The Bulwark Podcast - George Packer: Phoenix, the Most American City
Episode Date: June 19, 2024Phoenix is a microcosm of the big issues in the election and the country generally, including political extremism, climate change, and the border. But when it comes to the state's water crisis, Arizon...ians are showing signs of sanity—by accepting facts and downplaying partisanship. Could the city be a guide for America's future? George Packer joins Tim Miller. show notes: George's piece on Phoenix George's 2019 piece on his son's education
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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 Bullwark website. So I hope you go check that out.
Today on the podcast, I'm welcoming back, fourth time I think, George Packer,
staff writer at The Atlantic. He wrote the cover story for the magazine's big summer issue,
Phoenix is a Vision of America's Future. He's the author of 10 books, including Last Best Hope,
which I hope we got a little time for at the end.
How you doing, man?
I'm good. How are you?
I'm doing great.
I binged on all your old Charlie interviews yesterday, and I'm overwhelmed with content to discuss with you.
And also, we have like an apparent mutual, is affection the right word? Infatuation interest in Phoenix.
We're in the same places at the same time uh based on this uh
cover story a few times you know we were both hanging out with the young young fascists at
america fest and you know we popped around a couple of the same cities so i concur with your
thesis it's an interesting subject yeah it's a confluence of issues i think i'm as i you know
read the piece it's climate which is related to water, which is
related to the housing crisis and homelessness, which are all related to our political extremism.
How did you decide to package that all up for the piece? 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, said Phoenix.
I didn't know why he said that.
I was skeptical.
I've actually never spent any time there before last year.
And I started going and realized he was absolutely right.
Phoenix has everything.
It has political extremism distilled to a potent level.
It has a climate crisis in the form of unbearable summer heat and disappearing water in the
Colorado River and groundwater.
It has immigration with the border nearby and a large immigrant community in the greater
Phoenix area.
It has education, which I'm quite interested in. It's got all these different kinds of schools and
universities 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.
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 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. 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.
It only felt like 12,000, maybe 18. It was an easy read. 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.
Yeah. You spoke to our friend Rusty Bowers. Listeners might remember him. He testified at
the January 6th committee. He was 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. And it's interesting because Rusty encapsulates in a lot of ways the
challenge. 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. And yet, there was,
pun intended, kind of this bulwark against the
extremism in the face of people like Rusty Bowers and the voters and the kind of McCain-Flake voters
that came out and voted against Gary Lake and Blake Masters last time. I thought it was
interesting, you start with Bowers, he now works on the water crisis, which, you know, kind of
encapsulates, you know, all these challenges you talk about. So I'm just curious about your kind
of conversations with him, if he had any, any regrets, any reflections, any things that he
thought that he missed that you found particularly poignant.
So, he is 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. 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. And our
conversations were incredibly rich and interesting and impressive. 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. Find new electors and have them
vote for Trump in the House of Representatives. And he immediately realized what they're 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.
And he said to the president, I'm not going to do anything illegal.
I took an oath.
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 hard right, implacable conservative, but he was a member in good standing of the Arizona
Republican Party, its leader in the state legislature. He was more of like a Flake than
a McCain, a conservative person, but that was reasonable. 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. He no longer has a political life. Because the
Arizona Republican Party, the reason why I said in 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. So
that is what it means to be a good Republican. That's how you rise in the party, how you become
state party leader, how you become a muckety-mucking turning point USA, which has had a lot of overlap with the
state Republican Party.
His base there.
Yeah, Bowers resisted all of that and paid a very high price. And it was,
it came at him with a threat of violence. That's the really disturbing thing. 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 yeah it's
really sad and he dealt with tragedy you know i mean lost a child around that time and the threat
of violence i felt that people ask me a lot of times when i go to these events i went to that
america fest event you write about i went to several carry lake events and i don't actually
usually feel at all like scared at maga events for a variety of reasons but there is there is something about
that you know kind of ex-urban phoenix you know into a couple of carry 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 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 but 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 state meetings became vicious free-for-alls extremists were unseating conservatives
and i 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. 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 like this extremism
and this danger that was happening before our eyes. I don't know if he felt that way.
I don't think he thought he missed it. He was an eyewitness to it.
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.
But he was, like all of us, able to justify continuing in the party because it was backing policies he favored. It was doing
things in the Arizona House that he approved of. And I'm sure he enjoyed the power of being
Speaker of the House. And he campaigned for Trump in 2020. He did not stop being a Trump backer at
that point. He had to, or else, again, that would have been the end of him. 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.
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 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.
So he wouldn't allow me to give Mormons a kind of benefit of clergy when it comes to right-wing politics.
Maybe that's a follow-up piece for you, though.
There's something in the water with LDS.
When we were doing the Never Trump stuff in 2016, the Mormons were really the last ones to drop.
As we were trying to stop Trump from getting the nomination late in the process, it was multi-week churchgoers, Christians, and all Mormons that were the most resistant.
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.
I'm interested in the Rusty Bowers.
So now he's moved on.
He's working in water.
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 talk a little bit about the water crisis there in Arizona. And it's obviously
representative throughout the country. I'm in New Orleans. We have the opposite water issue.
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.
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.
Yeah, Arizona is undergoing a once a millennium drought for the past 20, 30 years.
The Colorado River has dropped to perilously low levels.
That feeds about half of the Phoenix Valley through the Central Arizona project, a 300-mile canal that Barry Goldwater, by the way, was instrumental in having passed through Congress.
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.
So Phoenix itself is not facing a water crisis right now. The metro
area, the municipal water systems have a lot of water because Arizonans have actually been very
farsighted going back 100 years to the Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River and the Salt
River Project. They have hundreds of trillions of gallons of water in
reserve, even with this drought. But when you get out of the central cities of the valley into the
exurbs that you mentioned, where MAGAism is stronger, water is disappearing. And those people
might even be depending on groundwater. 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. It's dropped so low that a thousand
foot well isn't deep enough to find water. 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.
Oh, yeah.
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.
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.
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.
And what that means is in rural Arizona, conservative Republicans are clamoring for their state
representatives to regulate groundwater
before it disappears. This 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. They can't be convinced
that it's a conspiracy or that it's not happening
when their well goes dry. 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 just try to
destroy each other. Okay, well, I'm here to burst bubbles on hope. And so, do you know the book, Strangers in Their Own Land?
Did you read that as a Berkeley professor, Arlie Hochschild?
Oh, Arlie Hochschild.
I haven't read it, but I know the thesis, yeah.
Yeah, you know the thesis, yeah.
I was reading this article and I was like, oh man, I went and tried to grab the book to get flashbacks because there was a lot of parallels.
That takes place in Louisiana.
It's less about flooding and climate- water than about pollution right and the pollution for energy
companies and how that was polluting the water and a lot of these you know cajun communities that are
on the bayou 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, you know, the rise of MAGA. She was writing about
this right around the time Trump's campaign was starting. And, you know, it ends up in kind of an
unhopeful place, right? Like there are some people that are, that's 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 but like it's hard to expand that out i don't know
it is i mean i wrote in my piece that i just hope charlie kirk never hears about groundwater
because if that 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. But right now, it's sort of an obscure issue. 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 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. So I'm hoping that it remains a complicated,
boring, obscure issue so that Arizonans can try to solve it without interference from demagogues.
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.
And I take your point, like on the one hand, hand that's good right with that there's a parallel in congress people call it the secret congress 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 you know that's a pretty fragile basis for bringing the country
back together that we can do as long as it's a secret.
It's more than fragile.
It may be fantastical.
And I look to my Never Trumper friends for wisdom because I, again and again,
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. There's more justifiable fear and more pessimism, I guess,
because I don't know, maybe you know the world better that seems to be coming for us.
Yeah. Unfortunately, I know these people a little too well. My hope is kind of a bleak hope,
I think, sometimes for people listening. They don't like it when i say this but like i think conceivably if we can dispense with trump there is a 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 that it's 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 and I'm jumping ahead this is related to your to your the book topic of your last book but
now that we're on the subject when you were last on with, one of your items of hope was that we had elected
Trump and then defeated him. 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 on the cusp of
potentially reverting. And I wonder how you think about all of that and whether your view of
Our Last Best Hope, so to speak, has evolved at all over the last two years.
It's devolved into confusion and despair. Because the other theme of that book, Last Best Hope, was that there was a politics oriented toward, say, the bottom 60 or 70 percent of the American
people that could both put a bit of a break on Trumpism and be a boon to whatever party
can make it happen. Because those voters who might be divided ethnically
are becoming more and more of a block 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. 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.
And no region has benefited more from those three bills than the Phoenix area. 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?
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.
They scarcely know who's president because he's an invisible figure. He has faded into invisibility.
So whatever chance there was of 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 MAGA-ism is unkillable. And it's partly because the American people have short memories
and are easily distracted and don't pay much attention to the news or to politics. And it's
partly because Joe Biden ran for reelection and turns out maybe not to be capable of convincing people that he can be president again.
Now we're in dreariness.
Okay, now we're in a sweet spot.
Yeah, I was feeling better in 2021.
Not great because we had just gone through 2020.
Yeah, right.
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.
And meanwhile, they should show that they care about that bottom 60 or 70 percent,
no matter what their race or background. And I don't know that the party's capable of doing that,
but it hasn't succeeded in doing that.
I agree with that. 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 but best hope, the younger justice oriented Americans
might have dominated a democratic primary, you know, and so that would have been a challenge.
That's right.
Going back to,
okay, what to do with where we're at. And in Arizona, yeah, Joe Biden's not a great messenger on this stuff. But the policies are done. 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. 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. I don't think I talk enough about on here because he's
pretty good at going along with the message you talk about. You mentioned in the article
that he tweeted his rejection of the term Latinx and the woke language around that.
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. They worry about
foreign companies sucking up the water. He supported all of these infrastructure bills.
When you talk to Rubin or Mark Kelly or the local Democrats, like why isn't that message landing
when they deliver it? He said to me, the problem is not having that message.
The problem is changing people's lives as a result of that message. 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.
And year after year, why should I believe you this time? Maybe I'll go for the guy who said
a few things that I don't like, but talk straight or is entertaining or is going to blow it all up
because I want to blow it all up. 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. And Gallego was telling me, yeah, I can de-emphasize cultural issues, although he hasn't
really. Abortion is 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 trying to get by on $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 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 so i don't want to be dismissive
of you write a lot about the people in phoenix who are really struggling people that are homeless
people that you know i don't have money for air conditioning and i want to get to that in a second
related to the heat but but first like the big middle in pho doing well like Phoenix is growing Phoenix is booming I was just there a couple
months ago it's like crazy how like the restaurants are full and airports full and
there are cranes everywhere and they apparently they're running out of water but you wouldn't
be able to tell as long as you're in Phoenix I guess because you said Phoenix isn't running
out of water so isn't there a disconnect there or you could say
those people that you're rightly noting are you know buying houses and flying to paris or to new
york from sky harbor are as likely to be democrats as republicans 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. 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, Californians, Oregonians, Washingtonians coming to Arizona because they were turning the state purple.
So I do think it's become an economic success for a lot of people.
But as you know, Tim, 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 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? Which team is going to get people to vote? 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 that probably would be bad for the Democrats,
because when turnout is low, Republicans tend to do better.
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I want to go back to the client 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. The heat and the homelessness side of this thing is the other side
of the impact of climate and summer's getting hotter and hotter. 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. She was fast food worker. And, you know, we were like, this is crazy. Like we will
help with that. And, but we were just visiting her for one day and I was like, this is insane.
Like how people live like this. And you, you know, did some reporting on that. And so just
talk about like the potential threat from that. because I don't think people have really come to terms with how bad the kind of heat stroke side of the impact might actually get.
Arizona heat, Phoenix heat is deadly.
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 had organ failure
and long-term neurological problems because of heat stroke, which is when your body temperature
is like 105, 6, 7. 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, which is 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 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? 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. It actually should be black, she said, not white. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. She's trained in environmental science and they're putting up,
you know, cooling centers and canopies,ies planting trees because there just aren't that many trees in phoenix it's
you know 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 yeah our neighborhood is two blocks from the tree neighborhood you know
the fans like we're gentrifying a little bit 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.
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.
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. 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. 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? 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? 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. It doesn't feel like it's got a timetable.
In Phoenix, people do have the 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.
So when people started saying it to me, it made sense.
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.
We also have that kind of conversation occasionally here in the Big Easy.
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?
And it's like that contrast is so jarring
but also it also feels very american it feels like the sort of brave and demented visions of
the the frontiersman you don't know whether to admire their courage and imagination or to be
horrified by their folly right and in bucke 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. It was closer to LA, so it could become a shipping center where you could get to LA
and back in one day. 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. 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. 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 three or 400,000
people in the middle of nowhere. 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.
I'm quite taken with the level of innovation and ingenuity that has allowed Phoenix to be a water-rich city.
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. And that's where
the apocalyptic fantasies start to set in. Could we maybe just build those 100,000 houses in Phoenix
so we don't have unhoused people in the 105 degree heat? Phoenix is building up, as they say. You saw the cranes.
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, 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. 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.
So you really are going to need a car to get around.
And there is so much nimbyism, Tim.
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. 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. 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. Maybe we have to
put some limits on our aspirations. Yeah, I don't know. 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. There's all this growth,
you know, 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 300,000 people in the middle of the desert,
dozens of miles from downtown Buckeye. In the Tessie Roosevelt damn way, and this would be
one thing about the Democrats sometimes, you know, that I worry about. 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 IRA, with what you discussed earlier.
But there's a lot of hangups and there are elements of the left that make that challenging at times.
Yeah, actually, this is something Rusty Bowers and I talked about as we drove through the Sierra Ancha Mountains east of Phoenix, where his ranch, among his trials of
Job, he lost his career, he lost his daughter, and he lost his ranch to a wildfire, all in the
space of about six months. He was complaining about the environmentalists who, you know,
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. 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. And I don't know if you remember the Obama stimulus that was sort
of the trial run for what Biden has done. 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. They didn't see it for two, three years. And then there was a Tea Party tsunami. 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. 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 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 we can come together and try to solve this water problem with some regulation or with
new ducks whatever whatever you know some new funding it is. But then when I go to vote, like my motivating issue, if I'm on the left,
it's abortion. If I'm on the right, it's whatever, transgenderism or immigration.
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You've written a bunch about education and going back, I guess, even to 2019,
you were writing about some concerns about what's the word we're using. We're not using
wokeism. What's the word we're using in schools? I call it the new progressivism. That's my
somewhat neutral term. I don't like the word woke. I try to avoid it.
The new progressivism in schools.
Anybody who has, you know, kids in schools right now can see, you know, some of the changes are good. I like that, you know, the kids are reading black and brown authors now. 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 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 and i'm just wondering similarly to the discussion about trumpism and i think there
was a hope in 2021 that we might have been, that balance might have been being
restored.
And I felt like maybe that was also true in, you know, this education and the way that
we're teaching our kids that balance might be coming back, that maybe, you know, having
some elements of identity politics was good, but we're shedding some of the more pernicious
elements.
But maybe that was false hope.
I don't know.
How do you assess that kind of discussion?
My feeling, Tim, is that if our, 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. People want to pull books off library shelves that have no business being
banned. 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, I still think
there's a basic sanity when it comes to my kid's education, your kid's education. Parents know when
their kids are being miseducated in one way or another, and they don't like it. 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. The four daughters are citizens. 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. They heard about a charter school that had a great books philosophy. They were reading
the classics. I sat in on a 12th grade class where these kids almost entirely of Latin American
origin were discussing the Aeneid. And this school has worked for their daughters. They have become great students.
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.
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 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
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.
Our family was seeing things happening that are now happening all over the country that
just seemed like miseducation, unnecessary.
It's 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? 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. And that article, by the way, which I wrote,
which is just a very personal account of our family's experience, got me more hatred online than any other thing I've ever written
because somehow this is what charges up the ideologues more than anything.
Yeah.
So I just wonder about whether we're capable in the social media age
of resolving this in a community manner.
Because I do agree with you on this, right?
It feels like it should be a classic thesis because i do agree with you on this right 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 maybe that goes overboard
where it's like we're dividing the classes by race or like you know like there's some of this
silly stuff that you get but then so then you have the guys are like oh we're the parents rights
movement they come in the right 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 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 maybe we're not
culturally capable of that right now because of the social media response that the loudest voices are going to dominate and then parents,
normal parents don't like want to get involved in it. So they just check out.
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. But then you
remember what does a school board meeting look like today? The biggest freaks in the community are the people that show up to it.
Yeah, people went 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. And they're all
ginned up and fueled by social media. And you mentioned civics.
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. So 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. They're almost counterintuitive. Why should I listen
to someone I disagree with? Why should that person have power and me not? Why should the majority rule? 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. 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 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 naive. I very goody-goody and, you know, sort of naive.
I like goody-goody and 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.
It could be on anything.
If you don't see any uplift in the campus culture, you've been writing on lots of stuff,
you know, talk to me about Seneca, whatever. I wish and I hope that we are remembering that there's an entire history of ideas that you could say almost culminated in the founding of this country, along with a lot of bad ideas and bad practices. And I'm seeing little signs that 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. 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.
And that means knowing how to talk to each other, having some basic knowledge of those
ideas and practicing it.
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.
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.
We have to, or if someone has another
one, I'm willing to hear it because I can't give up on the future. Amen to that. George Packer,
it looks like Jeff Goldberg changed the headline on you. It's now called What Will Become of
American Civilization, Conspiracism and Hyper-Partisanship in the Nation's Fastest Growing
City. That's the Atlantic story. Last Best Hope is the book that I referenced. Thank you for coming
back to the Bullard Podcast. Hope to see you again soon. Anytime. Thanks. All right. Up tomorrow,
we got our man Adam Kinzinger. We'll see you all then. Peace. Divided the flame you slowly gave to me
Sign of relief in my mind
But I only caught you the one time
Later I'd watch you and wonder what it was like
How do you bear the full weight?
How does the long way feel?
Needing your hand too tight against the wheel
How do you stay in that tower? How do you reckon your own power How does the wheel not turn
Hour on hour on hour
I was trying to find my way
I was thinking my mind was made
But you were making my heart change shape
It's all that I could take
I was trying to find my way
I was thinking my mind was made
But you were making my heart change shape
It's all that I could take now
How do you stay in that town?
How does the lonely feel?
How does the real night turn over on our, on our
chicken?
It's taking a man away.
Oh, oh.
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper
with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.