 And I started going and realized he was absolutely right. Phoenix has everything.

Speaker 3 It has

Speaker 4 political extremism distilled to a potent level. It has

Speaker 4 a climate crisis in the form of unbearable summer heat and disappearing water in the Colorado River and groundwater.

Speaker 4 immigration with the border nearby and a large immigrant community in the greater Phoenix area. It has education, which I'm quite interested in.

Speaker 4 It's got all these different kinds of schools and universities

Speaker 4 and technology. Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor and other companies are pouring jobs and plants into the region.
So it's got this tremendous growth, tremendous dynamism.

Speaker 4 It is not a place you go to in order to mourn American greatness in the past, but it does feel like it's all living on a knife's edge because

Speaker 4 it is so damn hot and water is such a problem. And every election does bring the threat of violence and kind of social collapse.
So it's a pretty rich target.

Speaker 4 And how to organize it was the real challenge for me as a writer. Basically, my piece, which is 25,000 words long, it's very long by today's standards.

Speaker 3 It only felt like 12,000, maybe 18.

Speaker 3 It was an easy read.

Speaker 4 That's high praise. Thank you.
I think

Speaker 4 it's a strong narrative that's divided into chapters, like a little book. And each chapter has a different theme and a different set of characters, but then they come back.

Speaker 4 So there's a kind of weaving together of the whole through a few figures that you meet early on and then you meet again later, or a few subjects like water that comes up early and then comes up late.

Speaker 3 Yeah. You spoke to our friend Rusty Bowers.
Listeners might remember him. He testified at the January 6th committee.

Speaker 3 He's a Republican Speaker of the House in Arizona who stood up to Trump and Rudy Giuliani's attempts to pressure him to help with their coup attempt.

Speaker 3 And it's interesting because Rusty encapsulates in a lot of ways the challenge.

Speaker 3 On the one hand, as you point out, Arizona has this political extremism, maybe at a greater ratio than the extremism we're seeing everywhere around the country.

Speaker 3 And yet, there was pun intended, kind of this bulwark against the extremism in the face of people like Rusty Bowers and then the voters and the kind of McCain flake voters that came out and voted against Gary Lake and Blake Masters last time.

Speaker 3 I thought it was interesting. You start with Bowers.
He now works on the water crisis, which kind of encapsulates all these challenges that you talk about.

Speaker 3 So I'm just curious about your kind of conversations with him, if he had any regrets, any reflections, anything that he thought that he missed that you found particularly poignant.

Speaker 4 So he

Speaker 4 is

Speaker 4 a very active member of the Mormon Church. He lives in a very conservative and heavily Mormon part of the valley, Mesa in the East Valley.

Speaker 4 And someone from the Arizona Republic said to me, you know, just a few years ago, he was one of the nuts. And that phrase really struck me because he certainly doesn't seem like a nut.

Speaker 4 And our conversations were incredibly rich and

Speaker 4 interesting and impressive.

Speaker 4 But what that person was saying was, it took one incident, which was November 2020 after the election, when Trump and Giuliani called up Rusty Bowers on his Bluetooth car phone when he was coming home from church with his wife and said, we want you to give the election in Arizona to Trump because it was fraudulent.

Speaker 4 Find new electors and have them vote for Trump in the House of Representatives. And

Speaker 4 he immediately realized what they were asking, even though they didn't put it quite that baldly, and had a moment of conscience and said to himself, Don't do it.

Speaker 4 And he said to the president, I'm not going to do anything illegal. I took an oath.

Speaker 4 It's a little oversimplified because he had been one of the Republicans in the House of Representatives in Arizona who had worked with Democrats on certain issues. He was not a

Speaker 4 hard-right,

Speaker 4 you know, implacable conservative, but he was a member in good standing of the Arizona Republican Party, the leader, its leader in the state legislature.

Speaker 3 He was more of like a flake than a McCain, that sounds a conservative, you know, person, but that was reasonable.

Speaker 4 That sounds right. And he was a man of conscience, like Jeff Flake, who was really prepared to throw away his career, which happened.
They destroyed him politically.

Speaker 4 He no longer has a political life because the Arizona Republican Party, the reason why I said in the the piece, it's the most radical Republican Party state among all the states, because the true test of being a good Republican in Arizona is you think elections are rigged and you will die on that hill as Kerry Lake did and others in 2022.

Speaker 4 So that is what it means to be a good Republican.

Speaker 4 That's how you rise in the party, how you become state party leader, how you become a muckety muck in Turning Point USA, which has had a lot of overlap with the state Republican Party.

Speaker 3 And it's based there.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Bowers resisted all of that and paid a very high price. And it came at him with a threat of violence.
That's the really disturbing thing.

Speaker 4 There was always this sense that they were going after him. And who knows where that might lead in a state where just about everybody has a gun.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's really sad. And he dealt with tragedy, you know, having lost a child around that time.
And that threat of violence, I felt that people ask me a lot of times when I go to these events.

Speaker 3 I went to that America America Fest event you write about. I went to several Cary Lake events.
And I don't actually usually feel at all scared at MAGA events for a variety of reasons.

Speaker 3 But there is something about that, you know, kind of ex-urban Phoenix.

Speaker 3 You know, I went to a couple of Cary Lake rallies in ex-urban Phoenix where it did feel like, you know, you don't know who has a gun there. There's a lot of radicalism.

Speaker 3 People are choosing to move there, right? Like they're kind of opting into radicalism in Arizona in a way that's a little different from what's happening in other states.

Speaker 3 The one other thing that kind of jumped out at me from the Bowers section is you wrote that he said that in the late 2010s, the party already had started to worry Bowers with its growing radicalism.

Speaker 3 State meetings became vicious, free-for-alls. Extremists were unseating conservatives.
And

Speaker 3 I do wonder when you're kind of having that conversation, if he felt like, you know, maybe he'd missed something. I know that I did.

Speaker 3 And a lot of, you know, those of us who have, you know, left that world, you know, felt like maybe we were blocking out this extremism and this danger that was happening before our eyes.

Speaker 3 I don't know if he felt that way.

Speaker 4 I don't think he thought he missed it. He was an eyewitness to it.

Speaker 4 He was at those state party meetings where people would get up and back and start screaming and demand an open ballot vote so that everyone knew who was a good MAGA Republican.

Speaker 4 But he was, like all of us, able to

Speaker 4 justify continuing in the party because it was backing policies he favored. It was doing things in the Arizona House that he approved of.

Speaker 4 And I'm sure he enjoyed the power of being Speaker of the House. And he campaigned for Trump in 2020.
He had not stopped being a Trump backer at that point.

Speaker 4 He had to, or else, again, that would have been the end of him.

Speaker 4 It was that moment when he was being asked to do something profoundly wrong, profoundly unconstitutional, and he said to me he believes the Constitution is divinely inspired.

Speaker 4 This, I do think, goes down to faith with Rusty Bowers. It goes down to the core of his religious beliefs, and he couldn't reconcile it.
And I once asked him: so, are Mormons sort of

Speaker 4 better than other conservative Christians? Because there's you and there's Flake and there's Mitt Romney? And he said, absolutely not. I know many members of my congregation who are all in for MAGA.

Speaker 4 So he wouldn't allow me to give Mormons a kind of benefit of clergy

Speaker 4 when it comes to right-wing politics.

Speaker 3 Maybe that's a follow-up piece for you, though. There's something in the water with the LDS.
When we were doing the Never Trump stuff in 2016, the Mormons were really the last ones to drop.

Speaker 3 Like as we were

Speaker 3 trying to stop Trumping the nomination late in the process, it was multi-week churchgoers, Christians, and all Mormons that kind of were the most resistant.

Speaker 3 They all ended up, not every single Mormon, but every group ended up succumbing to Trump. But the Mormons, there were some antibodies in there.
I can't put my finger on quite what that is.

Speaker 3 I'm interested in the Rusty Bowers. So now he's moved on.
He's working in water.

Speaker 3 You talk a lot in the piece about these fights and how it relates to climate and how it relates potentially to bridging partisan gaps. So you talk a little bit about the water crisis there in Arizona.

Speaker 3 And it's obviously representative throughout the country. I'm in New Orleans.
We have the opposite water issue.

Speaker 3 You have at the Atlantic today, the number one piece is Miami is entering a state of unreality related to their water problems. So, the inverse problems, but still, maybe some of the solutions are.

Speaker 4 But the same problem because it's all related to climate change, even if a lot of people I interviewed didn't want to use those words.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Arizona is undergoing a once-a-millennium drought for the past 20, 30 years. The Colorado River has dropped to perilously low levels.

Speaker 4 That feeds about half of the Phoenix, the valley, through the Central Arizona project, a 300-mile canal that Barry Goldwater, by the way, was instrumental in having passed through Congress.

Speaker 4 So those were the days when you could be Barry Goldwater and be far right and still see the need for government involvement in resources and environment.

Speaker 4 So Phoenix itself is not facing a water crisis right now. The metro area, the municipal water systems have a lot of water because

Speaker 4 Arizonans have actually been very far-sighted going back 100 years to the Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River and the Salt River Project.

Speaker 4 They have hundreds of trillions of gallons of water in reserve, even with this drought.

Speaker 4 But when you get out of the central cities of the valley into the exurbs that you mentioned, where MAGA is stronger, water is disappearing. And those people might even be depending on groundwater.

Speaker 4 They might need to drill a well in order to have water when they buy their dream house. And they might find out that they can't reach it.

Speaker 4 It's dropped so low that a thousand-foot well isn't deep enough to find water.

Speaker 4 And then when you get even further out into the rural areas, and I went to this county, Cochise County, which is down by the Mexican border,

Speaker 4 it's dramatic how much groundwater has dropped four feet a year in some areas. And that means people's wells are going dry all over the basins where they live.

Speaker 4 And it's partly because there's no regulation of that water, unlike the Phoenix water, and therefore unregulated out-of-state agribusinesses coming in and drilling 2,500-foot wells and sucking up all the groundwater.

Speaker 4 So to put it briefly, this is not an issue that only affects people in blue areas or people in red areas. It's very localized.

Speaker 4 And what that means is in rural Arizona, conservative Republicans are clamoring for their state representatives to regulate groundwater before it disappears. This

Speaker 4 is a turn that is recent and is, to me, hopeful because it means people are still sane. when it comes to something as basic as their water.

Speaker 4 They can't be convinced that it's a conspiracy or that it's not happening when their well goes dry.

Speaker 4 And if we could somehow take that insight and extend it to other issues, we might begin to actually solve problems in this country rather than simply try to destroy each other.

Speaker 3 Okay, well, I'm here to burst bubbles. I hope.

Speaker 3 And so have you, do you know the book, Strangers in Their Own Land? Should I read that as a Berkeley professor, Arlie Hoaks? Oh, Arlie Hocheschild. I haven't read it, but

Speaker 4 I know the thesis. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you know the thesis. Yeah.
Like I was reading this article and I was like, oh man, I went and tried to grab the book to get flash tracks because there's a lot of parallels.

Speaker 3 That takes place in Louisiana. It's less about flooding and climate-related water than about pollution, right?

Speaker 3 And the pollution for the energy companies and how that was polluting the water and a lot of these, you know, Cajun communities that are on the bayou.

Speaker 3 And some of these people had been really harmed by the environmental pollution resulting from, you know, the deregulation these energy companies, but they were cross-pressured by the MAGA, the rise of MAGA.

Speaker 3 She was writing about this right around the time Trump's campaign was starting. And it ends up in kind of an unhopeful place, right?

Speaker 3 Like there are some people thatse eyes are open, that want to do deals, that are willing to compromise because the water or the pollution or whatever this acute crisis is directly affects them.

Speaker 3 But it's hard to expand that out. I don't know.

Speaker 4 It is. I mean, I wrote in my piece that I just hope Charlie Kirk never hears about groundwater because

Speaker 4 if that becomes one of the things that America Fest puts a lot of its effort into, like immigration and trans kids, then it's over. It'll be polarized and partisanized and it'll be over.

Speaker 4 But right now, it's sort of an obscure issue.

Speaker 4 It's, as I said, not as partisan as most people don't take a position based on what they see their side doing because the sides haven't really taken positions. And

Speaker 4 as long as that's true, it does seem like people are capable of sanity and of taking facts as they are rather than inventing alternative facts for them.

Speaker 4 So I'm hoping that it remains a complicated, boring, obscure issue so that Arizonans can try to solve it without interference from demagogues.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you had another line that jumped out at me, though, is when Carrie Lake ran for governor, everyone knew her position on transgenderism and no one knew her position on water.

Speaker 3 And I take your point. Like, on the one hand, that's good, right? That there's a parallel in Congress.
People call it the secret Congress.

Speaker 3 People can, you know, Congress can do deals and get things done as long as there's not attention to it in the partisan news. On the other hand, it's like,

Speaker 3 you know, that's a pretty fragile basis for bringing the country back together, that we can do it as long as it's a secret.

Speaker 4 It's more than fragile. It may be fantastical.

Speaker 4 And I look to my Never Trumper friends for wisdom because I, again, and again

Speaker 4 encounter sort of clearer thinking about Trump in your camp than in the camp of liberals that I spend most of my time in. There's more passion about it.

Speaker 4 There's more justifiable fear and more pessimism, I guess, because I don't know, maybe you know the world better that seems seems to be coming for us.

Speaker 3 Yeah, unfortunately, I know these people a little too well. My hope is kind of a bleak hope, I think, sometimes for people listening.

Speaker 3 They don't like it when I say this, but like, I think conceivably, if we can dispense with Trump, there is a

Speaker 3 nationalist, populist, kind of European-style Republican Party that could emerge that would do compromises with Democrats, kind of in the mold of what you see JD and Tammy Baldwin working on on rail and things like this.

Speaker 3 That is not going to look at all like the people I liked. It's not going to be McCain again.
But I think there's potentially some hope for that, but we have to defeat this acute threat.

Speaker 3 And I'm jumping ahead.

Speaker 3 This was related to the book topic of your last book, but now that we're on the subject, when you were last on with Charlie, one of your items of hope was that we had elected Trump and then defeated him.

Speaker 3 And like that, there aren't a lot of examples in the world of somebody getting authoritarian in power and then removing them. And like now, here we are in the cusp of

Speaker 3 potentially reverting. And I wonder how you think about all of that and like whether your view of our Last Best Hope, so to speak, has evolved at all over the last two years.

Speaker 4 It's devolved into confusion and despair. Because the other theme of that book, Last Best Hope, was

Speaker 4 that there was a politics oriented toward, say, the bottom 60 or 70% of the American people that could

Speaker 4 both put a bit of a break on Trumpism and be a boon to whatever party can make it happen.

Speaker 4 Because those voters who might be divided ethnically are becoming more and more of a block

Speaker 4 by education, by class, and have a justifiable grievance against elites who have done well over the last 50 years while the working class has declined.

Speaker 4 And I thought Biden was doing the right things for that idea. He was passing bills that benefited those people, infrastructure, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Microchips Act.

Speaker 4 And no region has benefited more from those three bills than the Phoenix area.

Speaker 4 Money is pouring into Phoenix for battery plants, for microchip plants, for solar panels over canals, all kinds of things. And does anyone know it?

Speaker 4 When politicians go door to door to get signatures to get on the ballot and they say they're Democrats, does anyone know what the Democratic Party has done for them? No.

Speaker 4 They scarcely know who's president because he's an invisible figure. He has faded into invisibility.
So, whatever chance there was of

Speaker 4 a sane, multiracial, and somewhat bipartisan politics has dissolved in just a few short years since I wrote that book. And it's partly because MAGAism is unkillable.

Speaker 4 And it's partly because

Speaker 4 the American people have short memories and are easily distracted and don't pay much attention. to the news or to politics.

Speaker 4 And it's partly because Joe Biden ran for re-election and turns out maybe not to be capable of convincing people that he can be president again.

Speaker 3 Now we're in dreariness. Okay, now we're in a sweet spot.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I was feeling better in 2021. Not great because we had just gone through 2020.
Yeah, right.

Speaker 4 But certainly thinking that there was a path. And the path was to mute the culture wars.
Democrats should play down the culture wars. They should not exacerbate them and inflame them.

Speaker 4 And meanwhile, they should show that they care about that bottom 60 or 70 percent, no matter what their race or background.

Speaker 4 And I don't know that the party's capable of doing that, but it hasn't succeeded in doing that.

Speaker 3 I agree with that.

Speaker 3 And I think that in a lot of ways, the Joe Biden running thing was a damned if you do, damned if you don't, because had he not run that culture war side of things, the thing that you wrote in the Last Best Hope, the younger justice-oriented Americans might have dominated a Democratic primary.

Speaker 3 And so that would have been a challenge. But going back to, okay, what to do with where we're at in Arizona? Yeah, Joe Biden's not a great messenger on this stuff, but the policies are done.

Speaker 3 There's some shovels in the ground. There's a little more red tape than I would like, but there's some shovels in the ground on these projects.

Speaker 3 You've got Mark Kelly that's in Arizona, who is a compelling figure, an astronaut who can, you know, who can message. You write about Ruben Gallego, who's the Senate candidate.

Speaker 3 I don't think I talk enough about on here because he's pretty good at going along with the message you talk about.

Speaker 3 You mentioned in the article that he tweeted his rejection of the term Latinx and the woke language around that.

Speaker 3 When you talked to him, he talked about, he sounds kind of populist. He says, you know, MAGA folks hate pharmaceutical companies as much as I do.

Speaker 3 They worry about foreign companies sucking up the water. He supported all of these infrastructure bills.

Speaker 3 When you talk to Rubin or Mark Kelly or any of the local Democrats, like, why isn't that message landing when they deliver it?

Speaker 4 He said to me, the problem is not having that message. The problem is changing people's lives as a result of that message.

Speaker 4 And there's so much cynicism and alienation from politics and from political leaders that they may not give you a chance to get into power to do those things that you say you're going to do because they've been told that so many times and they haven't seen any difference.

Speaker 4 And year after year, why should I believe you this time?

Speaker 4 Maybe I'll go for the guy who said a few things that I don't like, but talks straight or is entertaining or is going to blow it all up because I want to blow it all up.

Speaker 4 And that seems to be Trump's staying power, that he wants to blow it all up because there's still the blow it all up electorate. It's pretty large.

Speaker 4 And Gallego was telling me, yeah, I can de-emphasize cultural issues, although he hasn't really. Abortion is...

Speaker 4 kind of landed in the laps of Democrats in Arizona as the main issue. Immigration is unavoidable, and it's a powerful issue for Kerry Lake, his opponent.
But when he talks about

Speaker 4 trying to get by in $15 an hour and pay for your mortgage and the need for good jobs, I don't think it sticks because people have heard it and it just

Speaker 4 doesn't resonate. And it also is a bit of a tough message for a Democrat because if people are struggling so much, whose fault is it? Who's in office?

Speaker 3 I don't want to be dismissive of, you write a lot about the people in Phoenix who are really struggling, struggling, people that are homeless, people that, you know, don't have money for air conditioning.

Speaker 3 And I want to get to that in a second, related to the heat. But first, like the big middle in Phoenix is doing well.
Like Phoenix is growing. Phoenix is booming.

Speaker 3 I was just there a couple of months ago.

Speaker 3 It's like crazy how like the restaurants are full and airports full and there are cranes everywhere and they apparently just are running out of water, but you wouldn't be able to tell as long as you're in Phoenix.

Speaker 3 I guess because you said Phoenix isn't running out of water. So isn't there a disconnect there?

Speaker 4 Or you could say those people that you're rightly noting are

Speaker 4 buying houses and flying to Paris or to New York from Sky Harbor are as likely to be Democrats as Republicans.

Speaker 4 I mean, you remember a few years ago, Governor Ducey said, Arizona is welcoming you, Californians. Leave your overpriced and unlivable state and come here where life is good.

Speaker 4 And they took him at his word and began voting Democratic because these were engineers from the coasts and suddenly the republicans didn't want westerners you know californians oregonians washingtonians coming to arizona because they were turning the state purple so i i do think it's become an economic success for a lot of people but as you know tim

Speaker 4 it's the prosperous parts of the country that are likelier to vote democratic now everything has flipped from when i was a kid so it it doesn't tell you which way it's going to go I think the biggest question that Ruben Gallego raised and that I have in my mind is: who's going to vote at all?

Speaker 4 Which team is going to get people to vote?

Speaker 4 Because there are, I think, a lot of people so turned off by the two very familiar and very old faces that they might not vote or might skip the presidential. And

Speaker 4 that probably would be bad for the Democrats because when turnout is low, Republicans tend to do better.

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Speaker 3 I want to go back to the climate part of this though, because, you know, we do Arizona punditry a lot, lamenting the state of why people are voting for Donald Trump a lot.

Speaker 3 The heat and the homelessness side of this thing is the other side of the impact of climate and summers getting hotter and hotter.

Speaker 3 Unrelated to my political time in Arizona, back when we were trying to adopt, one of the birth mothers that we were talking to was based in Phoenix and like didn't have air conditioning in her apartment.

Speaker 3 She was a fast food worker and we were like, this is crazy. We'll help with that.

Speaker 3 But we were just visiting her for one day. And I was like, this is insane, like how people live like this.
And you did some reporting on that.

Speaker 3 And so just talk about like the potential threat from that. Cause I don't think people have really really come to terms with how bad the kind of heat stroke side of the impact might actually get.

Speaker 4 Arizona heat, Phoenix heat is deadly.

Speaker 4 It killed about 650 people last year in the greater Phoenix area. That's a lot of people.
And many, many more went to emergency rooms and have...

Speaker 4 had organ failure and long-term neurological problems because of heat stroke, which is when your body temperature is like 105, 6, 7.

Speaker 4 I talked to an emergency room doctor who said, you know, when they come in at that, they're practically dead. We try to revive them by putting them in a body bag full of ice and water,

Speaker 4 which is

Speaker 4 a grim but effective method for bringing body temperature down to 100 degrees. I did spend a lot of time in an area that was called the Zone, which is a kind of homeless region.

Speaker 4 just south of downtown Phoenix where there's a large homeless compound that serves adults and if you can't get a bed inside and there are about 900 beds people live outside and so there's block after block of tents unlike anything I've seen in American City I've seen homeless encampments but nothing on this scale and they would use the compound for services but then they would sleep outside And I asked one of them, how do you live in the summer?

Speaker 4 How do you survive? And she kind of went through all the little tactics that you learn about, you know, getting your head and your shirt wet and what color the tent should be over you.

Speaker 4 It actually should be black, she said, not white.

Speaker 4 And then you find cooled buildings, of which there are a number around the valley, but a lot of homeless people don't know about them, or they close at the wrong hours. People living on the street are

Speaker 4 in constant danger of dying of heat. And one woman showed me a burn on her calf that was a really ugly second-degree burn.

Speaker 4 It had faded, but it came from having fallen down during high heat after years on the street. All you have to do is touch the pavement and you'll get a second-degree burn.

Speaker 4 And if you're on fentanyl and you're collapsing, if you're sleeping on the sidewalk, as I saw some people doing, I don't think you have very long to live in Phoenix.

Speaker 4 I interviewed the mayor, Kate Gallego, the ex-wife of Ruben Gallego, and she described all the things that the city is doing. And she's a very serious public servant.

Speaker 4 She's trained in environmental science, and they're putting up cooling centers and canopies, planting trees, because there just aren't that many trees in Phoenix.

Speaker 4 You know how when you're in a hot city and you just don't see trees, a kind of despair settles over you? New Orleans has trees.

Speaker 3 Yeah, our neighborhood is two blocks from the tree neighborhood. You know, the fancy,

Speaker 3 we're gentrifying a little bit. So, you know, we can walk two blocks and get to the tree neighborhood.
I'm a little jealous sometimes. I'll look down the street.

Speaker 4 A tree is a sign of prosperity and success in a hot city. And in Phoenix, it's just block after block where you don't see them.
And they're recycling wastewater in order to conserve water.

Speaker 4 They're doing all sorts of good things, but there's not much the mayor of even a large city can do about climate change, especially when everyone is driving all the time and the freeways are jammed with air-conditioned cars, which in turn are making the climate problem worse because I learned that air conditioning accounts for 4% of emissions globally.

Speaker 4 It's a very large number. So you're in your car, you're cooling off, going to your cooled house or your cooled workplace.
You're in these continuous artificial sanctuary.

Speaker 4 If you're lucky, if you're not homeless, if you're not poor, if you're not elderly and isolated. But meanwhile, you're making it worse.
So, how is it going to be in 2050?

Speaker 4 That's what the emergency room doctor asked me. What's Phoenix going to be like in 25 years? Will we be able to live here?

Speaker 4 And that gives rise to this image that I began the piece with: that unlike most cities, like New York and Chicago, where no one says, will this city be here in 50 years? New York is permanent.

Speaker 4 It doesn't feel like it's got a timetable. In Phoenix, people do have the

Speaker 4 recurring image of the disappearance of their civilization, like the Hohokam Indians who were there up to the mid-15th century. There's a sort of apocalyptic forecast that I had in my own head.

Speaker 4 So when people started saying it to me, it made sense.

Speaker 3 It's funny. The other item of the piece, this very American kind of binary, is there's that.
There's this feeling that, oh, maybe the city will not survive.

Speaker 3 We also have that kind of conversation occasionally occasionally here in the Big Easy.

Speaker 3 But the contrast, the very American frontierism side that you write about Buckeye, Arizona, right, which is like an hour outside of Phoenix, where some guy's like, I'm going to build another Phoenix an hour away where there's even less water and I don't give an F about it, right?

Speaker 3 And it's like that contrast is so jarring, but it also feels very American.

Speaker 4 It feels like the sort of brave and demented visions of the frontiersmen. You don't know whether to admire their courage and imagination or to be horrified by their folly.

Speaker 4 And in Buckeye, as you said, it was a little town until about 2000 or 2005. And then it started saying it was going to become the next Phoenix.
And it seemed to think it had the right things.

Speaker 4 It was closer to LA, so it could become a shipping center where you could get to LA and back in one day.

Speaker 4 It had all sorts of beautiful views of the mountains, which is what people want when they move to the valley. So they annexed land, and now Buckeye has annexed more square miles than Phoenix itself.

Speaker 4 But the population is, you know, it's still, I don't know, I think something under 100,000. They want to get to a million.

Speaker 4 There's a part of Buckeye where there's this immense graded desert with nothing built on it that is planned to be a master plan community of 100,000 homes, which is like 300 or 400,000 people in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 4 And right now without a water source because of policies that have been changing due to the disappearance of groundwater. So that's where I began to say, this makes no sense.

Speaker 4 I'm quite taken with the level of innovation and ingenuity that has allowed Phoenix to be a water-rich city.

Speaker 4 I am kind of horrified by the fact that everyone seems to feel that growth is the only model for prosperity and a good life. And growth on a scale that makes no sense in the middle of the desert.

Speaker 4 And that's where the apocalyptic fantasies start to set in.

Speaker 3 Could we maybe just build those 100,000 houses in Phoenix so we don't have unhoused people in the 105-degree heat?

Speaker 4 Phoenix is building up, as they say. You saw the cranes.

Speaker 4 Downtown Phoenix is a forest of cranes, and they are building high-rises, and young people are moving into downtown Phoenix and it is becoming more like a modern West Coast or East Coast city.

Speaker 4 But it's taking time and it's not the dream. The dream is 2,000 square feet on a quarter acre lot with a little bit of desert landscaping in a gated community.

Speaker 4 That's not my dream, but it is a lot of people's dream. And so a high-rise in downtown Phoenix doesn't really cut it.
There isn't much public transportation.

Speaker 4 So you really are going to need a car to get around. And there is so much NIMBYism, Tim.

Speaker 4 Every effort, it seems, at multifamily affordable housing in Phoenix, in Tempe, in Mesa, in Scottsdale, you name it, there's an uprising and it doesn't happen.

Speaker 4 There was a good article about this in the Arizona Republic. It's just not in the air.
It's not what people want when they move there.

Speaker 4 What they want is their own little piece of paradise, a little bit apart, but not so far apart that they have to drill a well because then they might not have any water.

Speaker 3 Maybe we have to put some limits on our aspirations. Yeah.
I don't know.

Speaker 3 I don't want to be the one to say that, but that's, you know, that's the unfortunate conclusion you're coming to.

Speaker 4 Well, there's all this growth

Speaker 4 philosophy of Democrats need to get back to believing in growth and in building things. And I'm with that, but maybe not in this way.
Maybe not in the

Speaker 4 300,000 people in the middle of the desert, dozens of miles from downtown Buckeye.

Speaker 3 In the Tesla Roosevelt damn way, and this would be one thing about the Democrats sometimes, you know, that I worry about.

Speaker 3 It's like we should be able to do big projects, big things that, and where it seems like the Biden administration was moving that way with CHIPS, with the

Speaker 3 IRA, with what you discussed earlier. But, you know, there's a lot of,

Speaker 3 there's a lot of hang-ups and there are elements of the left that make that challenging at times.

Speaker 4 Yeah, actually, this is something Rusty Bowers and I talked about as we drove through the Sierra Ancha Mountains east of Phoenix, where he, his ranch, among his trials of Job,

Speaker 4 he lost his career, he lost his daughter, and he lost his ranch to a wildfire all in the space of about six months. Wow, he was complaining about the environmentalists who

Speaker 4 think that in order to save this bird species, there can be no enlargement of the dam, of the Theodore Roosevelt dam or whatever. I might be getting it slightly wrong.

Speaker 4 And then it turns out that bird species doesn't require that habitat at all. So there is probably plenty of red tape that could be thinned out.

Speaker 4 And I don't know if you remember the Obama stimulus, but was sort of the trial run for what Biden has done.

Speaker 4 It died for red tape and lack of shovels in the ground that people in rural Virginia could see and say, ah, Obama's actually trying to get this economy going again.

Speaker 4 They didn't see it for two, three years, and then there was a Tea Party tsunami.

Speaker 4 So something like that might be happening to Biden, although the money is there and the cranes are silhouetted against the sky of northern Phoenix around the Taiwan semiconductor. fab.

Speaker 4 So it may be that people just are chronically cynical and just, I'll believe it when I see it and maybe not even when I see it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Or more motivated by the culture. And that's the part of it, right? Like just going back to the beginning of this conversation, it's like it's one thing if it's, okay, great.

Speaker 3 We can come together and try to solve this water problem with some regulation or with new ducks or whatever, whatever, you know, some new funding, whatever it is.

Speaker 3 But then when I go to vote, like my motivating issue, if I'm on the left is abortion. If I'm on the right, it's whatever, transgender

Speaker 3 immigration.

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Speaker 3 You've written a bunch about education. And going back, I guess, even to 2019, you were writing about some concerns about

Speaker 3 what's the word we're using. We're not using wokeism.
What's the word we're using in schools?

Speaker 4 I call it the

Speaker 4 new progressivism. The new progressivism.
That's my somewhat neutral term. I don't like the word woke.
I try to avoid it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the new progressivism in schools. Anybody who has kids in schools right now can see

Speaker 3 some of the changes are good. I like that, you know, the kids are reading black and brown authors now.

Speaker 3 Some of the changes, I think I was listening to an interview you did where it's like, you know, can we learn civics, you know, basic civics before, you know, we learn about every single crime in the history that America has committed in history?

Speaker 3 Like, I do feel like there's a balance there. And we see maybe the manifestation of that.
now as these kids have grown up and on the college campuses and the college protests.

Speaker 3 And I'm just wondering, similarly to the discussion about Trumpism, and there was a hope in 2021 that we might have been, that balance might have been being restored.

Speaker 3 And I felt like maybe that was also true in this education and the way that we're teaching our kids that balance might be coming back, that maybe having some elements of identity politics was good, but we're shedding some of the more pernicious elements.

Speaker 3 But maybe that was false hope. I don't know.
How do you assess that kind of discussion?

Speaker 4 My feeling, Tim, is that if our,

Speaker 4 and I'm going to sound very populist here, but if our political and media elites would just leave the schools alone and leave the parents and the kids alone and allow parents, yeah, there's bad impulses at the local level too.

Speaker 4 People want to pull books off library shelves that have no business being banned.

Speaker 4 But I do think so much of this is driven by grifters, by ambitious people making money off it, getting elected off it, that there is a,

Speaker 4 I still think there's a basic sanity when it comes to my kids' education, your kids' education. Parents know when their kids are being miseducated in one way or another, and they don't like it.

Speaker 4 And I saw this in Phoenix with this one family of immigrants in a poor area of western Phoenix. They're a mixed status family, as they're called.
The parents are undocumented.

Speaker 4 The four daughters are citizens.

Speaker 4 The kids were going to a crappy public school because the state of Arizona has crushed school funding and sent most of the, a lot of the dollars to private schools, the usual voucher argument.

Speaker 4 They heard about a charter school that had a great books philosophy. They were reading the classics.

Speaker 4 I sat in on a 12th grade class where these kids, almost entirely of Latin American origin, were discussing the Aeneid

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 this school has worked for their daughters. They have become great students.

Speaker 4 They're involved in sports and they are, as the mother said, learning to think for themselves and reading books that she'd heard of but she herself had never read. And she loved that.

Speaker 4 Why should that be an issue for the culture wars? Why should something like classical education or a charter school based on classical education be something that rouses

Speaker 4 hot feelings on both sides. It should just be seen as maybe a good alternative for girls in a school district that's been disinvested.
So,

Speaker 4 yeah, I see it all the time. My article in 2019 was about my son's education in Brooklyn, and I think I was a canary in the coal mine.

Speaker 4 Our family was seeing things happening that are now happening all over the country that just seemed like miseducation, unnecessary.

Speaker 4 It was a good school that had kind of turned itself into an ideologically orthodox school. And that made the education just less attractive.
Why are we doing that to our children?

Speaker 4 And I think it's partly because it's being driven by our national politics and by the arguments we have on cable news and on social media.

Speaker 4 And that article, by the way, which I wrote, which was just a very personal account of our family's experience, got me more hatred online than any other thing I've ever written.

Speaker 4 Because somehow this is what charges up the idea logs more than anything.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So I just wonder about the,

Speaker 3 like, whether like we're capable in the social media age of resolving this in a community manner, because I do agree with you on this, right?

Speaker 3 It feels like it should be a classic thesis, antithesis synthesis situation, right? Where it's like, we want more diverse education. We want our kids to expose to more things.
Great.

Speaker 3 Maybe that goes overboard where it's like, we're dividing the classes by race.

Speaker 3 There's some of this silly stuff that you get. But then, so then you have the guys who are like, oh, we're the parents' rights movement.
They come in the right.

Speaker 3 And we're like, no, you can't even mention gays until they're in 12th grade. You're like, no, wait, that response is crazy.

Speaker 3 Like, let's just go back to letting the actual parents who are in the school, gay, straight, black, white, like give feedback and determine what makes sense.

Speaker 3 Maybe we're not culturally capable of that right now because of the social media response that the loudest voices are going to dominate.

Speaker 3 And then parents, normal parents, don't like want to get involved in it, so they just check out.

Speaker 4 I'm afraid you're onto something. I mean, as soon as I said if we would just leave parents, children, and teachers alone, they would figure it out.

Speaker 4 But then you remember what does a school board meeting look like today?

Speaker 3 The biggest freaks in the community are the people that show up to it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, people with all the time in the world to show up and spend hours screaming at each other and saying insane things. And it's on both the left and the right on this issue.

Speaker 4 And they're all ginned up and fueled by social media. And you mentioned civics.

Speaker 4 We've lost the ability to talk across differences, to even argue vehemently across differences while remaining at the same table and remaining connected to the same facts and the same overarching goals.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 civics to me is about essentially giving children the skills to act as citizens in a democracy. These are not things we're born with.
In fact, they're very fragile. They're very hard to learn.

Speaker 4 They're almost counterintuitive. Why should I listen to someone I disagree with? Why should that person have power and me not?

Speaker 4 Why should the majority rule?

Speaker 4 And the failure of all of us to teach children to do that shows up now on college campuses where in this past spring, it seemed as if the major thing missing was that they didn't know how to talk to each other.

Speaker 4 And I put that on their parents, on their teachers, on all of us. And as you say, that is fundamental and comes before anything else, before

Speaker 4 even learning to read, I would say, and certainly learning about the dark history of the United States. So there is a movement for that, and it seems very goody-goody and, you know, sort of

Speaker 4 naive.

Speaker 3 I like goody-goody. End with some uplift.
I should have ended on the story about the great books program and the immigrant family. That was positive.
Give me some uplift to close out with.

Speaker 3 It could be on anything. If you don't see any uplift in the campus culture, you've been writing on lots of stuff.

Speaker 3 Talk to me about Seneca, whatever.

Speaker 4 I wish, and I hope that we are remembering that there's an entire history of ideas

Speaker 4 that you could say almost culminated in the founding of this country,

Speaker 4 along with a lot of bad ideas and bad practices. And

Speaker 4 I'm seeing little signs that

Speaker 4 this thing called classical education, and then there are all sorts of other versions of what I'm talking about, are coming back or are coming because there's an obvious lack.

Speaker 4 There's something missing. What's missing is maybe not the laws and the structures of our government, but the habits of the heart, as Tocqueville called them, the ability to be citizens.

Speaker 4 And that means knowing how to talk to each other, having some basic knowledge of those ideas, and practicing it.

Speaker 4 And we have gone so far down, Tim, and it's almost like we didn't even see it happening until it was too late. But we're now in such a deep hole that it will take a long time.
But I have kids.

Speaker 4 When you have kids, you know this. You simply can't give up on the future.
That is, it's almost psychologically impossible. So we may be talking just a lot of pie-in-the-sky ideas at this point.

Speaker 4 We have to. Or if someone has another one, I'm willing to hear it because I can't give up on the future.

Speaker 3 Amen to that. George Packer, it looks like Jeff Goldberg changed the headline on you.

Speaker 3 It's now called What Will Become of American Civilization: Conspiracism and Hyperpartisanship in the Nation's Fastest Growing City. That's the Atlantic story.

Speaker 3 Last Best Hope is the book that I referenced. Thank you for coming back to the Boulder podcast.
Hope to see you again soon.

Speaker 4 Anytime. Thanks.

Speaker 3 All right. Up tomorrow, we got our man, Adam Kinzinger.
We'll see y'all then. Peace.

Speaker 3 Watching the fog receive,

Speaker 3 divided the flame you slowly gave to me.

Speaker 3 Sign underneath in my mind.

Speaker 3 But I only caught you the one time.

Speaker 3 Later, I'd watch you and wonder what it was like.

Speaker 3 How do you bear the full weight?

Speaker 3 How does the long way feel?

Speaker 3 Needing your hand too tight against the wheel.

Speaker 3 How do you stay in that tower?

Speaker 3 How do you reckon your own power?

Speaker 3 How does the wheel not turn on

Speaker 3 our

Speaker 3 I was trying to find my way.

Speaker 3 I was thinking my mind was made.

Speaker 3 But you were making the heart change, shape.

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Speaker 3 I was trying to find my way.

Speaker 3 I was thinking my mind was made.

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Speaker 3 That's all that I could take now.

Speaker 3 How do you stay in that tone?

Speaker 3 How does the lonely feel?

Speaker 3 How does the wheel not turn on?

Speaker 3 The Bullark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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