Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

George Packer:

Can human beings come together and pass laws and find technologies, build infrastructure in ways that people, five million people can go on living in that valley with drought and heat? And the answer to that is somewhat hopeful.

Preet Bharara:

That’s George Packer. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and has been writing about American culture and politics for over two decades. Packer’s most recent piece is an incisive exploration of our democracy at home. Its potential and its fragility through the lens of a somewhat surprising place, Phoenix, Arizona. We discussed the climate crisis and water scarcity, the hot button immigration debate, the rise of identity politicians, and whether we can save the American project. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Janie. Hi, Preet. I saw an interview where a juror in Hunter Biden’s trial said they were initially 6-6 guilty, not guilty when they did their first vote on Monday evening. Then it was 11-1 when they returned Tuesday morning, and finally they got to unanimous guilty verdict after brief deliberations. Are you surprised that jurors change their mind so easily?

Well, Janie, that’s a super interesting question and often we have no idea and we just speculate here because one or more jurors have spoken to the press and to the public, we have a little bit of an idea. But first of all, I’ll say I don’t find it surprising that jurors shifted their position. First of all, when the initial straw vote, people are giving their first impression. They haven’t even begun to deliberate in any earnestness just yet.

And so I think an initial tally doesn’t tell you a lot about how far somebody must have shifted in a short period of time, and we know some of this to be true if you take the word of juror number 10 who did an interview with CNN, and that juror said in the interview that when they first got to the jury deliberation room, they said the first thing we’re going to do is let’s vote now and see how the count was.

And then he’s the one who said, as you saw, that they voted six, six. And the juror went on to say, “We weren’t trying to change anybody’s mind. It’s just the fact that I think they said no because they wanted more information. They wanted to talk more about the case, so they didn’t want to jump to conclusions right away and say, ‘Yes, he was guilty.'”

So if that’s an accurate representation of the first tally, that to me says there were members of the jury who took seriously their obligation to deliberate and deliberate carefully and go through the counts one by one and respect the presumption of innocence. It doesn’t sound like they were hard and fast standing in the way of a conviction in the case.

Another thing that’s striking from the reporting and the discussions the jurors had with the press was that maybe the initial stance on the part of some of them was that they didn’t like the case. We’ve talked on the podcast before about the concept and the idea of jury nullification, and it seems there was a whiff of that here, but it didn’t prevail.

According to CNN, “Other jurors who spoke to CNN after they reached the guilty verdict said that they believed they had no choice but to find Biden guilty, but said that they questioned whether the criminal case ever should have been brought against the president’s son.”

And one female juror told CNN more specifically that the case, “Seemed like a waste of taxpayer dollars.” And there you have in a nutshell what Joyce Vance and I have been saying on the Insider Podcast that there’s a reasonable question that people can ask about whether or not it was appropriate to bring a case like this given the circumstances, given the infrequency of this kind of charge being brought, but once it is brought, legitimately, given the evidence that they had, in the words of that one juror, they kind of had no choice but to find Biden guilty because there was so much overwhelming evidence that he was an addict and was taking controlled substances at the time he filled out that form falsely and at the time he possessed the firearm, illegally, under the statute.

It’s notable also I think that the jury deliberated only for a few hours. There seems to have been no strife, no real disagreement other than that initial tally, which I said was just preliminary and there were no notes unlike we saw in Donald Trump’s trial in Manhattan where jurors had a number of questions, wanted to hear jury instructions repeated to them and some testimony as well.

Here, it sounds like the case was pretty overwhelming from beginning to end, and while some jurors were uncomfortable with the idea of the case in the first place, they took very seriously their obligation as jurors to decide the case based on the fact and the law. I will note also, although you didn’t ask the question Janie, that what’s also distinguishing about this case versus Donald Trump’s case. Here, some of the jurors felt comfortable talking to the media, one even going on television, unlike in the Donald Trump case where there was I think an understandable and legitimate fear of being doxed or harassed or even being the victim of threats and violence. That’s not happening here and that’s a good thing.

This question comes in an email from Mary who asks, “Do you think the Supreme Court will step in before Steve Bannon must report to jail for his contempt of Congress conviction?” Well, that’s an interesting question and I will say that I’ve become a little tired of hearing the Trump folks and the Trump allies at every juncture, at every phase of a proceeding say, “We’re going to go to the Supreme Court.”

And implicit in Donald Trump’s declarations of a trek to the court is the insinuation that a third of the court that he appointed will be favorable to him. He’s been saying that with respect to his recent conviction in Manhattan, even though there is no mechanism that anybody that I know is aware of, nor that I’m aware of, of appealing directly to the Supreme Court on a state level of conviction of a criminal nature, that’s what he says. Steve Bannon and his allies seem to be suggesting the same thing.

To recap, Steve Bannon was convicted, as you have cited, for contempt of Congress and was sentenced to four months in prison. He has never served a day of that sentence because the judge in the district court held that in abeyance so he could file his appeal. His appeal was filed, argued fair and square, and a three judge panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that appeal. There was not a dissenting vote there. That should settle it, and would settle it for the vast majority of people.

There’s still one intermediate step that Steve Bannon wants to take before going to the Supreme Court and going to the Supreme Court is his right. I don’t expect the Supreme Court will take the case ultimately if it goes there, but first, he’s asked for the entire DC Circuit Court of Appeals and what’s known as an en banc hearing to hear his appeal, even though he lost three to zero in the initial appeal, but now withstanding the invocation of the Supreme Court at every juncture by people like Steve Bannon and others, I expect that he will have to appear for his period of incarceration as directed by the judge on July 1, unless something unforeseeable and extraordinary happens between now and then, which I don’t expect.

And before we move on to the interview, I just want to make one more comment about the Hunter Biden conviction and it has to do with what some of the critics are saying, people like Donald Trump and Steve Miller and others who basically are saying that the fact of the conviction doesn’t prove anything about the rule of law, doesn’t prove anything about how Joe Biden appropriately and legitimately and probably with some difficulty stayed out of the matter, how Joe Biden had nothing to do with Alvin Bragg’s decision to bring a case or to win a conviction on the case against Donald Trump, which continues to be just utterly ridiculous and it’s just stupid.

Stephen Miller, former President Trump’s advisor posted this on Twitter on Monday. “The gun charges are a giant misdirection, an easy op for DOJ to sell to a pliant media that is all too willing to be duped. Don’t be gaslit. This is all about protecting Joe Biden and only Joe Biden.” Right.

So the fact that it was a holdover from President Trump, a holdover US attorney who was appointed as special counsel, David Weiss, was part of a giant and easy op for DOJ to protect Joe Biden by having a criminal case brought against his son and convicting him and subjecting him to prison time. Not only in this one case that’s already concluded, but in another tax case in federal court in California. Yeah. A great op.

I responded on Twitter with this. “If every possible outcome can be argued as a point in your favor, charged, not charged, guilty, not guilty, maybe your position is for shit.”

I’ll be right back with my conversation with George Packer.

THE INTERVIEW

The Atlantic staff writer, George Packer, is a keen observer of politics and culture. His latest article asks, “Is America going to make it?”

George Packer, welcome back to the show.

George Packer:

Good to be back with you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

So you’ve been busy. We have a lot to talk about. I want to say to folks that we’ll be spending some time talking about this amazing piece you just wrote for the Atlantic. It’s called The Most American City, which city? And we’ll discuss why you think this is Phoenix, Arizona. I will note that the magazine did point out to us that this is the second-longest feature in The Atlantic in the last 40 years, so I’m deeply disappointed that you didn’t come in first place. Why?

George Packer:

They just kept cutting and cutting. I don’t know why.

Preet Bharara:

Do you know what the longest piece was and couldn’t you have written one word more?

George Packer:

I think the longest piece was Caitlin Dickerson’s piece on family separation at the border, which was a spectacular piece of reporting and she had a lot to say. So I am by no means aggrieve to be second place behind Caitlin.

Preet Bharara:

Look, some people are fine with the silver. Can we clarify for the public that you do or do not get paid by the word?

George Packer:

I do not.

Preet Bharara:

You do not?

George Packer:

The Atlantic generously pays me a salary, and as long as I keep working hard and doing good work, I hope I keep making it because, Preet, think about it, how many major magazines or newspapers are going to send a writer to one place for an entire year again and again, pay all those expenses and then publish 25,000 words about it? It’s an incredible privilege and a rarity today that this still exists in journalism.

Preet Bharara:

Am I correct? Do I remember correctly from my ninth grade, American literature, that Charles Dickens wrote in serialized fashion and got paid by the word, which is one reason why his books are so long? Do you recall that?

George Packer:

I don’t know if he got paid-

Preet Bharara:

Did I make that up?

George Packer:

… by the word. He certainly wrote in serial. He published his own work in his magazines, so I don’t know if he was paying himself per word, but that was the 19th century novel and for a while people thought the internet would be able to reproduce that because there’s no limit to length, but it turned out that serial journalism, lots of 80,000 word pieces coming in at 10,000 words a piece over the course of a week, that’s just not the way the internet works.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I don’t know. We have a very intelligent and well-read audience and I’m sure people will write in and tell me if I’m totally wrong or not. So the subtitle of your piece, as I said, it’s The Valley. The subtitle is Searching for the Future in the Most American City.

And before I ask you what that means, I guess my first question is, searching for the future in the most American city, is that meant as a compliment or not?

George Packer:

Not necessarily as a compliment but not as a curse either. I think it’s a suggestion that Phoenix, and there might’ve been other possibilities, but Phoenix really fit the bill. The Atlantic wanted me to go somewhere that could be a laboratory for the question, is America going to make it? Is our democracy going to make it? Is our society going to make it? What good things are happening? What bad things are happening?

There’s so much going on in Phoenix. It’s incredibly dynamic. It’s growing fast. A lot of tech companies are moving there. It’s also troubled by both a climate crisis and a political crisis, an ongoing political crisis. So that’s a lot, and not to mention the border and immigration and a lot of other things.

So it was I think the right choice to look at one place as a microcosm. Obviously it can never stand in for the whole country because this is such an enormous and diverse country, but it has a lot, and it’s also the Sunbelt, and 40 years ago, we might’ve said Chicago is the most American city, but it feels as if the center of gravity has moved south and west. And so Phoenix is a good choice for a place that represents the direction the country’s going in for better and for worse.

Preet Bharara:

What city is or would’ve been the runner up?

George Packer:

My first thought was I’ll go somewhere in the rust belt, but I was counseled against that by my editor, Scott Stossel, and I think he was right, because that may be more where you find the past than where you find the future. Maybe Las Vegas, maybe Orlando, maybe Nashville, Austin. These are the places that feel like… yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I thought Austin would’ve been an interesting choice.

George Packer:

Yeah. It would’ve been. Yeah. It has University of Texas, it has a lot of arts and technology and it’s surrounded by a very red state, but Phoenix in a way is… I think of Austin as a very blue city. Phoenix itself is divided, or at least The Valley that Phoenix is in is divided politically. Maricopa County, which is this huge county which is most of Metro Phoenix is where the contact point of red and blue is maybe at its most intense.

Preet Bharara:

What’s interesting to me is, and we’ll get to some of these, there are enormous challenges, political and sustainability issues in Phoenix, yet it’s very popular. The population is expanding, people are coming there. There are lots of incentivizing of people to come to Phoenix. But one of the most striking things in your piece was the very concrete and immediate way you describe how just freaking hot it is in Phoenix.

And this is a good segue into talking about the climate issues that Phoenix and the rest of the planet face, but can you just revive some of what you wrote about for listeners and talk about just how damn hot it is?

George Packer:

So I really had to be there over the summer in order to be able to write about it, and I went in early August. It was unbearably hot, Preet, 110, 115 degrees. People there said, “Once it’s over 110, it all feels the same.”

Preet Bharara:

Right. 110, 140.

George Packer:

Exactly. I’ve been to Baghdad a number of times where it’s hot, but Phoenix just felt like it was unlivable over the summer and it wasn’t just one day, it was every day over and over. I think 55 days of last summer it was over 110, and in this very advanced and rich country, 655 people died of heat in the Phoenix area last summer. And those people are the people who are vulnerable, who can’t get out of the heat, the poor, the homeless, the addicted, the isolated.

And I spent time with homeless people and just marveled at how they even survived. I mean, falling on the pavement in that heat is dangerous because you can get a second degree burn. A woman showed me one on her calf that was really ugly. The emergency rooms are full of people being brought in with heat stroke. Their bodies are 106, 107 degrees and it does feel…

And then the traffic jams with everyone sitting in their air-conditioned car on the urban freeways, and I found out air conditioning causes 4% of global greenhouse gases. So you’re escaping the heat in your car, but you’re also worsening the heat in your car. So it feels as if there’s a kind of inescapable trap in which people are creating more and more heat by trying to get out of the heat and it gets hotter and hotter every year.

So in that sense, you do have this feeling as I wrote, that it’s fragile there. That it isn’t necessarily going to go on existing the way it exists now, it does feel unsustainable.

Preet Bharara:

And yet you and your editors still thought it’s the city that represents the future, even though that literal future is uncertain because of the heat.

George Packer:

Because the question really is whether we human beings are capable of a collective answer because these problems are far too big for individual measures that will… It’s not going to change global temperatures by policy changes in Phoenix alone, but it could make the heat more bearable. Policy can make the homeless problem a little less intense. It can provide people with places to go who don’t have means. It could incentivize building up instead of out so that it isn’t simply one giant traffic jam.

And the related problem is water, which because of this once a millennium drought that is clearly related to climate change, the Colorado River, which supplies almost half of Phoenix’s water is drying up, and so are other sources and groundwater, which is irreplaceable, it’s fossil water, well underneath the surface of the earth is being pumped at rates that can’t be replaced.

So can human beings come together and pass laws and find technologies, build infrastructure in ways that people, five million people can go on living in that valley with drought and heat? And the answer to that is somewhat hopeful, not fully hopeful, but I saw things from the past and going into the future that suggest, yes, people in Phoenix, the mayor’s office, the governor, and ordinary folks are reacting to the disappearance of water and to the heat in ways that are rational and sane and that have not yet gotten caught in the gears of our culture wars where everything goes to be destroyed.

Water is not yet a huge culture war battleground in Arizona, and as long as it stays away from that, I think there’s some chance of solutions.

Preet Bharara:

You point out that civilization essentially in Phoenix, Arizona would be impossible without air conditioning. Is there something bad about that?

George Packer:

Well, Frank Lloyd Wright who built his western studio thought so. He thought we’re breaking down buildings and bodies by moving between temperatures that are so high and then temperatures that are so low. He wanted more natural air cooling so that it wasn’t as extreme-

Preet Bharara:

But it’s also against heat?

George Packer:

I think he didn’t care for heat, but he did move to Phoenix. He moved his operations to a hillside north of Phoenix in I think 1938 or so, wasn’t as hot as it is now and he also went back to Wisconsin for the summers, but he was mostly against the unnaturalness of living in that valley, that it forces you to live in this highly artificial way where it requires so much energy just in order to be in a livable space.

And people compared it to Minnesota in the wintertime, you just are not outdoors much. You stay indoors as much as possible for like three or four months of the year. It’s not a natural way to live. And as I said, air conditioning itself is making the problem worse because it is such a source of greenhouse gases.

Preet Bharara:

And a growing source because many tropical climate countries that are still developing are ratcheting up their air conditioning use as they become wealthier, are they not?

George Packer:

I think that’s true. And it’s also true that for working class and poor people in Phoenix to survive, they need to have air conditioning. And so there has to be a universal air conditioning for it to be just in any way a humane place. And all of this is making me extremely nervous because it has this feeling of a little laboratory animal that doesn’t realize that conditions are being brought to a point where it’s not going to survive.

It’s just constantly making little adjustments as if I can get past today, then things will be okay. But in fact, it’s getting worse and worse, and the most thoughtful people there know that and are trying to find answers to that on both heat and water. Water is more under human control. Heat is not simply because the problem of global warming is so immense that Phoenix can’t solve it.

So yeah. We’re now talking about the dark side, the really dark side, and the way in which when you’re there, people sometimes said to me, I sometimes picture what it’d be like for another civilization to come into this valley in a hundred years and find the ruins of our civilization and wonder what this piece of metal, that was a solar panel was used for.

Phoenix inspires little daydreams like that in a way that more settled and old cities like New York don’t.

Preet Bharara:

But I go back to my original question then. Given the heat, given the rising heat, given the sustainability issues, given the water issues, given the homelessness increase, why are people flocking to Phoenix?

George Packer:

Because it’s cheaper than California, cheaper than Seattle, because for the other eight months of the year, the weather is beautiful, far better than New York or San Francisco, and because the desert itself is beautiful. Phoenix is not beautiful. The metro Phoenix area, I compared it to a spaceship that’s landed on this giant flat part of the earth and at night when you fly in over the airport, you just see the glittering lights as far as the valley can stretch until it reaches the mountains.

But the mountains, the desert, natural surroundings of Phoenix is spectacular. The sunsets and sunrises, the hiking, the outdoor life, as long as you don’t die. So it is people find a cheaper place, although it’s getting more expensive all the time, a beautiful place, and a place where there are jobs because as I said, all these tech companies and others are moving into Phoenix.

Intel has a giant plant in Chandler. Taiwan Semiconductor is building its biggest U.S. plant in north Phoenix, and there’s just littler battery plants and stuff all around the valley. So there’s jobs, there’s a big university, Arizona State. So people think of it as a place where life would be better than in whatever expensive or poor or hurricane blasted part of the country you come from.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think if I had asked the question, not about Phoenix, but about America, your answer would be a little bit similar? In other words, one could ask the question, well, we’re very polarized, we have a lot of political strife, there are economic problems, we’re polarized. Why do all these people still want to come to America? How would your answer be different to that question?

George Packer:

It’s actually quite similar. You’re right, Preet. I went to the border, I spent a few hours with a guy who drives around in his truck and delivers water and snacks to asylum seekers who are at the wall waiting to be processed by border patrol. And I talked to them, I looked at their faces, they come from all over the world and whether or not they had an asylum claim, they all had a damn good reason to want to come to the United States because it is so hard, it is so hard to get here and to survive the last part of it across the desert, and then to go through the humiliation of the processing, and then not to know what your future status is going to be.

They want to come here because of the reasons that your family and mine came. It’s opportunity. It’s freedom. It’s the wide open, bold, challenging atmosphere here where you do feel that by your own efforts, if you are lucky, you can make something of yourself. That’s still true in this country. And in fact-

Preet Bharara:

But is it as true?

George Packer:

… they’re going to make it better than the people who are here for multiple generations because they have that desire.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know the answer to this question, but I will tell you, my family came 53 years, 54 years ago, my family thought that this was a heavenly place and we’d hit the jackpot and we did. It was a great place to come. My view still is finest place on earth.

Do you think recent immigrants, do you have some sense of whether or not recent immigrants, those who have come in the last five or 10 years, have that same sense of euphoria at being in America? Is it more perhaps, is it less, is it the same? Do you have a sense?

George Packer:

There has to be some shadow over it because they are not made to feel welcome in the way that perhaps your parents were and my father’s father was from Eastern Europe. They know that there’s a hostility to the crossings at the border. They’ve got to know that there’s a lot of political conflict over this, and in a way, what’s happening is the thing that is drawing them to this country, that sense of opportunity is also making this country less desirable because immigration and other issues have divided us so much, have made us so suspicious of each other, of our institutions, of our elites, our political parties, that they’re coming to this promised land that has a lot of cracks in its foundation.

Has a lot of flaws, some of them hidden, some of them obvious. Now that may not be enough to overcome the sense that life is better there and for some reason I’m going there instead of to say Italy or to Thailand or to some other country that’s not as rich and not as big and not as enticing, but that you could have a decent life.

They’re coming here and that tells you that there’s still at least the idea that this is a country where you can live out a dream, and they may still have that faith more than we do. That’s the thing that I came away feeling, that the people I met at the border, the writings they left behind, because I saw some of the things that they’d had to ditch at the wall since border patrol won’t let them bring their stuff in.

It’s all about the dream in a way that’s very moving. And it also feels like maybe they’re talking about a country that existed 50 years ago when your parents came here. I don’t know if it’s the same country today.

Preet Bharara:

Immediately following this interview, I’m going to play at a very high volume a certain Neil Diamond song and dance around. I think that’s correct.

I’ll be right back with George Packer after this.

What do you think has happened in America or in our politics or in our economic circumstances that has caused the decline in rhetoric over immigration? And for purpose of this conversation, I’m not drawing sharp distinctions between legal and illegal. I think the Trump folks conflate those things all the time, and then when called to task for, they say, “No. No. No. We’re only talking about illegal immigration.”

I don’t think that’s true. I think there’s an attitudinal issue that’s negative more recently against legal immigrants as well.

George Packer:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

But from the time of the end of the Reagan presidency when the rhetoric of both Democratic and Republican politicians alike was open and welcoming and draped in the language of the Statue of Liberty, et cetera, it’s not that long ago. What’s happened to cause that sunny optimism, we’re a beacon to all countries and all nations and all peoples, why has that faded so much?

George Packer:

I think the answer has to also be the answer to the much larger question of why have we lost faith in ourselves and in our democracy, our institutions? Why is there so much ranker and vitriol? Why can’t we not even get together over the Super Bowl and support different teams without having conspiracy theories about star players?

To me, the answer is twofold basically. One, in those 40 years, a lot of Americans have seen their standard of living stagnate. They’ve seen their communities deteriorate and hollow out. This is a story we know well. I wrote about it in The Unwinding. It’s still happening. Whole areas of the country have never recovered from de-industrialization and from the flight of wealth and talent to the cities and the coasts.

So this tremendous inequality, resentment that breeds, division of total lack of a common life. And at the same time, you could say the rise of non-white America, both post-Civil Rights Black America, and post 1965 immigrant America, which is a good thing. It’s a really important thing and has been a great addition to our national prosperity and to our fulfilling our own idea of what it means to have this democracy. But I think for those mostly white Americans who see their own fates slipping behind, and then look at non-white Americans coming here and doing, in some cases, better rather than blaming themselves, they’re going to blame someone else. And they might even blame the politicians who they think are doing it to them, and those come from both parties.

So it’s basically, that’s a maybe crude answer. It’s economic and is ethnic and racial. And then we have a politician, Donald Trump, who has made it his path to power to exploit that, to manipulate it, to aggravate it, and to do it by saying anything, by expressing people’s anger and resentment with the crudest, most brutal rhetoric and behavior so that it almost seems like a positive thing to people.

Finally, someone is telling the truth. Finally, someone is acting the way we act or feeling the way we feel. And once the bottom starts dropping and the taboos fall, it’s very hard to set them up again. And I feel like every day another taboo falls and we’ve almost forgotten that they’ve fallen because we are so used to it now.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. But what’s so confusing and hard to understand, and you make this point in your piece separately, is that in light of all of that criticism and scapegoating and othering of certain communities, immigrant communities or brown and Black communities and people, as you say, if the polls are to be believed, Donald Trump has made significant inroads into the Latino community, in particular, and even the Black community. How are those two things reconcilable?

George Packer:

It may be that some voters, and I talked to some of them, don’t hear the bigotry that comes out of his mouth or they dismiss it. They brush it aside. And what they hear is the resentment and the mockery of elites, of college educated people, people who live in progressive cities and who may say things that make more working class people feel as if they’re despised or as if they’re not good.

And that is sort of a breakdown of identity politics. The categories of identity no longer are so definitive in how people are going to vote. What I see more and more is class politics driving our elections. Class being determined in this country largely by whether you have a college degree. If you’re white and have a college degree, you used to be a Republican, now you’re a Democrat. If you are white and you don’t have a college degree, you are almost certainly a Republican now, you used to be a Democrat.

And if you’re Black or brown and have a college degree, you’re certainly a Democrat. But if you don’t, it may be that you’re open to the appeal of Trump who plays on your fear of trade taking your job away, of immigrants taking your job away.

You can be a first generation Latino immigrant and still not want immigrants coming in who you think are going to take your job away or lower your wages. And that’s Trump’s game. And he’s been incredibly effective at playing it and getting people to ignore the rest of it, to think that the rest of it just doesn’t really matter.

Preet Bharara:

Some people argue that part of it is that the left has gone too far left, and that certain communities, Latino communities, Black communities are just not as left as the far left of the Democrats and that’s what’s causing them to leave the party. Do you find any truth in that?

George Packer:

Yeah. I think there is some truth in that. I mean, polls show there’s truth in that. If you look at polling on issues, cultural issues, let’s say, whether it’s immigration, race, education, abortion, college educated white people are far, far more liberal on a lot of those issues than Black and brown Americans, whether college educated or not, and have moved farther to the left in the last 10 or 20 years, especially on immigration, where it used to be that there was a middle ground on immigration that did not think we should have open borders, but also didn’t think we should deport millions of people.

And that middle ground has begun to slip away, which is partly why there’s no agreement. I mean, I know that the Democrats tried to make a deal and Trump deep-sixed it earlier this year. But the Democrats had lost so much ground by seeming that to talk about the border needing security was to be a racist, that Biden suddenly has to try to save himself by this executive order stopping asylees from coming over after a certain number have.

So yeah. I think what I saw in Phoenix, interestingly in South Phoenix, which is very much a working class and mostly Latino part of town, was it’s still a Democratic area, but it’s an area where it’s possible for a tough talking, tough on crime, tough on immigration Republican can make a little bit of headway, and that’s something that ought to worry Democrats because that’s their base, and I think immigration is going to be the most important issue in November, especially in Arizona.

Preet Bharara:

So if that’s true, do you view the Biden action at the border, the unilateral action as Johnny come lately to the issue? Do you view it as smart politics? Do you view it as a move of desperation or none of those?

George Packer:

I think it’s desperation.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

George Packer:

I think it’s clearly political. They saw the polls. They saw how important immigration has become, and they have a problem because since Biden became president, the numbers that’s crossing the border have exploded, and that’s a reaction to policy changes. He was in a tough position because Trump’s policies were so brutal and Draconian, family separation. But Biden lifted all of that at the very start of his administration and immediately the numbers started ballooning.

And it’s not just that you feel it at the border, you feel it in New York City, you feel it in Chicago, you feel it in California. So I do think Democrats have failed to understand that both on principled grounds, countries have to have enforceable borders to be countries, and on political grounds, lower income people are going to desert you if they think that you don’t care about what’s happening to their jobs, their communities, their wages. Those were gigantic mistakes.

There’s an excellent book by David Leonhardt called Ours Was the Shining Future in which there’s a long chapter about immigration, and he makes a very persuasive case that this issue is one where Democrats have gotten themselves crosswise with their former base, Americans of more modest income and have really been hurt by that.

Preet Bharara:

Look, I’ll tell you that in New York City where we both spend a lot of our time and where we both work is a city full of progressives and liberals and they have developing views about some of the crises that have been caused by the influx of migrants here. How do you think progressives or liberals or whatever name you want to talk about people who are left of center, how are they coming to grips with their own thinking about the aesthetic of their politics and how they used to feel versus how they’re starting to feel now with this influx?

George Packer:

I worry that we oscillate wildly from one extreme to the other. In 2020, during the Democratic primaries, there was a debate, and there were probably 10 or 12 people on stage, and the moderator asked, “How many of you think that crossing the southern border without papers should be decriminalized?” In other words, essentially stop calling it illegal crossing. And all but I think one said, “Yes. It should be decriminalized.”

Now why did they do that? I don’t think they did it because they’d all given it a lot of thought and really come to a considered position that that’s the best policy for the country. I think they felt cornered. They felt that the primary vote, and we know primary voters are more extreme than general election voters. The primary vote depended on it, and they didn’t want to be the one person on stage whose hand wasn’t up.

And now we are where we are, and it doesn’t seem like it’s necessarily because of demographic changes or economic changes or a perception of what the country needs. Do we need more people coming across the border? It was a political panic or a political shift among people of a certain orientation that made it really hard to say, “No. We need security at the border. We need to stop these crossings. We may even need a wall.”

And that was such a verboten position among Democrats that they’ve gotten themselves now into a very tough position with the electorate. And it shouldn’t have been that way. It should have been more commonsensical to say, “We need immigrants. We want immigrants, but it has to be under our control. We have to be able to determine who comes in and who gets to stay and what the standards are.”

But of course, a lot of this comes back to the Republicans refusing again and again in Congress and just recently at the beginning of this year, but this goes back to George W. Bush, Republicans refusing to make a deal, a grand bargain on immigration because they thought the issue was working for them and it has worked for them, and Trump knows that, which is why he deep-six the deal that they had at the start of the year.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know or remember enough American history to know if that dynamic has been a constant feature of our politics. In other words, you have people on two sides of an issue battling over whether it’s taxes or immigration or trade or whatever the case may be, and particularly on an issue that has deep resonance with that party’s base and even independence and even some people from the other party and maybe it has growing resonance over time. Has it always been the case that there are members of a party who have that view and are in that position to not want to win and to just have the issue?

For example, there’s an issue like this now on the progressive side, right to an abortion.

George Packer:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

I think very, very badly, most Democrats want to win the issue. In other words, they want to have those rights restored. And in the process, it’s strategically helpful politically to be able to bludgeon the other side, and maybe that’s what tempered the losses in the midterm, et cetera, et cetera. But how do you think about that dynamic in the present as it relates to progressives versus conservatives in the present moment?

George Packer:

Yeah. Well, those are the two big wedge issues this year, and you see them in Arizona where I spent a lot of time in the last few year. Abortion has risen as a great tool for Democrats to bludgeon Republicans because of State Supreme Court decision and state legislature. And of course because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and immigration cuts the opposite way.

We should never romanticize the past and imagine that politicians somehow were more high-minded. They were never more high-minded. I think the incentives were a bit different maybe 50 years ago where it wasn’t going to end your career to make a deal with the other side. In fact, all the major legislation of the great society, the Civil Rights era, environmental legislation under Nixon, all of it was bipartisan.

And going back to Arizona, all of the policies that allowed Phoenix to survive with five million people and have enough water for all those people, those were bipartisan policies. There are no longer bipartisan policies for water in Arizona, which is a real crisis. And there are no longer bipartisan policies, much of them at least in Washington, especially on cultural issues that go to people’s sense of the core values of right and wrong.

And it’s partly because our primaries are now raked to use the word so that the extremists are always going to win.

Preet Bharara:

Careful.

George Packer:

Yeah. Sorry. They’re at least jiggered. They’re at least arranged so that this is where Andrew Yang comes in. He would like there to be ranked choice voting and for primaries to allow third parties and moderates to have a chance, and that would be a good thing for the country. But right now it’s the extremists who control the primaries and make it a real career threatener to cross the line.

I’ll give you one example from my piece. A man named Rusty Bowers was the Republican Speaker of the Arizona House during the 2020 election and after the election, Trump and Giuliani called him, as he was driving home from church and basically said, “We think this election was rigged. We think there were fraudulent votes, and we want you to call a committee of the Arizona House and put some new electors in, Trump electors.”

And almost every other leader of the Arizona Republican Party either caved into this or was happy to go along with it. But Rusty Bowers said, “No. I’m not going to do anything illegal. That sounds illegal.” Rusty Bowers is out of politics. The Arizona Republican Party destroyed his career because he crossed the line and stood up to the would-be dictator.

And it’s very hard it seems for politicians to face their own demise as politicians. It seems that almost every case you could think of, they’d rather destroy their honor that have their career end. I don’t quite know what’s so great about being in the House of Representatives that that’s the case, but it seems to be the case. And so when the incentives are so partisan, you could call them tribal, and going against an incentive is so fatal. We’re stuck. We’re stuck with these endless problems that we can’t solve.

Preet Bharara:

And relatedly, it used to be that achievements matter and legislative victories matter. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about and I wonder what you think about this. Have we reached a stage where we have, for various reasons, an incentive structure that doesn’t reward legislative or other accomplishment?

You can now be the most famous or one of the most famous members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene and have not one accomplishment to your name other than being snarky and other than making headlines for saying outrageous things and being a lackey or a cult member of the Trump faction. And meanwhile as spectacle wearing liberals say all the time, and I hear them and I know where they’re coming from, and of the same mind, Ken Burns has been saying, I think very persuasively for the last few weeks as he’s come out of his nonpartisan shell, that Joe Biden arguably has the third-best set of accomplishments for a president in the modern era after Roosevelt and after Lyndon B. Johnson. And nobody seems to give a shit. Why is that?

George Packer:

That’s a very good question. Back to Phoenix for a second. The three major legislative achievements, the infrastructure bill, the climate bill, the microchips bill brought and will bring tens of billions of federal dollars to the Phoenix area for those three reasons. Nobody knows about them.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

George Packer:

Nobody. I asked this one state representative, “When you go door to door, do people talk about those three bills and whether they might bring jobs here or whether you might see a new factory going up?” “No. They don’t talk about them. They don’t even talk about Biden,” she said. Biden is a non-factor in the lives of her constituents.

Now why is that? I think one reason is Biden, if he ever had it, has lost the ability to hold public attention with his speeches, his rhetoric. He just doesn’t do it.

Preet Bharara:

But isn’t something more than that?

George Packer:

Yeah. It is more than that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

George Packer:

It’s that the way in which people consume politics, think about politics, the way media presents politics is what did Marjorie Taylor Greene say on the floor of the House, or what did she tweet? What did AOC tweet? And what was the answer? And that becomes the story.

And those three bills, they’re boring, they’re complicated, they’re long-term, they’re not going to have an effect right away. And so whose career, whether in politics or in media is really going to benefit by talking about them? Once you make that calculation, then your legislative accomplishments don’t matter. What you want is to make a name for yourself as a gadfly or as a bomb thrower, which is apparently what people are now running for Congress to do and people are leaving Congress, retiring because they don’t want to do that.

Preet Bharara:

Could you write a book, and you don’t have to use this title, but maybe something like the New Attention Politics? And I wonder if you think Donald Trump has had a huge role in this or it’s just a combination of factors, both relating to media and how we consume news and our addiction to screens.

I mean, people who listen to this podcast regularly have known me to say this many times. I don’t think that Donald Trump’s goal was ever to become the most powerful person on earth or become the president. He wanted to be the most talked about person on earth, the person to whom the most attention has ever been paid on earth, and one path to that is to become the commander-in-chief of the United States of America.

And that’s what I was hearing in the answer to the question you were giving a few minutes ago, and if it is the case that attention grabbing is significantly more important to your electoral success and your survivability in political contests than actual legislative achievement, which is boring and hard to persuade other people to give you credit for, and other people lie and take credit for it as well. I don’t mean to sound too dire, but what does that mean for democracy?

Just on this infrastructure point, there are many things that irritate me about politicians, particularly those on the far right. The thing that upsets me the most is members of the House and Senate who take credit for shit, this the second time I’m cursing, and as we get closer to the election, I’m going to warn the audience-

George Packer:

I’m getting you a little bit riled, I can tell.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to warn the audience, you’re going to hear me do that more, I suspect, who voted against legislation that brought stuff to their district and they’re putting out press releases saying, “I brought this to the district.” If ever there was an example of complete and utter miserable, disgusting hypocrisy, it’s that, but they’re getting away with it. Discuss.

George Packer:

Yep. For example, Andy Biggs, who is a far right congressman in the Southeast Phoenix Valley area, a Trump sycophant who was essentially cheering on the insurrectionists in January 6th, voted against all of those bills that we’ve been talking about. And now that money is going into part of his district, I think it’s Chandler for Intel, of course, he’s taking credit and he’s counting on his constituents not paying enough attention or not caring enough to know that he had nothing to do with it. In fact, that he tried to stop it.

And because it’s such a deep red district, there’s no Democrat who can run against him and say, “This guy’s a hypocrite and a liar,” and make any progress because he’s already the wrong tribe and no one is going to listen to him. So the tribe determines what you believe.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

George Packer:

It determines the truth, and that’s why we are in this post-truth world because if Trump says those January 6th people were not criminals, they were warriors. They were just exercising their free speech rights as Americans. Well, that’s become the truth to a lot of people on the right regardless because he says it and because it’s convenient to believe it.

But let me try to cheer us up with one thought. In the Phoenix area, in Arizona, one issue I found that did not quite make people as crazy as we’re saying was water. And I think it’s because water is so basic and essential that if your well goes dry because a Saudi alfalfa farm or a California based or Minnesota based dairy farm is pumping all the groundwater next door to your four acres, and your well is no longer deep enough to reach the groundwater, and your state representative is refusing to allow any bill that could allow the state to regulate those out of state and out of country corporations from using your groundwater, you might begin to think that you need a different representative or a different policy.

I saw that happening in the most conservative county in Arizona, and that told me as crazy as we are and as unable to grasp the truth with both hands, there are these issues, there are these life experiences that are so essential that they might make you sane, politically sane, as long as your tribe hasn’t made it impossible for you to keep being sane. That might not count for much.

Preet Bharara:

I like that.

George Packer:

But that’s-

Preet Bharara:

If we’re dealing with something-

George Packer:

… that’s a little straw I’m holding on to.

Preet Bharara:

If we’re dealing with something that the absence of which is the quickest cause of death, then people will come together. Is that what you’re saying?

George Packer:

I don’t know that that’s true because COVID was a cause of death and some people refuse to believe in it while they were dying of it. So the human mind’s ability to rationalize, to deny, to not see what’s right in front of your face is limitless, but I did see the disappearance of water having this awakening effect on some very conservative folks out in rural southeastern Arizona.

Preet Bharara:

You think if America gets another Trump term, America will have deserved it?

George Packer:

Don’t we always deserve it?

Preet Bharara:

I think so. I think so. But I didn’t know if that was a controversial statement.

George Packer:

In this case. I mean, Preet, think about it. In 2016, maybe it was a kind of a I don’t like that woman vote or I’m tired of that Black guy in the White House vote or he’s a businessman, he’ll know how to make the economy come back vote.

Now we know who he is. No one’s under any illusions, and either you think that everything he is and stands for is antithetical to your values and what you want this country to be, or you are willing to overlook the worst of him because you think he’s going to appoint the right people to the courts and cut your taxes and your regulations or you love it. This is what you want. You want someone to blow it all up.

Preet Bharara:

Because he owns the libs.

George Packer:

That’s right. What can be more satisfying? I should say domestically one thing that really worries me is we might well see the tearing apart of a lot of our communities if Trump unleashes local law enforcement that’s sympathetic to him on undocumented people here because I do think he likes to inflict pain and he could inflict a lot of pain in Arizona, in New York, and really all over the country by shredding what there is of community fabric that involves undocumented people who are paying taxes and sending their kids to our schools.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Well, on that note, George Packer.

George Packer:

Yeah. Sorry.

Preet Bharara:

No. Look, I think I go back and forth between wondering between now and the election, should one be optimistic or should one call it like one sees it and raise all the red flags, which I don’t think are being raised high enough or loudly enough because I think it would be catastrophic to have another Trump presidency.

I think a lot of people who also think that way a little bit have their head in the sand and shake their heads and say, “They really don’t think that’s going to happen.” I don’t know how they can say that given that it happened before under less favorable circumstances to him. He has more favorable circumstances now, notwithstanding the criminal cases and notwithstanding the criminal conviction, and it can happen and it has a very good chance of happening. And so all alarm bell ringing to my mind is welcome.

George Packer:

I agree. The Atlantic is doing a lot of that ringing. I don’t know whose mind we’re able to change. People know who he is.

Preet Bharara:

Well, the elitist are already with you, George.

George Packer:

Yeah. The elitist are with us, which is maybe what the millstone around our necks because the elitist don’t seem very popular right now in the country and around the world, and Trump knows that, and that’s been the game he’s played so shrewdly all along, to divide the people from the elites.

Preet Bharara:

Although in India-

George Packer:

Yeah. In India.

Preet Bharara:

… I don’t know if we can take any lessons from that. Modi cruising to a landslide victory, everyone thought and expected the most popular elected leader in the world by a wide margin. He didn’t get handed a defeat, but he got a little bit of a drubbing. Any lessons there for the United States?

George Packer:

I think it’s just unknowable. It’s a different country. You look at France and Macron just got a big slap in the face in the European parliamentary election, so much so that he feels like he has to call an election in France in order to call the bluff of the French people and find out if they really do want the far right to govern.

There’s obviously a long-term trend around the democratic world against liberal democracy and against elites and globalization and Davos and trade and immigration on the part of a lot of people who feel that they’re not being heard or being left behind.

The key thing is for democratic, small D politicians, to hear them, to listen to them, and to try to make their lives better. I think Biden has done a pretty good job of that, and that’s why-

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know how well it’s working.

George Packer:

It’s just not working. That’s the hell of it. It’s just not working.

Preet Bharara:

And maybe it’s the case that the through line, the trend that can be relied upon is that people ultimately just want change. And so if you have a number of years of conservative rule, people want someone else. If you have a number of years of Modi, same. If you have a number of years of Democrats, you want something different, and so I don’t know if that means we should get another Trump term for people to get out of their system.

George Packer:

People are just aggrieved. They don’t like the way it is. They want it to be different. That is a fairly constant thing in human affairs. But look at the alternative. That’s what I would say. Look at the alternative. The alternative is not just Trump, the alternative is Putin.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Okay. Now on that note, we even reached a lower note than the prior low note. You’ve been very generous with your time, George Packer. Congratulations on the piece. People should spend some time with it, “The Most American City.” That’s extraordinary. Thanks so much.

George Packer:

I always love talking to you, Preet. Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with George Packer continues for members of the CAFE Insider Community. In the bonus for insiders, we discuss how identity can be a form of social division.

George Packer:

I don’t care if a Supreme Court justice flies a MAGA flag because-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Because I got Roe overturned.

George Packer:

Exactly. The ends justify the means.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

Before we wrap the show this week, I wanted to leave with a bit of an upturn. As George Packer and I spoke about the extreme heat in Phoenix is very serious, dangerous, and even deadly. The climate crisis is having an impact on cities and communities all over the world in different ways, and heat is a major one.

Last year was the hottest year on record, and there’s a good chance that this one may beat it. After I read Packer’s article, I came across another. Fast company reported ways that cities around the globe are responding to extreme heat as it continues to intensify. Many cities, including Houston and Phoenix, are prioritizing the planting of trees whose shade can cool areas by more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

In fact, new research from European cities has found that increasing tree cover to 30% could reduce extreme heat death by 40%. In places like Abu Dhabi, Arnhem in the Netherlands and cities in China, architects and engineers are redesigning buildings and public spaces like parks and roads to specifically address extreme heat.

One example is shrinking roads to lessen amounts of asphalt. Another is building walls that strategically channel wind. In Spain, local authorities have actually begun naming heat waves much like we do with hurricanes. Naming a recent heat wave in Sevilla, Zoe, helped to communicate to the public that it was a serious threat, which triggered residents and emergency workers to prepare accordingly. Research is showing that the strategy is working.

New York City is promoting a program to paint some roofs and streets white for free, which is incredible because nothing is free in New York City. White roofs reflect the majority of harsh sunlight, cooling buildings and the surrounding area. And in Phoenix, which Packer focuses on in his piece, the city’s office of heat response and mitigation is working to protect their unhoused residents by providing free bottles of water, cooling towels, and rides to cooling centers across the city.

Local organizations are also working to create large shady areas for folks to get out of the sun. Of course, no one solution or person is going to be the magic fix and much bigger structural changes are necessary to mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis. But it is always encouraging to see communities all over the world innovating and collaborating to protect the most vulnerable among us.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, George Packer.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producer is Noa Azulai. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Jake Kaplan. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.