Making Sense - Sam Harris - #444 — America's Zombie Democracy

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

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00:00:26.260 it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're

00:00:30.240 doing here, please consider becoming one. I'm here with George Packer. George, thanks for joining me.

00:00:38.800 Thanks for having me, Sam. Great to see you. I'm a huge fan of your work. I'm an avid reader of

00:00:43.820 everything you write in The Atlantic. I'm also now a reader of your latest novel, which is titled

00:00:49.420 The Emergency, which I haven't yet finished. I actually wasn't planning to talk about it,

00:00:54.620 but I can just say that it's extraordinarily good and alarming. You've done something very

00:01:01.440 Orwellian, and it's just a very unnerving fable you have written here that I'm deep into, and it

00:01:09.440 really grabbed me from the first page. So I just encourage people to read it, whether we talk about

00:01:13.380 it or not. You're a very talented writer, both in fiction and nonfiction. So congratulations.

00:01:18.900 Thank you, Sam.

00:01:19.340 Yeah. Yeah. It's actually beautifully published. FSG still produces a nice book. I love the cover.

00:01:25.920 And even the texture of it. Yeah. It's special.

00:01:28.020 Yeah. It's got a very good hand feel, which in these dark digital times, I take more and more

00:01:34.820 pleasure in now. There was a time where I was reading at least half of what I was reading on

00:01:39.260 Kindle and or an iPad, but that's behind me now. I still listen to audio, but now I really love to

00:01:46.240 get back to physical books and hardcovers, especially.

00:01:49.980 I'm with you on that. When I find myself reading too much on the screen on my phone,

00:01:54.840 I just feel alienated from the words and the world. And when I reach on my shelf for a physical book,

00:02:02.320 there's something solid and reassuring about it. And we must never let them disappear from the world.

00:02:07.340 Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you're so wayward that you've had this experience, but I find that

00:02:13.820 with audio or digital books, because you really never see the cover again, it's possible for me

00:02:21.080 to read a book and even enjoy it and forget the author's name, right? Because I'm literally never

00:02:28.060 confronted by it again for the whole experience of interacting with the book. That, as a writer of

00:02:35.160 books, that makes me fairly nauseous. It's unnerving. Yeah. Someone wrote it in that

00:02:41.900 the book is the expression of their individuality, their humanity. So we got to keep their name in

00:02:46.840 mind if it's a decent book. Yeah.

00:02:49.120 Okay. Well, so I mostly want to focus on the article you wrote that was titled America's Zombie

00:02:54.220 Democracy, which came out at, I guess, the end of September, where you really just come right out

00:02:59.460 and say that you think we're living in an authoritarian state. And I mean, you argue that

00:03:05.380 our expectations about what it would mean to slide into authoritarianism are kind of faulty based on

00:03:13.060 some 20th century examples. And in the 21st century, the erosion of democratic norms has a different

00:03:20.900 character than goose-stepping troops in the streets or people getting put up against the wall and shot,

00:03:28.640 et cetera. So I guess to start, what in your view are the clearest indicators that we have slid

00:03:35.520 into something like authoritarianism in the US at this point?

00:03:40.360 Well, one of them came the day the piece was published or the day after, which was

00:03:45.400 the Justice Department filing charges against James Comey and filing them in the most nakedly

00:03:52.940 political way possible after a series of prosecutors had refused. And a grand jury had

00:03:58.320 originally refused to as well. And finally, President Trump found the prosecutor who would do his

00:04:04.480 bidding. And she, in a kind of shambolic way, assembled a case very quickly and got a grand

00:04:12.960 jury to go along with it. And since then, other enemies of the president, political enemies have

00:04:17.740 also been indicted. And that the rule of law is such a powerful tool. And the pressure of the state

00:04:24.020 weighing down on an individual is so crushing that it almost doesn't matter. Of course, it matters,

00:04:29.440 but they will suffer irrevocably whether or not they're convicted because of the amount of time

00:04:34.900 and money and energy and just sheer anxiety and stress that is involved in having the federal

00:04:39.200 government coming after you. So if the president can do that, can use the Justice Department as

00:04:43.940 his personal police force, prosecution force to go after people he regards as his political enemies.

00:04:51.720 That's a huge check against unaccountable power that's been taken down. And there are a whole

00:04:57.440 bunch of others. But that one was so glaring that when it happened right away after the article came

00:05:02.700 out, it was as if the White House was saying, we don't care. Yeah, this is what we're doing.

00:05:07.600 Make a stop. Of course, the MAGA retort to that would be no figure has been more victimized by

00:05:16.440 purely political prosecution than President Trump himself. And that happened under Joe Biden's watch.

00:05:24.060 So by the same measure, they would say, OK, well, then authoritarianism arrived during the Biden

00:05:29.240 administration. Right. And that would make some a little bit of sense when it came to the one

00:05:35.680 conviction that for 34 felonies that befell Trump under the Manhattan DA. That was the weakest case

00:05:43.200 against him. And it was the only one that was successful. The others never happened. They fell

00:05:50.000 apart along the way for mainly political reasons. And if you think about how long it took Merrick Garland

00:05:56.920 to a name of special prosecutor who then had to begin assembling a case on about January 6th, which was

00:06:03.980 a pretty strong case against the president, the former president. And the fact that it never came

00:06:10.240 to fruition before Trump was reelected, that tells you the rule of law and procedures and norms were

00:06:15.380 in place or else they would have nailed him long before he was reelected. They would have made sure

00:06:20.220 that Trump was in at least convicted, if not in prison, for attempting to overturn a democratic

00:06:27.120 election before he became president again. Now it's all history because he's back in power.

00:06:31.440 So I would say there's always some gray area where you can point and say you did it first,

00:06:37.340 but look at the details of that gray area and you see it's not Biden ordering it to be done.

00:06:43.220 It's not Biden going through a series of prosecutors until he can find one who will do it.

00:06:48.560 It's not a complete rookie prosecutor filing the charges. So it falls apart upon it on close inspection,

00:06:55.180 I think. So in the title of your piece, you have this phrase, you know, zombie democracy,

00:07:00.140 which is referring to the institutions that are persisting in some kind of, you know, zombie

00:07:07.040 afterlife. Which institutions are you most worried about at this point and which are the, um, the most

00:07:14.020 crucial in their failure to, uh, check Trump and, and MAGA's authoritarianism?

00:07:20.580 Let's name two or three. The rule of law, the justice department, the justice system is the

00:07:26.520 first. After Watergate presidents without having it written down as a law respected, at least to

00:07:34.320 varying degrees, the independence of the justice department, the, the need to insulate the credible

00:07:40.960 power prosecution from the white house, from politics that has completely disintegrated.

00:07:46.460 There is no distinction any longer between what Trump wants and what his attorney general is

00:07:51.240 willing to do. Second Congress, Congress has stopped functioning as Congress. And that happened

00:07:58.340 before the shutdown ever came along. They no longer assert their right to tax and spend. Trump can tax

00:08:05.660 with tariffs. Trump can spend or not spend if it's been appropriated and he decides he doesn't like it.

00:08:12.020 Trump can eliminate programs that Congress legislated beginning with, uh, USAID. So because of the

00:08:21.740 nature of our partisans politics, and this has been happening for a long time, again, you could say

00:08:27.600 the democratic party became more and more tool of democratic presidents and the democratic Congress

00:08:34.540 was more willing to cede article one power to the president. If it was a democratic president. Yes,

00:08:42.100 we've been watching presidents gain more and more power over the last decades. But again, this is a

00:08:47.340 complete qualitative break as the Republican Congress simply cedes its constitutional authorities to,

00:08:57.160 to the white house without a peep, without a peep. We're finally seeing a little bit of a break,

00:09:03.400 a little daylight over the Epstein files seems to be the very first matter in which Republicans in Congress

00:09:10.460 are not lining up in a single file behind Trump. And the third would be the defense department now called

00:09:16.660 the war department, not legally, which Trump makes no, no hesitation, no secret of using as a partisan tool or

00:09:26.060 at least trying to having his, you know, Pete Hegseth firing senior military leaders on the basis of

00:09:34.160 political dislike or even racial or gender dislike. Trump gives speeches to troops that are nakedly

00:09:42.100 partisan in which he insults Biden. He talks about using the military to go into the cities, the blue

00:09:49.060 cities as a training ground. This is maybe the most dangerous one. And I think the military is

00:09:54.780 probably the, still the most inherently independent institution in the government,

00:10:00.780 more than Congress, certainly more than apparently the justice department, because there is such a deep

00:10:06.000 code of nonpartisanship of independence, of not being political. And because it's so dangerous

00:10:10.940 if the military does become a tool, a political tool of the president, but Trump would love for it to be

00:10:16.640 that. And he's behaving as if he sees it that way.

00:10:21.400 Yeah. On the list of qualitative differences, the one that shocks me the most or the absence of widespread

00:10:29.300 shock in response to it shocks me the most, which is this, the level of corruption that is so obvious with

00:10:35.780 Trump and his enablers. I mean, I still remember a time when Hillary Clinton was castigated for her speaking

00:10:43.600 fees when she was out of office, right? People thought it was just totally unseemly that a former

00:10:50.320 secretary of state would dine out on her time in office to the tune of, you know, $200,000 or so

00:10:57.720 to speak to hedge funds and, you know, Wall Street firms and other deep pocketed hosts. And yet now we

00:11:06.220 have Trump and his family literally raking in billions of dollars and creating mechanisms by

00:11:12.760 which foreign agents and criminals can pay them directly, you know, in a meme coin and even holding

00:11:17.880 dinner for the people who have done that most lavishly to reward them with attention and even

00:11:23.380 using U.S. trade policy and even foreign policy to extort tribute from other countries. And yet somehow

00:11:31.560 this isn't perceived to be the five alarm fire that it is. I mean, somebody is worried about it.

00:11:38.700 I'm worried about it. I know you're worried about it, but I, and I think it's doing obvious damage to

00:11:43.680 our reputation as a country, but just stepping back from the autopsy we've begun to perform here,

00:11:50.120 how do you account for the fact that at least half of American society doesn't think that anything

00:11:57.320 truly out of the ordinary is happening? How do you account for that perception? And I mean,

00:12:02.460 leaving, leaving aside the people who simply don't follow the news or don't follow politics

00:12:07.760 at all, uh, or people who are, um, you know, so red pilled or so deep in, in the MAGA cult that they

00:12:15.740 just, you know, that up is down and down is up. And they simply don't care about the kinds of things

00:12:19.780 we would list here as being crucial to the survival of our democracy. But like, you know, I know

00:12:25.860 ordinary people who read the wall street journal and who are not, not MAGA who don't share our

00:12:34.040 concern about the fate of American democracy. Uh, I would imagine, you know, a few of those people

00:12:39.720 yourself too. How do you explain that state of mind? That's a profound question that I've been

00:12:45.940 asking myself all year and sort of waiting for the worm to turn and for suddenly there to be a

00:12:52.000 kind of collective shock and awakening and it doesn't happen. Perhaps it's because they wake

00:12:58.760 up in the morning. The wall street journal is still there. It's not been censored by the government.

00:13:04.480 No one is, is knocking down their door in order to bring them in and question them about their

00:13:09.480 political loyalties. They can take the commuter train or drive to work and listen to whatever they

00:13:16.400 want. Hundreds and hundreds of radio stations, podcasts, books, and then they get to work and

00:13:23.060 people are doing the same thing they've always done. There's a sort of eerie normality to life,

00:13:30.060 which I wrote about a bit in that piece. My life is also, even though I'm a journalist and this is

00:13:35.240 what consumes me. When I look at the world around me, I just see the same world. You have to leap a bit

00:13:42.700 into your imagination or into your ability to understand what's happening, maybe more abstractly.

00:13:49.160 The Qatari jet made it very concrete, but meme coins and deals with UAE over AI chips that lead to

00:13:59.700 all kinds of money flowing into the Trump family bank. These are pretty large, abstract scandals.

00:14:07.980 There is no, there's no, um, some of these same people would be, would have reacted to,

00:14:14.380 you know, the Hillary Clinton speaking fees or the Obama's getting a very rich Netflix deal or,

00:14:21.380 I mean, they, they were, their sense of indiscretion was finally calibrated enough

00:14:27.740 to react to those sorts of venial sins. And yet when you have this black hole of corruption

00:14:35.980 appear in the middle of our politics, sucking everything into it, they seem either not to care

00:14:43.240 or they just think that basically everything is on par with everything else. There's no sense of

00:14:49.200 magnitude. There's no scale that they're holding up to judge how colossal these changes are.

00:14:55.640 It's analogous to saying, well, if you refer to Trump's, you know, 30,000 and counting documented

00:15:02.320 lies, the response is, well, all politicians lie, right? As though Trump were not lying on a scale

00:15:08.680 we have never seen before. Right. And your first example about Trump being prosecuted during the

00:15:15.340 Biden years is that's a grayer area, but it's another example of, well, who started it. There's

00:15:21.020 always a way to say they do it too, or they did it first and to sort of intellectually disarm and not

00:15:28.640 bother with, let's look at this and really weigh it against what's happened before. There's always

00:15:34.300 been political corruption. There's never been corruption like this. And in a way, I don't know,

00:15:39.160 Sam, it may be that it's the blatancy of it. The openness is a bit of a, a shield for Trump.

00:15:46.120 It's as if, well, of course he's corrupt. He's Trump and he's not making any bones about it. He's doing

00:15:52.620 it in daylight. He's not trying to hide anything. So that makes it seem perhaps for some people as if

00:15:59.500 it's more acceptable than hypocrisy, which, which has a smell that people don't like.

00:16:06.080 I think you've put the, put your finger on, on at least one variable here, which is that

00:16:10.140 hypocrisy is the thing that people find most infuriating. And because Trump doesn't acknowledge

00:16:16.720 the existence of any of these norms, the one thing you can't convict him of is hypocrisy. He really

00:16:22.400 is not a hypocrite. He's just corrupt. He won't even acknowledge that corruption is a thing, 1.00

00:16:28.680 right? Or a self-dealing is a thing. This is, of course I'm self-dealing. This is, you know,

00:16:33.180 I would be stupid not to be self-dealing. Right. And we all hate hypocrisy and it, 0.99

00:16:38.120 it seems slimy and, you know, something sneaky about it. But when you're then confronted with

00:16:44.760 blatant immorality and corruption, the virtue of hypocrisy begins to become clear.

00:16:52.400 It is actually a sign that there are certain standards that have to be at least pretended

00:16:57.720 to be kept. And if you don't, there's some shame involved, whereas there's no shame and shamelessness

00:17:04.500 with Trump is a great superpower. I'm beginning to think shamelessness might be the superpower of

00:17:10.720 the most powerful and successful people in the world today. They all seem capable of doing anything,

00:17:17.100 coming back from any embarrassment or scandal without being crippled by it. You could say,

00:17:23.000 you know, Elon Musk can be revealed to have cheated on every woman he's ever been with and had children

00:17:27.940 across the landscape, et cetera. And it still doesn't matter because he's shameless and Trump 0.98

00:17:34.180 is shameless. And so what is there more to say? Yeah, you're corrupt. I don't, I don't deny it. 0.99

00:17:39.820 Yeah. Yeah. It is a kind of superpower to feel that you never have to look back at the harms you cause,

00:17:47.480 much less apologize for them. And I've noticed this whenever I've witnessed the aftermath of a

00:17:53.860 public apology, how it so often leads to a kind of redoubling of the outrage over the thing apologized

00:18:01.940 for. It rarely translates into just kind of relief. And I don't, I don't find this with personal

00:18:09.840 apologies, but I just noticed that when challenged with the, having to manage their reputation in

00:18:16.080 public, when public figures apologize for something, it almost invokes more outrage. So they become a kind

00:18:25.080 wounded prey animal and the public just wants to see more blood at that point. That is the nature I'd

00:18:32.800 think of social media for sure. And, and of media generally, if you apologize, if the, the baying 0.98

00:18:39.200 hounds finally force you into some public confession, it's going to look more like a cultural revolution

00:18:46.020 confession where that just becomes the trigger for them to then descend on you and tear you to pieces

00:18:52.360 rather than a ceremony of confession, atonement, redemption, forgiveness, which is what we would

00:19:00.280 have in a, in a more humane world. It just, in politics and in public life, it's a confession of

00:19:07.320 weakness. And it seems as if the only real sin is weakness and shame and self-reproach. And there's so

00:19:15.980 many politicians who apologized, didn't live to, to fight again. And the politicians who

00:19:22.160 pretended it never happened or just ignored it, just hung on. We didn't like them, but they,

00:19:27.440 they kept their power.

00:19:29.540 Yeah. Just, uh, you just recall to mind, uh, Al Franken's exit from political life. What a quaint

00:19:35.900 time that was.

00:19:38.640 He actually tried to say I did something wrong and I'm sorry. I want to apologize to each of them

00:19:44.000 individually. What a, what a fool. Why, why not just say, uh, yeah, so what make me resign? 1.00

00:19:49.760 Yeah. Okay. So looking forward, what, what bright lines do you see that if crossed,

00:19:57.840 they would, um, those indiscretions would suffice to wake people up or would just be whether,

00:20:04.400 whether the sleeping herd woke up, they would be especially worrying from your point of view that

00:20:10.440 we had crossed further into, you know, beyond the range of, of any democratic norms and physics.

00:20:18.220 I'm looking at next year's election and trying to think through all the ways of...

00:20:23.580 If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

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00:20:53.580 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - November 17, 2025

#444 — America's Zombie Democracy

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