Making Sense - Sam Harris - #460 — When the Center Cannot Hold

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

00:00:11.740 hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing

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00:00:26.240 it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're

00:00:30.220 doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks

00:00:38.860 for joining me again. Hey, it's great to be back. It's great to see you. So I think it's

00:00:43.020 been about six months since you were on the podcast, and a few things have happened. I

00:00:46.260 think I looked at it, it was somewhere around August of last year. I have a list of things

00:00:51.080 that I think we could profitably discuss, but what's most concerning you these days,

00:00:56.940 or has your head been on our political landscape? If we're talking politically, right? I mean,

00:01:03.140 there's all sorts of, you know, the AI thing is interesting in all sorts of ways. We could

00:01:07.580 talk about that and all. But if you're just talking about, like, get Goldberg on to do

00:01:11.080 report from inside the Beltway, what's going on with politics stuff, I think the continued erosion

00:01:16.960 and politicization of our institutions in distressing ways is probably the main thing I'm

00:01:24.920 concerned about. I mean, we're talking on, you know, February 19th or whatever, like,

00:01:30.020 by the time that people listen to this, we could be invading Iran. So that could make anything I say

00:01:34.860 kind of outdated. But just the potpourri, you know, just a couple days ago or yesterday, Kevin

00:01:40.520 Hassett, chief economic advisor of the president, you know, he said that some

00:01:45.960 staff economists who did a paper verifying what economists have been saying for 30 years,

00:01:51.180 50 years, 70 years about tariffs, that Americans pay them and that foreigners don't. Kevin

00:01:57.180 Hassett, who I knew personally, and I know he agreed with that when I knew him, now says

00:02:01.560 that those staffers should be penalized for releasing such a finding. And you, or you look

00:02:08.160 at the chicanery that's going on with Stephen Colbert and the FCC. Trump is running what political

00:02:13.800 scientists sometimes call a personalist regime, where the distinction between his personal aims

00:02:20.440 and desires and the demands of state are completely blurred. And I don't think that's going to last

00:02:26.020 forever. You know, the guy's, you know, 80 or whatever. And I don't think Vance can pull off

00:02:30.600 that act or anything like that. But the problem is, is that it's like with trust. Once you violate

00:02:36.020 these kinds of norms and these institutional rules, you know, the sort of Hayekian hidden law stuff,

00:02:41.500 you can't recreate it overnight. We have an, what should have been a headline story all across

00:02:47.180 the country is a number of federal judges have basically have, have abolished or, or rescinded

00:02:53.200 what they call, I think it's the presumption of regularity, which is basically a fancy term for

00:02:59.000 saying that when lawyers for the government come to court, judges are going to assume-

00:03:04.640 Are they going to lie?

00:03:06.220 Right. They're assuming they're not lying, right? That's it. That's the gist. That the facts they're

00:03:10.100 presenting are true to the best of their knowledge. And the bunch of judges, including

00:03:14.300 conservative judges saying, we can't give you that benefit of the doubt anymore because you

00:03:18.300 guys are lying. And I'm a both sides guy. Like I think these kinds of norm violations invite

00:03:23.740 future norm violations. And so that stuff really worries me. And what Trump does with the midterm

00:03:29.420 elections or tries to do or imply could just really mess things up too. So that's, that's sort of

00:03:35.020 where I'm at. If you're like, if you're looking for reasons to, for things I'm worrying about.

00:03:39.220 Well, I want to talk about a few things you mentioned there, the midterms and even a possible

00:03:43.300 invasion or otherwise attack on Iran. But this point you're raising now, just how the degree

00:03:49.700 which our institutions have been vitiated by Trump loyalists and, and people who we know

00:03:55.940 more or less to a man and woman now are not disposed to follow the norms that we really have

00:04:01.640 every right to expect our institutions would, would enshrine. This raises the question, which 0.59

00:04:06.720 several people have asked of late, which is in a perfect world, we'll say we get a completely

00:04:11.460 sane president in 2028. How do we reboot the system? Because it seems that, that any, you

00:04:19.940 know, wholesale change in staffing is going to be perceived at least by a large minority on

00:04:27.040 the right as just yet more, you know, purely partisan tribalism. I mean, just, it can be

00:04:34.300 viewed in the most cynical way as exactly analogous to what Trump did when he came into office and

00:04:39.600 staffed it all with his loyalists in the first place. How do we, with the best of intentions,

00:04:45.200 perform a reset back to something like normal that gets perceived for what it is rather than just

00:04:51.820 this pendulum swing into the antithetical style or antithetical pole of hyper-partisanship?

00:04:58.960 It's very hard, right? It is just very, very hard to see how you do that. Look, I'm not,

00:05:04.100 I'm still a sort of, I'm a right of center guy. I've been conservative. I was at National Review for

00:05:08.860 20 years. I've lost all of my rooting interest in the Republican party, but I haven't gained a lot

00:05:13.180 of rooting interest in the Democratic party, except as a way to sort of right the ship of the American

00:05:19.380 political system. And I've come to the conclusion that the only way you can have a sane Republican

00:05:25.980 party or a sane Democratic party is if both parties are sane. You can't just have one sane party

00:05:32.060 because part of this has to do with, for structural reasons, having to do with primaries, part of it

00:05:37.220 has to do with social media and the balkanizing of the landscape. But the simple fact is, is that

00:05:41.720 we live in a climate now where if one party is crazy, it gives permission to the other party 0.91

00:05:47.140 to be crazy as well. And that's a vicious cycle. And so-

00:05:52.680 Do you think the virtuous cycle is just as strong that they, once you have a, some sanity come over

00:05:58.380 one party, it's going to drag the other party back to the normal?

00:06:01.300 I do think it encourages it, but the way you need to do that, right? The only way I know of how to do

00:06:05.520 that is to get back to the system that you and I kind of grew up under, right? You remember,

00:06:10.040 I probably talked about this last time I was here. It's like, you know, when we were going up,

00:06:12.780 Republicans ran a little bit to the right in the primaries to get a little bit of the base,

00:06:17.160 right? And then they ran back to the center once they got the nomination and focused on the median

00:06:22.720 voter, the swing voter, the independent, whatever. Same thing with the Democrats. They ran a little

00:06:26.760 bit to the left of the base in the primaries. And then once they got the nomination, they ran to the

00:06:30.700 center. The problem is, is that structurally the threat to incumbency or election in our system now

00:06:37.760 is in the primaries. It is not in general elections. Something like 80% of districts and

00:06:42.560 states, if you get the nomination in a very blue state, you're going to win. And if you get the

00:06:47.020 nomination in a very red state, you're going to win. And so this has created a sociology within both

00:06:52.260 parties where they think they are there to represent the base of their own party rather than try to be

00:07:00.040 a majority party. Is this truly a symmetrical problem on both sides? Are the rules the same for

00:07:05.520 Democrats and Republicans such that there's no difference here?

00:07:07.920 Well, I want to be really clear. I think the problems with the Republican party are much

00:07:11.260 worse for the country than the problems with the Democratic party.

00:07:14.180 Just as a fact now, or just actually systemically in any decade?

00:07:19.380 Well, I mean, so to answer the first part of your question, yeah, they're basically symmetrical.

00:07:23.400 The two big mistakes we made as a country politically was one, moving to primaries in the first

00:07:30.940 place. I don't want to get, I can get in the weeds on it, but basically we're the only advanced

00:07:34.780 industrialized democracy in the world whose parties have given up the ability to pick their

00:07:39.080 own candidates. Instead, we farm it out to the angriest people on the left and the right who,

00:07:45.100 you know, if you're running in a very blue district and you say, if you send me to Washington,

00:07:49.520 the first thing I'm going to do is work with anybody, including people across the aisle to

00:07:53.320 do what is best for my district and my state. You will not win a primary. If you say in Texas,

00:07:58.600 I'm going to go, I don't care what party you are. I want to do what's best for Texas.

00:08:02.060 You will not win. If you say, if you send me to Washington, I will tear off the, I will tear

00:08:07.860 the skull off of our enemies and use their heads as a victory goblet. You will get the nomination, 0.99

00:08:13.960 right? So the incentive structures internally, which are backed up by Fox news and MS now and

00:08:18.840 all of that is to pander to a non-representative voter. And the other mistake we made was having

00:08:25.680 to do with the campaign finance stuff, which basically, you know, Bernie Sanders in that crowd

00:08:29.880 thought we were going to have mass participatory democracy with lots of small donors. And it

00:08:34.860 turns out what we had was mass participatory populism with very small donors. The biggest

00:08:40.020 fundraisers in the Democratic and Republican part in the house for a long time were AOC and Marjorie

00:08:45.740 Taylor Greene. Yeah. They didn't do any legislating, but they were really good at like getting people

00:08:50.400 to give them 10 bucks, give them 15 bucks a month on their credit cards. That incentive structure

00:08:54.800 has messed things up. And then you add in the narcissistic psychosis of Donald Trump, 0.97

00:08:59.680 who, you know, literally thinks he's a war president and the enemy is really the other

00:09:05.700 party or the people who don't like him. And that messes all sorts of stuff. So take the Colbert

00:09:10.940 FCC stuff. I think the FCC, I think the equal time rule should have been abolished a long time ago.

00:09:15.780 I kind of thought it kind of had been for all intents and purposes. Stupid law written in 1936, 0.99

00:09:20.260 when we basically only had radio and now you're going to apply it to broadcast television when 1.00

00:09:25.520 broadcast television is dying. This podcast probably has more viewers than Stephen Colbert

00:09:30.340 on a given night. You know, the idea that somehow you're free to say whatever you want, but Colbert

00:09:34.560 can be policed by the state. I think it's all stupid. But if you're going to establish the principle 1.00

00:09:38.620 that for partisan purposes, you're going to punish networks that voice criticism of the president,

00:09:42.940 and you don't think that in the next democratic administration, and I think there will be one,

00:09:47.360 there's not going to be enormous pressure, even on a sane democratic president to go hammer and

00:09:52.860 tongs at right-wing talk radio, which is wildly disproportionately partisan to the right. That's

00:09:58.200 what I'm talking about, about trying to find a balance again about, you know, rather than this

00:10:02.200 tit for tat culture. But as long as both parties think they are only answerable to their most committed

00:10:08.120 base and the most committed base really doesn't like their own party. They just hate the other party

00:10:12.020 more. It's very difficult to figure out how you have a president approach politics as if they're

00:10:19.000 president of the entire country. And the structural reforms I'm thinking of would require getting our

00:10:25.080 system back to the place where we have competitive elections in a lot of places, and the deciding voters

00:10:30.080 are the swing voters, independent voters, the median voter, rather than the fringe voter.

00:10:34.560 What do you think about the prospect of a democratic presidential candidate running on the platform

00:10:41.020 that the first thing he or she would do in office is reset and diminish the powers of the executive?

00:10:48.280 I mean, seemingly work against his or her own interest not to fall into this tit for tat pattern

00:10:53.500 of now using all the full scope of the Trumpian powers of the presidency to do the antithetical thing,

00:11:00.160 but to actually recognize how the shape of the executive branch has been distorted and to figure

00:11:05.860 out how to pull it back and minimize this overreach. I mean, one of this could be, as these words come

00:11:11.400 out of my mouth, it sounds fairly quixotic, but one, do you think that would be something that could

00:11:16.760 be run on? And do you think it could be accomplished if somebody actually had the intention to do it?

00:11:22.200 So I have a sort of a disheartening answer and an upbeat answer. The disheartening answer is,

00:11:26.200 I think it's very hard to get to the democratic primaries with that message. So you would have

00:11:31.120 to, in fact, downplay that message to a certain extent to get the nominee in the process of getting

00:11:36.760 the nomination. But once you had the nomination, I actually think you could, that would be a fairly

00:11:41.460 winning message. You know, that's, that was Joe Biden's message was a return to normalcy after the

00:11:47.440 Trump years. And the problem is he didn't deliver on it because he made a deal with the hardcore base

00:11:52.260 of his party and didn't try to govern as a majority party president.

00:11:56.020 Yeah. I think his first executive order had to do with the trans issue, if I'm not mistaken.

00:12:00.800 Right. So, and, and the first legislation I think that came out of the house, democratic

00:12:05.080 controlled house was to nationalize elections, which everybody's freaking out about right now.

00:12:09.220 Right. And so, look, I think I've talked to Rahm Emanuel about all this stuff. I'm not a massive

00:12:14.620 Rahm Emanuel fan. I have my disagreements with the guy, but the thing I like about Rahm Emanuel is that

00:12:20.560 he's actually willing to have a real argument with the left-wing base of his own party. And I think

00:12:27.320 that sentiment is how, is the, is how you get towards, towards sanity. And, you know, there's,

00:12:32.960 there's rumors that like, if Rahm got the, not got, was elected, he would have like, you know,

00:12:38.080 Chris Christie as his attorney general, try to do a unity government kind of thing. I think a lot of

00:12:43.560 people would, would appreciate, particularly given how I think the Trump presidency going to end,

00:12:48.280 not just a return to normalcy, but a return to decency kind of thing. And that was a winning

00:12:53.040 message for George W. Bush at the end of the Clinton era. And I have to imagine it'll be,

00:12:58.380 it could be an even more winning message at the end of the Trump era, but it takes the right kind

00:13:03.800 of Democrat to carry it. Yeah. Yeah. So what are your expectations around the midterms, both with

00:13:09.960 respect to, um, I guess a result, if a clear result is achieved, but the chicanery that, uh, many people

00:13:17.180 are worried about coming from the Trump administration. Yeah. So let's just say,

00:13:22.000 all right, without Trump, like doing legitimately crooked things, right. Sending in national guard

00:13:29.420 or ICE agents and let's just assume he sits out of it for the most part. Inconceivable to,

00:13:34.940 not inconceivable, but really unlikely that Democrats don't take back the house by a significant margin.

00:13:42.380 I know there aren't that many competitive seats left and all of that for the reasons that we sort of

00:13:45.880 alluded to before, but at the same time, you know, the historic average for a midterm election in a

00:13:51.180 presidency, you know, it's something like 26 seats, give or take. I mean, it's a little

00:13:55.000 sui generis because Trump, this is kind of a second term and it's kind of his second, first term. So,

00:14:00.040 but in a first term, it's, it's like 26 seats. And it's not entirely clear that the Republicans are

00:14:04.780 going to hold onto the house majority by election day. All you need is one dude to slip on a bar of soap 0.92

00:14:10.320 or eat some bad clams and the Democrats are going to be a majority. They're down to a one seat

00:14:15.800 majority in the, in the house. The bigger question is the Senate. That is still a heavy lift, but if

00:14:22.680 you actually have a real wave, which there are reasons to think that there is going to be a

00:14:27.260 democratic wave, it does put it in play. Republicans are definitely worried about putting the Senate in

00:14:32.460 play. And so I think it's going to be a good democratic night. The question is how good is depends on

00:14:37.420 your expectations, but I would, it's just very hard for me to imagine that Democrats don't take

00:14:42.640 back the house and at least tighten the margin in the Senate. If they got all of Congress, what would

00:14:49.120 that spell for the rest of Trump's term? I mean, is that just synonymous with impeachment proceedings

00:14:54.860 and endless investigations and just proper gridlock? I mean, I know most of what he's done in any case

00:15:01.160 hasn't even involved Congress. So perhaps he could just keep forging ahead, but you would imagine

00:15:05.740 Congress would no longer be sitting on its hands watching him do that. Yeah. So with the absolute

00:15:10.960 concession that Democrats could screw this up, the simple fact is that it is an outrage that Congress

00:15:18.220 no longer does its job, that Congress is run along partisan lines rather than along institutional lines.

00:15:25.000 And I do chapter and verse of how we got here, but the simple fact is the GOP controlled Congress,

00:15:30.780 at least in its orientation, I'm not talking about their eternal souls, is just shot through with what 0.96

00:15:36.240 social scientists call cowards. It's embarrassing. It's terrible. And so- 0.96

00:15:41.940 And is the full explanation of that cowardice simply that the Republican Party has turned into a

00:15:48.060 proper cult of personality such that the Republicans in Congress can't afford to take their responsibilities

00:15:54.860 to provide any kind of checks and balances seriously. They don't care about the independence of their

00:16:00.160 institution anymore because each of them perceives their political future to be totally dependent on

00:16:04.940 whether Trump endorses them or not. Yeah. So like the end of that sentence is not necessarily support

00:16:11.340 for the cult, the beginning of it. And so far as for some people, it's definitely a cult of

00:16:15.320 personality. It's that they love his musk. They think he's a genius. They think he's like a world

00:16:19.920 historical figure. They look at him the way Champ Kind looks at Ron Burgundy in the Anchor Nan movies,

00:16:24.880 right? So there's some of those people. And then there are other people who really don't like him.

00:16:28.500 But the base. Fewer than there were. They're afraid of the base.

00:16:31.080 But they're afraid of his base, right? Trump's superpower is still that he can kill you in the 0.99

00:16:34.560 primaries. And so one thing to look for as we approach a lot of these primary deadlines in the

00:16:38.920 next weeks or month is how many Republicans, once they have avoided a primary challenge,

00:16:44.680 start heading for the hills and running on their own rather than running on a sort of Trumpy ticket.

00:16:50.840 So some of that might happen. But there are a lot of reasons for the institutional gelding of

00:16:55.580 Congress. My only reason for getting into all that, and I'm happy to get into it more, is that

00:17:00.100 it will be in the partisan interest of Democrats to actually do the job more. The job of Congress is

00:17:07.360 to do oversight, right? I mean, in terms of a president, the job of Congress is to protect its

00:17:11.760 prerogatives. Now, I would like it if they were doing it for more institutional or constitutional

00:17:15.840 reasons than partisan reasons, but I'll take the partisan. And so I think you're going to see

00:17:20.800 a lot of replays of like that Pam Bondi hearing where everyone go, you know, cabinet secretaries

00:17:28.460 go and they perform for Trump or they perform for Trump's base rather than actually showing respect

00:17:35.140 and deference and providing information. I'm fine. You know, that's better than nothing. I want a lot

00:17:40.500 of oversight. I want Congress to sort of carve back its prerogatives. Congress is the supreme

00:17:44.780 branch. The whole concept of co-equal branches is Nixonian propaganda, not sustained by any of

00:17:51.000 the founding fathers. But I also think it's very possible Democrats wildly overreach with impeachment

00:17:56.620 stuff, which is not to say I think he's done a half dozen things that are legitimately impeachable

00:18:01.780 or worthy of impeachment. But if you don't have your ducks in a row, if you seem like you're just

00:18:07.260 doing it to get on cable news or, you know, small donations and not doing it seriously and doing

00:18:13.740 the proper legwork on investigations, it could backfire on Democrats. And, uh, I could also see

00:18:19.840 Trump using all of that stuff as a pretext to just simply truly defy Congress in ways that we've never

00:18:25.880 seen a president do before. And you could see, you can see a much worse erosion of things. I just,

00:18:31.840 I just don't know how it would play out, but like it would be, I think it'd still be better for the

00:18:35.440 Republic if Democrats at least took back one of the branches.

00:18:38.480 So what do you make of all the infighting we've seen of late on the right? I think the epicenter

00:18:43.640 of it was the turning point AmericaFest conference where you had, um, I mean, the schism, which I've

00:18:51.140 spoken about on the podcast before, it seems to be between Republicans who think Nazis are probably

00:18:56.040 still bad, all things considered. And, uh, those who think that, no, we actually kind of need the

00:19:00.860 Nazis. We'll take every last one of them. So you have people who, um, want to disavow someone like

00:19:07.420 Nick Fuentes and they obviously Ben Shapiro is prominent on that list, but he's, uh, disconcertingly

00:19:13.580 alone or nearly alone or surrounded only by other Jews in the Republican party. And then you have

00:19:20.300 some very prominent people like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, and even, you know, J.D. Vance to some

00:19:25.900 considerable degree. I mean, J.D., the only daylight Vance seemed to want to put between himself and

00:19:30.340 Fuentes was, you know, of the don't talk about my wife variety, but it's fairly alarming. Again,

00:19:35.580 you're much closer to these characters than I am. I don't know any of these people personally,

00:19:40.180 really, except for Ben a little. What do you make of this schism and, um, how do you think it's going

00:19:46.740 to resolve itself? So I think you described the schism pretty well. The way I've been saying it is,

00:19:51.360 you know, like, you know how, like, there's this safe harbor for conservatives where they're,

00:19:55.040 they're not pro-Trump. They're just anti-anti-Trump, right? Which is a throwback to being

00:19:59.660 anti-anti-communist. It's like a lot of liberals were like, eh, I don't like the Soviet Union,

00:20:04.580 but I really hate the McCarthyites. So like, I don't like the anti-communist people. There are a

00:20:09.780 lot of people on the right who have fallen back into being anti-anti-Trump because they don't like

00:20:13.400 the resistance types. I see Vance as basically the titular leader of the anti-anti-Nazi crowd.

00:20:20.040 It's not so much that he's a Nazi. I don't think he is. He just thinks part of his

00:20:24.360 political interest is covered by defending people who are either Nazis or Nazi adjacent,

00:20:29.980 or want to have a big tent that allows Nazis in it, or neo-Nazis or bigots, whatever you know,

00:20:35.000 we can get down a little. 0.67

00:20:36.480 Christian nationalist, white supremacist, I mean, the different, there's a Venn diagram here of

00:20:40.520 different commitments, yeah. 0.98

00:20:41.620 There are many rooms in the mansion of bat guano, crazy, bigoted right-wingery, and I get a little

00:20:49.000 tired of people who want to have a big tent that allows all of them in the movement, but then take

00:20:54.560 offense when I associate them with one of the other people in the, they want in the tent.

00:20:59.840 It's like, if you, if you want neo-Nazis in the tent, it is a reasonable conclusion looking from

00:21:06.540 outside the tent. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 20, 2026

#460 — When the Center Cannot Hold

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