Making Sense - Sam Harris - November 10, 2016


#51 β€” The Most Powerful Clown


Episode Stats

Length

12 minutes

Words per Minute

132.08461

Word Count

1,636

Sentence Count

95

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American Republic, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump s shocking victory, his ascension to the highest office in the history of the United States, is a sickening tragedy for liberal democracy. And yet, in the coming days, commentators will try to soothe their readers with thoughts about the, quote, innate wisdom and essential decency of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of Trump s nationalism displayed, and pass over the malign influence of Russian intelligence, provided by the uninterrupted, unmediated coverage provided to us by the free-flowing, unedited media coverage of his rallies, and the endless hours of unedited, unscripted coverage provided by cable news outlets. This episode is the first part of a two-part conversation about what went wrong, and what went right, in order to elect a man who embodies the worst that America has to offer, and who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of his populist rhetoric. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, who are not currently on our subscription feed. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a member of the M&M Club, where you'll get access to the full-length episodes of Making Sense Podcasts and all other premium-quality premium episodes of the show, including bonus episodes available on all major podcast directories, including the most popular culture and social medias, including The New York Times, The Huffington Post, NPR, and NPR, The New Republic, The Financial Times, and The Independent, and much more. Subscribe to the Making Sense podcast wherever you listen to the podcast. If you're not already a member, please consider becoming one! Subscribe today! You'll get immediate access to our newest episode next week, starting on our newest podcast on the next episode of The Making Sense PODCAST, on all of the latest podcasts available on your favorite podcast, coming soon! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your ad choices are available, and we'll be giving you the most up-to-date updates on the latest in the making sense podcast? Thanks for listening to Making Sense: What s going to be your ad-free version of The M&A?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.
00:00:10.880 Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
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00:00:46.760 Well, it has come to pass.
00:00:49.340 President Trump, a man who many of us treated as a buffoon and only took seriously as a threat
00:00:57.380 at the 11th hour, will be the 45th President of the United States, with a Republican Congress
00:01:05.680 behind him, and with at least one vacancy, probably more, on the Supreme Court to fill.
00:01:13.100 So, what went wrong, and how bad is this?
00:01:22.480 Well, I think there are two parts to this story.
00:01:26.360 The first is unambiguously depressing, and this is the part that has been seized on by
00:01:34.060 most liberals.
00:01:35.040 But it's only half the story, and it is this.
00:01:40.560 Trump has ascended to power, despite showing every sign of being dangerously unfit for it.
00:01:48.840 And by exposing in himself, and in the electorate, the worst that America has to offer.
00:01:55.820 Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, a contempt for the most vulnerable among us, intimations of
00:02:04.920 fascism, a positive love of bullying, total disdain for our democratic institutions, a willingness
00:02:13.560 to make threats of political violence just for the fun of it, a contempt for science, and
00:02:19.880 a love of conspiracy theories.
00:02:21.640 I mean, I could run through it all again, the crazy things he's said, and the toxic alliances
00:02:28.300 he's made.
00:02:29.960 The irony is, if he had been merely half as bad, he would have seemed worse.
00:02:37.480 He would have been more recognizably dangerous.
00:02:41.460 There were so many awful moments that the media couldn't focus on them for long enough, or
00:02:47.220 weigh their significance.
00:02:48.680 And the big things were as big as they get, right?
00:02:52.160 Climate change is a hoax.
00:02:54.340 Why can't we use our nuclear weapons?
00:02:56.640 Maybe nuclear proliferation is a good thing.
00:02:58.980 Let the Saudis and the Japanese and the South Koreans build their own nukes.
00:03:03.380 Who's to say we should support our NATO alliances?
00:03:05.780 What have they done for us?
00:03:07.740 Putin is a great leader.
00:03:10.240 Maybe we should just default on our debt, cut a better deal.
00:03:13.980 Any one of those things should have ended it.
00:03:17.120 But of course, the little things were just as weird, and should have been just as disqualifying.
00:03:22.720 I mean, we have just elected a president who has bragged about invading the dressing
00:03:28.020 rooms of beauty pageant contestants, so that he could see them naked, when they were effectively
00:03:33.540 his employees.
00:03:34.760 I mean, he owned the pageant.
00:03:36.580 And then he even bullied some of these young women publicly.
00:03:40.420 Some on social media in the wee hours of the morning, while campaigning for the presidency.
00:03:45.460 And then he denied doing any of these things, when no denial was even possible.
00:03:52.340 We had all seen his tweets.
00:03:54.320 And in response to the astonishment of the media, he looked the American people in the
00:03:59.180 eye and said, no one respects women more than I do.
00:04:03.760 No one.
00:04:04.380 And half the country accepted that as, what, the truth?
00:04:12.900 As good theater?
00:04:15.240 As sketch comedy?
00:04:17.080 I mean, there are really no words to describe how far from normal we have drifted here.
00:04:27.240 David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, described the situation the night of the election
00:04:34.680 in a piece entitled, An American Tragedy.
00:04:39.820 Now, I'll read a little of that, so you get a sense of what the liberal elites were thinking
00:04:45.700 at 3 a.m.
00:04:46.720 The election of Donald Trump to the presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American
00:04:53.440 Republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and
00:04:59.360 abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.
00:05:05.940 Trump's shocking victory, his ascension to the presidency, is a sickening event in the
00:05:11.600 history of the United States and liberal democracy.
00:05:14.100 And then he goes on.
00:05:44.100 In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event.
00:05:48.160 They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the, quote, innate
00:05:52.320 wisdom and essential decency of the American people.
00:05:56.620 They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man
00:06:02.800 who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric
00:06:08.560 of blood and soil.
00:06:10.380 The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount
00:06:16.100 the bumbling and destructive behavior of the FBI, the malign influence of Russian intelligence,
00:06:22.160 the free pass, the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies provided to Trump by
00:06:28.040 cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign.
00:06:31.260 We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the
00:06:36.860 most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office.
00:06:41.340 Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters
00:06:46.920 were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune.
00:06:49.900 There's no reason to believe this palaver.
00:06:52.800 There's no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates, Chris Christie, Rudolph
00:06:57.400 Giuliani, Mike Pence, and yes, Paul Ryan, are in any mood to govern as Republicans within
00:07:03.940 the traditional boundaries of decency.
00:07:06.480 Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule
00:07:12.220 of law.
00:07:13.360 He was elected in the main on a platform of resentment.
00:07:17.880 Fascism is not our future.
00:07:19.300 It cannot be.
00:07:20.620 We cannot allow it to be so.
00:07:22.500 But this is surely the way fascism can begin.
00:07:26.300 End quote.
00:07:28.180 I think most of that's true, unfortunately, but it's not the whole truth.
00:07:34.960 And the parts that are true are probably not worth dwelling on at this point.
00:07:40.580 I'm not sure how useful it will be to stay in the well of blame and despair and to resist
00:07:46.720 quote, quote, normalizing this situation.
00:07:49.380 But it is true that the normalizing seems like an act of prayer.
00:07:55.920 I mean, just consider Trump's victory speech, which was alarming for how un-Trumpian it was.
00:08:02.840 I mean, it read like it was written by Van Jones on Ambien.
00:08:06.540 It was the most anodyne bit of fence-mending.
00:08:10.520 But you could feel the desperation in the media to read into his surprisingly gracious notes the normalcy that Remnick is talking about here.
00:08:19.600 I mean, maybe we were all just wrong about him, right?
00:08:24.420 Maybe he's a nice guy after all.
00:08:27.940 What are the chances of that?
00:08:30.400 Is it possible that an ethical person merely pretended to be a total asshole for 18 months?
00:08:39.320 It seems somehow far-fetched.
00:08:41.240 But what are we to make of the fact that Trump had nothing but nice things to say about Clinton?
00:08:48.540 I mean, what happened to lock her up?
00:08:50.600 Does anyone care that the Trump who spoke on the night of the election was totally unrecognizable?
00:08:56.580 Who did his supporters think they had elected?
00:09:00.860 Were his supporters surprised to see him merely praise Hillary?
00:09:06.780 Is it all theater?
00:09:09.040 Who is this guy?
00:09:11.240 Will he attempt to do anything he promised to do?
00:09:14.840 Does anyone know?
00:09:17.120 Does Ivanka have any idea what her dad will do as president?
00:09:24.960 Now, I've gotten a fair amount of grief from people at this point for having been wrong about the election.
00:09:32.240 I'm not sure what they mean.
00:09:34.400 I admit I did jinx it by posting a suitably repellent picture of Trump on Twitter early in the day
00:09:40.160 and saying, bye-bye, Donald.
00:09:42.860 Now, of course, that wasn't a prediction.
00:09:45.220 I was simply saying how nice it would be to never think about him again.
00:09:49.940 Of course, when I sent that tweet, the polls were giving him around a 20% chance of winning.
00:09:55.300 Now, whether the polls were wrong or not is anyone's guess at this point.
00:10:01.040 If a 20% chance of winning is not nothing, right?
00:10:06.340 Spend a few minutes with some dice and see how often a 20% chance comes up.
00:10:11.540 It comes up quite frequently, sometimes on the very first roll.
00:10:17.780 So, I jinxed the election.
00:10:20.740 Sorry about that.
00:10:22.560 But surely it can't have been a failure of judgment to have trusted the most reputable polls.
00:10:29.260 Basically, everyone was doing that.
00:10:32.220 What else was there to trust?
00:10:34.560 Just the torrents of hatred I saw on social media?
00:10:37.900 But the story about what happened with the polls will be interesting in the weeks and months ahead.
00:10:46.360 And the truth is, I always had a bad feeling about the election.
00:10:50.080 And that's why I talked about it so much on this podcast.
00:10:53.660 I could tell that Hillary's flaws as a candidate were causing people to ignore Trump's flaws as a human being.
00:11:01.820 Well, we're about to find out how high a price we and the rest of the world will pay for that.
00:11:07.900 And speaking personally, I can say I feel that I left more or less everything on the field.
00:11:13.620 I know I alienated many of you in how fully I disparaged Trump.
00:11:18.100 And I kept doing it even at the risk of boring those of you who actually agreed with me because I thought it was so important.
00:11:23.660 So, I don't honestly see how I could have done any more.
00:11:29.680 And at this moment, that's actually a good feeling.
00:11:33.060 I was preparing myself for this moment.
00:11:36.180 And I certainly know many scientists and business people.
00:11:40.480 And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.
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