Making Sense - Sam Harris - #296 — Repairing Our Country

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:38.900 okay well what's going on out there in the world i hadn't spent much time thinking about the british

00:00:54.380 monarchy i guess i've always had a good american skepticism about the validity of the institution

00:00:59.820 but andrew sullivan just wrote a really wonderful short piece mourning the loss of the queen

00:01:07.240 that gave me i think for the first time an appreciation of the value of a constitutional

00:01:14.060 monarchy at one point he quotes c.s lewis who wrote where men are forbidden to honor a king

00:01:22.440 they honor millionaires athletes or film stars instead even famous prostitutes or gangsters

00:01:29.560 for spiritual nature like bodily nature will be served deny it food and it will gobble poison

00:01:37.640 i disagree with lewis about many things i've always thought his defense of christianity was

00:01:43.240 fairly risible and i'm not even sure i agree with this quotation entirely but there's something

00:01:50.360 interesting there and sullivan continues writing the crown represents something from the ancient

00:01:57.880 past a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation

00:02:04.520 something that gives its members meaning and happiness however shitty the economy or awful the prime minister

00:02:12.120 or ugly the discourse the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time in a living breathing mortal person

00:02:21.800 so anyway this as i said gave me something to think about as though for the first time

00:02:27.800 and it strikes me now that a monarch when she or he is actually functioning as intended

00:02:34.920 is the opposite of a scapegoat in the bible in leviticus the scapegoat is literally a goat that's

00:02:44.600 imagined to contain all the sins of a community and then it's cast out into some wasteland to die

00:02:51.880 taking the sins of everyone with it now of course the phenomenon of scapegoating is something that happens

00:02:57.480 with people too albeit unwittingly and one can often see this you can see a community on the verge of

00:03:05.480 violence or just intolerable conflict can focus its destructive energy on a single person and use the

00:03:14.440 obliteration of this person whether in reality or just reputationally as a way of resetting itself

00:03:22.840 everything can go back to normal now that the witch has been burned

00:03:26.600 the philosopher René Girard wrote about this some and one can see a lot of this online now

00:03:32.840 the way a community increases in solidarity by sacrificing

00:03:36.600 individuals who commit some sort of blasphemy

00:03:40.760 perhaps this point's been made many many times because it seems somehow obvious but

00:03:46.440 the monarch in a constitutional monarchy seems like the opposite of a scapegoat

00:03:51.880 and queen elizabeth seemed to serve this role unusually well

00:03:56.040 she was the embodiment not of the community's sins but of many of the virtues it didn't even have

00:04:04.600 right virtues like discipline and dignity and self-restraint right the sacrifice of self

00:04:12.040 to the institution which the queen demonstrated to an incredible degree she was a kind of anti-celebrity

00:04:18.840 she was perhaps the most famous woman on earth but she was really a cipher she subordinated

00:04:25.400 everything to the role that she was meant to play it simply wasn't about her in place of her

00:04:32.440 personality she functioned as a kind of symbol of service to her country and of patriotism and of

00:04:40.840 civility and continuity and stability so in venerating the crown people were venerating all of these things

00:04:51.720 and as Sullivan points out all of these things are markedly absent in society at this point

00:04:59.800 anyway culturally and personally all of this is quite foreign to me but i can understand it

00:05:06.280 and i can understand why so many people felt so personally touched last week by the queen's death

00:05:13.080 which brings me to something that happened on social media that seemed to typify all that's wrong with

00:05:17.240 social media itself and with our larger culture a professor at carnegie mellon university wrote the

00:05:24.280 following on twitter when the queen was on her deathbed she wrote i heard the chief monarch of a

00:05:32.200 thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying may her pain be excruciating and then she wrote a

00:05:40.120 series of tweets defending this tweet after twitter removed it so anyway this professor became twitter

00:05:47.240 famous when jeff bezos reacted to her tweet i think i'm not even going to name her my intention needless to

00:05:55.160 say isn't to make a scapegoat of her i think i just want to point out that she's probably not this

00:06:03.000 terrible a person in real life right i think the existence of twitter is largely to blame for what's

00:06:10.440 happening here she's clearly a diversity equity and inclusion expert right so she's talking to a cult

00:06:19.640 and being rewarded for it and social media is what is providing the incentive here as well as the

00:06:27.240 mechanism for her to broadcast this opinion and it's providing the mechanism for everyone else to

00:06:33.240 discover just what an aberrant person this woman is or seems to be right and to react to that and there's

00:06:41.720 no possibility of anyone persuading anyone of anything right so our conversation more and more is

00:06:49.160 conforming to the epistemology of the mob and by mob i mean not mafia but the crowd and the mob is

00:06:59.320 unreasoning more or less in principle and it's unprincipled it has no limiting principles it has no mechanism

00:07:08.600 by which to detect or even care about its errors it's just pure advocacy and agitation is continually

00:07:19.160 shrieking about the worst of its opponents and is determined to see the worst in them now i've

00:07:26.120 experienced this both from the right and from the left and it's not fun coming from either side obviously

00:07:32.520 but what one sees once one ceases to take it personally is the dysfunction of it how people

00:07:40.680 aren't even making contact with the problems they're purporting to respond to all the while growing

00:07:47.560 increasingly certain that they are responding to some kind of moral emergency and what's more that

00:07:53.720 they're making progress toward solving it anyway i really think life is better than it seems online

00:08:01.480 and yet i'm increasingly worried that the distortions of reality one gets online is feeding back into

00:08:09.080 the world and making people more cynical and more distrustful and more despairing of making progress

00:08:17.640 i think social media is making us less capable of living good lives together anyway this is in part

00:08:25.640 the subject of today's conversation today i'm speaking with jonah goldberg jonah is editor-in-chief and co-founder

00:08:34.040 of the dispatch and the host of the remnant podcast he's a scholar at the american enterprise institute

00:08:42.280 and la times columnist a cnn commentator and the author of three new york times bestsellers

00:08:49.800 and he also worked at national review for two decades and today we speak about the whole catastrophe

00:08:57.080 really focusing mostly on the state of american politics and civil society we discuss the hyper

00:09:04.120 partisanship of the left and the right what trump has done to the republican party the breakdown of trust

00:09:11.000 in institutions we discuss this new catastrophism enabled by social media the problem of populism

00:09:19.400 and other topics and despite all of those dire things i thought we ended on a refreshingly

00:09:24.840 hopeful note and now i bring you jonah goldberg

00:09:29.000 i am here with jonah goldberg jonah thanks for joining me it is truly a pleasure and an honor to

00:09:41.000 be here thanks for having me yeah we've never spoken i've spoken to some of your friends and

00:09:45.160 colleagues most recently david french but i've admired your work from afar for years now and uh

00:09:53.240 perhaps you can summarize your background politically and as a writer how do you

00:09:58.600 describe your um pilgrim's progress at this point sure let's see i i sort of grew up in a pretty

00:10:05.160 political family both my parents were at one point or another journalists my mom was something of a

00:10:11.880 famous troublemaker she was involved in that lewinski scandal stuff and some other scandals to be honest

00:10:18.040 and i uh and we were i grew up on the upper west side of manhattan we were always politically

00:10:23.160 conservative so we were a bit like christians in ancient rome in that sense and my first job in

00:10:29.560 washington was at the american enterprise institute as a research assistant i was there or adjacent to

00:10:36.040 it for much of the 90s and then i came over to national review where i was the founder of national

00:10:43.480 review online and the founding editor of national review online and i was at national review in one

00:10:49.320 capacity or another for 20 years um in that time i worked i was a i was a contributor to fox for about

00:10:56.280 11 years and i mean my my conservative bona fides the only reason i'm bringing this up is i'm making

00:11:03.400 assumptions about why you want me to lay this stuff out are pretty solid i mean i i i joke and it's funny

00:11:08.840 because it's true i met pat pat buchanan at my bris um and so hopefully he didn't perform the bris

00:11:17.720 no i have friends who think that maybe this explains some of his problems with jews it's like my god

00:11:22.520 what do these people do um but um and then um in the run-up to in 2015 and 2016 i was one of many

00:11:31.880 conservatives who was deeply troubled by donald trump and thought this was a bridge too far and

00:11:39.000 was troubled by the rise of populism on the right and and then the ranks of people who saw the world

00:11:45.400 the way i did shrank quite rapidly over time until it was me david french and you know maybe a dozen

00:11:52.520 or so other people written three books i'm very interested in in intellectual history particularly

00:11:58.520 conservative intellectual history and i mean i i'm a syndicated columnist been running for the la times

00:12:04.200 for about 17 years i think and uh and you have the the dispatch so your main platform now is the

00:12:10.200 dispatch which you yes founded right my my and thank you for bringing that up because my my co-founder

00:12:15.080 would scream at me if i didn't mention it yeah in a couple years ago steve hayes and i steve was

00:12:19.480 formerly the editor of the weekly standard we launched the dispatch which is a you know unabashedly

00:12:27.640 right of center but fact driven place that is trying to prove that you can do honest serious

00:12:34.280 reporting and analysis from the center right without doing a lot of the fan service you see on a lot of

00:12:41.800 the parts of the right in some ways when i try to explain it to people of a certain age um i compared a

00:12:47.960 little bit in terms of the the editorial philosophy to the new republic in the in the 1980s and early 90s

00:12:57.000 you knew it was coming from a generally liberal perspective but it also had a in a more classical

00:13:02.280 sense a liberal attitude of of rejecting sort of cant and piety of being willing to call bs on its own

00:13:12.760 side and trying to do reporting um with some famous failures but trying to do reporting that was trying to

00:13:21.240 engage in making serious arguments that took the other side's arguments seriously and that's sort of

00:13:29.480 the spirit that we would like to have at the dispatch isn't going very well we're we're leaving

00:13:33.880 substack soon because we launched on substack as a full publication but since our launch i believe i

00:13:40.200 believe it's still true we maybe there's something going on in the last six months i haven't looked at but

00:13:45.880 since launch we've been the number one revenue generating product on all of substack and um

00:13:51.000 it's done very very well and um and we've assembled a great team about i don't know 25 28 people and

00:13:58.200 we're growing even more every day that's great that's great congratulations thank you though i do

00:14:04.200 i do think it's a troubling sign of the times that uh we're all having to rebuild civilization in this

00:14:11.320 piecemeal way on our own and uh we'll talk about the failure of institutions which i know is a concern we

00:14:17.640 share but um yeah i mean one of the reasons why i like you um putting your your conservative bona fides

00:14:27.800 up front is that one you know i i i don't have them right i i have been traditionally a liberal i have

00:14:35.400 i have never voted republican for anything you know on any point i don't think certainly not for president

00:14:42.760 and yet i'm often attacked as a partisan whenever i say anything negative about trump and my argument

00:14:51.800 has always been that there really is nothing intrinsically partisan in noticing his unfitness

00:14:58.760 for office and the um corrosive effect he's had on our politics which is to say that there's almost

00:15:04.840 nothing really you know absolutely nothing i i say about him that i would be tempted to say about

00:15:10.040 a republican like mitt romney right and it is also true that i spend more of my time criticizing the

00:15:16.840 left at this point for all of its obvious failings so it's just good to have someone like yourself or

00:15:23.800 david french or david from or you know many of the never trumpers to talk to on that particular point

00:15:32.200 and it's also interesting that it's just you know while we are coming from different places politically

00:15:37.240 i think we will agree about almost everything with respect to the the failings of trumpism and

00:15:45.000 the failings of the far left and it's just it there really is a reshuffling of political intuitions

00:15:51.800 here on many fronts and um so yeah anyway i think it's i think it's a good point and i've made a

00:15:58.360 similar point many times it's like if you're willing to reject the the sort of the group think

00:16:06.360 of either political party and stand up for i mean we're going to talk about institutions but

00:16:12.440 this sort of simple liberal institutions that define much of what it means to be an american

00:16:19.640 in a political at least in a political and in some ways a cultural sense too if you're classically

00:16:24.840 liberal at heart where you're willing to engage in good faith arguments and deal with with

00:16:31.080 inconvenient facts in a good faith way that that makes you something of an outlier from either side

00:16:39.240 these days and i'm not trying to do a symmetry between you know it's not a lot of people understandably

00:16:44.040 hate the both sides thing but there is this there is a remarkable you know mirroring going on

00:16:51.160 among the sort of the hard left and the populist right in terms of embracing identity politics kind

00:16:58.920 of arguments tribalist kind of arguments and and so there are people you know like you again we've

00:17:06.520 never spoken but like people like you people like jonathan height i can you know list a bunch uh yasha

00:17:12.920 monk who probably profoundly disagree with me about various public policies but agree with me about

00:17:20.920 sort of on on the epistemological level and agree with me on the sort of basic systemic or i agree

00:17:26.520 with them on the basic sort of systemic level about what are the institutions customs norms mechanisms

00:17:33.960 whatever you want to call them that preserve and define a free society and that creates this weird

00:17:40.520 sort of cross cross trans ideological kind of fellowship that i do think is is oddly i don't i don't know if

00:17:49.480 it's totally new in american politics but it's it's if it's been around it hasn't been it it's it feels

00:17:56.600 new at least in my lifetime yeah it certainly feels new and i i don't know how distorting a lens social

00:18:04.440 media has thrown over it but it does feel new and um i want to talk about the pathologies as we see them

00:18:12.440 on the right and among republicans but i don't want us to exclusively focus on that i really want us to

00:18:18.120 talk about what it would mean to repair our society at this point because i think many of us are

00:18:25.160 asking whether we're witnessing the beginning of the end of of our political and social order

00:18:31.880 in some sense and the breakdown of trust and institutions is certainly part of that

00:18:36.760 and perhaps the most galling part of that is that in many cases the loss of trust has been

00:18:43.240 well earned right i mean it's not just that people's attitudes have changed it's just there

00:18:49.080 has been a breakdown of competence on so many fronts and in so many crucial moments that um it's fairly

00:18:56.280 phantasmagorical at this point and it extends from everything from public health messaging from the cdc

00:19:03.400 and the fda to you know scientific and governmental institutions in general it encompasses the media in all

00:19:11.240 all its forms from journalism to hollywood there's now a serious question about whether we can run

00:19:17.800 free and fair elections and even if that's not really in doubt that there is a serious concern that large

00:19:24.280 segments of society will no longer trust the results of free and fair elections when we do run them

00:19:30.760 and there are new institutions that are proving corrosive of social order i'm thinking in particular of social media

00:19:38.760 and it does this in part by amplifying our doubts about everything and exaggerating the severity of

00:19:47.880 of real problems but also by inventing imaginary ones and it has just been a factory of lies and

00:19:57.160 misinformation at a scale we've never seen before and so you know to my eye what we have now we have

00:20:03.800 people on the far left who think that that racism and other forms of bigotry have in some sense never

00:20:09.400 been worse and you you've got someone like jk rowling who is who is their idea of a moral monster

00:20:17.320 and then we've got people on the far right who think that the you know at the far extreme of the

00:20:23.000 far right you know way out there in trumpistan they think the world is being controlled by child

00:20:28.360 raping cannibals so there's a kind of a radical core of craziness that is touching a lot i mean it

00:20:35.720 shouldn't have as much political surface area as it does but it really is distorting and and again it's

00:20:42.520 hard to know how much social media is magnifying this and how much that the mere magnification of it

00:20:48.840 is itself feeding back into creating you know real problems and and so there's like there's like a new

00:20:57.000 religion of catastrophism that is you know in many cases an exaggeration i think but also

00:21:03.960 the exaggerations result in a level of cynicism and distrust that can become a kind of self-fulfilling

00:21:10.200 prophecy so i i guess that's that's my general picture of what we're living through now i don't know

00:21:15.880 if it departs at all from yours but what is your view of american society at the moment yeah so i

00:21:22.440 let me put it this way i have days where i agree with you entirely and then i have days where like

00:21:28.200 maybe i'm too online i'm too in a bubble maybe i'm taking the the shadows on the wall of plato's cave

00:21:35.240 too seriously which is a lot of you know the social media stuff if you you can do these gut check

00:21:40.120 things like when you see a wildly viral tweet that has 5 000 likes or 10 000 likes and then you say

00:21:49.880 okay that's as many people as would fill a decent sized high school football stadium in texas

00:21:57.960 and you're like it gives you a sense that you know there's just a lot of stuff going on in america

00:22:02.200 most people aren't on twitter yeah most people aren't taking their cues from it you know the the

00:22:07.960 the sort of pareto distribution of how many people are extremely online and tweeting constantly

00:22:15.080 particularly political tweeting is very distorting and i think it creates real problems for for democrats

00:22:22.040 and democrat affiliated or you know sympathetic mainstream media you know we can get into it but

00:22:28.440 you know in a sane political climate you know you know james carville would have and i'm not a huge

00:22:35.720 james carville fan obviously but like james carville any old style serious politician the second they

00:22:42.040 heard some democrats say defund the police they would have gone on the phone and say shut up are you

00:22:49.000 crazy and you know at the height of the defund the police stuff the all the polling said that um something

00:22:57.320 like 80 percent or upwards of people of color wanted the same amount or more policing yeah no one wanted

00:23:05.480 no police no one and but this was one of these ideas that transmitted through this sort of pure petri dish

00:23:12.920 of blue checkmark bubble twitter online stuff and went straight into the blood veins of of you know msnbc and

00:23:21.960 at the time cnn and then so even though it was a bullshit thing on twitter it becomes real because

00:23:28.360 it goes on tv and then politicians are asked about it and have to take a position and so

00:23:33.960 the it's it's difficult to figure out whether some of this stuff matters or not because it gets into the

00:23:39.960 bloodstream even though it shouldn't and then once it's in the bloodstream it becomes a real thing

00:23:45.240 yeah i i think one i wrote this book a few years ago called suicide of the west and and part of

00:23:52.200 part of my argument about where we are is that we we increasingly in part and i think part of this has

00:24:00.360 to do with the breakdown of civil society the breakdown uh you know the whole bowling alone thesis

00:24:06.040 the cocooning that we're doing where we're basically hiding in front of screens rather than engaging with

00:24:10.920 human beings in real life and one of the things that has led to is following politics like it's a

00:24:15.720 form of entertainment yeah and there's a thing that happened i mean you know this stuff better than i do

00:24:20.760 but there's a thing that happens in your brain when you follow entertainment we allow ourselves to root for

00:24:29.080 murderers bank robbers you know torturers when we see them on the screen so long as it's been clear

00:24:36.280 that they're our hero or our anti-hero or whatever and we forgive all sorts of behaviors that we would

00:24:42.680 say should put you in jail never mind make you a pariah and the problem is is that when you

00:24:50.120 start following politics like it's a form of entertainment you start the sort of tribal mind kind

00:24:55.320 of takes over and you start judging things about whether your team is winning or losing and you no longer

00:25:01.800 care about the the the norms the institutional rules and all that because in movies you don't

00:25:08.200 care about that stuff you just want the hero to get the mcguffin and in politics now so much of i'll

00:25:14.440 give you an example it'll it'll feel partisan but i know we're going to do a lot of trump bashing so i'll

00:25:20.120 get the equal time and barack obama said i think it was 24 times maybe it was 28 times that he literally

00:25:27.000 did not have the power to do daca the deferred thing with the dreamer kids and he said look i'm

00:25:33.240 not a king the constitution does not give me this power um we don't live in the kind of society where

00:25:38.680 i can just rule at a whim and he said that for like a year and then he realized that he couldn't get

00:25:46.760 it through congress so he did it anyway and the response from the leaders of the you know of the

00:25:55.000 the sort of the influencers and leaders of our political class the journalists and and so forth

00:25:59.720 if they weren't like objectively partisan republicans they all cheered about this courageous you know act

00:26:06.760 of of political morality without caring that by according to the president's own terms he had just

00:26:13.560 done something tyrannical and monarchical now you can agree with the policy that's not my point it's like

00:26:18.840 the student loan stuff the student loan thing that biden is proposing is lawless i mean it's like

00:26:24.280 literally lawless and no one seems to care and i think it's sort of emblematic of of the way we

00:26:30.760 follow politics because so many of the things that donald trump did were either certainly were either

00:26:37.320 literally lawless or certainly in open and complete defiance to all traditions and norms of the job and

00:26:46.280 that's what his biggest fans loved about him and it's particularly problematic as a conservative because look

00:26:52.920 you guys on the left your whole you own the fact that you believe you're the forces of progress and

00:26:59.160 that the forces of change and the forces of reform and rewriting you know the face of society that's

00:27:04.680 that's your bag and that's fine that's an ancient and honorable thing to believe in what i have even

00:27:08.840 if i have disagreements with it but conservatism at a metaphysical level is supposed to be about

00:27:15.400 preserving those things that need to be preserved about preserve about loving this country as it is not just for

00:27:22.280 as it should be for thinking that fidelity to the constitution matters and if all of a sudden

00:27:28.520 the right joins this game in an even uglier you know fascistic kind of way and just simply says it's

00:27:36.120 all will to power it's all about winning it's all about whether my guy can punish your guy then that's

00:27:44.600 really bad for america it's fine when one party it's not fine but it's it's tolerable when one party is the

00:27:50.600 gas pedal and the other party is the brake when both parties are the gas pedal the whole thing can

00:27:57.240 just fly apart yeah yeah well so one thing i think i hear you arguing for is that we maintain a sense of

00:28:05.160 proportion and in the spirit of doing that i think we have to recognize that there are asymmetries on both

00:28:12.920 sides of this continuum so it's really like the game of both sideism doesn't quite work and it is

00:28:21.160 so it's the there's one asymmetry which um accounts for why i've spent more time focused i mean as much

00:28:26.840 as i bang on about trump i've actually spent more time focused on the problems of the left and it's

00:28:32.440 because the left has really captured culture and institutions in a way that the right hasn't you

00:28:39.560 you know i mean the the morons who marched in charlottesville don't have significant cultural

00:28:44.200 power but their equivalents on the left really do in in that their arguments and that their and

00:28:50.760 their moral intuitions have filtered into institutions that i actually care about right right so that you

00:28:56.760 know the new york times isn't being vitiated by kukuk's clan ideology but it is being vitiated by

00:29:04.520 a sense that you know racism is at the bottom of everything and and what's more it's intellectually

00:29:11.400 and ethically trivially easy you know to the point of just absolutely stultifying boredom to point out

00:29:19.240 what's wrong with the far right i mean just you know what's wrong with being a member of the kkk well

00:29:23.880 right you know just do we really have to do a podcast on that whereas what's wrong with the far left

00:29:29.960 is genuinely confusing to smart well-educated well-intentioned people and what's wrong with

00:29:36.360 black lives matter and what could be wrong with that what what how was the the video of derek

00:29:41.880 chauvin killing george floyd not proof positive that we have a an omnipresent problem with racist

00:29:49.720 sadistic cops killing young black men right i mean that's that's that's just confusing to vast numbers of

00:29:57.000 smart people and so that's there's much more to pick apart there but the other asymmetry that is

00:30:04.120 truly enormous is in the political derangement of the democrat and republican parties at the moment and

00:30:14.760 the way in which the republicans have been captured by a personality cult under trump and this is something

00:30:23.160 that again people people who defend trump always get wrong i mean they'll point out the kinds of

00:30:28.600 things you've pointed out sort of like ordinary opportunism and cynicism and hypocrisy that that

00:30:36.600 happens within that you know that the ordinary norms of norm violations politically so you know obama

00:30:42.040 said he wouldn't do this thing and then you know 24 times and then he did the the very thing he said he

00:30:46.040 wouldn't do and so you if you line those indiscretions up with the kinds of things trump has done well

00:30:52.440 then it seems like okay this is both sides problem you know politicians always lie right that you know

00:30:57.640 what's new about that and many people saw in in biden's recent speech you know he's he's doing the

00:31:03.320 very thing we've accused trump of he you know struck a sort of very discordant semi uh fascistic note in

00:31:10.120 condemning a large part of american society but it's just the wrong scale of comparison and so

00:31:16.280 here's an analogy that comes to mind which it's not perfect but it gets at it certainly doesn't

00:31:21.720 capture the the multiplicity of problems with trump and trumpism but it captures the scale

00:31:27.160 and maliciousness of the dishonesty that is really the under underwriting the whole enterprise

00:31:33.800 and so just i would ask our listeners to imagine that you know especially any listeners who

00:31:38.600 are still with us who you know would defend trump here imagine that rather than having president

00:31:44.200 biden we had a president jesse smollett right now i mean that may seem insane but that's precisely how

00:31:51.880 insane i think it is that we have a had a president trump i mean just imagine for those who don't

00:31:56.920 recall jesse smollett was with this actor who who faked a an attempted lynching on himself he claimed that he

00:32:04.280 had two maga people attacked him and put a noose around his neck and poured some you know flammable

00:32:10.840 liquid on him and tried to kill him because he's black and he's gay and they said this is maga country

00:32:16.280 and you know inconveniently for his uh allegations it happened to be 20 below zero that night in

00:32:21.960 in chicago and the idea that there were two guys running around in maga hats looking to lynch

00:32:26.440 somebody seemed pretty far-fetched and his story unraveled but he got on national television and you know

00:32:32.840 talked about how harrowing it was to have been almost lynched and he told what really is at bottom

00:32:40.440 a a vicious and society shattering lie at scale right now imagine if he had been politically rewarded

00:32:50.520 for this imagine if he was holding rallies with tens of thousands of people and whipping them up into a

00:32:56.840 frenzy over the lie that he was almost lynched in in my view that's really the scale of derangement

00:33:03.400 we see among republicans at the moment this lie that the election was stolen the lie that and and the

00:33:10.200 fact that we had a you know sitting president who wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power

00:33:14.840 and the party has defended him on this that's what's just so far beyond the pale here and it's quite

00:33:22.520 quite divorceable from all of the policy concerns that are rational that would cause people to have

00:33:29.480 defended trump in the first place i mean it's totally rational to and and defensible and we

00:33:35.480 it's not necessarily my position but we can argue about you know whether we want to have less

00:33:40.040 immigration or different immigration sure whether we want more economic nationalism whether we want

00:33:45.480 fewer foreign entanglements all of that is fine but it seems to me what can't be argued for at this

00:33:50.680 point is that it's acceptable to have had a president who is lying at this scale uh this maliciously

00:33:59.320 and deranging our politics that fully on that basis yeah look i i agree with you entirely i wasn't

00:34:08.440 trying to do a just to be clear i wasn't alleging that i was just trying to connect the dots the way

00:34:12.600 a trumpist would yeah no i i i let me stipulate i agree with you entirely in the sense that you know i

00:34:20.280 i mean my late friend pj o'rourke probably understated it but it gets directionally it's the right point

00:34:26.520 in 2016 he said look something i'm paraphrasing but he said look hillary clinton is unacceptable

00:34:33.880 within normal parameters donald trump is unacceptable outside of normal parameters and i think that's right

00:34:41.800 trump himself is sui generis in in in a lot of ways in so insofar as you know he is i've been issuing

00:34:51.560 this challenge for seven years now to have somebody give me a definition of good character

00:34:58.600 then trump can clear yeah and no one has done it successfully and many people have written thousands

00:35:05.080 of words claiming that they've done it and then you look for the actual sentence that says here's why

00:35:10.040 jonah's wrong you know and it's you know like david horowitz says well trump you know is incredibly

00:35:15.480 loyal to his family well first of all that even if that were true it's not even it's not true but

00:35:21.400 even if it were true really like that is a threshold thing to say he has good character i mean like we

00:35:28.680 normally think that that's sort of like priced into like normal behavior but it's not true you know this

00:35:34.120 is the guy who cheated on his third wife while she was nursing their newborn with a porn star i mean

00:35:39.160 he is he's famously vicious to his kids not not his daughter but his sons there's one story that he uh

00:35:46.520 we don't have to do that i can go on autopilot about this stuff but he was once when it was when

00:35:50.680 his wife his first wife suggested that they name their firstborn don jr he said we can't do that what

00:35:56.040 if he turns out to be a loser and there is literally i mean i mean this very sincerely there is

00:36:03.240 no definition of good character um no matter how far out you wanna you wanna take it that

00:36:10.840 donald trump can get a passing grade on and i'm one of these you know fuddy-duddy conservatives who

00:36:17.400 used to think that like emphasizing good character was an important thing to do in politics maybe not to

00:36:23.800 the point where it was the only issue but to me it's important good character also should not have

00:36:29.080 an ideological valence and this is just a sordid narcissistic guy who you know i guess this is a

00:36:37.240 good way to i don't know if you've had my my friend and colleague uval levin on but no no but so he wrote

00:36:43.560 a wonderful book on called fractured republic on the role of i'm sorry wrote another book called a time

00:36:49.560 to build on the role of institutions in america and i think he has a fundamental insight that gets at the

00:36:55.080 broader landscape of why we're in the mess that we're in and why institutions are so sick

00:37:01.800 normally you know institution is a lot of thing for economists it's just a rule but like when we

00:37:06.360 talk colloquially about an institution we think of an organization or some other form of association

00:37:14.680 that molds character right i mean the sort of cliched version of it would be

00:37:18.920 you know you get some irresolute slacker or hippie you put them in the marines they turn them into a

00:37:25.560 marine uh you have you have undisciplined little boys you put them in the boy scouts they end up

00:37:30.840 helping little old ladies across the street you go into the monastery you come out a priest right

00:37:35.400 there are things that institutions do to shape the individual for the greater good of the institution

00:37:41.800 and in the process make the individual a better person along the way or at least that's the hope

00:37:48.920 and the problem that we have today is that we no longer see or too many people no don't see

00:37:56.360 institutions as mechanisms of character formation instead they see them as platforms to perform upon

00:38:05.800 to to to extract essentially rents or status from the institution for their own self-aggrandizement

00:38:13.720 their own glorification and you see this in journalism all over the place these journalists who used

00:38:18.600 their association with you know the new york times or the washington post or wherever and they you

00:38:24.280 know and and then they go out and they tweet and they create their own cults of personality their own

00:38:28.520 brand we can have a perfectly legitimate conversation about colin kaepernick and and certainly say that

00:38:35.960 the cause he was associated with is a is a righteous cause that's all fine but there's no disputing that

00:38:41.400 he used the nfl as a platform for his own issues elizabeth holmes at theranos you can go through a long list

00:38:48.600 and donald trump is i don't know the nae plus ultra of all of this he used the presidency as a platform

00:38:58.280 for his own personal cult of pop of personality in ways that where he was commenting on things

00:39:06.040 that the government was doing as if he was a pundit he was using the mechanisms of power and of

00:39:13.080 government to create an independent informal base of power and adulation when normally you know what

00:39:20.360 presidents do whether it's barack obama or ronald reagan or whoever you know they bend their needs

00:39:26.680 to a large extent to the needs of the presidency itself it's a cell it's a job that requires remarkable

00:39:33.480 amounts of self-sacrifice and donald trump rejected that entirely to make it all about him and the

00:39:40.440 glorification of him and that is something i mean i don't know enough about andrew jackson to say that

00:39:44.600 we've never had this before but it's it's certainly we've never had it before in the age of modern

00:39:49.800 media or anything like it and he's done lasting and permanent damage not just to our institutions in

00:39:55.560 the country but also you know my ballywick which is conservatism because conservatism is now being

00:40:01.400 redefined into a kind of right-wing populism which is antithetical to actually being a conservative

00:40:07.400 well it's often said that trump is a symptom right he says it really the problem isn't trump

00:40:13.880 the problem precedes him i think there's some truth to that but he's also a cause of further

00:40:20.840 symptoms right i mean he's he's the product of hyper partisanship on both the right and the left

00:40:25.800 but he's also made that partisanship much worse and so and he's also a symptom of the loss of trust in

00:40:32.760 institutions but he's also made everything on that front worse too so there's obviously there's a

00:40:38.440 dialectical nature to all of this so he's made that he's made the right worse and he's also made the

00:40:44.760 left worse that's right and then the left becoming worse has given much more energy and justification

00:40:51.320 even for trumpism right so it's like i mean almost everything that trump is to cry on the left is

00:40:59.720 something that is worth worrying about on the left right and and as as the left turns up the volume

00:41:05.480 of their you know moral panic over pronouns or whatever it is it's understandable that it's causing

00:41:11.880 the right to go berserk but this mutual reinforcement is really unhealthy i agree entirely so there's a quote

00:41:18.680 from orwell which i use often to make this point or orwell i think it's in politics in the english

00:41:23.080 language where he says a man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure but then fail

00:41:28.680 all the more completely because he drinks right and i think that's sort of the dynamic we had problems

00:41:34.120 that led to trump but trump made all of those problems worse it's almost tolkien-esque how this

00:41:40.280 creature yeah brings out and distorts the worst in his enemies too and provides justification

00:41:46.440 to hate the enemies even more and it's it's very depressing if you get too caught up in it

00:41:52.840 well what's been your experience does it first remind me i called you a never trumper i imagine

00:42:00.360 in fact that was the case wait what when did you get off the tree

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 13, 2022

#296 — Repairing Our Country

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