Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 20, 2024


#396 — The Way Forward


Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

173.48378

Word count

5,658

Sentence count

243

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Matthew Iglesias joins me to talk about why the Democratic Party has lost its way, and why he thinks it s time for a course correction. We also talk about identity politics and why we should all be woke about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
00:00:11.640 you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be
00:00:15.580 hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making
00:00:19.840 Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our
00:00:24.960 scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run
00:00:29.340 ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our
00:00:33.120 subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:45.220 I am here with Matthew Iglesias. Matt, thanks for joining me.
00:00:49.120 Oh, thanks for having me.
00:00:50.520 So how would you describe your journalistic and political background before we jump into the
00:00:57.620 deep end of the pool of democratic politics?
00:01:00.520 Sure. You know, I started writing a blog sort of in my spare time when I was a college student
00:01:06.020 around 2001, 2002. Graduated, worked for a kind of a small progressive magazine here in D.C. called
00:01:12.880 The American Prospect for a number of years. I've been doing different things, but mostly,
00:01:16.920 you know, kind of digital journalism from Washington, D.C., writing about politics.
00:01:21.620 I was working at Vox.com. I left there a little bit more than four years ago,
00:01:26.200 go off on my own, start a substack. Like a lot of people, I think I felt a little pushed out of the
00:01:32.480 currents in progressive politics that had been churning in the late teens, circa 2020.
00:01:38.720 Been doing my own thing since then. You know, consider myself liberal, leftist center,
00:01:43.440 a Democrat. I voted for Kamala Harris. But, you know, with the kind of increasing unease about where
00:01:49.560 things had gone. And I'm sad that Donald Trump won the election, but I also hope this can be an
00:01:54.620 opportunity to kind of set things aright, do some course corrections in left-of-center politics.
00:02:01.540 Yeah, yeah. So you and I are in a similar spot politically. Perhaps there's some daylight
00:02:05.580 between us, which we can explore. But how would you say the Democrats have lost their way? If you had
00:02:14.120 to summarize the destroyed fortunes of the Democrats politically in this last cycle,
00:02:20.400 what would you give as the primary reasons? I mean, you lose your way in many ways
00:02:28.160 simultaneously. But, you know, I mean, I think primarily Democrats have gotten sort of out of
00:02:34.680 touch with kind of mainstream cultural and moral values that people have. You know, I have some of
00:02:39.700 my own criticisms. There are ways in which I myself am a little out of touch with mainstream
00:02:44.540 cultural and moral values. But, you know, you really saw a party that has gotten so invested
00:02:50.800 in certain kinds of identity politics and, you know, slightly loopy ideas about people and democracy
00:02:59.060 in ways that I think don't really work and have lost or sort of buried the core of what it is that
00:03:07.320 people like about the idea of a political party that cares about, you know, protecting vulnerable
00:03:13.340 people and making sure that we're all taken care of has gone into this kind of hyper-focus on the
00:03:19.680 idea of a kind of, you know, escalator of privilege and oppression in a way that has, you know,
00:03:26.220 distorted the kind of basic epistemological soundness of how progressives think and talk.
00:03:32.920 So let's talk about identity politics because have you migrated at all in your view of this issue?
00:03:39.220 Because I, you know, you and I have never spoken before, but I dimly remember you making some
00:03:44.280 fairly woke noises when I had my falling out with your colleague Ezra Klein back in, I think it was
00:03:49.660 2018. Have you, are you in the same spot you were in there or did I, am I misrecalling what,
00:03:56.680 what actually happened there?
00:03:58.880 No, I mean, I think you're correct. I mean, I have shifted my view quite a bit about, about what the
00:04:06.060 balance of risks are in our society. You know, I think that when that went down in 2018, it seemed
00:04:13.100 to me that, you know, all this stuff about political correctness, et cetera, was being really kind of
00:04:19.400 badly overblown. And I think that was wrong. You know, that what we really saw over the next few
00:04:24.980 years is that there was a real challenge among Democrats in kind of articulating, you know, basic
00:04:32.660 approaches to crime problems, police brutality, other things that came up over the, over the past,
00:04:38.700 you know, over the next several years. And, you know, I was on the wrong side of that. And I think
00:04:44.320 more and more people have been catching up to the fact that, you know, we, we let things get too far.
00:04:50.940 Yeah. So actually it's in the news now. I mean, I think it's probably still in the news. I just
00:04:55.740 happened to read a, a nation article on this topic that I found especially galling. There's this story
00:05:01.620 of the, the Daniel Penny, Jordan Neely incident on the, on the subway car in New York. Penny, as many
00:05:08.580 people remember, was acquitted of, of murder charges and even manslaughter charges. And he was found not
00:05:14.540 guilty of whatever Alvin Bragg threw at him. Yet I, it's still being covered. It seems to me in,
00:05:19.460 in left-wing politics and media in ways that seem morally deranged and don't suggest that the,
00:05:27.960 the democratic party is going to learn the lessons or, or it's guaranteed to learn the lessons that,
00:05:34.180 that I think you and I agree that it should learn, right? So this, this nation article kind of lined up
00:05:39.100 the case of Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione. I don't know if you read this article, but it made them
00:05:45.140 seem essentially as equivalent cases of vigilante justice or pseudo justice that were, you got both
00:05:51.940 monstrous acts of violence that are being celebrated by, in one case, the far left, in one case, the far
00:05:57.560 right. And if anything, according to this author of the nation article, the Penny case where you had
00:06:04.840 somebody to my eye, actually just simply trying to defend innocent bystanders from the, the rampages of
00:06:11.800 a, a violent lunatic. You had the, what was optically judged to be the worst or, or least
00:06:18.900 sympathetic case, which is to say that the writer of this article thought that his readers at the
00:06:23.420 nation would find Luigi Mangione, the person who murdered a, a ran, more or less randomly selected
00:06:31.040 healthcare CEO would seem more sympathetic than Daniel Penny, who, you know, by the lights of this
00:06:38.280 author had effectively lynched a, a homeless black man on a subway car. How do you view that case?
00:06:45.640 And, and are you, are you, are you as baffled by some of the, the left-leaning intuitions you've
00:06:52.900 heard about it as I am? Yeah. I mean, the, the, the Penny case is interesting because I think this is a
00:06:57.140 little bit of a lagging indicator, you know, of the politics from a previous time when the indictment
00:07:02.560 originally came down. I, you know, never looked into this in extreme detail. He was acquitted. It
00:07:09.420 seemed like it was not that close of a call among the jury in a very liberal city. I think you've got
00:07:15.520 to believe that, you know, there was no case, right? There's no strong case against him. And that if
00:07:21.260 anything, you know, the racial politics on this probably went in the opposite direction of the one
00:07:27.300 that I've seen some leftist people suggesting, you know, I think an African-American Marine who
00:07:34.720 stepped up to defend other people on a subway would have been given the benefit of the doubt
00:07:39.560 by left-wing people. But instead, a white seen as conservative one was viewed with, with incredible
00:07:46.160 suspicion. So, you know, I think the coverage of that case that I've seen since the verdict in some
00:07:51.420 of the further left sources, some of the Twitter feeds of left-wing politicians has been, has been
00:07:56.780 pretty thoughtless and pretty bad. At the same time, if you compare the reaction to what it would
00:08:02.540 have been four or five years ago, it's much more muted. You know, The Nation has always been a far
00:08:08.460 left publication. When I was, you know, very enthusiastically voting for Barack Obama in 2008,
00:08:15.520 2012, they were saying, oh, he's like, he's way too moderate. You know, we're much more left-wing than
00:08:20.460 that. So, you know, I don't think it's surprising to see ideas in The Nation that I think are too far
00:08:27.540 left. I don't think it's so surprising that a handful of politicians in New York City are fired
00:08:32.320 up about this. When Penny was first arrested, you know, there were, there were big protests in New
00:08:37.340 York demanding that this happen. When he was acquitted, much more muted response. I mean, I think that the
00:08:43.620 country has moved to the right in a number of ways, Donald Trump winning the election, sort of most
00:08:49.840 notable of them, but that we are seeing a, not an evaporation of kind of out-of-control left-wing or
00:08:56.800 woke ideas, but a, but a recession of them back more to, you know, the kind of normal level that it's
00:09:03.060 historically been at. But I did think that this case was a good example of, you know, racial politics
00:09:09.060 on the left getting a little bit out of control. You know, you can't expect people to ride on mass
00:09:16.920 transit if there's going to be mentally disturbed people acting out and threatening people. I think
00:09:22.380 that's sort of common sense. It's something that transit officials around the country have started
00:09:27.300 to recognize. And it is, it's good if bystanders come in and intervene and try to help people.
00:09:33.520 It's, of course, tragic if when they do that, somebody ends up being seriously hurt or even
00:09:38.580 killed in this case. But that just goes to show, you know, that we need to think more seriously
00:09:43.220 about how we treat people with severe mental illness. The man who unfortunately died in this
00:09:48.340 case, as I understand it, had been arrested many, many times, had been offered all different kinds
00:09:53.620 of mental health support and treatment. But, you know, we've really moved away from being able to
00:09:58.520 coercively treat people who are a danger to themselves and to others. And that's a real problem,
00:10:04.520 I think, in our society. You can't just treat, you know, the public space as a kind of, you know,
00:10:11.920 open venue for disorder and chaos. I have a heuristic in my mind that I would want the
00:10:19.240 Democrats to absorb. I'm wondering if this goes too far for you. But it seems to me that any reference
00:10:26.720 to race most of the time, virtually all of the time, is politically and even ethically
00:10:33.880 suspect at this point, right? I think we should be very, very slow to talk about, think about,
00:10:41.580 reference, point to, be motivated by the concept of race in our politics and really in our ethics.
00:10:49.080 I mean, there are certain cases where I think you could defend it and perhaps those could readily
00:10:54.580 spring to mind. But generally speaking, you know, 99% of the time, it seems to me to be the wrong
00:11:01.140 direction to move. And politically, I think this is now obvious, but I think I could make the ethical
00:11:08.620 case for that. Does that seem like it's overreaching to you? Well, I mean, it depends what we're talking
00:11:13.060 about, right? I mean, I read a book recently about prison gangs. And obviously, I think if you want to
00:11:19.220 understand how prisons function, the fact that many of them are sort of de facto controlled by these
00:11:25.700 racially segregated gangs is very salient. It's very relevant. You can't speak intelligently about 0.99
00:11:31.380 that without talking about race. At the same time, I mean, I really do think that what we want to do
00:11:38.060 as humanists, as liberals in the sort of broad philosophical sense, is reduce the salience of race
00:11:46.200 in our society, right? Is not injected into contexts where it's ambiguous or, you know, debatably
00:11:54.200 relevant. And I think that a trend really emerged around five to 10 years ago of doing the opposite,
00:12:01.260 right? Of sort of taking situations and finding opportunities to inject a racial discourse into
00:12:07.840 them. And there was a view that that was going to help us make some kind of progress as a society.
00:12:13.400 And I think that's really wrong. I mean, it's wrong. It's wrong as an electoral politics question,
00:12:18.480 but it's wrong as a question of human psychology and interaction, right? We don't want to be
00:12:24.560 encouraging people to think in terms of racial and ethnic categories. That's sort of contrary to
00:12:30.160 the American value ethic historically. Obviously, we have had a lot of people in American history
00:12:36.540 who do encourage people to think in terms of racial categories. But classically, what you would say
00:12:41.980 is, well, those people are racists, right? They're doing something bad by saying we need to be
00:12:48.280 thinking about race all the time. We need to be thinking about racial categorizations all the time.
00:12:52.720 And we should be moving away from that. You know, I have one of my grandparents is from Cuba. 1.00
00:12:59.600 And so, you know, a question arises in the scheme of, you know, American ethnicity. Does that mean I'm in
00:13:05.500 some sense? Am I a Hispanic person, quote unquote? And, you know, I think in most real world senses,
00:13:12.240 it's like, no, you know, I have light skin. I only speak English. I was raised in a Jewish household.
00:13:19.660 Don't you know, Matt, you're Latinx. Did you get the memo? 0.97
00:13:22.700 At the same time, you know, it's a true fact about my family, my ancestry, et cetera. But, you know,
00:13:28.060 there's no fact of the matter about these kind of schemes and categorizations where people,
00:13:35.060 we have family members who are from different places. We have ancestries. But it's not healthy 1.00
00:13:41.880 to encourage this kind of, you know, obsessive thinking about race and ethnicity.
00:13:49.180 Yeah. Well, the painful irony for me, and this is something that I've whinged about,
00:13:52.920 I think for several years at this point, is that the Democrats, you know, up until yesterday,
00:14:01.460 thought about race, spoke about race every bit as much as white supremacists on the right. I mean,
00:14:08.140 you have to go all the way to the neo-Nazis to find people on the right who are as vocal about the
00:14:14.780 salience of race and racial difference. And that just seems patently crazy to me. I mean, just,
00:14:20.540 and it's, I mean, what's wrong with identity politics, in my view, you know, there are many
00:14:26.960 ways you could come at this, but it's, I mean, to come back to the Daniel Penny, Jordan Neely case,
00:14:31.920 and perhaps make it generic. I mean, if you described a situation on a subway car where
00:14:35.720 there was a, you know, a violently deranged and threatening person who came on the car and
00:14:40.740 terrified everyone, you know, including women and children, and a man at some risk to himself
00:14:46.340 and in some, at some obvious risk of future prosecution stood up to try to pacify this
00:14:52.580 person and attempted to use the minimum amount of force, but because of his, you know, lack of
00:14:57.420 perfect skill wound up severely injuring or even killing the aggressor. If you describe that
00:15:04.080 situation generically to people, left of center, as you move further left, and you don't actually have
00:15:09.780 to move that far left. I mean, really just a step left of center. I think you meet people reliably
00:15:15.300 who don't know how they feel about that situation, no matter how exhaustively you describe it and
00:15:20.580 describe the motives of people involved and the testimony of bystanders, et cetera. They don't
00:15:25.880 know how they feel about it until you tell them the skin colors of the people involved, right? And
00:15:31.480 if you swap the skin colors on the various participants, they feel differently, reliably
00:15:36.540 differently. If you tell them that the victims are Jewish, they feel one way. If you tell them that
00:15:42.760 they're black, they feel another way, all of these markers of identity are incredibly salient for
00:15:48.440 them morally. And that, to my eye, is the very definition of not actually thinking these things 0.78
00:15:57.700 through in moral or ethical terms, right? It's just, it is a layer of political delirium that is
00:16:05.160 riding atop of our, you know, otherwise serviceable moral toolkit and visibly, palpably damaging it.
00:16:12.760 So what I think we need in the Democratic Party to reboot, and we're going to come to your list of,
00:16:19.620 I think, nine principles that you wrote about on your blog, Slow Boring, which seemed to have been
00:16:24.780 quite influential. But I think that, you know, one place to reboot from is just a call for basic
00:16:32.060 moral sanity and honesty, right? And if changing skin color in a situation changes your intuitions as
00:16:41.100 reliably as it does for a white supremacist, the onus is on you to make moral sense of that.
00:16:47.100 I think that's right. I mean, I think that what happens in the identity politics space on the left
00:16:52.960 is people have taken a, you know, I would say a widespread moral failing, right, which is to judge
00:16:59.340 cases in part based on the identity of the people involved and your kind of group affiliations and
00:17:05.660 turn it into a kind of a virtue. And I don't know, you know, I think there's probably a lot of people
00:17:12.860 whose snap judgments of a situation might be influenced by information about the ethnicity
00:17:18.880 of the people involved. But what's become very unusual on the left in America is for people to
00:17:24.360 say that that's good, right? To say like that that's true and correct. And in a more abstract
00:17:31.420 policy sense, I think there's been a move to, you know, a lot of disparate impact type logic. I mean,
00:17:37.840 a kind of circular argument that I've seen play out in D.C. where I live, but in a lot of other cities
00:17:42.940 is, you know, there's been a move in cities to have cameras, you know, to catch cars who are
00:17:49.760 speeding, right? And then in D.C., in Chicago, in a number of other cities, once these were installed,
00:17:55.600 it's come out, well, you know, they're catching more people speeding in Black neighborhoods.
00:18:00.520 And so that's bad, right? Somehow the cameras are discriminating or something. And you think that
00:18:06.060 through and it's like, well, by definition, right, we've put cameras in place precisely because
00:18:10.760 cameras aren't subject to these kind of biases. If people are speeding more in African-American
00:18:15.880 neighborhoods, that could be a disproportionate benefit to the pedestrians living in those
00:18:20.860 neighborhoods, right? I mean, if people are driving unsafely by your house, by your kid's school,
00:18:25.860 that's really bad, right? You have learned something about the world from that. And it also
00:18:30.780 just doesn't matter, right? I mean, there's, you know, cities should set speed limits appropriately.
00:18:35.900 It shouldn't be too low. The fine shouldn't be too high, whatever it is. But if you
00:18:40.540 have reasonable traffic rules, then you should try to enforce them and get people to drive
00:18:45.260 safely. And this kind of endless inquiry about the identities of people involved or trying to draw
00:18:52.260 inferences or trying to draw obvious conclusions about what's right and what's wrong based on those
00:18:57.880 kind of things, it doesn't make sense. It's not something that you find, you know, if you look
00:19:02.580 at the kind of the great reference points that even progressive-minded people look to, say, you know,
00:19:07.420 who are our moral leaders in the past? Who are our political heroes? That's not how they talked.
00:19:12.400 It's not how they acted. You know, these are ideas and habits of thought that have arisen
00:19:18.640 relatively recently, I think, out of a kind of slightly odd academic milieu that I don't totally
00:19:25.200 understand. It's not, you know, I was a philosophy major when I was in college and, you know, read political
00:19:31.280 moral theorists, et cetera. None of the people I was assigned said that you should proceed on that
00:19:37.300 kind of basis. You didn't get to that chapter in Rawls where it said... Right. I mean, you know,
00:19:42.700 it's not Rawls. It's not Mill. It's not part of the liberal tradition. It's not part of the Marxist
00:19:48.540 tradition even. It's... I don't know 100% what it is, but it's become very, very dominant and especially
00:19:56.020 became ultra-dominant about five years ago. And, you know, it's something... I mean, this is part of
00:20:02.560 what I wrote in my piece, but, I mean, it's something that Democrats really desperately need
00:20:08.080 to move away from back to, you know, an ideal of treating people as individuals and judging them
00:20:14.380 based on what they do. You know, we can talk about the history of America, right, in which obviously
00:20:20.320 racial categorizations were a very important part of American history for a long time. That's like a
00:20:25.520 real fact. We don't need to lie to people about that, but it's not something that we should encourage
00:20:30.560 on a forward-looking basis. Well, why isn't wealth inequality as a focus an appropriate surrogate for
00:20:39.440 rectifying the disparities as people that have, obviously, a historical explanation that people
00:20:45.800 are still worried about? I mean, if it is, in fact, true, and last I looked, it seemed to be true,
00:20:50.160 although these data are a few years old, that, on average, African-American families have one-eighth
00:20:56.160 the amount of familial wealth as white families. And that's a disparity which might have, you know,
00:21:03.640 several reasons, but the most glaring certainly is the history of racism and racial discrimination and
00:21:11.340 racist policies in America, right? I mean, that has a legacy effect that would seem undeniable,
00:21:17.100 but whatever the reasons, it is the current reality. And if you just focused on class,
00:21:24.400 if you focused on disparities in wealth and all of the opportunities that correlate with wealth,
00:21:29.420 you know, educational opportunities, et cetera, health outcomes, if you focus on those things
00:21:34.000 in a way that was race-blind, you would obviously disproportionately advantage or appropriately
00:21:39.180 and proportionately advantage, depending on how you thought about it, people of color without ever 1.00
00:21:45.460 stepping onto this terrain of politically invidious and morally suspect distinctions,
00:21:55.680 which, you know, of the sort that we saw during COVID, where you have, you know, the Biden
00:21:59.680 administration saying that we're going to privilege black and brown people for the vaccine,
00:22:04.900 because that's obviously the good thing to do, or we're going to give, you know, aid to black,
00:22:11.040 you know, businesses run by black and brown Americans before white Americans, because that's 0.97
00:22:15.020 obviously a step in the direction of equity. I mean, that, you know, it's understandable that,
00:22:20.780 I mean, the good intentions at the bottom of all that are recognizable,
00:22:24.200 but it is understandable that that is just akin to just obvious political evil when viewed from
00:22:32.100 the perspective of a desperately poor white American who, you know, should be just as much 0.63
00:22:40.760 within the circle of our social concern as any other poor person.
00:22:46.580 Yeah. I mean, you know, something I like to tell people, remind people of is when Barack Obama was
00:22:51.880 president, you know, early in his term, he was trying to do a big healthcare bill that, you know,
00:22:56.660 among other things, it expanded Medicaid, it gave extra money to low-income people to help take care
00:23:01.880 of their health needs. And Rush Limbaugh, you know, conservative radio host, very influential
00:23:08.000 guy while he was alive, he used to say, oh, this Obamacare, this is really a reparations program,
00:23:15.600 right? Because that was, he was trying to sink an effort to help poor people by making it out to be
00:23:22.520 just an effort to help black people, right? He was trying to mobilize, you know, racial division to
00:23:28.940 defeat an egalitarian economic program. That's a very classic trope in American politics. And if you go
00:23:34.580 back, Martin Luther King's book, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community? He talks about how,
00:23:40.120 you know, the only way we are going to develop what he wanted for black people, you know, living in 1.00
00:23:47.460 slums, living in ghetto neighborhoods, was to build an alliance with lower-income white people who had
00:23:52.320 similar needs. And in the freedom budget that he and Bayard Rustin and Philip Randolph put together,
00:23:58.800 you know, they say, we're going to have quality education when we have good schools for everyone.
00:24:03.820 We're going to have good jobs for everyone, right? That's sort of how you try to create a politically
00:24:09.220 tractable vision as you decrease these kind of racial divisions. And, you know, it's obviously,
00:24:16.500 it's politically toxic. I remember in the summer of 2020, I was in rural Maine, you know, and there's
00:24:22.260 a kind of affluent town by the coast, and they had all the Black Lives Matter, you know, banners up there.
00:24:28.820 And then there's a poorer town inland, you know, people living in trailers, things like that. All white 1.00
00:24:34.220 in both cases, very white state. You know, and obviously, you know, if you're living in a trailer
00:24:41.060 in Penobscot, Maine, and the lumber industry that your family used to work in has gone away,
00:24:47.580 things like that. I mean, you don't want to be lectured by other people about how privileged you
00:24:51.540 are in life. And I think that's just completely obvious. It also does a disservice, actually, to
00:24:57.360 William Julius Wilson talked about the truly disadvantaged, by which he meant, you know,
00:25:02.120 poor Black people living in, you know, high-poverty neighborhoods, right, really cut off from
00:25:07.800 economic opportunity and kind of functional social institutions. You do no favors to people in that
00:25:15.120 kind of situation to kind of hyper-focus on, you know, microaggressions or kind of pure
00:25:22.760 representational politics among the elite. Because, you know, the only people able to take advantage of
00:25:29.360 those kind of opportunities are actually people who have achieved a fair amount of prosperity,
00:25:35.360 right? So if you want to help people who are really suffering, which I think you should,
00:25:40.840 you know, you need to focus on kind of objective indicators of deprivation, whether that's income,
00:25:46.480 wealth, health status, other kinds of things like that. That's common sense politics. That's the way it
00:25:51.540 was done by almost everybody up until, you know, the 20-teens. And it's been a dead end. And I think
00:25:59.920 that should be the message of the extent to which all kinds of people swung toward Trump this time
00:26:06.740 around.
00:26:07.760 I want to, again, I want to jump into your nine principles, and this will take us over some of the
00:26:12.660 ground we've already covered, perhaps, but in greater detail. But before we jump into your nine
00:26:17.360 principles, I'm wondering, what do you think Biden's legacy will be at this point?
00:26:22.620 You know, I mean, I think it's going to be quite meager. His whole pitch was that he was going to
00:26:27.820 sort of save the country from Trump. To go out the way that he did, to be succeeded literally by Trump,
00:26:35.900 you know, means there essentially is no legacy, except that we don't know what's going to become
00:26:41.260 of Trump, right? I mean, if he turns out to be as threatening to American institutions as
00:26:47.260 I'm certainly concerned he might be, that could leave Biden with a very bleak legacy.
00:26:53.100 If four years of Trump goes okay in America, you know, then he'll be a kind of a funny trivia
00:26:57.860 answer, right? Like Benjamin Harrison, who served between two Grover Cleveland terms. And that's
00:27:03.340 because, you know, who even remembers Grover Cleveland, right? So Biden may just not amount to
00:27:09.420 anything when he, I think, actually had a lot of promise, you know, in 2020. He had some appealing
00:27:16.860 ideas, I think. And I think that the vision of kind of a figure from an older generation who was going
00:27:24.800 to try to bring Democrats back to stability is why he won the primary, you know, in a very kind of
00:27:32.240 tumultuous time. He was seen by rank and file Democrats as a steady pair of hands who was going
00:27:38.760 to, you know, both beat Trump, but also bring the party back to a set of values that, frankly,
00:27:44.500 Biden had been associated with for most of his career. And then that's not how he governed. And
00:27:49.320 I'm, you know, I'm quite taken aback by it and have been consistently for the past several years.
00:27:55.280 And what do you actually expect of a second Trump term at this point?
00:27:58.660 I mean, it's very hard to say, you know, I mean, everything that you get from Trump
00:28:03.120 is very contrary signals all the time. You know, he campaigns the whole time. He says,
00:28:09.100 we're going to have tariffs on everybody. And then his allies in the business community say,
00:28:13.820 no, don't worry, he's not really going to do that. There was a Wall Street Journal
00:28:17.120 article this morning which said, no, like he's really he is going to do that. There was this kind
00:28:22.060 of, I think, slightly unnerving story about ABC settling a defamation case with Trump that I think,
00:28:31.080 you know, I'm not a lawyer, but most people who are informed about these things say they think ABC
00:28:37.240 could have won that case if they'd taken it to court, almost certainly would have won. But,
00:28:41.500 you know, they wanted to settle it because the Walt Disney Company didn't want to make Trump
00:28:45.560 angry, didn't want to make him upset. You know, he's going to put in an FBI director who says he's
00:28:51.300 going to like purge the institution and find Trump's enemies. So, I mean, who knows? You know,
00:28:57.980 it's, it's, if there's anything that I know from 20 something years of covering politics, it's that
00:29:03.680 it is very hard to predict the future. I hope it goes okay. You know, not all of his ideas are
00:29:09.040 terrible. I think people had some valid reasons to want to vote for him. I think it's unfortunate
00:29:15.080 that Republicans threw up somebody with really a kind of a low character. You know, nobody,
00:29:21.300 nobody has ever said to me about Donald Trump, well, if you only, like, if you really knew him,
00:29:26.740 you know, if you saw what he was like behind closed doors, he's so much more thoughtful. He's
00:29:31.020 so much kinder than he comes across as. And you hear that every other president, you know,
00:29:35.920 maybe it's BS, but like people who worked for George W. Bush, people who worked for Biden,
00:29:41.200 people who worked, you know, people who lost Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, their closest aides
00:29:46.240 will say, you know, this person is so great. I talk to people who worked for Trump in his first
00:29:50.500 term and they'll say, you know, no, like this guy's totally nuts. It's, it's exactly what it 0.93
00:29:55.340 seems like. And that, you know, that worries me. Do you think Trumpism and the more generically
00:30:02.920 this trend of right-wing populism in America ends or, or gets severely mitigated in the absence of
00:30:10.380 Trump? I mean, is Trump a singular figure that has potentiated this cult of personality that has
00:30:16.260 subsumed the Republican party? Do we swing back to a, a more normal Republican party after Trump or
00:30:22.380 not necessarily? You know, there's an element of personalistic politics to Trump that's,
00:30:27.800 that's very unusual. And that I think is going to be hard for anybody else to replicate.
00:30:33.200 There's also an idea though, of a kind of a crude nationalism to Trump that I think has kind of
00:30:40.620 deep roots and that you see in a lot of different countries and a lot of different contexts that I
00:30:46.400 don't, I don't like, you know, I don't think it's morally admirable to be saying things like,
00:30:52.260 we should have taken the oil, that kind of thing. I don't think that, you know, there's very
00:30:56.660 legitimate criticisms of how immigration policy was handled under Joe Biden. I also don't think
00:31:01.840 that trying to promote, you know, indifference to people because of, they were born in another
00:31:07.180 country is like a good thing. This is a form of identity politics that I think, you know,
00:31:14.180 can be quite problematic, but that also is, is kind of deep in the, in the structure of democratic
00:31:20.920 politics and isn't going to be vanishing. I did think, I thought that if Trump had lost,
00:31:26.380 you know, that the, that the spell would kind of break on this, that Republicans would say, 0.99
00:31:31.720 you know what, like this guy had some good points, but fundamentally he's a loser. He's dragging us 0.98
00:31:38.040 down by being so weird. We have a lot of other people in our party who can talk about border
00:31:43.180 security without being so nutty and without having these kind of authoritarian aspects. Since he won,
00:31:49.820 you know, winners tend to prosper. People are going to try to copy him whether they can or can't.
00:31:54.600 What do you make of the failure on the part of Democrats and the Biden administration to deal
00:32:00.520 with the immigration problem at the border, which was so obviously politically disastrous? I mean,
00:32:05.820 even if you had no other concern about it, the, the optics of it were so terrible.
00:32:10.780 If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at
00:32:14.740 samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense
00:32:20.040 podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't
00:32:25.240 afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast
00:32:30.280 is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.