Making Sense - Sam Harris - #428 — Political Extremism

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

00:00:11.720 hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing

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00:00:26.220 it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're

00:00:30.180 doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks for

00:00:39.140 joining me. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, it's great to see you again. So I'm

00:00:44.360 sure there's a lot to talk about. Let's remind people, first of all, where they can find most

00:00:48.140 of your stuff to read online, and how do you describe what you do and where you are these

00:00:53.960 days? Sure. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, which Steve Hayes and I launched about

00:00:59.100 six years ago because we wanted to sort of model behavior that wasn't too much on display in American

00:01:04.880 journalism, particularly in right-of-center journalism. And so we are unapologetically

00:01:09.960 right-of-center. We have some left-of-center writers as well, but we pride ourselves on being

00:01:15.020 fact-driven, and we're sort of violently nonpartisan, so we're perfectly happy to talk about how the 1.00

00:01:20.060 Republican Party's a shit show. And so The Dispatch is the best place to find me. I'm an LA Times 1.00

00:01:24.820 columnist, have been for almost two decades, and I've got a podcast called The Remnant. So there you

00:01:30.360 go. Nice. Nice. Well, let's start with Trump 2.0. How's it going? How has the first, what is this,

00:01:38.960 seven months, almost eight months been in your view? What has surprised you? What is better than

00:01:44.780 you thought, worse than you thought? Yeah, so that's a good question. I am, uh, I have to admit

00:01:49.300 I was wrong about some things. I, like a lot of people, thought that we would see more continuity

00:01:55.660 with the first term for good and for ill than we have. I had this theory, I may have even floated

00:02:01.900 it on here, that the kind of mass deportation he was promising is too big of a lift logistically

00:02:08.460 politically and politically for him to pull off. I don't think he's where, he still hasn't gotten to

00:02:14.260 where he sort of promised to go, but he's gotten closer to it than I thought he would. I have to say

00:02:19.060 I've been surprised at his remarkably quick success in shutting down the border. I think if he were

00:02:25.120 smart politically, he would talk about that a lot more and stop doing a lot of the other stuff that

00:02:28.860 he does. I've been surprised by the really sort of complete feckless confusion of Democrats in all

00:02:37.040 sorts of ways and how to counter him. Yeah. I also, you know, but the thing that I was wrong about

00:02:41.820 is more that I, I thought that in his first term, the condo salesman part of his presidency was much

00:02:49.940 more pronounced insofar as he liked the headline. He liked to promote the headline. He liked to claim

00:02:55.220 total victory. You would tell people he actually built the wall. He claimed that he completely tore up

00:02:59.520 NAFTA when in reality, he basically just added a couple, you know, new provisions to an updated NAFTA

00:03:05.320 and kept it, but he got to claim that he did something huge. Right. And this time around,

00:03:09.740 I've been shocked to the degree to which there's more substance for good or for ill to a lot of his

00:03:16.500 stuff. I never thought Doge would work and it didn't, but it did a lot of damage. There was a lot of

00:03:21.600 performative vandalism to it. Yeah. And I, I guess the thing I'm sort of most shocked by, it's hard.

00:03:27.900 I should have made a list, but I guess the thing I'm most shocked by is the cavalier way a lot of people

00:03:33.380 just sort of price in the corruption. And I don't mean, I don't necessarily just mean like the crypto

00:03:38.740 stuff and the Bitcoin stuff and taking a plane from the Qataris and all those sort of obvious

00:03:43.780 things. You know, corruption has a more, has a richer, more redolent meaning than the sort of

00:03:49.140 just bribe-taking kind of connotation to it. The corruption of sort of the way the system is

00:03:54.500 supposed to work, the, you know, one of the things that's good about hypocrisy that people

00:03:59.380 don't really appreciate is that even lip service to an ideal that you fall short of maintains this

00:04:06.260 idea that the ideal should be an ideal, right? Like Wayne Booth, the literary critic says that

00:04:11.140 rhetoric is the art of probing what men believe men ought to believe. And so the fact that Trump has

00:04:17.740 been so successful in just dispensing with the pretense of doing the right thing some of the time

00:04:24.460 and people cut them slack for it, you know, this idea that you're going to fill the government with

00:04:29.740 loyalists where you make them take loyalty tests and everyone says, well, that's just Trump. That's

00:04:34.040 what people voted for. The idea that you're going to put some of these, some truly unqualified people

00:04:38.240 in power solely because they're loyal. That's the kind of thing that, look, loyalty tests are a thing

00:04:44.540 in politics and have been for thousands of years and they're never going away. But the pretense that

00:04:49.600 you're doing things for other reasons is usually cover for it. And here, there's a lot of crap he's 0.99

00:04:55.180 doing that, that they're just, they're just owning it. And that's been pretty shocking to me. 0.98

00:05:00.760 Yeah. That point about hypocrisy is, is a deep one. I think it was, I think there's this, uh,

00:05:05.380 La Roche-Vicotte maxim that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice plays to virtue.

00:05:10.040 Right. And that does have the same, it's making the same point that you're only truly capable of

00:05:15.620 hypocrisy if you're to some degree granting the importance of certain norms tacitly. So it's by

00:05:21.860 reference to those norms that you can be convicted of hypocrisy, but there's just no pretense of

00:05:27.660 normativity at all with these guys. You know, the one thing, I mean, Trump lies about everything

00:05:32.440 under the sun. Uh, he's a massive imposter and has been for, in so many respects, you know, he 0.61

00:05:38.900 pretended to be rich when he wasn't rich, et cetera, but he's never pretended to be a good

00:05:43.380 person, right? He's not a hypocrite in that sense. And I think that's some of some key to his, his

00:05:48.860 charm for at least half of America. Yeah. I'm kind of curious what you think about this. Cause I,

00:05:53.540 I often try to explain this point to people and they look at me the way my basset hound used to look

00:05:58.260 at me when I tried to feed it a grape with just sort of head tilting, total incomprehension. I see

00:06:03.460 Trump in many ways as almost a culmination of postmodernism, right? And we can stay on the

00:06:09.380 hypocrisy thing for just a second. You know, as, as a friend of mine once said, when Hugh Hefner

00:06:13.900 moved out of the Playboy mansion to raise little kids, no one criticized him for failing to live down

00:06:20.120 to his principles, right? Like the, I, in a healthy society, the hypocrisy thing about upholding the

00:06:27.180 ideals is important because it still keeps the standard alive and the cult of authenticity,

00:06:35.060 which is more from romanticism than postmodernism, but they overlap says, no, the true, the highest

00:06:40.120 version of, of truth, the highest version of legitimacy comes from within that you just have

00:06:45.040 to be true to yourself. And that's why I think our culture for the last 50 years has been so obsessed

00:06:50.440 with notions of hypocrisy. But I always used to say, you know, if a glutton says everyone should

00:06:57.760 overeat that he's being true to himself, but he's giving terrible advice. It's better to say,

00:07:03.000 don't do what I do, right? The essence of good parenting is to say, you know, don't make, you

00:07:07.360 know, is not to sort of teach your kids to make the same mistakes you made, but to say, I learned from

00:07:12.160 some things and we're going to set some standards and do as I say, not as I did. And Trump, I think

00:07:17.740 comes partly from Norman Vincent Peale and the power of positive thinking upbringing that he had

00:07:22.480 and partly from his just, you know, malignant narcissism. He has this approach to the universe,

00:07:29.940 which is to say that his feelings are determinative of reality. We just saw this last week with the

00:07:36.000 firing of the BLS commissioner. It's critical Trump theory, right? If any external truth or standard

00:07:42.640 undermines his desires, his will to power, his preferences, it must not only be corrupt or rigged,

00:07:50.160 as he would put it, but it must be specifically rigged against him, that it's bigoted against Trump,

00:07:55.800 right? When Barr told him, we looked into these allegations that the election was stolen and there's

00:08:00.840 no evidence to it. Trump's response was, wasn't go look again or show me the facts. It was, you must

00:08:08.640 hate Trump because he doesn't speak the vernacular of, you know, Foucault reading campus radicals or

00:08:16.880 anything like that. And because he, he, he's so naked in his appetites and his agenda, people don't

00:08:23.340 see it that in many ways, it's a kind of horseshoe theory thing where he is, he's living down to this

00:08:29.680 cult of authenticity thing and it gets him off the hook. People will say, that's just Trump being Trump

00:08:34.840 as if an explanation is the same thing as an excuse. Yeah. Well, there's this phrase that is

00:08:40.440 gaining some currency in, among the commentariat, which is the woke right, you know, or the postmodern

00:08:46.760 right. And, um, the claim seems to be that the right has learned, if not explicitly by osmosis from

00:08:55.160 the success of wokeness on the far left, that you can essentially take all of your political assertions

00:09:02.380 off the gold standard of reality testing and truth claims and intellectual honesty. And it's

00:09:08.300 just all a matter of just the memetics of what will win. I mean, what narrative can you force

00:09:14.220 into people's brains on social media? Who can you smear successfully? And yeah, then there's just

00:09:20.940 whatever sticks, sticks. And it's, it's just a set of power relations, right? You're just, you're,

00:09:26.900 you're worried about who has power, who's going to benefit from anything being established as true,

00:09:33.700 as opposed to whether or not it is true. And yeah, it does vindicate at least this part of

00:09:39.940 horse, horse to share theory. I mean, I guess there's antisemitism also vindicates it. If you 0.75

00:09:44.740 go far enough left or right, you meet antisemites of a different flavor. But the resemblance of the,

00:09:50.280 of the political extremes to one another is in the lack of principles and the conspiracy thinking

00:09:56.660 and the willingness to really break all of the, the norms that allow for sane, rational compromise.

00:10:03.520 Yeah. It seems to be there and it just is in self-evident. I used to be a big critic of horseshoe

00:10:09.260 theory and I'm still willing to defend my old criticisms, but I've had to say times have changed

00:10:15.140 it and I've changed my mind about it. And so far as I used to defend the American right and

00:10:20.660 conservatism, and I still defend the conservatism that I believe in on these grounds. It's just that

00:10:24.980 my conservatism isn't very popular these days, but you know, American conservatism is liberal in the

00:10:31.040 classical liberal sense is that the heart of the American conservative movement in my lifetime was

00:10:35.980 defending, you know, the founding fathers and the, the constitution, free market capitalism,

00:10:41.300 all of these things that stem out of 18th and 19th century classical liberalism. And a big chunk of

00:10:48.000 the American center left is classically liberal too. I mean, they have too much Rawls in it for me,

00:10:53.020 but that's a different conversation. And what kind of just dawned on me is like, I never, I always

00:10:58.180 thought that the right would not let go of those commitments. And it turns out that the reason why

00:11:04.300 horseshoe theory works is the second you stop being liberal, right? In the classical liberal sense,

00:11:11.340 you know, individual rights, the sovereignty of facts, the liberal of liberal arts, right? That's

00:11:15.840 the kind of liberal I'm talking about. This idea that rules and rights are sovereign, that the individual

00:11:23.300 is key, that conscience rights are important, that we don't judge people as members of groups,

00:11:29.280 but on their own actions and based on their own arguments and facts and all that. The second you

00:11:34.580 abandon that, whether you do it for a culturally loaded left-wingism or a culturally loaded right-wing

00:11:41.900 ism, the salient point is it's illiberal. Yeah. And illiberalisms, it's sort of like in particle

00:11:48.120 physics, you know, you got different, they start giving these different things, different tiny little

00:11:52.340 flavors to explain the differences of them. But at the end of the day, like illiberalism is a liberalism.

00:11:58.300 And the differences between them boil down to flavors and aesthetics and also which constituencies

00:12:07.220 you want to reward, right? Which powers, which groups you want to elevate and which you want

00:12:12.120 to denigrate. But in terms of like respect for rights and facts and logic and reason and conscience

00:12:19.560 and all that kind of stuff, the different forms of illiberalism are all remarkably similar.

00:12:24.100 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're both tribal, right? You're, you're fighting for your tribe and

00:12:30.040 there's no pretense of the universality of your commitments, you know? So, I mean, to be actually

00:12:35.520 ethical, to be saying something is good or something is evil, really you have, it can't just be, it's

00:12:41.540 that way because you are you part of your group or you have your skin color. I mean, you have to be 0.97

00:12:46.380 making a claim that's generalizable to people regardless of identity. But once you give up

00:12:51.480 that criterion and you just think identity is everything, then yeah, there's no reason to

00:12:58.240 respect expertise. I mean, obviously we, you know, expertise is a sham. That's just another power

00:13:01.980 relation. Institutions don't have to be preserved. We don't, you know, as you go far enough left and

00:13:08.180 far enough right now, you meet people who don't seem to think there's much of any, anything worth

00:13:15.440 preserving in our society, right? So it's definitely not conservative. The further right you go,

00:13:21.800 you meet the tear it all, tear it all down brigade, you know, just as surely as you meet them on the

00:13:26.600 left. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the arguments, I think, I apologize if we talked about this last time I

00:13:32.080 was on here, but one of the arguments that drives me crazy is this claim, which you get from a lot of

00:13:37.320 people on what they call the common good constitutionalism. It's one of these post

00:13:41.580 liberal right-wing intellectual niches. And the argument that they like to make, which has its,

00:13:48.280 its analogs in the arguments that the Trump administration makes all the time is that the

00:13:53.060 constitution and by extension, the rule of law, but the constitution is a morally neutral document.

00:14:00.300 And I find this really grotesque because first of all, where the constitution is neutral,

00:14:07.940 that neutrality itself is profoundly moral, right? This idea that you, you know, the reason why

00:14:13.820 justice is blind is that you're not supposed to pick favorites by the color of the scheme of people

00:14:17.680 walking to the courtroom, right? But at the same time, you know, the idea that you have the right

00:14:22.880 to confront your accuser, right? That was one of the most hard won moral victories for humanity, right?

00:14:30.300 The idea that you should be secure in your papers and your properties, and you have a right to

00:14:34.040 privacy and all these kinds of things, that is not morally neutral. And it's very easy to see how

00:14:38.980 it's not morally neutral. If you feel like it, when it's violated, you know, if you, if you start

00:14:44.280 thinking about the fifth amendment or the first amendment, the right to speak your conscience

00:14:48.360 without punishment, right? The right to worship as you please to associate as you please. We take these

00:14:54.000 things for granted, which is a shame, but taking them for granted is not the same thing as

00:15:00.000 thinking that they're morally neutral. This is what makes Western democracies morally superior

00:15:07.480 to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the right or the left, right? The fact that we recognize

00:15:15.120 these things, but this tribal thing that you get on the post-liberal right says, no, no, no,

00:15:20.540 because they don't reward the things that we like and they allow for the freedom of people we disagree

00:15:26.620 with. That's a suicide pact and we got to get rid of it. And I think it's, that's what's suicidal is

00:15:32.820 that kind of thinking.

00:15:34.100 So what do you make of Trump's apparent failure to put the Epstein mess behind him in a way that is,

00:15:40.420 uh, as efficient as, um, his dispatch of most of the scandals he's had to deal with?

00:15:46.140 So, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm, and I'm glad we've moved on from the, the philosophical stuff for a little

00:15:51.620 bit. So I think the Epstein thing is kind of fascinating. All right. We'll just do this as

00:15:55.760 political punditry for just for a second. Part of what we're seeing here is it dawning on the various

00:16:04.740 hotbeds of MAGA, social media, podcast bros, whoever, right? Steve Bannon, it's dawning on them

00:16:13.700 that Trump's not going to be around forever. And the Epstein story is just too good. Right. It's

00:16:20.340 got, I mean, it is, as my friend, David French says, it's something like he calls it the thinking

00:16:25.020 man's QAnon. Right. And it just checks so many boxes and scratches so many erogenous zones. It's

00:16:32.520 got this, this perfidious Jewish guy at the head of it. Right. And he's in the shadowy globalist world 1.00

00:16:38.420 of banking and all of this kind of thing. And it's got pedophilia and, and sexual depravity, 0.97

00:16:46.440 which, you know, is always a big theme of the QAnon crowd. And to let go of it means that you

00:16:54.240 can't use it down the road, say in the Republican primaries or in the post Trump era. And so part of

00:17:03.100 it, I think is like a bunch of people are realizing this topic is just too damn monetizable to let go

00:17:09.460 of. That's part of it. There's also the fact that it's just too damn juicy. Right. And people like

00:17:14.820 Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, they have invested so much of their identity in these stories that

00:17:22.540 they're presented with. And for listeners, I assume they know head of the FBI and the number

00:17:26.880 two guy at the FBI that for them to say, Oh, we were just, there was nothing there puts them in

00:17:34.700 this incredible bind, which I find utterly justified and delicious because either the only choices are 0.98

00:17:39.840 we were lying to you all along or we were full of crap all along. Right. Um, maybe the, it could be 0.98

00:17:45.980 one or both of those. I, I think they're both, but, but we were, we were gaslighting you all along

00:17:51.620 and, and now we're telling you the truth or we were telling you the truth before, and now we're

00:17:57.180 lying to stay in power. And that rubs up against this whole sort of anti-deep state, anti-establishment

00:18:04.420 thing. It creates excruciating problems for them. And the fact that Trump has had such a hard time

00:18:09.180 putting it to bed, I mean, it's kind of gone to bed now. It's taking a nap. I don't think it's,

00:18:13.520 it's gone. Shows how fraught creating a mass movement based on a cult of personality is

00:18:20.880 because you've got this massive coalition that is only unified basically around one

00:18:26.780 thing. It's Donald Trump. And that's not an ideological coalition. That's not a political

00:18:33.100 coalition. That's not even a coalition of interests properly understood. It is purely a

00:18:38.300 grift about a cult of personality. And the fact that you can see that he can't hold it all

00:18:44.220 together on when it comes to an issue like this is fascinating. Now, as for why he wants it

00:18:50.780 to go away, I'll just be clear. I don't think there's any, I don't think we're ever going to

00:18:55.360 get evidence that he was on the blackmail list. I don't think there was a blackmail list. I don't

00:19:00.920 think there's going to be any evidence that he was sleeping with underage girls. And the reason

00:19:06.100 I think that is not because I have a high view of Donald Trump's character. It's because if that

00:19:13.180 stuff existed, there is no way the Biden administration or New York district attorney's

00:19:19.560 office or the justice department generally wouldn't have weaponized it when they were 0.98

00:19:24.160 putting Donald Trump on trial for the stupid bank, you know, uh, business records thing. Right. Um, 1.00

00:19:29.500 and that kind of stuff, if they had this and opted not to use it, that would be utterly bizarre.

00:19:35.160 The idea that it wouldn't leak is utterly bizarre at the same time. Do I think there's embarrassing

00:19:41.180 stuff in there for Trump? Absolutely. And I think that's probably enough. And he deserves all the

00:19:46.800 grief he gets for it because he's covering up something that he's told his people for years,

00:19:51.980 any government coverups of something is proof of some conspiracy. And now he's covering up something

00:19:57.500 that he said he was going to release. So it would sort of take a heart of stone not to laugh at all.

00:20:01.860 Yeah. Yeah. No, my, my schadenfreude circuits have been humming along for at least a month now.

00:20:08.520 Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, the only time I can remember Trump getting sideways with his cult in

00:20:14.480 this sort of way that was kind of briefly surprising. And then he'd never touched that

00:20:18.680 again, I think was when he, uh, in front of some crowd, it might've been CPAC, I don't know where he

00:20:23.820 was, but he took credit for the vaccines and he got booed. Right. And that, that was just this first

00:20:31.320 moment, really. I mean, I think not to be repeated until the Epstein mess where it was just clear 0.78

00:20:37.400 that, okay, his cult, it's all about him, except there are a few things they really do care about.

00:20:44.500 And if he seems to see those things differently, that's a potential problem for him. Right. So they

00:20:49.500 really were against the vaccine more or less to a man at that point. And so for him to take credit

00:20:55.840 for it as though it were a good thing, that was just too much cognitive dissonance. They just,

00:20:59.820 they erupted in booze. And here it seems like, yeah, they, they know he lies about everything

00:21:05.880 or they pretend not to know that he lies about everything, but here's a case where he seems to

00:21:10.620 be lying about something they actually care about. Right. And that might've been the first

00:21:15.440 occasion where that was the case. So I agree with you entirely on the, the analog that I think that

00:21:20.200 is the last time, I think it's worth pointing out that this sort of adds another layer of

00:21:25.740 schadenfreudtastic deliciousness to all of this, which is that Donald Trump's bubble, like when he

00:21:32.120 was, I think you're right, it was CPAC, but if it wasn't CPAC, it was TPUSA or one of those kinds of

00:21:36.580 groups, his primary feedback mechanism are the extremely online ultra mega types, right? The

00:21:48.120 people who, um, that's his pool of narcissists are, are those people. And, and they steer him the wrong

00:21:55.680 way all the time. And sometimes to his credit, I gotta say, he doesn't listen to him, but like

00:22:01.500 he imbues, he sees that crowd, those kinds of crowds as avatars for the rank and file Republican

00:22:08.800 voter. And the rank and file Republican voter, there's not a lot of polling evidence that they

00:22:14.200 care much about the Epstein stuff, that they're focusing on the Epstein stuff. This is an obsession

00:22:19.400 among the groups that he's obsessed with rather than sort of the median voter. And, you know, the

00:22:27.080 Democrats are trying to change that and turn it into a bigger thing. And I do not blame them in the

00:22:30.400 slightest as a matter of just raw politics, but Trump would be in better shape if, you know,

00:22:36.340 he stopped caring what Laura Loomer and these other gargoyles thought about stuff because they

00:22:42.200 actually off of social media platforms, they actually don't seem to move the needle very much

00:22:47.740 on, on public opinion, but he cares about them. Don Jr. cares about them. The people in his orbit

00:22:54.500 care about them. And I think some of it is a function. I remember back when he was running for the

00:22:59.380 first time in 2016, people, he would constantly talk about how online polls are very scientific.

00:23:04.760 And the reason he thought they were scientific is that he did well in online polls. And because he

00:23:11.320 invests in the shadows on the Plato's cave, he, he overreads their importance in all sorts of ways.

00:23:18.600 It's why he puts Fox news hosts throughout his administration. He lives in this very meta sort of

00:23:24.780 online, on TV universe. And he doesn't actually have good instincts for reading the normies all

00:23:33.940 that well. And that's one of the reasons why this thing has gotten him into trouble because he cares

00:23:38.560 so much about their feedback that he's the one who keeps bringing it up.

00:23:42.000 Is there anyone in that orbit who's fundamentally broken with him over this? I mean, I haven't

00:23:48.420 followed this that closely, but people like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, or I mean, they were quite

00:23:53.440 disgruntled in the beginning around how, I mean, I think they deflected a lot of their blame onto

00:23:59.600 Pam Bondi and Cash Patel and Dan Bongino. But has anyone just actually broken with Trump and MAGA

00:24:06.900 over this be like, this is clearly that they've just become the swamp and you know, the, the new

00:24:11.900 rulers are as bad as the old rulers.

00:24:13.580 Not that I can think of all the top of my head. I mean, I remember, I mean, Charlie Kirk said shortly

00:24:17.860 when this thing first started to blow up that he would never let go of the story. It's the most

00:24:21.780 important story of the 20th century. And then like 72 hours later, after he got a call from the White 0.79

00:24:27.000 House, he's like, yeah, I'm not going to be talking about this anymore. Uh, I think I get, I try not to

00:24:32.240 follow Tucker too closely, but I don't think Tucker's let go of it, but I don't think, I don't think

00:24:36.940 the incentives are quite there to say I'm done with Trump. I mean, there's this dynamic that has

00:24:42.980 been very common. I mean, I'm sure you've seen it a thousand times, right? There's this, it's sort of

00:24:47.760 a cliche and among, about Jews and in czarist Russia, where they would always say, if only the czar

00:24:54.160 knew, right. And there's this desire to say, oh, whenever Trump gets himself into trouble, his advisors

00:25:01.540 should stop telling him this as if he hasn't made these decisions himself, right? Falsifying Trump,

00:25:09.900 it gets you in a lot of trouble saying that the people around him are in error is usually the safe

00:25:15.360 harbor. What do you think about the state of the democratic party at this point? I mean, as you say,

00:25:21.060 they're trying to ride this political controversy to some better, uh, spot on the map. But until this

00:25:28.920 moment, until the Epstein story began to cause Trump, uh, this amount of anguish, I mean, they

00:25:35.100 seemed completely feckless. And I mean, it's hard to even know what they were attempting to do. It

00:25:42.680 seemed like they were, it was just nothing but apathy and bewilderment that had subsumed the party. I,

00:25:48.480 I mean, I, it's like they were, you know, apart from the, the rallies that, uh, Bernie Sanders and AOC

00:25:54.360 were holding, they got some traction, uh, which seemed to be pulling the party in absolutely the

00:25:58.680 wrong direction for, for future political success. It's, it was hard to know what anyone was attempting

00:26:05.080 to do to push back against, uh, Trump in his second term. What, what, how do you view the democratic

00:26:10.280 party at this point? And what, what do you think the prospects are going forward?

00:26:14.160 So Ezra Klein had this piece, which I don't think was, I'm not trying to insult Ezra. It was less

00:26:20.740 that it was so insightful than it was so indicative of a mood shortly after the election, where he

00:26:28.000 was lamenting the fact that given how close the presidential election was in 2024, the vibe shift

00:26:34.840 is waving. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe

00:26:39.680 at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense

00:26:45.260 podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.

00:26:50.740 And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 07, 2025

#428 — Political Extremism

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