#160 — The Revenge of History
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Summary
In this episode, I speak with journalists Michael Weiss and Yasha Monk about the state of global politics, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, and the prospect that democracy could fail in the U.S. We discuss Trump and his political instincts at some length, the political liability of wokeness, the left's failure to rethink support of Chavez in Venezuela, the dangers of political polarization, the attractions of extreme partisanship, cancel culture, and other topics. This conversation was recorded about a month ago, so the recording date would explain why we might not mention the most up-to-the-minute embarrassments of basic sanity and common decency you might have noticed in the media of late or in your Twitter feed. As always, if you get value from this podcast, I encourage you to support it by becoming a subscriber at Samharris.org. We re currently making changes to the website there, and there will be more subscriber-only content coming soon, but your support is what allows me to do this without relying on outside sponsors of any kind, and without alienating sponsors who might not be as interested in my work as I'd like to be included in the making of the podcast in the future. Thanks for your support, you re helping me make sense of the world! Sam Harris - The Making Sense Podcast, by Sam Harris This is a podcast that s all about making sense, not just of things that make sense, but also of people who are making sense of things, and they can help me do that, too. - My pleasure, my pleasure, by you, my love, and I'm so much more than that, you're a good friend, too, thank you, I'm grateful to have you, and you're welcome, I'll give me a chance to help me, I say that, I appreciate you, so I'll send you a good day to me, you'll say me a cup of coffee, good night, good day, good thing, you say that I'm all of that, etc., etc., I'll say it, I love you, good things, etc. Thank you, bye, good morning, good evening, good bye, thanks, bye bye, bye... - MRS. - Sarah, Sarah & Yasha, Sarah, Cheers, Cheeeeayayayeeeee, good chance, good luck, bye? - Cheeayeee - Sarah & Joee
Transcript
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I've been spending less time on social media of late, and I think that trend will probably
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We've got some good people coming up on the podcast.
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Judea Pearl, the father of the Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by
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But Judea is also one of our most celebrated computer scientists.
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And I've got some other good people coming up soon.
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As always, if you get value from this podcast, I encourage you to support it by becoming a
00:01:43.300
We're currently making changes to the website there, and there will be more subscriber-only
00:01:51.900
But your support is what allows me to do this without relying on outside sponsors of any
00:01:57.360
Which, if you knew how often I encounter people who are afraid or otherwise unwilling to say
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you would know what an unusual circumstance you've helped me create here.
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Today I'm speaking with two people, Michael Weiss and Yasha Monk.
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Michael is an investigative journalist who has covered the wars in Syria and Ukraine and
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focused on Russian espionage and disinformation.
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His first book was titled ISIS, Inside the Army of Terror, which he co-wrote with Hassan Hassan.
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And that was a New York Times bestseller and named one of the top 10 books on terrorism
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As well as one of the best books of 2015 by the Times of London.
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Michael's a regular guest on CNN and MSNBC and the BBC, and he writes a column for the Daily Beast.
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And Yasha Monk is a writer and academic and public speaker known for his work on the rise of populism
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He's an associate professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund
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and also a senior advisor at Protect Democracy.
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He writes for The Atlantic and The New York Times,
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and he also hosts the Good Fight podcast on Slate.
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Yasha has written three books, Stranger in My Own Country, The Age of Responsibility,
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and his latest, The People vs. Democracy, which explains the rise of populism and talks about how to renew liberal democracy.
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Anyway, this conversation was recorded about a month ago.
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Everything we talk about is still entirely relevant,
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but the recording date would explain why we might not mention the most up-to-the-minute embarrassments of basic sanity
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and common decency you might have noticed in the media of late or in your Twitter feed.
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the prospect that democracy could fail in the U.S.
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We discuss Trump and his political instincts at some length,
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the left's failure to rethink support of Chavez in Venezuela,
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but Yasha, we have just met for the first time.
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And I brought you guys together because I think you are both extremely astute political minds,
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and I was surprised to learn you two have never met.
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So I picture you both impaneled at the same conferences.
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But I thought we could talk about just areas of mutual concern.
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You know, I have a few nouns floating around in my head that I think we can connect.
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Things like liberal and illiberal democracy, populism, Trumpism,
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all of these trends that make me wonder about the political landscape now,
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both at home and abroad, and where this is all headed.
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But it seems that we can take very little for granted right now, politically,
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and that we're now part of history in a way that hadn't been so obvious a couple of years ago.
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So I want to say we, those of us privileged to be in the West who could have imagined that they were not part of history at some point in their lives.
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What do you, first, for those who don't know you, what do you focus on,
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and what are your foremost concerns at the moment?
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You know, I started worrying about the state of our democracies sort of before it was cool.
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I saw the rise of far-right populist parties in various European countries throughout the early 2000s.
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You know, I observed things like the appeal of Sarah Palin in 2008 here in the United States.
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I did some survey work with a colleague we're about to for that showed that
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people give a lot less importance to living in a democracy than they used to,
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that they're more open to certain authoritarian alternatives to democracy even.
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So I sort of connected the dots and started shouting into the wilderness, saying,
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Perhaps our democracies aren't really stable, and people said to me, you're Cassandra,
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And then 2016 came, Donald Trump won the United States, you had Brexit.
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Since then, you've had the rise of people like Bolsonaro in Brazil,
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And so I've sort of become, over the last couple of years, one of the sort of chief populism
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I studied history as an undergrad, and then got bored of that.
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And then I thought, those texts are really interesting, but I kind of want to think
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So I started doing a sort of political philosophy, and then I thought, well, it's nice to think
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about what the world should be like, but actually, there's really important things going on
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So now, I suppose, I'm just a sort of general-purpose political scientist.
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Okay, Michael, who are you, and what are you worried about?
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Well, like Yasha, I suppose I specialize in catastrophe studies.
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I actually, I think if there's a theme to the work that I've done as a journalist, it's
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looking at totalitarianism and some of its lesser offshoots.
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So obviously, I wrote this book on ISIS, which was a deep dive into Middle Eastern jihad
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and the wellsprings of it, both theological but also materialist.
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I mean, the last time you had me on, we talked at length about why people were joining this
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Not always because they were fundamentalists or they had been ideologically brainwashed.
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Nutella and Grand Theft Auto, that was the big lore.
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I'm glad we have a meeting of the minds here on that topic.
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And now, I mean, well, actually, I shouldn't say this.
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Before I was even interested in the region at all, I was more interested in communism, Soviet
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I had done a lot of, as an amateur, I mean, in college and then post-college.
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Reading on Soviet history, Soviet literature, and also the debates that had been taking
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I have a sideline hobby in New York intellectuals who congregated around partisan review in the
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And I always find myself coming back to their polemics and their essays.
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And I never thought after, well, I suppose I didn't come into a political consciousness
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But certainly when I was in university, these things were dead and buried, right?
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It was the end of history was definitely in the ascendant as a kind of conceit in political
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science, even though there were plenty of people who were pushing back against it, saying this
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And so in many ways, I suppose the tie that binds my intellectual fascination is movements
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that ought to have been consigned to the dustbin of history, but keep coming back around for
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whatever reason and reinventing themselves and how they reinvent themselves.
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So, you know, we bandy around words like fascism and now socialism has become au courant again.
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And how are these things being used and deployed in the 21st century context as opposed to the
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I mean, maybe we should define or unpack that phrase, the end of history, which I know you
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This is due to a very influential article by Francis Fukuyama and then a book by that title.
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I don't know how he's weathered the disconfirmation of his thesis, but Yasha, do you want to tell
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Yeah, I mean, the idea of the end of history became a sort of meme before we started really
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And I think a lot of people caricature what Francis Fukuyama was arguing in big ways.
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But basically, you know, he published this article in The National Interest in, I think,
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the summer of 1989 saying that ideologically liberal democracy has won.
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That the idea of self-determination and individual liberty no longer has real competitors because
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the Soviet Union has been discredited, fascism has been discredited.
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The, you know, Islamic regime and Iran does not offer an alternative that's appealing to
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And so even though, as he put it in that article, there's still going to be historical events that
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will be recorded in the annual chronicle of foreign affairs, you know, in the larger Hegelian
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sense, in the larger sense of what history is headed towards, history has ended.
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And I sort of always like to defend Fukuyama because, you know, when I was a grad student in
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political science at Harvard in the late 2000s, people laughed at Fukuyama.
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They didn't take the idea of the end of history seriously.
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But I learned as not gospel truth, but certainly something that we believed in, an article by
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two political scientists who would never use grandiloquent claims like the end of history,
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saying once a country has changed governments for free and fair elections a couple of times,
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and once it's reached a GDP per capita of about $14,000 a year, it was consolidated.
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And there was every bit as much a claim about the end of history as what Fukuyama ever said.
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We now have sort of the theory-busting cases that show that you can have democracies that
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So if you remember the famous speech by Winston Churchill in 1946, an iron curtain is descending
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across the center of Europe from Szczecin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.
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Like, I sort of noticed that you can now drive along that old iron curtain through Poland
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and Hungary to Austria and Italy and never leave a country ruled by authoritarian populists.
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And now, in some countries like Austria and Italy, there's clearly still democracy,
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and the governments are undermining that in certain ways.
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In other places like Poland and Hungary, democracy is really on the line.
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And when I was in Schopron, a small Western city in Hungary in March, I was struck by the
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You know, you talk to ordinary people in the street and you say, hi, I'm doing a documentary
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And you put the microphone away and say, look, you know, I'm not going to use your name.
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But if I tell you that, I might lose my job tomorrow.
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And even interestingly, the people who support the government are afraid to talk to you because
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they think if they somehow end up saying one critical thing, or perhaps we sort of selectively
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edit to make them say something that they're not actually saying, they're going to get in
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So that culture of fear in the heart of Europe, in a country that's a member of the European
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And, you know, it's because somebody came in as a populist saying, all of the political
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And instead, what they've done is to abolish independent institutions, to undermine individual
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rights, to put loyalists into the courts and the state media and the Electoral Commission.
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And even for Viktor Orban was definitely elected democratically in 2010, it's now no longer
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And Hungary is a country that does have more than two changes of government for free and
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It has a GDP per capita of just over $14,000 a year.
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And also what's interesting to me is Hungary and Poland, the leadership in both of these
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countries had come from this anti-totalitarian or anti-communist tradition, right?
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And they have diverged from the inevitable liberal paradise that was meant to descend upon
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all of us to become more right-wing authoritarian populists.
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But still, within the context of how they see their national destiny, it's still being fought
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The people who informed, the people who worked with the Soviet satellite governments and all
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the rest of it, that's still used as a cudgel to smash their opponents.
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So that's another interesting aspect of all of this.
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These debates were not completely settled when we thought they were.
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And all of the factionalism and the intramural fighting that came out of what was.
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I mean, you know, you had all of these arguments before 89, like what was the main driver of
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But now, really, it's almost a fraternal split.
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The anti-communist movement has now shattered into a million pieces.
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You have your conservatives, center-right conservatives.
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And now you have, you know, your Viktor Orbans, who are essentially dictators-in-waiting, if not
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So how paranoid would it be to draw any kind of lesson from those examples for the U.S.?
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Like I once had, you know, this was early on when the full hysteria of Trump's election
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But I remember I had the historian Timothy Snyder on the podcast.
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And, you know, he's been not at all shy about drawing a very straight line between the example
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of any failed democracy and the prospects that ours could fail under Trump.
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He has these very vivid anecdotes of, you know, people going to the polls for the last time,
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not knowing it's going to be the last time, you know.
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And yet, needless to say, the pushback you get from Trumpists is excruciating whenever
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And, again, I think the stupor of the end-of-history assumption has not totally lifted for me.
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I mean, it does feel impossible on some level that America could ever go down that path that
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we just sketched or noticed in other democracies.
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Well, I think it depends on the exact nature of the parallel you draw.
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I respect Tim Snyder a lot, and I think he's done very important work.
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I also have some important disagreements with him, and one of those is about how useful
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I think fascism was, in many ways, quite different.
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One of the differences is that a lot of fascists quite openly opposed democracy.
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They said, look, all of this democracy, people squabbling with each other, this sort of bourgeois
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And then they paraded in the streets with brown shirts and, you know, little sticks of wood
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Now, if that was the situation, then it would be easy to recognize.
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Aren't there elements of Trump's behavior that echo that?
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I think the elements are cultural more than, I mean, look, if this was really fascism, and
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I'm not, by the way, I'm not one of these people who thinks, oh, America is going to be
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forever immune to these diseases and pathologies.
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I just don't think it's necessarily happening now.
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And the answer to that is, look at the institutions.
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The Republican Party got pretty trounced in Congress.
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This investigation, which he has tried by hook or by crook to obstruct and dismantle,
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meaning the Mueller investigation, still made it to completion.
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Yes, there are shenanigans happening between the White House and, you know, the special counsel's
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office, but we still have a picture of a deeply dysfunctional presidency.
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So all of his attempts, whether by Twitter, whether by mobilizing, you know, the real angry
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fanatical base that still supports him and will support him no matter what he does, American
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liberal values, American, the resilience in American society has bitten back.
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And I mean, I don't, this is not to say I actually happen to think he has a fairly okay chance
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A lot of that has to do, though, with what the Democratic Party is going to represent.
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I mean, we still do have an independent judiciary.
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Well, so I think they are more pessimistic, right?
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So I think, look, we're talking about Hungary, right?
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Comparing it to Hitler, I think, is unhelpful in all kinds of ways.
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Comparing it to Hungary is in some important ways also wrong.
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I mean, one of the things that I was struck by when I was in Chopron is that people had
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real fear about losing their jobs because a lot of them either worked for the state or
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in indirect ways, the job depended from the state.
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They worked for a little contractor who did most of their work for the local town and things
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The United States are very different in those ways, right?
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It's a much bigger country, a much richer country, a country with more independent power
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In Hungary, most newspapers live to some extent from government advertising.
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So you can not just take over the important state broadcasting agencies, but you can basically
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force the private media to follow your line as well by taking away advertising of a criticizer.
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We've had a very active press in the last two or three years.
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But it's done, along with some very silly op-eds, some of the best reporting work in the history
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And unlike in Hungary, people can't shut up about how much they hate Donald Trump.
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They're outspoken in their criticism of this government.
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Now, at the same time, I do think it's important to see the parallels.
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The first is in the nature of the movement we're facing right now.
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So what populists do is to say that they and they alone represent the people.
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So they promise to represent the people, which means they promise to be more truly democratic.
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But they don't acknowledge the existence of any power centers independent of them.
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And they don't understand that people can have different political views and still retain
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And both of those claims are very, very dangerous because it's why one populist after another
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starts to vilify and marginalize minorities, whether religious or ethnic.
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And it's why they cannot accept the rule of law, why they cannot accept the existence of
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And so when you look at the rhetoric of Orban in Hungary, of Erdogan in Turkey, or of Donald
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Trump here in the United States, them calling opposition parties traitors, them calling the
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This started even before the election, where he was open-minded as to whether or not he would
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accept the results of the election if he lost, right?
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And he was calling for the imprisonment of his rival.
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And encouraging people to physically assault journalists who are covering him critically,
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which is to say, honestly, enemy of the people.
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A lot of these tropes, which are not accidental, I don't think, particularly, you know, to my
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mind, the most dangerous thing that this president still poses is Bannon has gone from the White
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And you see now, he's gone to Europe to try and essentially export his political savvy.
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I mean, this whole idea, this Breitbartian notion, you know, politics is downstream from
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Like I say, I think Trump is much more effective as a cultural reactionary than as a political
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And that's because as a political neophyte, I mean, his first office was president of the
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He is completely befuddled by the fact that he can't simply order his attorney general
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to investigate his enemies and have that done the next day.
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He is astounded at the fact that the White House counsel cannot terminate a special counsel
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investigation into obstruction of justice and Russian interference.
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And like the snap of his fingers, Thanos-like, this gets done.
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That to me suggests, and that's not to say that a simpleton or somebody who's completely
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uninitiated into the vagaries of American politics is not dangerous in his own right.
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But again, what worries me more is, you know, the rise in race hatred, the rise in anti-Semitic
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hate incidents, particularly in places like New York.
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And people argue about, well, is Donald Trump responsible for this?
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I do think he's created the mood music, the atmospherics for this.
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I don't like the word polarization because it doesn't really adequately describe what we're
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But when, you know, he describes out-and-out fascists, marching to the tune of Jews will
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not replace us, as there's some fine people on both sides and traffics in this kind of
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moral equivalent, he is giving license to the worst elements of the society.
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He is giving them a sense of impunity that they can carry on in a way that they hadn't
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ever been able to do before, and now they have the imprimatur of the presidency with which
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Although, just on that point, in his defense there, and I rarely come to his defense, if
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you look at the full video from that press conference where he supposedly said nothing
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to denounce white supremacy, he does denounce white supremacy.
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The problem with the left now is that they're so scattershot in their attacks on him.
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You don't have to lie to paint Trump as a racist or a bigot or a grifter or a con man because
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he's undoubtedly all of those things, but in that case, there's a few things muddy in
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One is that you had Antifa very likely initiating the violence against neo-Nazis who had a permit
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There was violence coming from both sides, and that's not to say that Trump hasn't, as you
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say, created the mood music for racism and white supremacy, but I think we have to be careful
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on every one of these points because the amount of energy that Trumpistan draws from every
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error here, they can just point to the video of him decrying white supremacy.
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Sure, but this is also a man who took a very long time and tried to dodge at every opportunity
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And the reason for it was, again, it doesn't mean that he's pathologically...
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Well, he claimed not to know who David Duke was when we do that with a lawsuit.
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This is not, and to Yasha's point about these facile comparisons to Hitler and the Third
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Reich and really deeply motivated, bulk-style fascism.
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David Duke and white supremacists, they support me, and I like anybody who supports me and who
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So why am I going to go out of my way to denounce these people, even if I don't really like the
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But that itself, again, goes to this kind of cultural reaction.
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And I do think it's important that we don't get caught up in the details of those things.
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You're right that we have to be very careful about the claims we make.
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But I do think there's a larger story to how he thinks about politics and how he's trying
00:26:48.640
Now, lock her up is an incredibly extreme statement.
00:26:52.660
I mean, the very basis of any democracy is that you might think of your political competitors
00:27:04.280
But you have to recognize their legitimacy in saying, I'm going to go and put her in prison
00:27:11.340
The fact that at one point in the debate, he seemed to call in doubt whether he would
00:27:17.440
There's still a very real question in my mind about whether Trump would have acknowledged
00:27:21.700
the legitimacy of a 2016 election if he had lost it, and what he will do in 2020 if he
00:27:29.280
So I think it's important to go back to the larger question we're asking about, okay, so
00:27:32.340
to what extent are we seeing the system under threat here in the United States?
00:27:36.740
Now, you have a similar set of forces pushing against it, as in Hungary.
00:27:42.340
You have older democracy, a more affluent democracy, trying to defend itself.
00:27:51.400
Well, the first thing I would say is that, as you said earlier, Michael, Trump is not a
00:28:02.140
Now, that both means it is less likely that things will go deeply wrong in the next couple
00:28:07.920
It also means that if we get a smarter, more strategic, more ruthless incarnation of the
00:28:17.360
same energy, it might be able to do a whole lot more damage than we've seen the last couple
00:28:23.200
The second thing I would say is that if you go back and read the New York Times, the Wall
00:28:31.840
Street Journal, about Turkey in 2003, in 2005, a few years, three years, even five years into
00:28:41.180
Erdogan, even 10 years into Erdogan being the prime minister at the time of Turkey.
00:28:48.060
And they're all saying Erdogan is deepening democracy in Turkey.
00:28:51.580
He's finally bringing a form of moderate Islam into the Turkish government, overcoming some
00:28:57.640
of the very real discrimination against religious Muslims in Turkey.
00:29:01.860
This is a Muslim form of Christian democracy that's going to give us actual democracy.
00:29:06.600
Smart people thought that for many years, not seeing the ways in which Erdogan was undermining
00:29:11.140
democracy and well on his way towards becoming a dictator.
00:29:16.720
It is not, in none of these cases, not in Venezuela, not in Turkey, does a populist come
00:29:21.620
in and three years in, it's obvious it's a dictatorship.
00:29:26.320
And so then look at what the institutions actually are doing right now.
00:29:32.540
You both have just put your finger on the thing that worries me, that to my eye, Trump
00:29:47.080
He is, as you said, Michael, just a black hole of narcissism.
00:29:52.640
And that is the thing that determines everything he does.
00:29:55.680
And it just so happens that aligns with an authoritarian shtick as a politician.
00:30:00.080
But it's just so astonishing to me that he has succeeded to the degree that he has, and
00:30:06.020
that he has this personality cult around him where it's not even that he has policies that
00:30:13.460
They just, on some level, they're enamored of him as this anti-norm, you know, or this
00:30:22.340
And I don't know if it's just kind of the spirit of reality television, whether people just like,
00:30:27.380
they just want to tune in for the next episode, and they just like that it's exciting, and
00:30:31.960
the liberal media has gone berserk in response.
00:30:34.520
But the fact that we're here with someone who so obviously lacks the real tools of political
00:30:42.440
genius and insight into how things work, you know, that's scary.
00:30:47.640
I think what he was actually very masterful at tapping into is the amygdala of American
00:30:52.900
politics is to say, the establishment is corrupt.
00:30:56.560
The establishment is cheating everybody, right?
00:31:00.820
And what he did very cleverly, and I don't credit him with the kind of political savvy
00:31:06.660
that like a Sorkov in Russia has, who really sort of has a playfulness with which he plies
00:31:15.400
With Trump, though, it was, hey, you know, I'm already corrupt, but at least I'm telling
00:31:23.100
I cheated the system, let me show you how to cheat it too, or let me show you how it
00:31:28.700
And this resonated so well with so many people, not even Trump supporters.
00:31:31.780
But that's such an amazing point, because he's, so he's, he objectively lies more than
00:31:36.500
any person anyone has ever seen, and yet that line showed up as a kind of authenticity.
00:31:45.300
He's honest about the corruption in the system.
00:31:51.420
His best moment in the primaries was when Hillary Clinton was asked why she attended
00:31:55.560
his wedding, and he was asked why he had invited Hillary Clinton.
00:32:00.720
And Hillary Clinton, with a tortured look, said something like, well, I thought it would
00:32:05.900
And everybody knows that Hillary Clinton's idea of fun is not to go to Donald Trump's wedding.
00:32:11.620
And Trump said, well, I'm a real estate developer in New York, I got to get along with all these
00:32:17.600
So he was actually admitting to corruption of a certain form.
00:32:22.220
He certainly was admitting to taking part in the corruption of the system.
00:32:28.600
He said, well, I did it because I had to get along with influential people.
00:32:31.460
Also, when she said you haven't paid taxes in however many years, he said, that makes
00:32:36.080
Now, prior to Donald Trump, would any American politician stand up at a debate and say, I've
00:32:41.260
never paid any tax money in 10 years or whatever it was.
00:32:45.120
But for him, not only was that a sort of impulse response, but he really does, and this I
00:32:51.640
think he was right about, there are Americans out here who don't want to pay taxes.
00:32:58.460
He claims he made all his money himself, which is not true.
00:33:01.620
He inherited a lot of it, certainly born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
00:33:06.960
The system that has cheated us, maybe what we need is a con artist and a fraud.
00:33:11.420
But somebody who says, who sort of pulls back the curtain and shows the Wizard of Oz,
00:33:16.500
Or at least pretends to, which is what he really does.
00:33:18.800
He's not actually showing the heart of corruption in the American system.
00:33:23.920
That resonated very powerfully with a lot of people.
00:33:26.000
And we can get into this conversation later if you want, and I'll hold my thoughts on it.
00:33:29.500
But what you're now seeing on the left in this country is an attempt, I think, at least certain
00:33:35.760
quadrants of the left, to replicate Trumpism, but from a progressive point of view, this sort
00:33:43.780
In fact, I just read a piece in the FT, Financial Times, about Bannon trying to create
00:33:48.840
a kind of academy for the alt-right in an abandoned or old monastery in Europe.
00:33:53.840
And he said, you know, one of the things that he's alighted upon in Europe is this fusion
00:34:00.500
It's sometimes called red-brownism, although that's complicated too, for reasons we just
00:34:03.600
discussed, why we shouldn't traffic in these sort of outmoded comparisons to fascism, communism.
00:34:08.120
But anyway, you know, in Italy, for instance, left-wing populism, right-wing populism, they
00:34:14.360
find a happy marriage together in Salvini, right?
00:34:17.420
And Salvini, by the way, people forget, I mean, Legon Nord, he founded the first Stalinist
00:34:27.260
So he's had a kind of ideological promiscuity, similar to those in the 20th century who made
00:34:35.340
But the point is, Bannon, more than anybody on a cultural level, understands, look, the
00:34:42.420
It's not Republican, Democrat, it's not even liberal, conservative.
00:34:45.480
It's who wants to tear it all up and start again.
00:34:48.440
And that can apply just as easily on the right as it can on the left.
00:34:54.860
And I think, again, to me, the danger is the left overreaction to Trump threatens to do
00:35:04.900
I mean, my fear is in part a kind of left authoritarianism, and we're seeing in Venezuela
00:35:14.540
In the American context, I think that's a lot less likely.
00:35:17.260
So I'm not worried about Bernie Sanders becoming president.
00:35:20.420
I'm worried about Bernie Sanders being the candidate of a Democratic Party, ensuring that
00:35:32.240
One point about the way in which Trump profits from this elitist, which is that it's sometimes
00:35:42.400
puzzling, I think, to understand why things that he says that most Americans really do
00:35:47.840
And there's good evidence that they dislike that when he calls Mexicans rapists and so
00:35:52.860
That is not something that the majority of Americans wants to have any kind of track with.
00:35:58.240
But what happens is that all of the people who the majority of Americans hate condemn Trump.
00:36:05.580
And they have good reason to condemn Trump when he says those things.
00:36:08.820
But they look at that and they say, do I like what Trump said?
00:36:12.320
But if all of those guys hate him, there must be something right with him.
00:36:18.220
And I don't actually know how to get out of it.
00:36:19.900
I don't think people should shut up about, you know, should stop condemning terrible things
00:36:26.220
But there is a strange way in which it helps him.
00:36:29.920
Because all of the Democrats and all of the sort of more moderate Republicans standing up
00:36:34.720
and saying, how dare you say this, makes people look at him and say, oh, yeah, he is the
00:36:39.320
one who actually is willing to say things and who's not like the rest of them.
00:36:45.520
Yeah, well, I do see that directed at me occasionally by people who are smart.
00:36:52.900
Again, we're more than two years in and I'm still mystified by this.
00:36:56.100
But it seems like a kind of nihilistic delight in just getting a rise out of his political
00:37:07.240
It's that it's created a situation where apparently there's nothing he could do that's
00:37:13.800
sufficiently odious to cancel the delight that his fans feel in watching people react
00:37:22.860
It's kind of a superpower that he's got politically.
00:37:27.960
Well, that's why I think it's mission critical to never be wrong.
00:37:31.100
But if you say if you say he didn't condemn white supremacy and then we can go to the
00:37:35.620
tape and he did that undoes 100 good things you might have done.
00:37:43.440
The marchers in Charlottesville find me a good person.
00:37:45.640
But let's take a simple example of what you were just saying, Sam.
00:37:49.200
I mean, I was on Twitter, you know, a few weeks ago and everybody was as I was reading
00:37:54.800
it, reporting that Trump had said, oh, Boeing, they should just rebrand the 737 MAX and put
00:38:03.180
And I was like, well, that really seems ridiculous.
00:38:05.240
And I actually went to Trump's Twitter tweet and it turns out that he had said we should
00:38:09.540
fix it and then rebrand it, which is a silly thing for a president to say.
00:38:13.660
I don't know why the president of the United States should be giving branding advice to
00:38:16.400
Boeing, but it's very much not what I had gotten the impression on my Twitter feed.
00:38:22.640
It's definitely a case when I thought, look, Trump says so many odious things.
00:38:26.620
Do we really need to exaggerate his silly tweet about Boeing to get like a little point on
00:38:34.000
And, you know, look, the extremists always manage to thrive and exploit the failure of
00:38:40.860
center parties, whether it's center left or center right, to address real problems in
00:38:46.600
You know, for a brief flickering moment, the British Nationalist Party did quite well, I think,
00:38:52.040
in the European parliamentary elections were going on, what, 10 years ago now.
00:38:56.360
And the reason was they were some of the only people banging on about immigration and its
00:39:02.940
Labor and conservatives just refused to touch the issue as too hot button or whatever.
00:39:07.440
Trump, with his comments about, you know, well, somebody's doing the raping and his ridiculous
00:39:13.060
xenophobic remarks about Muslims and Mexicans, is tapping into a genuine concern a lot of Americans
00:39:19.860
have about rampant immigration or about, well, what's going to happen now that this post-Arab
00:39:25.600
Spring Middle East is on fire and we have, you know, it's give us your tired, your poor,
00:39:29.640
or we just don't know where they're coming from or what their ideological motives may
00:39:35.720
He's just addressing them in a sensationalistic way.
00:39:39.300
But at the same time, encoded in his commentary is, if you criticize me or you attack me for
00:39:46.600
what I'm saying, you're just, you're another exponent of political correctness.
00:39:50.660
Remember, in the primary, the first thing he did was, we do not have time, I don't have
00:39:57.980
That's a valid argument when made by people who, in good faith, who say, yeah, I think culturally
00:40:04.240
there is something about, you know, condemning a man before all the facts are in, or jumping
00:40:09.220
the gun, or as we say on Twitter, virtue signaling when you don't even know what the hell you're
00:40:18.220
So listen, I don't want to spend all the time on Trump, and I want to swing to the left and
00:40:23.540
do a post-mortem on the pathologies we detect there.
00:40:29.640
But, Yasha, you said something that had a Snyder-esque echo, at least in my brain, which
00:40:46.160
Whether he will accept the results of that loss and what that portends.
00:40:51.060
But also, should we get him for four more years?
00:40:54.060
Is there a further erosion of democracy or institutional norms that you worry about?
00:41:06.700
Well, again, it depends exactly on what you mean by that.
00:41:09.700
Look, I mean, I remember in 2016 having debates with political scientist friends of mine about
00:41:17.340
what would happen in the Republican Party if Trump won the presidency.
00:41:21.380
And there's basically optimists who said, the Republican Party, you know, these people
00:41:27.920
have a very different set of ideological beliefs.
00:41:33.040
They're not going to go along with what he does at all.
00:41:39.360
And then there's pessimists like me who said, no, Trump has more support than the sort of
00:41:46.020
So over time, he's going to be able to primary people and to run his own candidates.
00:41:52.120
And it'll be a civil war in the Republican Party for four or eight years.
00:42:01.600
Actually, what happened is that the party grandees just rolled over and flipped.
00:42:07.540
In 2016, I would have said, well, perhaps they'll primary Lindsey Graham.
00:42:12.500
Well, just think of the fact that Trump could dance on McCain's grave while he was in advance
00:42:21.040
I mean, just speak badly of a dying man who was objectively a war hero and the best friend
00:42:29.120
I mean, you know, Yasha, you're here for the Milken Institute.
00:42:31.600
I moderated a panel with Lindsey Graham on it about ISIS and the threat to the Middle East
00:42:37.520
In 2016, when Graham was one of the most outspoken anti-Trump Republicans backstage, and I've
00:42:44.620
said this publicly, so I have no problem betraying the confidence, it was Lindsey Graham on one
00:42:48.720
side, Tony Blair on the other, having a competition, an auction for self-pity as to whose party has
00:42:54.260
lost its fucking mind, you know, more, the British Labor Party or the Republican Party.
00:42:58.580
And Lindsey Graham was saying, I don't understand why we can't just chuck him out of the party
00:43:03.840
Wanted him gone from the GOP and now has become this sort of vanguard defender of the faith.
00:43:14.800
And then, you know, if you jump to what's happening with the Department of Justice, I think that's
00:43:21.420
I mean, it is now very obvious that we have an attorney general who openly says he's the
00:43:26.220
president's lawyer, as opposed to the lawyer of the United States, who has, and I don't,
00:43:33.020
you know, I don't want to get into the Mueller report and all of that.
00:43:35.980
I was never somebody who, I thought it was very important to make sure that Mueller wasn't
00:43:40.180
I never thought that the report would show that Trump is a secret Russian spy or anything
00:43:44.360
like that, but who clearly misrepresented the nature of it.
00:43:48.000
You have Trump calling on investigations of his political opponents in a situation in
00:43:55.100
which some of the more reasonable people in the Department of Justice are leaving, in
00:43:59.900
which Barr is quite clearly saying he's just representing the interests of Trump.
00:44:05.520
I wouldn't be entirely astounded if there is a politically motivated investigation into
00:44:11.600
the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate or one of his close associates in a way that
00:44:21.420
Now, I am not saying that Trump is going to steal the election in an outright way.
00:44:26.960
I'm not saying that if he loses, he will refuse to leave the White House.
00:44:31.880
He will go and undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the system all along.
00:44:37.800
But if he's in power for four more years, and if he's succeeded by somebody who's a little
00:44:41.960
bit more popular, who is a little bit shrewder, I think it would be naive to assume that American
00:44:52.480
And I mean, I can speak with some insight here, because I still report on Syria and U.S.
00:44:59.120
All of Trump's instincts, complete withdrawal, take the oil, you know, let the Russians sort
00:45:07.380
All of these things have actually been rebuffed, and not just once, but repeatedly.
00:45:12.400
You know, Trump campaigned on military withdrawal from Syria.
00:45:16.140
And, you know, frankly, let's just bomb the shit out of ISIS and go home.
00:45:23.860
Policy that had been cobbled together by the Brains Trust, such as it is, with the National
00:45:30.300
Security Council and some of his Mideast hands.
00:45:32.440
Remember, there were still, at the very beginning of the administration, some good people in
00:45:35.740
government, particularly at the level of the State Department, even to the level of the
00:45:40.060
The only reason this man, I think, wasn't indicted by Mueller for flagrant obstruction of justice
00:45:45.900
is because, frankly, professionals in the White House kept him from committing overt crimes.
00:45:51.100
I know you don't want to get into Mueller, but that was my takeaway.
00:45:53.300
McGahn basically said, I'm not going to do this.
00:45:57.400
Similarly, with respect to U.S. policy, maybe not at the domestic level, I know that's not
00:46:02.340
my bag, but foreign policy-wise, you know, one of his apologist's main lines is, well,
00:46:10.700
Look at how hard this country has been on Russia, whether it be sanctions or supplying
00:46:14.920
javelin anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainians or now standing up to Putin's proxy Maduro in
00:46:21.380
Well, yeah, I mean, with Venezuela accepted, where Trump has been quite outspoken, the
00:46:25.660
institutions of American government, I mean, it's very difficult to get things done.
00:46:29.760
Like, there is a Treasury Department for a reason.
00:46:31.780
Doing sanctions is not—I mean, the president can dictate policy, but the implementation of
00:46:39.100
We didn't recognize Crimea as Russian Federation territory.
00:46:42.000
All of the worst-case scenarios didn't come to pass because of the sort of—the staves.
00:46:50.480
And that gives me a little bit of hope and optimism.
00:46:54.580
Somebody more sophisticated who's seen what Trump has done in terms of tenderizing the
00:46:59.640
electorate and making the rise of a real authoritarian possible, that's the real danger.
00:47:05.140
Because, you know, it's never the first guy out the gate.
00:47:07.940
It's usually the one who follows, who has, you know, more wisdom and more experience that
00:47:17.160
The wokeness on the left that is obviously on some level a response to Trump, but it predates
00:47:27.740
And I think we all detect that there's a problem in principle with identity politics.
00:47:33.980
But to point that out is to be convicted again and again of insensitivity with respect to
00:47:41.720
the underlying concerns like racism and gender equality and everything else that has pushed
00:47:48.820
people to identify with some subgroup first and foremost, whether defined by the color of
00:47:58.940
And yet, at least to my eye, it is so obviously a losing hand to play in the current environment.
00:48:08.880
I mean, forget about the foundational ethics of it or where we want to be in 100 years as a
00:48:17.220
If your concern is just to bar the door to Trump in 2020, amplifying the wokeness is a disaster.
00:48:28.040
It is totally possible for decent ethical people to disagree about what our immigration
00:48:36.740
And if you are going to stand on the left and equate any concern about immigration or any
00:48:42.640
concern about having a defensible border with racism every time, there are enough people
00:48:48.100
in this country who are sick of being called racist when they're not actually racist who will
00:48:52.960
vote for Trump over your woke candidate who's framing everything in terms of racism and
00:49:04.360
And I don't know if we want to talk about specific candidates at this point, but what
00:49:07.900
are the stirrings on the left do to you at the moment?
00:49:11.040
I mean, I suppose, you know, to your point about the political non-viability of maximum wokeness,
00:49:17.640
I mean, you know, Bernie Sanders is not for open borders.
00:49:22.380
He's spoken about, you know, a firm immigration policy, but firm, you know, according to Bernie
00:49:27.900
No candidate, I think, is running on, you know, this absolute kind of utopian concern or
00:49:35.140
conceit that the United States should just let everybody in, no background checks, nothing.
00:49:40.620
Yeah, look, wokeness to me is political correctness from the 90s turbocharged and taken to really
00:49:49.080
I mean, I was in university, not in the, well, late 90s to early 2000s.
00:49:53.280
There was elements of this then, but it was the kind of thing, it was on the wane then.
00:50:05.600
But yeah, no, I mean, we were talking earlier offset about Twitter and the kind of cesspit,
00:50:10.260
almost the kind of Stasi-like mentality that persists when you, it's not even, look, it's
00:50:16.840
not even about somebody saying something really ridiculous and overtly offensive and then having
00:50:21.860
It's trying to inject a little bit of nuance or being even at a little variance with liberal
00:50:27.440
orthodoxy can get you pilloried, you know, and publicly shamed.
00:50:31.200
And though, to my mind, the one saving grace of all of this, and Yasha, you can speak to
00:50:37.180
this because you've written about it, very online culture, as it's called, or, you know,
00:50:42.800
the internet wokeness is not at all reflective of American social reality.
00:50:50.520
Because I feel that the fact that Trump got elected without anyone realizing he was going
00:50:55.600
to win was an example of the Twitterverse being the real world, and we didn't notice it.
00:51:03.860
Well, I'm not sure, you know, on the night of the election, Nate Silver said there was
00:51:07.480
a one-third chance that Donald Trump would win it.
00:51:12.520
I mean, you're not going to agree to play Russian roulette two or three times, which would
00:51:16.760
give you a one-third chance of losing your life, right?
00:51:18.940
I mean, so, you know, the polls picked up what people actually thought.
00:51:22.640
And when you poll people about some of the issues that are at the center of what you
00:51:28.160
are calling wokeness, they don't have very much support at all.
00:51:31.280
So I wrote a piece in The Atlantic late last year about the number of people who think that
00:51:35.460
political correctness is now a problem in this country, and it is about 80% of Americans.
00:51:40.160
And by the way, it is a higher number of people of color in this country than of whites.
00:51:47.760
I don't know if you wrote this article or not, but I remember someone, I think it's a New
00:51:52.320
York Times piece, that the woke social justice warriors are, for the most part, privileged
00:51:59.860
This is not people of color who are lining up by and large along these ideas.
00:52:06.860
So what's interesting is when you look at the people who, in the words of this very, very
00:52:11.640
good hidden tribe study by an organization called More in Common, progressive activists.
00:52:16.520
It's about 8% of the population with those kinds of beliefs, and they are far, far more
00:52:21.300
likely than the general population to be white.
00:52:23.360
They're about twice as likely to earn more than $100,000 a year, but three times more
00:52:30.100
And of course, white people who are very liberal have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the
00:52:36.640
views of people of color in the United States are for two reasons.
00:52:39.160
First, that a lot of black people vote for the Democratic Party for the simple reason
00:52:43.320
that in its current incarnation, parts of the Republican Party really are racist.
00:52:47.280
So obviously, even a black person who's pretty conservative in all kinds of ways is not going
00:52:54.320
So a huge majority of blacks in the United States vote for the Democratic Party, but when
00:52:59.440
you ask them to self-identify as liberal, moderate, or conservative, only 27% of them say liberal.
00:53:05.660
Well, 30% say conservative, and 40% say moderate, which is really quite striking.
00:53:12.240
So we need to get out of the categories of Twitter.
00:53:16.040
We need to understand that if you're a white listener to this who probably has a good degree,
00:53:21.860
a good job, the people who you know in your world who are people of color are likely to
00:53:27.000
be pretty liberal, because most people in your world are likely to be pretty liberal.
00:53:31.760
But that is not a good stand-in for the majority of people of color in this country.
00:53:37.380
Well, and the irony of all this is the term itself, woke, began, I think, in the African-American
00:53:43.780
And the idea was it's to raise consciousness about the plight of American blacks, whether
00:53:49.940
it's through police brutality, lack of employment opportunity, or the relative economic status
00:53:57.260
It has now been co-opted, or it's, I don't know to what extent, and I haven't seen any
00:54:02.840
studies on this, it's used parodically, or it's used in earnestness, but it has been
00:54:07.200
And I remember this because the first time I ever used it on Twitter, you know, a colleague
00:54:11.020
of mine who's black, who's very much part of what's known as black Twitter said, why
00:54:17.660
She's like, ugh, it was only a matter of fucking time before they took this from us, too, in terms
00:54:23.520
And yeah, because when you're being beaten up or choked out by the cops, or being accused
00:54:29.180
of, you know, violent crimes you haven't committed, you don't have time to worry about a third gender
00:54:37.940
You don't have time to have the kind of ridiculous, arcane debates that eat up so much time right
00:54:44.660
I mean, so two funny things today on Twitter, and I couldn't help but relate the two.
00:54:48.620
One was millennial college students want to eject Camille Paglia from, I forget what the
00:54:58.180
And number two, according to The Economist, millennials are not having sex.
00:55:01.660
I think if millennials are having more sex, they wouldn't be worried about Camille Paglia
00:55:04.820
and what she's written over the course of 25 years in a pretty accomplished academic field.
00:55:10.480
And I guarantee you, you know, the downtrodden and the oppressed, not to use that word sardonically,
00:55:16.960
but truly, don't give a shit about Camille Paglia and what academic organization she belongs
00:55:26.000
So here's something that I think is important, though, for making progress on these issues,
00:55:30.560
which is that we could spend a lot of time beating up on the silliest manifestations of
00:55:43.880
I mean, I think it's important to criticize it.
00:55:45.340
It's important to point out some of the craziness.
00:55:47.560
But I think what's more important is actually to argue about what kind of country we want
00:55:52.400
and to point out the poverty and the vision of what a lot of progressives now envisage
00:56:07.100
So what I see is, for example, in the thesis of the inevitable demographic majority, that's
00:56:17.860
Identity politics always means very different things.
00:56:20.920
What I see in it is basically saying, look, we have, you know, people of color vote for
00:56:26.440
the Democratic Party much more than white people.
00:56:30.560
So we just have to sit pretty, sit tight, and 30 or 40 years from now, we'll win every election.
00:56:36.220
Now, I think that's wrong for all kinds of empirical reasons that we could go into.
00:56:39.480
Yeah, although I'm impressed with someone who can care about the self they'll inherit
00:56:42.660
30 or 40 years from now and be motivated by that.
00:56:44.700
Well, there's a sleight of hand there where it goes from by 2044 we'll be a majority-minority
00:56:49.040
country to, well, we're sure to win the next election if we only mobilize that base,
00:56:53.260
So that's sort of, you know, they pretend that you don't have to be patient until 2044.
00:56:58.060
I think it's not going to happen in 2044 either for various reasons.
00:57:04.360
Do we want a society where 30 years from now I'll be able to walk down the street and
00:57:10.940
observe, oh, you're black, you must be voting for the Democrats.
00:57:13.520
Oh, you're white, you must be voting for the Republicans.
00:57:17.640
Do we want a society in which there's a big block of deeply resentful white people,
00:57:25.820
deeply resentful white people, deeply resentful people, which isn't the case?
00:57:28.740
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