Making Sense - Sam Harris - #334 — The Low-Trust Society

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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00:00:32.480 therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy

00:00:36.500 what we're doing here please consider becoming one well i have a significant housekeeping to do but

00:00:48.820 i think that will be a standalone podcast so look for that next today i'm speaking with david brooks

00:00:56.660 david is a contributing writer at the atlantic and also a columnist for the new york times

00:01:02.940 and a commentator on pbs's news hour he's the author of several books including the second mountain

00:01:11.360 and the road to character as well as the forthcoming book how to know a person the art of seeing others

00:01:18.820 deeply and being deeply seen david has been awarded more than 30 honorary degrees he is a member of the

00:01:26.220 american academy of arts and sciences and he teaches at yale university david and i spoke about the

00:01:32.620 state of american democracy and the liberal world order we discussed the weaknesses of moral

00:01:38.560 individualism the loss of social trust the dangers of identity politics what happened to the republican

00:01:45.900 party the hatred of elites the 2024 presidential election the trump indictments the war in ukraine

00:01:54.000 moral force the roots of liberalism the various flavors of trump support at this point the biden

00:02:02.280 presidency hunter biden's laptop biden's prospects in 2024 nikki haley economic inequality the enduring

00:02:11.980 problems with meritocracy the state of media and social media the lure of conspiracy thinking the

00:02:19.480 politics of politics of recognition our handling of the covet pandemic our difficulty is acknowledging

00:02:25.380 uncertainty our withdrawal from afghanistan the limits of american power and other topics and i bring

00:02:33.740 you david brooks

00:02:35.100 i am here with david brooks david thanks for joining me oh great to be back with you so you've been on the

00:02:47.120 podcast before and um i am certainly a fan of yours and and read your work as it appears in the new york

00:02:54.200 times and the atlantic um that's i perhaps you appear somewhere else and i'm not aware of it but

00:02:59.120 maybe you can just uh summarize how you view your career as a writer and a journalist at this point what

00:03:07.440 kinds of things have you focused on and what are you doing of late well uh to start at the beginning

00:03:12.860 and when i was seven i read a book called paddings and the bear and i decided i want to become a writer

00:03:17.580 and i've been writing pretty much every day except maybe 200 in the intervening 50 years

00:03:22.720 wow my joke is in high school i wanted to date this woman named bernice and she didn't want to date me

00:03:28.000 she dated some other guy and i remember thinking what is she thinking i write way better than that

00:03:32.520 guy uh so those were my values that you should date the better writer but those were not her values

00:03:37.540 apparently um so you know i i worked for the college newspaper the university of chicago and

00:03:43.360 then i was a police reporter on the south side of chicago and i got a lucky break we can talk about

00:03:47.260 when william f buckley spotted me and gave a speech to the student body of chicago and it said david

00:03:53.980 brooks if you're in the audience i want to give you a job and i sadly wasn't in the audience i was

00:03:58.860 actually debating milton friedman on national tv and if your listeners want to watch my first tv

00:04:04.880 appearance it's yeah a 21 year old me getting slaughtered by friedman so is that on youtube

00:04:10.420 that that's yeah if you youtube david brooks milton friedman you will see uh me in a big afro

00:04:17.100 and these 90s glasses that look like they're on loan from mount polymer lunar observatory

00:04:22.140 and then i i toured through the sort of conservative world the wall street journal editorial page the

00:04:27.960 weekly standard washington times eventually landing in 2003 and my joke is i was hired as the conservative

00:04:35.400 columnist at the new york times a job i likened to being the chief rabbi at mecca and the one constant

00:04:41.640 i would say just to get us up to the present is that i was always been a fan of a period of non-fiction

00:04:46.940 between 1955 and 1965 when you had a series of writers who were a little above journalism but not

00:04:54.080 quite as specialized as academics and so they would be people like jane jacobs and irving crystal or

00:05:01.560 daniel bell or irving howe richard john newhouse abraham joshua heschel and hannah rent uh and so they

00:05:10.720 they took on big subjects reinhold niebuhr took on he wrote a book called the age and destiny of man

00:05:17.160 which covers a lot of ground um so i i always wanted to be in that lane like slightly off the news

00:05:23.980 from a regular journalist but not quite specialized like an academic and i've i've done these big

00:05:29.760 pieces where i attempt to just figure out what's the temper of our times and how would you describe

00:05:36.040 your politics at this point my politics are weirdly unchanged i i have two heroes uh one is edmund burke

00:05:43.020 and burke is a believer in epistemological modesty the world is complicated so we should be really

00:05:48.400 complicated and what we can know and change and when we do it should be constant but incremental

00:05:52.860 and then my other hero is alexander hamilton who was a puerto rican hip-hop star from the heights

00:05:59.000 and he was uh he was a he for me is you know my i was raised by my grandfather really an immigrant

00:06:05.380 and so i have that immigrant mentality that government should be energetic on behalf of people so they can

00:06:12.740 rise and succeed in america and so hamilton's really starts the tradition the whigs in the 19th

00:06:19.020 century henry clay daniel webster continue at abraham lincoln uh with the the land grant college act and

00:06:25.580 the homestead legislation and i think the whig tradition really intellectually goes up to teddy

00:06:30.500 roosevelt and maybe john mccain but it's a tradition that dies out but it's there are six of us left

00:06:37.080 and i'm happy to be a whig and uh there was a phrase i ran across from isaiah berlin the philosopher

00:06:42.380 who said i'm happy to be at the leftward edge or the rightward edge of the leftward tendency

00:06:46.960 and these days i'm so repulsed by the republican party i guess i'm supporting and rooting for the

00:06:52.480 democrats but i'm on the rightward edge of the democrats right right well i've often i've always

00:06:57.920 considered you right of me i mean i certainly have never been tempted to be a republican um i don't

00:07:04.560 think i've ever voted for a republican but um you know i have for many years now made common cause

00:07:11.680 with republicans who see the recent events on the right uh and on the left uh more or less as i do so

00:07:20.200 you know yourself and david french and brett stevens and jonah goldberg and others who saw in trump

00:07:28.000 precisely what i saw in trump and and we have never gone quiet on that topic so i want to i want

00:07:35.080 to have a conversation with you that is perhaps a little more narrowly focused than the age and

00:07:39.820 destiny of man but not by too much because i want to talk about the state of american democracy

00:07:46.800 and the liberal world order really uh and i want i want to start with an essay you wrote back in 2020

00:07:54.980 which was you published it right before the presidential election in the atlantic uh the

00:08:01.200 title is america is having a moral convulsion and uh it's really it's a wonderful and quite depressing

00:08:08.480 piece and i just want to revisit it because i i stumbled upon it i don't know a few months ago and

00:08:14.020 and was wondering how you're thinking about our situation may have evolved since uh whether this is

00:08:22.200 the intervening three years have just confirmed all of your worst fears or magnified them or if

00:08:27.840 anything has changed but in that piece you focus on the breakdown of social trust mainly in america and

00:08:35.020 you argue that our trust in our institutions and in one another was in something like a death spiral

00:08:42.580 and really just a catastrophic decline and um you paint this very vivid picture of lost

00:08:50.560 promise where you just what would seem to be the the high watermarks of capitalism and democracy and

00:08:58.280 pluralism and diversity and globalization at the end of the 20th century were followed by this more or

00:09:06.120 less unraveling of all of that you know and and the apparent promise of all of that and it just to

00:09:12.360 get you started to remind you where your your head was three years ago i just want to read a short

00:09:17.900 paragraph which um conserve as a nice starting point here it's uh this is you it all looks naive now we

00:09:26.580 were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class naive to think the internet

00:09:31.740 would bring us together naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony naive to think

00:09:37.780 the privileged wouldn't pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them we didn't predict that

00:09:42.720 oligarchs would steal entire nations or the demagogues from turkey to the u.s would ignite

00:09:47.800 ethnic hatreds we didn't see that a hyper-competitive global meritocracy would effectively turn all of

00:09:54.240 childhood into elite travel sports where a few privileged performers get to play and everyone else gets left

00:10:00.360 behind and so that touches on so much that concerns me about our current moment both domestically and

00:10:09.680 and for its implications for maintaining what many of us uh perhaps naively have thought about as the

00:10:17.820 rules-based international order so just uh i give you that as a starting point tell me how do how do things

00:10:24.820 look to you three years on yeah let me go suck on the gas pipe there i know that is depressing

00:10:29.700 uh you know i one of the things i was trying to do in that piece is just investigate the psychology of distrust

00:10:36.040 distrust we had entered and still are in a world with high distrust and so what does that do to

00:10:40.580 people in it one of the things that distrustful people try to make themselves invulnerable they try

00:10:45.240 to armor up they want to feel safe they see threats that aren't there in a period of distrust you get

00:10:52.560 surges of populism people who feel betrayed and so i think that's all true but but i think if i could

00:10:59.120 step back that piece poured out of a moment i think a lot of us live through i live through it very

00:11:04.240 materially i was with the wall street journal and i was covering i was a foreign correspondent in the

00:11:08.700 90s and so i covered the end of the soviet union the reunification of germany the end of apartheid in

00:11:15.020 south africa the maslow peace process the maastricht process of the european unification and this was all

00:11:21.500 good news and so it was a period of convergence when people seemed to be coming together when barriers

00:11:26.940 seemed to be falling and at the end of my time in europe i covered an event of the yugoslav civil war

00:11:34.340 and in the it turns out that that little events with authoritarian strongmanism and ethnic conflict

00:11:40.920 turned out to be the more important than all the other stuff i covered in predicting what would happen

00:11:46.920 over the next 25 years and so the end of convergence ended and we entered it 25 years of really

00:11:53.040 ethnic conflict authoritarian rising and really a closing up a disassociation across all sorts of

00:12:00.160 societies and the thing that troubled me the most and still troubles me the most is the freakish

00:12:06.760 breakdown in social and relational fabric of american society the the rise of depression and suicide is

00:12:14.000 well known but the number of people who say they have no close personal friends has gone up by

00:12:18.460 four times the number of people who say that they have broken with a member of their immediate

00:12:24.380 family has risen there's been a third increase in the number of people living without a romantic

00:12:29.220 partner and if you ask the number of people who get who rate themselves the lowest happiness category

00:12:35.080 is up substantially if you ask high school kids do you feel persistently hopeless and depressed

00:12:41.160 well that's risen from like 20 to 45 so we are still in the middle of some sort of societal emotional and

00:12:49.020 relational crisis now there are two things to be said to cheer us all up one is and this has been a surprise

00:12:55.100 to me it is a pillar of the literature on trust that low trust societies are poor societies that if you can't

00:13:02.400 trust the people around you you can't do business deals and yet i would have to say american capitalism has sailed on

00:13:08.160 in pretty nice fashion and picking up steam uh europe and america were roughly even in gdp per capita

00:13:15.100 back when i was over in europe and now the u.s is just crushing europe we are our economy is just way

00:13:21.360 stronger we're number one in investment we're number one in innovation one or two along with switzerland

00:13:26.740 and so the american economy has gone from strength to strength as we speak we're seeing a big turnaround in

00:13:34.460 the fate of nations if you want to put it that way china which seemed to be expanding and rising and

00:13:40.080 seem to be the rising power has hit hard times and seems to be struggling to say the least

00:13:46.200 economically meanwhile if you go to ohio you've got gigantic multi-billion dollar investments from amazon

00:13:53.000 from google from intel and so we're seeing a renaissance especially the american heartland the

00:13:58.500 american midwest and so i'm a little surprised the american economy has really surged at a time

00:14:03.840 even despite the low social trust and so that's one thing that's making me feel a little better maybe

00:14:08.500 it's not ruin all around well i want to talk about politics and um there are many threads here there's

00:14:16.720 this you know what we might call meritocracy and its discontents the problem of trust and something you

00:14:23.980 make clear in several of your of your essays is linked to the problem of or being unable to have

00:14:31.080 a fact-based discussion about more or less anything of substance now so when you look at what happened

00:14:37.220 during the pandemic what we witnessed was a a more or less total failure to come together as a society

00:14:45.720 because we simply couldn't have a convergence of belief about what was actually happening and much less

00:14:53.340 what what to do about it uh so there was a total lack of cultural cohesion and i think we're still living with

00:14:59.440 the aftermath of that and the attendant cynicism and political populism that just it just seems to be

00:15:07.740 further fracturing our society so the the trust in institutions piece is enormous and perhaps uh mirrored by a

00:15:17.740 failure of interpersonal trust um and obviously there's a piece of around diversity and identity

00:15:25.780 politics that seems to argue that trust can further break down here i guess i mean just speaking

00:15:33.980 personally i i noticed that this is i feel very late to some of these topics because i i mean when i look

00:15:40.920 back on my professional output it really has been almost entirely an argument for what i think of as

00:15:48.540 enlightened individualism and much of your work i think suggests the obvious limits of individualism and

00:15:59.280 when i say enlightened individualism i i mean enlightened really in both senses of that term i'm thinking of

00:16:06.100 the western birth of of science and secular rationality i'm also thinking of the more esoteric

00:16:12.840 eastern spiritual sense of enlightened i mean in the sense that suggests contemplation and self-transcendence

00:16:19.860 so i've been arguing for you know science and scientific skepticism in the culture wars against

00:16:26.720 organized religion for many years and simultaneously i've been championing the virtues of meditation and

00:16:33.120 philosophical reflection and personal ethics and i do think that all of these things are indispensable for

00:16:40.080 living a good life but i'm actually humbled by the degree to which all of our independent efforts

00:16:47.680 to live well and to think clearly just can still totally fail to cohere at the level of society at large

00:16:56.940 right so it's just so it's really it wasn't until trump and the pandemic that i i believe i fully

00:17:03.960 recognized how much we need institutions and political norms and economic incentives that make us better

00:17:11.980 collectively right that make it much easier for selfish people to behave well rather than requiring you

00:17:19.500 know sainthood for someone to act you know halfway decently and and so much of the time i see that we're

00:17:24.800 we've built systems that are incentivizing all the wrong things and you really do have to be

00:17:32.100 basically you know a saint to behave well in certain contexts and you know what what you see most of the

00:17:40.480 time is is quite normal people psychologically behaving in ways that make them indistinguishable from

00:17:46.500 sociopaths and i you know i think social media is the primary example of this and so you know i deleted

00:17:52.000 my twitter account because it just seemed that you know staring you know hour by hour into that fun

00:17:58.760 house mirror was not only giving me a false sense of how grotesque my neighbors were but it was actually

00:18:05.300 making me a kind of grotesque and so i you know i just had to pull the plug on it so anyway i just this

00:18:11.480 is just to lob a softball to you but i mean i really i i see your wheelhouse as perhaps among several

00:18:18.880 others as being one where you have recognized that we not only need lives of personal integrity

00:18:27.600 we need cultural contexts and institutions and norms and systems that support those lives

00:18:36.340 and enable them yeah i mean i i'm a liberal too um but i guess i would say you know i grew up in new

00:18:42.880 york and greenwich village in the 60s and i was surrounded by what you might call moral individualism

00:18:48.000 or or social individualism you should do what you want and i imbibed that and i celebrate a lot of

00:18:53.320 the changes that came out but i think in the ensuing 80 years we've overshot the mark and we became

00:18:59.620 too individualistic and there were some weaknesses there one the illusion that if we all do our own

00:19:05.260 selfish thing everything will work out for society and to me that didn't work out i mean we we can all

00:19:10.860 do our selfish thing and no invisible hand will create a healthy society the second thing and

00:19:15.860 here's the the conservative in me coming out and that would be that reason and individualism and

00:19:23.520 individual choice are built on institutions that precede choice so the liberal order we treasure is

00:19:30.340 built on an order that is not liberal and so there are certain attachments we have to our family

00:19:36.140 to our town to our nation to our creeds which are not really chosen they're just we absorb them in

00:19:43.540 the culture around us and our commitments to those things like family nation community are total and so

00:19:50.160 those things are not something we choose those things are institutions that form us and so we you know we

00:19:57.240 want to live in moral ecologies in which it's just easier to be good and so let me give you a concrete

00:20:03.020 example so like i don't know 20 years ago i got a job on pbs to be a pundit for jim lair on the news

00:20:11.640 hour and every time i said something crass and sort of self-indulgent on the air i would see lair's

00:20:18.140 mouth downturn and every time i said something he thought was good i would see his eyes crinkle in

00:20:24.200 pleasure so for 10 years he never had to say anything i just tried to chase the mouth the eyes wrinkle

00:20:30.420 and try to avoid the mouth downturn and so in that way he set standards of behavior that i didn't really

00:20:35.980 consciously think about all that much but in which it was easier to be good and so the point is none

00:20:41.800 of us are separable individuals we're all very porous deeply influenced by the world around us and so

00:20:47.980 we need that world around us to have a shared ecology that'll make it easier for us to be good

00:20:53.560 and if we don't have that we're gonna we're gonna defer to our default selfishness so you wrote this

00:20:59.560 this essay that we i referenced at the top here before the election in 2020 and obviously before

00:21:07.600 january 6th what has your sense been i mean the the the economic trends notwithstanding what what is

00:21:14.740 your sense now of the political landscape how durable the the populism of the of the right and

00:21:24.520 left are and you know how much trumpism may exceed the problem of trump himself um where are we

00:21:33.280 politically as a nation trump was obviously the epitome of distrust a distrustful person who was

00:21:39.800 both a symptom of our larger distrust than an accelerant uh making us all distrustful and

00:21:45.400 making us look one another i guess in the years since a couple things have happened the first is

00:21:52.060 i've come to see that the problem is not just politics but our particular kind of politics we

00:21:58.100 practice now in a healthy society people practice the politics of distribution like how much should we

00:22:03.980 raise taxes where should we spend our money and that seems to be a healthy politics we don't

00:22:08.920 practice that kind of politics by and large at least donald trump doesn't we practice the politics

00:22:14.320 of recognition we want our political leaders to humiliate the other side and affirm us ours is a

00:22:20.960 politics looking for identity we're looking to be admired by ourselves and that is asking too much

00:22:27.280 of politics than it is required than is possible of delivering and so you know we if you're naked and

00:22:34.500 alone you feel morally lost and so you seek politics because it seems to offer you a moral landscape

00:22:40.860 there are us good guys over here and those bad guys over there it seems to offer you community we all

00:22:45.840 watch newsmax together and we hate the other side it seems to offer you moral action you don't have to

00:22:51.500 sit with a widow or feed the hungry you just have to feel properly indignant at the outrages of the

00:22:56.620 other side but in all these ways politics is failing to deliver what you're seeking you're not really

00:23:02.240 it's not really a moral landscape in real life complicated life morality is right down the

00:23:07.840 middle of every human heart we're all capable of good and bad in real life community is not just

00:23:13.400 watching newsmax together it's it's you know building a town or doing whatever you want to do

00:23:17.900 together in real life community is you know meeting people befriending people it's not just joining

00:23:24.520 some tribe this or that tribe so in my view we've become over politicized and under moralized we've

00:23:30.080 turned everything into politics whether it's late night comedy shows or church or sporting events

00:23:36.540 and we've become terribly over politicized because people have gone to politics seeking the moral purpose

00:23:44.040 that their moral life is not delivering for them what explains the apparent inversion of more or less

00:23:53.200 of more or less than anything that has occurred in the republican party i mean how how did we get to a

00:23:58.340 republican party that would champion a this new isolationism and celebrate a figure like putin not care that

00:24:09.300 trump as a sitting president wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power really not see any flaws in him

00:24:17.180 as a a moral actor not not care at all about the character of the person they were putting in the oval

00:24:24.200 office i mean it just seems like all the toggle switches got flipped at least with respect to how they

00:24:30.340 how republicans thought of themselves in election cycles you know prior to 2016 what do you think

00:24:37.720 explains that and and do you see any sign that it could reset in in the near term yeah i would guess i would

00:24:45.640 tell a lot of different stories some of which contradict each other but all of which i think are

00:24:49.540 true and so you know that it's part of the story i think is that there was a hidden not so hidden

00:24:55.300 racist element on the right uh that uh surfaced though i have to say as somebody who inhabited a

00:25:01.940 certain kind of conservative precinct for much of my life i never heard direct racism even in private

00:25:06.740 but do you think just first i i i find it hard to believe that that would explain the embrace of

00:25:14.020 trump and trumpism by the editorial board at the wall street journal right like how did how did

00:25:20.820 how did you know brett stevens get you know spit out of the wall street journal in your view yeah i guess

00:25:27.040 i would tell another the main story i would tell is a story that is not particularly flattering to people

00:25:31.520 like me which is round about 1950 to 1960 we shifted the definition of merit in this society

00:25:40.600 and so the median sat score of somebody at harvard rose from like from say 550 to 680

00:25:47.600 and we created a new version of the meritocracy basically around cognition and your ability to be

00:25:53.660 pleasing to teachers between the ages of 15 and 18 and this meritocratic class

00:25:58.800 rose up in universities all across the country married each other invested massively in their

00:26:06.120 kids those kids got into the same elite schools that the meritocrats went to they also married each

00:26:12.040 other they invested massively in their kids those kids went to the same schools they went to live in

00:26:18.360 a few places with booming economies like san francisco austin denver washington new york and so

00:26:26.720 basically and this happened in the u.s but it happened across the western world which is why populism is a

00:26:31.720 western thing not an american thing and so 20 of the population garnered an immense amount of wealth

00:26:39.140 but more important immense amount of cultural power so those of us in my class more or less control the

00:26:45.900 media or at least the mainstream media hollywood the universities and so every system has every

00:26:52.640 society has a recognition order who's going to confer recognition and approval on people and my little

00:27:00.260 class controls it in this country and so a lot of people in this society and also in france and in

00:27:06.160 hungary and italy and sweden and a lot of other places said that group of meritocratic elites just has

00:27:13.380 too much power they have too much economic cultural political and social power and we hate them and so we're

00:27:18.940 going to take them down and donald trump is our bastard to take those people down and those people

00:27:24.700 hate donald trump and therefore whatever trump does i'm going to be behind and the one thing that

00:27:30.600 continues to shock me to this day is that christians are supposed to believe in a lot of things but one of

00:27:38.300 them is that the ends do not justify the means and yet the entire white evangelical world and now i hear

00:27:46.560 this every day from white evangelicals that he's our he's a bastard but he's our bastards the ends

00:27:50.820 justify the means and so that is continues to shock me on a daily basis yes you you echo i think you've

00:28:01.300 you've written a book more or less on that topic but i'm also hearing what charles murray was saying in

00:28:06.060 his book coming apart about the the segregation of economic rewards that have gone to a certain class

00:28:13.060 of people that have really defined success in terms of a specific cognitive work and and virtues

00:28:21.740 and then there's the the the attendant economic inequality of all of that where does that leave

00:28:29.000 us currently politically i mean we're both watching the republican primary season begin to unfold or at

00:28:36.820 least the campaigns aimed at primaries uh next year do you see any of this resetting or you're just

00:28:43.620 expecting trump to be the candidate or some trumpist impersonator to be in his place well i guess i recall

00:28:52.140 a time when ronda sanus was only behind by four percentage points to trump and there was a time that

00:28:57.960 a crucial question to me was they asked republicans are you primarily a supporter of donald trump or are you

00:29:04.520 primarily a supporter of the republican party and during the trump presidency most people said donald

00:29:09.040 trump but after the defeats of 2020 the defeats of 2022 the majority of republicans said no i'm a

00:29:15.660 disciple of the republican party and so that gave me great hope that republicans would go for somebody

00:29:22.700 else and i think that hope was dashed on the day the fbi found the documents at mar-a-lago

00:29:28.860 and on that day and then in the ensuing indictments you know donald trump's support has risen and risen

00:29:36.380 and risen because again if you go back to the central narrative that were the americans who

00:29:41.340 are fighting against the educated elites then this allows trump to play that narrative and i have faith

00:29:48.260 in the justice system i think they're doing the right thing but a lot of people out there do not have

00:29:53.060 any faith in that system and do not think they're doing the right thing so a bunch of lawyers in

00:29:56.940 washington and atlanta and new york going after donald trump is just underlining the key narrative

00:30:02.600 and so trump looks in a very dominant position to me right now i guess just to return to the to my

00:30:10.860 initial question for a second many of these educated elites obviously are supporters of trump or supporters

00:30:18.340 of the populist unrest uh that prompts him up i mean you see have somebody campaigning like vivek

00:30:26.640 ramaswamy right he's he's the quintessence of an educated elite and yet he's mouthing all of the

00:30:34.380 pablum that trumpism would uh require of him do you view that as a purely cynical and opportunistic

00:30:45.100 style of politics or do you do you think that and and i guess this would this opprobrium would extend to

00:30:52.600 like the wall street editorial board in 2016 is it pure cynicism and opportunism or is do you think

00:31:02.040 that many of these so-called elites have managed to squint their eyes in such a way as to actually

00:31:08.960 agree with trump and not see a problem with his style of politics yeah for ramaswamy i think he looked

00:31:18.200 at the world and said hey the uh narcissistic hucksterism is in vogue my ship has come in

00:31:23.260 this is my great skill for somebody like tucker carlson who i knew we worked together for nine

00:31:27.880 years of the work the standard i think there's excitement the desire to be relevant to the desire

00:31:33.340 to being on the thrill uh and a fair degree of cynicism for people like rudy giuliani i do think

00:31:40.120 it is pure desire to remain relevant for other people i think there are a whole variety of

00:31:45.500 rationalizations and i will say i i periodically go on reporting trips where i interview the republican

00:31:51.900 donor class i just want to know what they're thinking because they've been interesting and i

00:31:56.540 would say in 2016 the vast majority of the normal gop rich guy donors were anti-trump and then

00:32:05.500 they ended up voting for him because they couldn't vote them for hillary and then in 2017 they were still

00:32:11.680 sort of against him and then as you interviewed them by 2018 and 2019 suddenly they were all sort

00:32:17.240 of for him and it was reminder the power of team spirit is super strong in american life and that if

00:32:24.780 your enemies are attacking a guy who's sort of on your team and he happens to be cutting your taxes and

00:32:31.200 putting together a reasonably strong economy well then it becomes pretty easy for you to slide over and

00:32:36.740 suddenly you're not anti-trump you're just kind of pro-trump because you want to be part of the team

00:32:43.020 i have to say now when i look at the republican donors they're back to being anti-trump and they're

00:32:48.720 looking for an alternative but they can't find one but i do think there is this mentality on there is

00:32:55.300 just a binary mentality to american politics so i worked at the wall street journal editorial page for

00:33:00.780 nine years and i think they don't want to be seen as totally pro-trump but if every day they can wake

00:33:06.780 up and critique you know rachel maddow well that's something that feels kind of natural

00:33:13.100 what if anything changes when you when you focus this question through the lens of the war in ukraine

00:33:20.580 right you have many many republicans seemingly sincerely espousing the belief that we have absolutely no

00:33:30.100 business selling arms to ukraine we're culpable for putin's invasion because we so recklessly provoked

00:33:39.260 him with talk of uh extending uh nato you know and and so it was just pure a pure history of provocation

00:33:47.060 and failed diplomacy on our part that forced putin's hand he did what any rational actor would do in

00:33:53.860 invading ukraine uh there's no interesting moral asymmetry there you know you know any talk of a

00:34:03.120 a democracy that was a sovereign democracy that was invaded by a belligerent who we should support

00:34:10.980 under a rules-based international order just invites you know a cynical guffaw from these people

00:34:19.600 uh you know with echoes of trump saying do you think our hands are so clean in i think in that

00:34:27.320 context he was talking about uh mbs and the murder of um khashoggi but i mean i gotta think that many if

00:34:36.420 not most of of these republicans who are deeply skeptical of of of any argument that we should be

00:34:44.840 supporting ukraine have come to that but at least imagine they've come to that belief not calculating

00:34:52.560 some weird political self-interest but actually just feeling that they've had some kind of epiphany about

00:34:58.540 the status of america on the world stage and the wisdom of retreat on some level how do you think about

00:35:07.520 ukraine and russia in particular and and and the work they are doing in american politics

00:35:15.040 yeah i have to say first i'm i'm at least proud that at least most republicans uh i think overall

00:35:22.020 and most republicans in congress are pretty very strong in support of zelensky and what the ukrainians

00:35:28.200 are trying to do i know brett stevens talked to you about this a couple weeks ago uh so i think that

00:35:33.000 that's one thing that should be pointed out the second thing that should be pointed out is that

00:35:37.320 it's funny how nothing ever goes away and so the american first ideology that's deep in american

00:35:43.740 history and and it used to be in the democratic party now it's in the republican party and when

00:35:48.540 trump said america first for the first time i thought oh that's terrible for him that'll discredit

00:35:53.480 him with everybody because everybody knows america first didn't work out in the days before world war

00:35:57.980 ii but turns out i was wrong there are a lot of people who are genuinely america first

00:36:01.740 but i think the thing i've learned which i didn't anticipate is how signing on to trump

00:36:07.440 involves an aggressive amoralism and so if if you're a liberal you believe in as you said earlier

00:36:14.960 the rules-based international order and that is based on the idea that human beings have the ability

00:36:20.980 to make cooperative arrangements and establish a set of moral norms that are good for everybody

00:36:26.900 and so thou shalt not invade your small neighbor that's just a moral norm and it's it's not only

00:36:34.500 good for the independence of peoples around the world it happens to be good for building a stable

00:36:39.200 world order but donald trump's worldview is not that that any moral order any set of norms

00:36:45.300 any institutional set of norms is a cover for elites masking their oppressive power on everybody else

00:36:52.180 and therefore the world is dog eat dog live with it or as you know the ancient athenians said

00:36:58.720 the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must so suck it up and so i think that

00:37:05.240 is genuinely the mentality i encounter among trump supporters that boot and strong ukraine was weak

00:37:10.360 what do you expect and i think that aggressive amoralism is really a crucial dividing line in not only

00:37:18.340 in american politics but in world politics because there are other leaders like xi xi pin who also

00:37:23.040 believe that power is everything and so where those of us who are liberal are trying to defend

00:37:28.920 this liberal order this set of norms this belief that people can cooperate and that it's not just

00:37:34.420 airy-fairy but cooperation is actually a tenacious noble thing we do and i think evolutionary psychology

00:37:41.200 backs that up but we have to restate moralism and and that's you know i've mentioned morality a lot

00:37:46.800 recently in this conversation and it sounds so pompous and self-righteous i understand but it's

00:37:53.000 a real thing and moral moral force uh the moral force that makes us cooperate one with another

00:37:59.140 the moral force that if you make an error and i'm not going to take advantage of it because i want to be a

00:38:05.160 decent person that's hard for us to talk about these days because we're sort of out of habit but i i do

00:38:11.380 think that's the challenge one of the challenges trump throws up in our faces yeah i mean what one of

00:38:16.760 the most corrosive things he has done and and the movement he has inspired has done is is convey the

00:38:24.560 sense that there is no such thing as moral high ground right there's any pretension that there is

00:38:30.320 or might be and that much less that one might occupy it is just a a cover for a deeper hypocrisy

00:38:38.240 right it is just elite speak and selfishness and hand waving and virtue signaling and there's there's

00:38:45.040 there is just no there there right there's it's impossible to ever sincerely aspire to wisdom and

00:38:52.000 compassion and any other you know higher virtue individually or collectively because it's all just

00:38:58.780 a fig leaf for selfishness and getting what you can yeah it's just it's awful to see

00:39:06.360 how difficult it has become to even use aspirational language in a political context without provoking a

00:39:15.440 reflexive cynical response and see when you when you talk about it to use this narrow case when you talk

00:39:23.560 about the the moral imperative of backing a democracy over the rampages of a of a of an invading

00:39:34.740 despotism you know we're not uh lionizing somebody like putin who murders his political opponents and

00:39:41.320 journalists even in other countries the fact that that just it falls on deaf ears and it not only falls

00:39:48.700 on deaf ears it just there's this basic sense that we should never have cared about any of those

00:39:53.840 differences yeah it's it's been a reminder to me i agree with you completely that how recent the

00:40:01.820 liberal enlightenment project how recent it is i mean one of the things that did not exist in the

00:40:07.740 ancient world was the notion of compassion like the idea that you should feel sorry for a slave

00:40:13.360 or somebody was poor who somebody was being whose intestines were being ripped out of their guts

00:40:18.660 that sense that you should be humble before all that humility was like what are you being humble for

00:40:24.360 humility is for losers humility is for the downtrodden humility is not a virtue but slowly over the

00:40:31.180 centuries we have a sense no humility is into my mind the primary virtue humility is an awareness of

00:40:38.240 how little we know and the humility is an awareness of how how morally flawed we are and therefore we

00:40:44.800 need each other to set up norms and that we have to rely on what we may disagree on this but i think

00:40:52.020 there is a universal moral order i think martin luther king got his great strength from a belief that

00:40:56.720 it wasn't just he who believed segregation was wrong but segregation was wrong in all circumstances

00:41:01.500 in all time it's part of the universal moral order that slavery and segregation are wrong

00:41:05.720 and that these beliefs were either revealed or slowly built up over centuries and a lot of people

00:41:14.880 accuse liberalism enlightenment liberalism as being this amoral set of procedures but it's not it's it's

00:41:22.520 actually based on a moral vision of human dignity that democracy it's not we're just it's not just

00:41:28.080 about voting but it's an encountering another person who disagrees with you profoundly and being

00:41:34.440 curious enough to see into the depths of that person about why they do and so that curiosity is a show of

00:41:40.780 respect and that that show of respect is something we built up as a sort of the democratic ideal

00:41:47.640 and it's funny that i have a quote in one of my recent pieces from jonathan height my friend who's

00:41:52.780 a new york nyu social psychologist says moral communities are very hard to build and very easy

00:41:59.200 to destroy and and so that would be the threat the thing to worry about these days i must say i find that

00:42:06.880 i am at a impasse in any political conversation with a trump supporter when i can't get

00:42:16.940 any acknowledgement that having a sitting president not commit to a peaceful transfer of power

00:42:25.280 was a problem right a problem worth taking seriously right the fact that we the fact that trump

00:42:32.100 repeatedly declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and we in fact didn't have a peaceful

00:42:38.780 transfer of power if i find myself in a conversation with a trump supporter who won't give any assent

00:42:46.800 progress to that point and it really just will just put a brave face on and and seek to just kind

00:42:53.780 of blow by it it has no implication for anything right i find that i i simply don't have the tools

00:43:00.000 to continue having a conversation we can have a conversation about something else but it's like

00:43:05.980 there's it's just clear that there's no way to converge politically can you is there anything you

00:43:11.720 can give me that can can can get me to navigate that impasse can i can you hope yeah i would say

00:43:17.460 my experience is multi-layered i guess on this one you know i do think there are certain people who

00:43:23.320 i'm including people i'm close with who are trump supporters for whom there's no purchase you you can

00:43:28.500 say x and they'll say no y and they won't weigh whether x is true or not they'll just say y and so

00:43:34.460 they're they have a self-enclosed system of belief that once you accept their assumptions you can't get

00:43:41.460 in and out of but i would say one of the things i've learned is i'm done generalizing about trump

00:43:46.840 supporters i think you know i was at i ran into this is years ago a woman who um was if i remember

00:43:53.520 this correctly was a big trump supporter she was at a trump rally she was a lesbian biker who'd survived

00:43:59.600 a plane crash and converted to sufi islam and so i was like what stereotype do you fit into

00:44:05.820 and so i would say i meet a lot of people who are that guy's a jackass but he's my jackass

00:44:13.180 or i'm a one issue voter i'm an abortion voter i hate that guy but i think abortion is the primary

00:44:19.440 issue of my for me i i i found it's hard now to general i even more complicated today to generalize

00:44:26.060 about trump supporters than it was in 2016 because i do think they've bifurcated there's there's

00:44:30.880 certainly a hardcore of like 20 or 30 percent who are like cult members but i find a lot of people who

00:44:37.160 are sort of trump friendly trump adjacent trump skeptical would love to see another candidate

00:44:42.500 but they have persuaded themselves that four more years of joe biden would be the end of the republic

00:44:49.380 and so if they're going to stick with the guy so yeah there's if i can cheer you up there's

00:44:55.180 i find a wide variety of of kinds of trump supporter these days how do you think biden has

00:45:02.800 been doing and and what do you think of the democratic prospects going forward i mean i you

00:45:07.720 know i've said repeatedly here that i really wish biden were not running due to the the obvious

00:45:13.880 liability of his age perhaps there are other liabilities that that are worth taking seriously

00:45:18.800 at this point but what's your sense of the biden administration and or the biden presidency and

00:45:24.760 the democratic side of things going into 2024 i'd say age obviously his liability i think his

00:45:31.420 approvals would be like 10 or 15 20 points higher if he was 60 but i'll say a couple things about

00:45:36.740 that one is i do get the chance to be in a room with him from time to time and the extent to which

00:45:43.040 he is physically decayed or mentally decayed is vastly overstated in the media i've been interviewing

00:45:48.400 the guy since he was you know for 20 or 30 years i almost wrote a book about him about 30 years ago

00:45:53.160 and sort of regret not doing it but so i've interviewed him over many decades and um he's

00:45:59.040 like a pitcher who used to throw 92 and now throws 87 so it's a decline but it's nothing nothing

00:46:04.780 tremendous and second in some ways he's better because in those days when i started interviewing him

00:46:10.820 he had to cram every fact in the universe into every answer so they were like 45 50 minute answers

00:46:16.820 now he stays on point and so i think that's positive third i think he's basically picked

00:46:23.260 the right fights he sees this big fight between authoritarianism and democracy and i think he's

00:46:30.020 essentially right about that he's pretty successful as a foreign policy president i think second i think

00:46:34.960 he's identified the core gap in american society which is the gap between as i say the coastal elites

00:46:43.000 who are doing pretty well and a lot of other people who are not and he is actively acting to repair that

00:46:48.280 gap so a treasury department report which may be a little biased or probably not too much says that

00:46:54.200 90 of the money from the inflation reduction act went to some of the poorest counties in this country

00:47:01.740 i mentioned earlier something which i think is really fascinating to me that if you look at where

00:47:07.240 the mega investments are in manufacturing plants battery plants chip plants etc etc it's not in

00:47:14.000 california anymore it's not in new york anymore it's in iowa arizona illinois i mentioned ohio

00:47:21.460 and so that's just to me tremendously good news and a sign that the market is healing

00:47:26.960 that there are all these hard-working people in these places who were de-industrialized and they're

00:47:32.660 they couldn't really we couldn't take advantage of their talents and now capitalism is saying yeah

00:47:38.160 we're going to locate our plant in columbus ohio because there are a lot of hard-working people there

00:47:41.540 and i think joe biden has materially benefited frankly a lot of trump voters the people who have

00:47:48.720 been left behind and so i have a much more positive view of the biden administration than you would

00:47:54.220 think from my political profile but i think he's he's basically doing the right thing and the big

00:48:00.120 thing he screwed up on well a couple things obviously the withdrawal from afghanistan but the

00:48:04.540 second one was there was too much stimulative spending so we got too much inflation but

00:48:09.380 joe manchin saved him there joe manchin cut back the stimulus and so it's we had the inflation but

00:48:14.880 now the inflation is down our unemployment is low wages are rising inequality is falling slightly

00:48:21.140 compared to europe our economy looks good compared to china it looks fantastic

00:48:25.200 and so i think the age thing and the moral trauma of the last six years keep his approvals low and i

00:48:31.480 have no confidence he'll win re-election but i have to say i think he's been a pretty good president

00:48:35.760 what if anything has come spilling out of hunter biden's laptop that you think

00:48:41.040 we should all take seriously i guess i have to say it's more serious than i thought it was

00:48:46.220 i think there he was trying to obviously trying to peddle influence whether he actually successfully

00:48:52.080 peddled influence is an open question to me i have to say i'm not a big scam

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 18, 2023

#334 — The Low-Trust Society

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