Joining me tonight to make sense of this year and America's future, which is a big job, admittedly, is George Packer.

George is my colleague at The Atlantic and was my colleague at The New Yorker, and he's known far and wide for his penetrating analysis of American history and American politics.

George is the author of many books, including the bestselling The Unwinding, An Inner History of the New America, which won the 2013 National Book Award, and is widely understood to be one of the most prescient books of the pre-Trump era.

Across his distinguished career, George is a reporter from Iraq.

He was one of the first reporters to recognize from the streets of Baghdad that the American invasion was going sideways, as well as from war zones in countries and turmoil around the world.

Tonight, we're going to focus a bit on turmoil at home.

George, welcome.

Welcome to the show.

GEORGE PACKER, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: It's good to be with you.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: âThanks for coming on.

So, let's start with your biggest piece of the year, What Will Become of American Civilization?

You really give you headlines that are daunting.

Obviously, the piece which ran in the summer of 2024, it was written before Trump's second victory, but it was written, I think, with Trump very much in mind.

The backdrop is Trumpism.

So, for the story you spent many months in Arizona, which you kind of treat it as a crystal ball, in a way, for the future of the country and here's the way actually you describe the precariousness of the valley in which Phoenix sits.

Growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence.

Democracy is also a fragile artifice.

It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls, belief, virtue, restraint.

Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the valley.

And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.

So, what did you learn about America in Phoenix?

GEORGE PACKER: So, you'll remember that you gave me the assignment to find a place that could be looked at as a test of the viability of this concern, namely the American experiment.

And our colleague, Scott Stossel said, go to Phoenix, and it was the right place to go.

Because in Phoenix you see tremendous dynamism, ingenuity, Arizona State University, which is a laboratory both for education, but also for technology.

It's one of the fastest growing regions in the country.

There's a lot of tech there.

There's A.I., there's a microchip manufacturing.

So, it is a hub, a hive of American entrepreneurship and enterprise.

It's also stricken with the consequences of climate change.

It's been a once a millennium drought for a few decades, so that parts of the valley that depend on groundwater, where there's no municipal water system, wells are running dry.

And people, it turns out, it doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, if your well is running dry, you're out of water.

It's also a place where politics is lived at the extremes, I would say, where during the 2020, after the 2020 election, when Donald Trump decided to try to overturn the results, he zeroed in on Arizona and on the speaker of the Arizona House, a man named Rusty Bowers, a conservative Republican, who refused to Trump's and Rudy Giuliani's demand that he throw out the vote and put in some Republican electors instead of the legitimate Democratic electors.

There is a MAGA force in Arizona Republican politics, Kari Lake and others, that is as wild and as devoted to the lie of election theft as anywhere in the country.

So, you have this precarious combination of fast growth, heat, which is part of climate change, and disappearing water, and political tension, which borders -- it always feels like it, it might be bordering on violence.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, one of the things that, that fascinates me about Arizona is how quickly it went from McCain Republicanism to Trumpian Republicanism.

How do you explain that?

I mean, John McCain, we were talking ten years ago, we would say John McCain is the most dominant political figure, most dominant Republican, certainly since Barry Goldwater in the history of Arizona, and then one day gone.

GEORGE PACKER: Yes.

And that Arizona Republican Party is basically gone.

And it was the business party.

It was the party of conservative corporations, businesspeople, retirees who came to Arizona for the good life.

And, basically, the people who made up that party, led by John McCain, have either died or become - - made their peace with MAGA, or been driven out of the party, which is what happened to Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the House.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

GEORGE PACKER: So what happened to it was Trump, once Trump emerged as the dominant force in the Republican Party.

It seemed that he had a natural constituency in Arizona.

There's something insurgent like about politics there.

People's roots are not that deep for the most part.

People haven't lived there that long.

Communities aren't held together as tightly as they might be, say, in the Midwest or the Northeast or the South.

And so it seemed like the threads that tied together the old Republican Party were not all that strong, and they snapped.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

One of the things that you warn about in your writing, generally, is hyper-partisanship, meaning a level of partisanship that could lead to actual fracturing of the American polity.

You said you found a lot of hyper-partisanship, and I guess its cousin, conspiracy thinking, conspiracism, in Arizona to a degree greater than you would find in many places, is it that shallow roots quality of Arizona?

Is it the immigration pressure of the issue and the reality of immigration?

What is going on there that creates that?

GEORGE PACKER: I think both of those are crucial, the fact that the border is there.

Although the new wave of migrants who've been coming in the last few years are not staying in Arizona for the most part.

They're spreading out across the country, but they're probably passing through.

They're crossing the border in Arizona.

There's a previous generation of immigrants, mostly from Mexico, who were the target of a long campaign by the former sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who was trying to get them deported.

So, there's a lot of tension around immigration.

There is the insurgent and sort of libertarian quality to Arizona politics that allowed people to say, I'm not going to stay with this establishment party.

I'm going to go over here.

And once they went over there, it seemed like there was no guardrail.

It just kept going so that eventually the nominees for all the major statewide offices, governor, secretary of state, attorney general, were extremists like Kari Lake, who thrived on propaganda and lies and who seemed to have no notion that there was a public responsibility to watch what you said, to be careful with the facts and to respect institutions rather than simply watching with pleasure while they burn down.

And so in Arizona, the Republican Party has gone quite far.

It's not an accident that the shaman of the January 6th insurrection -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The guy with the horns.

GEORGE PACKER: The guy with the horns, he's from Arizona.

I interviewed him when I was out there.

He's now a guy named Jason Chansley who -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You interviewed him at a Chipotle.

GEORGE PACKER: At a Chipotle.

And he was much reduced from the guy with the horns.

He was just a young man with a lot of conspiracy theories who was considering running for Congress so that he could get back into the Capitol building.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to note, by the way, that Kari Lake is an avatar of what you're describing has been nominated, or sort of nominated, it's a complicated process, by Donald Trump to run the Voice of America, literally the government operation that disseminates accurate information about the United States, or we hope accurate information about the United States and the world, in multiple languages across the world.

And you're talking about no restraint in rhetoric and no restraint in guardrails.

It's a very symbolic and fraught appointment.

GEORGE PACKER: Yes.

It's a little reminiscent of Matt Gaetz for attorney general.

I mean, she defaulted on a defamation lawsuit that was brought by Stephen Richer, the soon to be former recorder of Maricopa County, because she said that he threw the election of 2022 when she lost for governor.

And he essentially won that suit, and defamation is a very difficult thing to prove in this country for a public figure.

So, that's the person who's going to essentially be the source of credible information going out to the world from Washington through the voice of America.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Go back to hyper-partisanship for a second.

What are the symptoms of pathological hyper-partisanship?

What do you look for out there and what are you looking for in 2025?

GEORGE PACKER: One thing was within the Republican Party itself.

And Rusty Bowers told me what it was like to watch his party move in that direction.

The annual convention of the party started becoming riotous, a lot of yelling, a lot of denouncing, people demanding that everyone show their hands so that everyone could know who was with the Trump people and who was against them, a kind of loyalty test law, Kari Lake secretly recording a guy who was the head of the Republican Party and who was trying to get her not to run for governor and record -- not to run for senator rather and recording she recorded him in order to prove that he was doing that, and just a kind of self-purging of the moderates -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That one associates with the more extremist parties around the world.

GEORGE PACKER: It feels authoritarian.

It feels authoritarian.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It doesn't feel like an American political tradition.

GEORGE PACKER: It doesn't feel as if policy differences and clashes of ideas are what's driving us.

It feels like a power struggle of an authoritarian party in which there's going to be some blood on the floor, metaphorically speaking.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, although the threat of violence is something that you take seriously in American politics going forward.

GEORGE PACKER: If you've got armed groups standing outside the counting center while the vote is being counted in Maricopa County, in Phoenix, yes, I think, and they've been issuing threats on Twitter and writing personal emails to people like Rusty Bowers saying, you know, watch out, yes, I would take it seriously.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

You know this conversation, especially the, where the policy and the politics meet, remind me of that famous Fiorello La Guardia quote, Fiorello La Guardia for mayor of New York, quote, there's no Republican or Democratic way to collect the garbage.

And there's a piece of this article that is not pessimistic at all.

I think you started the reporting process thinking, oh, this is going to be dystopian, this might be a somewhat apocalyptic, especially you throw in the heat.

GEORGE PACKER: Yes, because you made me go there in August.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, I wanted you to experience the heat for yourself so you can explain it to the reader.

Hardship pay is coming any day now.

But there's this interesting turn the piece makes where you say, there are so many people that are trying to actually deal with the water crisis, for instance.

You did not leave hopeless at all.

We'll talk about that going into this very, well, exciting, dramatic year that we're about to go into.

GEORGE PACKER: Right.

Water is so basic that if you can't solve that problem, you can't live there.

And it's not certain they will solve that problem but there's a lot of technological reasons to think they're doing the right things.

There's amazing dam systems and underground storage and wastewater plants that are, you know, recycling it into potable or usable water.

So, there is a tremendous collective effort -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Across party lines?

GEORGE PACKER: -- across party lines that's been going on for over a hundred years to make sure that the valley, which is in the desert, remains livable for the 5 million-plus people who live there.

In the rural areas, it's even more interesting because that's where the wells are the only source and where the disappearing groundwater, which doesn't come back, is a huge issue.

And that has also kind of forced a reckoning across party lines where neighbors or local officials have to get together to figure out what to do and even pressure the governor and pressure state officeholders and their legislature above all to regulate it, which is it's not regulated now.

Rural groundwater is unregulated because they are afraid that they will not be able to live there for much longer.

And so that has concentrated the minds across partisan lines.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, that -- I don't want to sound Pollyanna-ish here, but it sounds like what you're saying is that when a crisis becomes truly dire rather than a performative crisis, when it's actually life or death, Americans have the ability to come together.

Again, am I being too rose-colored glasses?

GEORGE PACKER: I think we can.

I think it depends on certain things because you would not say that we're doing it for climate change, which is also a slow-moving -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I would not say it about COVID necessarily.

GEORGE PACKER: COVID, all kinds of things.

Climate change may be too remote and slow-moving, but it's coming.

It's there in a lot of places.

It's certainly there in the valley.

I think what it depends on is, first of all, a local area so that you actually look your neighbor in the eye and go to the town meeting where you have to talk to each other.

And that has been a key part of the rural areas.

I went to kind of coming to the light on conserving water.

It's because they have to deal with each other and they know they can't do it alone.

You can't just dig a deeper well and expect to solve the problem.

So, that -- and it's also a little bit populist because the enemy in those rural areas is not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.

It's the outside corporations, whether it's nut farms, dairy farms, or even Saudi alfalfa farms that are sucking up the groundwater at rates that is depleting people's wells because those corporations are sinking 2,500-foot wells instead of 500-foot wells to get the water.

Once you have an enemy that's a big corporation from outside, you can kind of get together with your neighbor no matter what you think about Donald Trump.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

By the way, that's the first time the expression Saudi alfalfa farms has ever been mentioned on Washington Week.

We'll focus on it.

I know.

It's very -- I mean, no, but it's a fascinating thing, and it brings up this idea of, you know, an external enemy unites Americans like nothing else.