JEFFREY GOLDBERG: âTonight, a conversation with one of America's leading writers, George Packer, who will join me to discuss nothing less than the future of the American democratic experiment, next.

Good evening and welcome to the last Washington Week of 2024.

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.

I want to turn to a subject that doesn't give you particular hope at the moment, which is the immediate future of the Democratic Party.

You've been very critical of the Democrats for veering into identity politics and away from the interest of the working class, of working people.

Here's what you wrote recently in The Atlantic.

The triumph of the Trump reaction, which is what you call this whole political moment we're in, the triumph of the Trump reaction should put an end to two progressive illusions that have considerably strengthened it.

One is the notion that identity is political destiny.

For a long time, the Democratic Party regarded demographic change in America, the coming minority majority, as a consoling promise during interim Republican victories.

As the country turned less white, it would inevitably turn more blue.

Not true.

And, by the way, you mentioned a second illusion about majoritarianism, which you say by this theory, the Democratic Party is kept out of power by a white Republican minority that thwarts the popular will through voter suppression, gerrymandering, judicial legislating, filibuster, the composition of the Senate and Electoral College.

By this thinking, the ultimate obstacle to the American promise is the Constitution itself.

That doesn't sound like a winning cause, particularly.

GEORGE PACKER: Especially now that we're hearing about some Republican legislators who want a second constitutional convention and who are pushing for it because they want to turn the Constitution into Project 2025.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, why did Kamala Harris lose in the framework of what you're writing here?

GEORGE PACKER: There are other things outside the framework, I think, that had a lot to do with it, inflation, the border, Joe Biden waiting far too long to do what he should have done all along, and then Kamala Harris being installed by party elites instead of nominated by a democratic process, so all of that.

But I think the larger problem is the Democratic Party has become the party of the establishment, of the status quo, of the institutions, which is not the worst thing to be.

They need defending, but they also need reforming.

And not along the lines that the party has been pursuing, which has been basically to believe that the most basic identity of a citizen is group identity based on race, gender, sexuality.

And that is how the party's organized itself.

It's how it's seen its constituents, how it's come to various positions on cultural issues.

And I think in doing so, it has lost a large number of ordinary Americans who don't see themselves primarily in those terms, who are mostly working class, middle class, and who used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party.

If you look at the party 50 years ago and today, it's almost done a reversal with the Republicans losing its working class base and inheriting college-educated professionals who used to be the Republican Party's base.

And that, to some prognosticators, seemed like a good direction to go in and it has turned out not to because there are a lot of non-college educated Americans of all races and they are moving toward the Republican Party.

And that is not a winning strategy.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Something that's really notable in the last round was that the elites, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, surprised to the point of being shocked that black people, black men in particular, Hispanic men in particular, would vote for somebody, Donald Trump, who has said outrageous, offensive, racist things about those groups.

What are you taking from that?

What are you taking from both that reality and also the surprise of the elites?

GEORGE PACKER: Yes.

Well, they shouldn't be that surprised because this has been a trend over the last few election cycles.

So, you have to pretty much wipe your mind of the memory of those demographic numbers from the last couple of elections to think that this couldn't happen.

It's been happening for a while.

It really happened this year.

Because if you look at, say, where I live, New York, the borough where Harris' numbers went up over Biden's in 2020 was Manhattan, the most white borough, the group over $100,000 income, so in other words, well to do white people, whereas in Queens and the Bronx, where it's a nonwhite majority, Trump improved his numbers.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Asian also, by the way.

GEORGE PACKER: Asian, Hispanic, black.

So, I was standing in a giant crowd outside Madison Square Garden right before the election, trying to get in to hear the final Trump, yes, the big New York rally where all kinds of crazy things were being said.

I couldn't get in.

There were too many people.

But I had a maybe more interesting experience was I standing in a group of three guys who were Trinidadian immigrants who lived in Flatbush, which is a very black and Latino part of Brooklyn, immigrant part of Brooklyn.

They were wearing full MAGA regalia.

And I said, why are you here?

Why are you for him?

The price of eggs, we're not respected around the world, and that stuff he says, we just don't listen to it.

We don't take it that seriously.

And, by the way, there are a lot of people like us in Flatbush.

They just don't wear the MAGA hats, but they're there.

They were right.

And they have to be listened to and taken seriously and not told you have false consciousness, you're voting against your interests, all the things that Democrats have said about people like that.

How about hearing what they say and then thinking, how can we appeal to them without betraying our values?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Do you think the Democrats are going to reform in order to beat the next Republican?

GEORGE PACKER: I don't think so.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Why?

GEORGE PACKER: I think it'll take longer than that, because, first of all, I don't see the immediate aftermath of the election moving in that direction.

I don't see a kind of party-wide sense we have to do something different, which is what happened after '88, when, for the third straight time, a Republican wiped out a Democrat for president, and because these are entrenched ways of thinking and ways of organizing the party.

And they can't be uprooted quickly.

There are interest groups whose entire purpose, not just financial but idealistic, is to push the party in the direction that I think has cornered it in a way that makes it less and less popular with the broad American public.

And they're not going to go away either.

The donors, who are the financial backbone, may not feel the economic pressures that ordinary people do and may be more concerned with the cultural issues.

So -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: A million bucks buys a lot of eggs?

GEORGE PACKER: Yes, it does.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's my slogan.

GEORGE PACKER: I think that could be a good one for 2028, if anyone wants to grab it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

I'm going to do something terrible to you now.

We have like about a minute and a half, but I want to ask you about America's role in the world.

You're going to have, basically by the time I finished talking, a minute to answer whether the next Trump administration is going to bring an end to the 80-year period of the post-war liberal order that America has undertaken.

Obviously, you have a lot of experience covering foreign policy and America's adventures and misadventures and attempts, idealistic attempts to remake the world.

Give me a minute on how isolationist and how post-NATO, to put it in shorthand, we're going to see this administration.

GEORGE PACKER: Well, like the drift toward of the working class for the Republican Party, this has also been going on for a while.

If you look at how many wars have broken out, the Biden administration has pretty much been unable to work its will on in the last few years.

It's clear that we are not the unipolar power that we were after the end of the Cold War, but we still stood for something.

And that something actually was important.

Of course, we violated it.

Of course, we're hypocrites, like any great power, but we stood for a certain order, a certain set of values, a certain liberal view of the world.

And I think that could collapse very quickly under Trump because he doesn't believe in it.

In fact, he wants to destroy it and so do the people who he's putting into key positions.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, we'll have you back next year to see how that's going, but I'm really glad that you joined me tonight.

Unfortunately, we do need to leave it there for now.

I want to thank George for being here and for sharing his analysis.

And to our viewers at home, thank you for joining us.

You can find more of George's excellent reporting at theatlantic.com.

From all of us here at Washington week, we want to wish you and your loved ones a wonderful New Year.

I want to thank the great teams here at Washington Week and The Atlantic for a terrific year.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.