What can Phoenix and Arizona tell us about the future of the country?
That’s one of the questions George Packer, staff writer for The Atlantic magazine, tried to answer in a new piece.
Packer says his editor-in-chief told him a couple of years ago that he wanted him to write a "really long" story about some place in the U.S. that could tell us whether America is viable, a vague and ambitious project, Packer says.
His editor then suggested Phoenix, since it has so much of what is both difficult and possible about the country. Over the past nine months, Packer visited several times, speaking to politicians, farmers, policy experts, immigrant families and activists both on the left and right, among other people.
The result is one of the longest pieces the magazine has published in decades, called "The Valley."
The Show spoke with Packer earlier about his reporting here and asked when he looks at a place and tries to determine whether or not that place can tell us about the future, what he found in that regard during his trips here.
Full conversation
GEORGE PACKER: I mean, I really started cold - although hot, because it was summer - In the sense that I didn't really know anyone, I didn't know much about Phoenix, I just started trying to make contacts and talk to people and very soon realized that what interested me most was the the nexus of two things: one of them being climate, which includes heat and water, and the other being politics, especially political extremism, which is something that afflicts the country and afflicts, I think, Arizona and metro Phoenix particularly, and whether something as big and complicated and basic as water, and the threat to water in Arizona and around Phoenix, could be solved by a political culture that's as divided as ours and as sort of hot and intense as ours gets.
MARK BRODIE: One of the things I found really interesting in reading this was that you talked about a lot of the issues that a lot of folks have talked about in Phoenix, in terms of heat in terms of, you know, politics, and, you know, it becoming more of a swing state, some of the extremism here, homelessness as an issue, that kind of thing. But as you reference, you really took the issue of water and made it sort of a throughline here, and I'm curious, you know, what did you learn? What did it tell you, not just about water and whether that is an issue that can be solved, but maybe on a broader scale of whether any issues can be solved given the current political climate here and across the country?
PACKER: Oh, there was so much to learn. I mean, I sat down with Sarah Porter of Arizona State's Kyle Center for Water Policy, and the first thing she said to me was "probably most of what you think about water here is not true." And she was right because, for one thing, as as you know, Phoenix itself, the city, is not short of water. So, one thing you have to get your head around is that here in the desert, with a once-a-millennium drought, there is not an immediate threat to water supply in the metro area.
But once you get beyond the municipal water systems, into the excerpts and the new developments, suddenly water is urgent and threatened because they are depending on groundwater, or on water that has to be brought in from pretty far away through infrastructure that may or may not exist. And the the scale of growth is is far ahead of the pace of fine new water.
So, I soon learned that even though there are parts of Phoenix and Arizona that have planned well for the desert, for water, there are parts where growth is threatening it and that also includes the rural hinterlands. I went to Cochise County and talk to people whose wells had gone dried because of groundwater pumping by mega farms.
So, to answer the second question you asked, what I learned was water sort of escapes the narrow confines of the red-blue divide and the culture wars, at least so far. It is not a culture war issue in Arizona. It's a local issue, and it's so basic that it allows people to stop thinking in the static terms of our national politics, and instead to think about what will work for this community or for this family or for this county.
And that to me is a little glimmer of hope because it is - although it's whiskeys for drinking water is for fighting, I must have heard that 50 times - nonetheless, the fighting over water feels, in some way, more sane than the fighting over immigration, for example, or education.
BRODIE: Well, and you know, as you report, you know, there are both activists and policymakers and politicians on - especially on the water issue - whose frame of reference is, as you say, their neighbors wells have run dry, or their wells have run dry, and it's a really, not only is it a local issue, it's a very personal issue for a lot of them. I wonder if that maybe serves as a template for other maybe even more controversial, tricky issues to solve in terms of putting a human face on an issue or making it not about sort of the universe of this issue but let's deal with what's going on on this block or in this community?
PACKER: I think that's exactly right. For example, in Cochise County, as you know, it's one of the most conservative counties in Arizona. It went heavily for Trump, and it's also a place that is among the most threatened by loss of groundwater. I talked to farmers in Cochise County, religious conservatives who would not have a whole lot in common with a Democratic Party activist from Phoenix, but who understood that if they want their farm to be there for their children and for their grandchildren, they have to start conserving water.
And it's not just about this or that individual putting in place a conservation plan. It has to be done, to some extent, collectively because it affects the whole county, it affects the whole basin, the Wilcox basin is where I spent time, which means there may need to be regulation from the state, which is not something conservatives generally favor. But if your well is dry, or if your neighbor's well is dry, or if your farm is, is not going to be able to sustain its production over the next decade, then you start thinking about other things.
And it has this way of cutting through disinformation and cutting through partisan clichés and focusing the mind on something about as real as it gets, which is water. And that's why I do think ... it's a kind of example of how we could think in a different way about issues that affect us, affect us very personally, as you say, very locally, but are also universal, and therefore, the solutions have to involve all of us. They can't simply be "my tribe against your tribe," and "I win and you lose."
BRODIE: At the risk of being a downer, though, despite all of that, water is still a plenty controversial issue in this state, and, you know, as I'm sure you heard and learned during your reporting trips, you know, getting policy done on it is increasingly difficult, it seems, and and, you know, maybe not on the partisan lines that we're used to, but still, you know, very distinctive policy lines. And it's still, as I said, very difficult to get, you know, big policy done here.
PACKER: That's absolutely right. I mean, when you think about why Phoenix has water, it's because of three 20th century bipartisan policies: the Salt River Project dams of the early 20th century, the Central Arizona Project, which was signed into law in the 60s with the backing of Democrats and Republicans, including Barry Goldwater, and the 1980 Groundwater Management Act, which was a Democratic governor, Bruce Babbitt, and a Republican legislature. There isn't that kind of cooperation anymore.
So, in Arizona, there is - partisanship has taken over water policy and has cut a whole bunch of loopholes into the Groundwater Management Act … and stopped the ability of the legislature and the state government to conserve and to create new rules so that groundwater isn't depleted. And at the same time, there's a once-a-millennium drought going on, which some people may not admit is going on.
So, those two things have prevented water policy from adapting to the 21st century in in the Phoenix area. But if your well goes dry, and your state representative says "we're not going to regulate because regulation is bad," you may have voted for him or her time after time, but suddenly they don't seem like they're representing you. They may have lost touch with you, and that's why I do think personal experience, the direct physical experience, of losing water can begin to push elected officials and and policymakers into a more sane direction if they listen to the people who they represent.
BRODIE: Let’s return now to my conversation with George Packer, staff writer at The Atlantic magazine, about his piece called "The Valley." It’s a long story – one of the longest the magazine has published in decades, and tries to answer some big questions, both about Phoenix and Arizona, but also the rest of the country.
Before the break, we spoke about water, and efforts to solve problems related to it and I asked if Packer got the sense that what he found about water could apply to other issues that are affecting people here in the Valley, be it housing and homelessness, or immigration and border security, and if it could help impact policy on issues affecting other communities across the country.
PACKER: I mean, that's asking a lot and I don't have any wisdom about the direction those issues are going in, except that they just seem to become more divisive and polarized every year.
Certainly, immigration has never been more of a hot button and and sort of third rail issue that that a lot of politicians don't dare touch and other politicians just use as a wedge issue. I think Democrats are beginning to realize they've lost that argument over the border and have to figure out a way to win back the trust of the voters on it. Abortion may be the same going the other way for Republicans who've lost the trust of voters on it.
Those issues are so, in some ways, insoluble, or at least, have not been solved for so long, and there may be no middle ground, especially on abortion, that I don't think water is really the the model that they're going to follow.
What struck me over and over was how everyone I talked to at the ground level, ordinary people, were tired of the extremism, tired of the polarizing rhetoric, kept saying "why can't we just acknowledge we're all together in this and, and and solve problems?" But once it gets to the level of the airwaves or of national politics, that's lost and they have to choose sides.
And that, I don't know the answer to that, but let's just say I felt more hopeful when I was talking to a tire store manager, or a widower in Mesa or a family in Maryvale, than I did when I was at, say, the Turning Point USA convention last December in the in the convention center.
BRODIE: So, when you think about the people with whom you spoke, and what you learned during your visits here, and then you think about maybe what the Phoenix area can tell us about the future, like what comes to mind for you?
PACKER: I think the first thing is the danger that this could easily all go wrong. I mean, ... one of the main figures in my piece is Rusty Bowers, former Speaker of the House of Arizona, who pretty much, alone among leading Republicans, stood in the way of Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani attempting to overturn the election results. There were others, as well, but he was the main figure because Trump was talking to him directly and Giuliani was too. He's out of politics. His career has been destroyed.
The Republican Party doesn't have room for people who have a principled attachment to democracy. And if one person was required to stand in the way, and he's not there anymore, how do we know that this time around there isn't going to be outright theft, or the demand for an overturning of results that will lead to violence?
And violence is the thing I worry about most, and it's, to me, amazing that there hasn't been more political violence in this country over the last few years. And I really do worry that it could come and it could come in Phoenix.
There's a lot of guns, a lot of extreme rhetoric, a lot of people who can be whipped up into a state of, of anger if they feel that their vote has been stolen from them, and maybe a lack of, I don't know, a sense of belonging to each other that comes from being a big place where a lot of people come from somewhere else and are new there and don't have deep roots. And that combination, that's that's my biggest worry, looking ahead to the end of the year.
BRODIE: It's interesting how, based on on your reporting here, you have both reasons for optimism and reasons for pessimism, which I guess is part of life.
PACKER: And part of America. I mean, we haven't talked too much about the reasons for optimism in Phoenix, but they're all around. I mean growth and development and tech companies coming in, Taiwan semiconductor, Intel battery plants. Just, I know it's not wonderful to be a resident and to see more people wanting to live there, but the fact that they want to live there is a good sign.
Arizona State is a, for me, a hopeful institution. It's educating large numbers of people who, who otherwise might not be able to go to college and who will then become part of that tech economy of the Valley.
There's there are good things going on, and that's one reason why I wanted to to focus on Phoenix because America still has that energy and dynamism that you just see everywhere in the Valley. But it also has this potential to go flying apart, that the social bonds are so frayed that it just doesn't take much to set people against each other.
BRODIE: Yeah, that is interesting. Alright, that is George Packer, staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. His latest piece is called "The Valley." George, thank you so much for the conversation. I really appreciate it.
PACKER: I enjoyed it a lot.
