Making Sense - Sam Harris - #83 — The Politics of Emergency

Fareed Zakaria is the host of his own show on CNN, and a Washington Post columnist and an editor at The Atlantic. He s the author of several best-selling books, including The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World, and most recently, In Defense of a Liberal Education. He was named by Esquire as the most influential foreign policy advisor of his generation, and Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 global thinkers. He and I had a wide-ranging conversation about politics and partisanship, and our differing opinions about how to talk about the connection between Islam and the sorts of violence and intolerance we see in the world. We didn t agree about everything, but I think you will find that it was a very productive and civil and honest conversation. And now I give you, here, with Fareed, I am here with you, to give you a chance to listen to the first part of this conversation. Sam Harris The Making Sense Podcast is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, who are making possible what we're doing here. Please consider becoming a supporter of what we re doing here, by becoming one of our listeners. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore you won t miss out on any future episodes of the podcast! If you're not a subscriber yet, you'll need to subscribe to our premium membership, which means you'll only be hearing the first half of the conversation! . You'll get access to the full episode next week, where you'll get to hear the second and third parts of the full-length episodes of Making Sense, which will be released next week. Subscribe to the Making Sense and other premium episodes next week! Subscribe and subscribe to the podcast so you won't have access to all the full Making Sense episodes, including the rest of the making sense episodes, coming soon. You won't miss out! Sam and I'll be listening to the second half of this episode next Tuesday. Thanks for listening to this one! - Sam Harris and I hope you'll leave us out there listening to it on your favorite podcatcher, making sense of it. - Your comments and sharing it with your friends and posting it on Insta-tweeting us on Instapaper, Insta: and so we can spread the word to your friends about it! Tweet me or text us your thoughts, and we'll be spreading it around the world!

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

00:00:14.680 feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.

00:00:18.420 In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at

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00:00:28.360 other subscriber-only content.

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00:00:34.640 of our subscribers.

00:00:35.800 So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

00:00:46.260 Today I'm speaking with Fareed Zakaria.

00:00:49.360 Fareed is the host of his own show on CNN, Fareed Zakaria GPS.

00:00:54.460 He's also a Washington Post columnist and an editor at The Atlantic.

00:01:00.240 He's the author of several best-selling books, The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World,

00:01:07.880 and most recently, In Defense of a Liberal Education.

00:01:12.900 He was also named by Esquire as the most influential foreign policy advisor of his generation, and

00:01:19.960 foreign policy named him one of the top 100 global thinkers.

00:01:24.380 He and I had a wide-ranging conversation about politics and partisanship, and our differing

00:01:30.220 opinions about how to talk about the connection between Islam and the sorts of violence and

00:01:36.260 intolerance we see in the world.

00:01:39.360 We didn't agree about everything, but I think you will find that it was a very productive and

00:01:43.200 civil and honest conversation.

00:01:47.660 And now I give you Fareed Zakaria.

00:01:56.680 I am here with Fareed Zakaria.

00:01:58.840 Fareed, thanks for coming on the podcast.

00:02:00.660 My pleasure, Sam.

00:02:02.040 Well, listen, the tables have turned.

00:02:03.380 I have been on your show at least twice, I think, and now I get to play journalist.

00:02:09.000 It's a pleasure to get a chance to talk to you about you and your views.

00:02:12.480 It's my pleasure.

00:02:13.820 I'm a little apprehensive, but let's make it work.

00:02:17.840 Just to begin with a little background on you, everyone is obviously quite familiar with

00:02:22.320 you, but how do you view yourself primarily?

00:02:26.760 Do you consider yourself a journalist?

00:02:28.360 Because you give your own opinions and commentary on policy and current events so often.

00:02:35.180 I mean, it really is never far from the next thing you're about to say.

00:02:39.680 How do you describe your own job?

00:02:41.260 Yeah, it's a good question.

00:02:42.940 I'm a sort of strange bird in the sense that I've never been a reporter.

00:02:47.300 We had no point in my career, never pretend to be one.

00:02:50.560 I have enormous respect for reporters.

00:02:52.880 When I was at Newsweek, there were a bunch of brilliant reporters who worked with me when

00:02:58.660 I was editing Newsweek International.

00:03:00.280 But I'm a commentator.

00:03:02.100 And I really am a lapsed academic.

00:03:03.960 I went into a PhD program, thought I completed it, wrote a dissertation, got a couple of academic

00:03:11.360 job offers.

00:03:12.800 It was all set to begin an academic path.

00:03:15.020 I had been teaching as a graduate student and then sort of stumbled into journalism.

00:03:20.340 I didn't quite stumble into it.

00:03:21.540 When I first got an offer to do something, I hesitated a lot.

00:03:26.360 And then I looked at my life.

00:03:29.080 Economists have this wonderful phrase called revealed preferences, which is a fancy way of

00:03:33.760 saying, don't worry about what you say.

00:03:35.860 Look at what you've done.

00:03:37.580 And what I'd done with every summer of my life, really since high school, was work at

00:03:42.140 a newspaper or a magazine, you know, done research for an op-ed writer, things that were clearly

00:03:48.240 in the realm of journalism.

00:03:49.760 So I took a baby step and I became the managing editor of foreign affairs.

00:03:53.720 Then I started writing a column for Newsweek.

00:03:55.860 Then, you know, went as a commentator on ABC News.

00:04:00.220 So it's always been commentary, but I was always drawn to the public fora, to being more

00:04:07.460 actively engaged than being an academic.

00:04:09.260 But I still, you know, when I think about how I've been shaped and the way in which I

00:04:15.240 think about the world, I think my training as a social scientist and as an academic is

00:04:19.860 still very, very much at the heart of how I look at problems.

00:04:24.440 And you got your PhD in government at Harvard.

00:04:26.940 Is that right?

00:04:27.380 Exactly.

00:04:27.880 I got my PhD in government.

00:04:29.380 The subfield was called international relations at Harvard, 1992.

00:04:34.320 Is that synonymous with a political science degree or is that an IR degree?

00:04:39.260 What is government?

00:04:40.800 So at Harvard, yeah, Harvard, you know, being Harvard once, every other university calls

00:04:46.900 it political science.

00:04:48.080 Harvard calls it government.

00:04:49.200 But it's exactly, it's a PhD in political science.

00:04:52.140 And did you study with Samuel Huntington?

00:04:54.280 Yep.

00:04:54.580 He was my dissertation advisor.

00:04:56.020 He was my closest advisor.

00:04:57.740 He's the guy who kind of offered me a job when I finished my PhD.

00:05:01.520 Yeah.

00:05:01.880 Nice.

00:05:02.740 So perhaps you can remind our listeners of his thesis about the clash of civilizations, which

00:05:09.260 I'm wondering how you think that has fared, because it's certainly come in for a fair

00:05:14.460 amount of opprobrium, at least on the political left.

00:05:17.540 I mean, Huntington and also Bernard Lewis have gotten fairly hammered by their association

00:05:24.900 with, and their influence on neoconservatives in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

00:05:29.480 Perhaps you can give a kind of potted history of that for our listeners.

00:05:32.940 Sure.

00:05:33.660 I actually have a very personal connection to it, because Sam was my dissertation advisor.

00:05:39.060 I went to him one day and said, I have this job offer at Foreign Affairs.

00:05:43.880 Do you think I should do it?

00:05:45.220 And he said, no, absolutely not.

00:05:46.600 You should take this other job I think you'd be very good at, which is an assistant professor

00:05:51.240 at Harvard.

00:05:52.060 At Harvard, they never offer you a job.

00:05:53.640 Of course, they invite you to apply for it.

00:05:55.740 But he did it in a way that suggested that I thought I had a good chance of getting it.

00:06:01.060 And we talked about it.

00:06:02.060 And I said, no, I think I'm going to take the Foreign Affairs job.

00:06:04.180 And he said, OK, well, if you do, here's a manuscript I've been working on.

00:06:08.340 Tell me what you think of it anyway.

00:06:10.320 You think it's something Foreign Affairs would be interested in publishing?

00:06:14.300 Let me know.

00:06:15.320 So I went home and read it.

00:06:16.420 And it was The Clash of Civilizations.

00:06:18.680 And I went back to him and said, I think we would love to publish it.

00:06:21.820 And it was actually the first issue that I edited at Foreign Affairs.

00:06:25.620 I made that really the first ever cover essay at Foreign Affairs.

00:06:29.580 We put it in big, bold type above everything else in a way that signaled we thought it was

00:06:35.120 very important.

00:06:36.460 So I think it's a very powerful, interesting set of ideas that have in many ways been very

00:06:43.720 prescient.

00:06:44.460 It has its flaws.

00:06:46.220 So the basic thesis of The Clash of Civilizations, which I think is true, was that at the end of 0.98

00:06:51.600 the Cold War, as the Cold War waned, the dominant motivating force of the Cold War had been political

00:06:58.520 ideology.

00:06:59.320 It had been the great dividing line.

00:07:01.160 So whether you were communist or capitalist, whether you were communist or democratic, whether

00:07:05.320 you were part of the American sphere or the Soviet sphere, that was really how you figured

00:07:09.920 out international politics.

00:07:11.820 You figured out the fault lines of the world.

00:07:13.820 And that that was obviously over.

00:07:16.940 This was 1992-93 that we published.

00:07:20.120 I think it was January 93.

00:07:22.580 The new fault line, he argued, was this thing he called civilizations.

00:07:27.700 But at the heart of civilizations was religion.

00:07:30.760 And his argument was that human beings have lost their identity as ideological beings.

00:07:37.160 And states have lost their identity as ideological beings.

00:07:40.200 Are they in the East camp or the West camp?

00:07:43.500 So they are regaining or finding again their identity, which is based on culture, on civilization,

00:07:51.400 and on religion.

00:07:52.700 I think that piece of it is incredibly powerful.

00:07:55.900 And I think one only has to look at the return of these ideas of culture and religion, not just

00:08:03.740 in the Middle East, but in, you know, places like India and Russia, even a place like Israel

00:08:09.660 has become, you know, more deeply conscious of its religion.

00:08:14.060 Sometimes it takes the form more of culture than of religion.

00:08:17.260 But in many cases, religion is at its heart.

00:08:19.540 So I think that piece of it, Sam really powerfully and early on identified.

00:08:24.960 And he identified that there was a particular problem in the world of Islam, which I think,

00:08:30.260 again, has proved to be, you know, very powerful impression.

00:08:33.740 Where I think he went wrong was he got very enamored with the idea of these civilizations

00:08:38.740 and the clash of civilizations.

00:08:40.940 And so he had this, he imagined this world in which Western civilization was going to clash

00:08:46.580 with Chinese civilization and Islamic civilization.

00:08:49.920 And he almost viewed them as in big interacting, you know, kind of billiard balls on a global billiard

00:08:56.920 table.

00:08:57.480 But in fact, what we discover is, you know, the world is very messy there.

00:09:02.420 You know, where does Latin America fit into that framework?

00:09:05.500 How do you deal with the fact that the big conflicts of the world are really mostly within

00:09:09.960 the world of Islam, you know, between the Shiites and the Sunnis, between the moderates 0.69

00:09:14.560 and the radicals?

00:09:15.320 In fact, you know, I think that the last five years, if you look at the number of people

00:09:20.100 who've been killed by Islamic terrorism, 95, 98 percent of them have been Muslims, you 0.97

00:09:25.240 know, Muslims killing each other. 1.00

00:09:26.720 So he got too enamored with this idea of civilizations and the idea that they cohere.

00:09:32.980 And so I think that part of it has never really worked.

00:09:36.160 You know, if you're you don't notice that like Saddam Hussein, when he invaded Kuwait, 0.83

00:09:40.600 didn't notice that they were both Arab, both Muslim, both Sunni countries that he was there

00:09:45.080 was that was old fashioned geopolitics.

00:09:47.660 So that piece of it, I don't think has worked as well.

00:09:49.760 But the the core insight, I still think that it's important to remember in 1992, not a

00:09:56.360 lot of people were saying the next big source of identity, conflict, power is going to be

00:10:03.380 culture and identity.

00:10:05.100 And he got that exactly right.

00:10:08.300 Yeah.

00:10:08.620 Yeah.

00:10:08.800 Well, we'll talk about Islam and hopefully I'll ask you a few questions about China as

00:10:13.440 well.

00:10:13.660 And I think Huntington might come back and in about half an hour or so.

00:10:18.140 But now, how do you view yourself politically at this moment?

00:10:21.940 How would you describe your your political biases such as they are?

00:10:26.100 You know, I I think of myself sort of fundamentally as a classical liberal, somebody who looks at

00:10:33.320 the 19th century tradition of liberals, by which I mean people who were dedicated to the idea

00:10:38.900 of human liberty, the preservation of liberty, free speech, free thought.

00:10:42.720 But but like many of those people, I think the world you learn as you go along, as it

00:10:47.420 were.

00:10:47.640 And I think that I've you know, I would describe myself as a kind of moderate or reformed classical

00:10:54.260 liberal, by which I mean, I can see that that there are excesses within capitalism, which

00:10:59.480 does not allow for a pure free market, that a pure free market ends up often being the rule

00:11:04.480 of the strong or the well-connected, you know, that the game is in some ways rigged and

00:11:09.460 that people don't have perfect information or perfect knowledge.

00:11:12.700 So you have to you have to play a role there.

00:11:15.380 I think that, you know, traditional liberals had too benign a view of international conflict.

00:11:21.100 You know, they tended to all believe that if everybody just became democratic, that we

00:11:25.020 would all live in peace for the rest of our lives.

00:11:26.800 And I think this power matters.

00:11:28.800 There's geopolitics matters, geography matters.

00:11:31.860 So, you know, where does that place me in today's political spectrum?

00:11:36.940 When I was in college, I was I was very enamored of Reagan.

00:11:39.660 I was kind of a right winger.

00:11:41.180 I liked I think part of it was I grew up in India and I was I came from a essentially a

00:11:47.400 socialist country.

00:11:48.200 And I liked Reagan's emphasis on freedom and free markets.

00:11:53.360 I liked his frank talk about the Soviet Union as an evil empire, which I liked. 1.00

00:11:58.220 I never bought the the social conservative agenda.

00:12:00.840 I've always been a social liberal.

00:12:02.840 And then I found that the to my mind, the the Republican Party went right and right and

00:12:08.940 right and right after Reagan.

00:12:10.640 And, you know, particularly I remember the Clinton years where, you know, they were on

00:12:15.660 this kind of insane crusade to impeach Clinton and the Democratic Party had moved to the center.

00:12:20.940 So I found a lot that I liked among liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.

00:12:26.120 And I would say politically, that's sort of still where I am.

00:12:29.140 I tend to think I didn't move as much as the country moved.

00:12:32.640 But my overall effort has always been to try to look at every issue, you know, on its own

00:12:39.320 merits.

00:12:39.720 So I try not to start with the assumption if the Republicans propose this, it must be

00:12:44.460 a bad idea.

00:12:45.100 If the Democrats propose it, it must be a good idea.

00:12:47.400 I try to look at, you know, these things just literally are they do they make sense?

00:12:51.660 So Trump just proposed the privatizing the FAA, the the the you know, the airline traffic

00:12:57.100 control.

00:12:58.000 And it's sort of essentially been been dead on arrival on the left.

00:13:03.320 So I just kind of looked at it and I came to the conclusion it's actually a pretty good

00:13:07.120 idea.

00:13:07.460 You have to be structured carefully.

00:13:09.160 But they did it in Canada, which is not exactly a bastion of crazy libertarian ideas.

00:13:15.000 And and it seems to be working pretty well.

00:13:17.340 And it allows for the kind of technological upgrade that we really need.

00:13:21.900 So, you know, I know that's a very small bore one.

00:13:25.200 But I was struck by how even that got subsumed with the kind of partisanship that we have

00:13:30.080 now, where nothing is viewed on its own terms.

00:13:33.020 Yeah, well, I want to talk about partisanship.

00:13:36.140 You've written about it recently.

00:13:38.160 And I want to attempt, however, vainly to inoculate our audience against the sense that we are

00:13:46.640 merely expressing partisanship when we talk about Trump, as we inevitably will.

00:13:52.020 Now, I don't know if you've listened to any of my podcasts where I've spoken about Trump,

00:13:55.700 but I have now it has to be at least 10 hours of me railing against the president.

00:14:01.520 I mean, both, you know, as a candidate and now as a president.

00:14:03.980 And I've had people like David Frum and Anne Applebaum and Andrew Sullivan and Juliette

00:14:10.460 Kayyem and people who who are quite critical of and worried about Trump in the Oval Office.

00:14:17.760 And we have just gone to town on him ad nauseum.

00:14:21.620 And this very much to the consternation of some significant percentage of my audience.

00:14:27.160 I actually don't know how large a percentage.

00:14:29.940 It's a very vocal minority.

00:14:31.380 But every time I've done this and more and more, I have tried to make it very clear that

00:14:37.980 partisanship is not the motivation here.

00:14:41.560 And there are easy ways to see this.

00:14:43.240 It's hard for people to really take these facts on board.

00:14:46.500 But one point I now often make is that anything I or my guest says in this context, which seems

00:14:53.520 to be hoping for impeachment, is, as a matter of fact, a hope for a president, Mike

00:15:01.260 Pence.

00:15:01.660 Now, Mike Pence is not someone who I would ever have thought I would want in the Oval

00:15:06.960 Office.

00:15:07.440 But insofar as I go down the road of impeachment, that's the goal.

00:15:11.940 Hillary Clinton is no longer on the menu, as should be clear.

00:15:15.540 And also, it should be clear that most of the guests, virtually all of the guests I've

00:15:21.440 had talk critically about Trump have been Republicans, for the most part, their entire lives, or the

00:15:28.440 very least center-right.

00:15:30.160 It's not a Bernie Sanders-style critique of Trumpism.

00:15:34.120 So in any case, I want us to talk about Trump.

00:15:37.480 I don't think we're going to spend a lot of time on his flaws, because I don't think there

00:15:41.300 are so many surprises there.

00:15:42.560 But let's begin with this issue of partisanship and how it has seemingly increased at this

00:15:50.800 moment for us, and how it's made talking about political reality and just terrestrial reality,

00:15:57.920 just talking about facts, talking about climate change, talking about, in the example you just

00:16:02.600 raised, whether privatizing the FAA could be a good idea or not.

00:16:06.600 It's made it impossible to do that without this toxic miasma of partisanship and tribalism

00:16:14.920 seemingly subsuming everything.

00:16:17.680 So before we jump right into Trump and what concerns you there, talk a little bit about

00:16:23.320 partisanship in the current moment.

00:16:26.000 I think the most worrying thing about where we are politically is what seemed to be the

00:16:33.840 core of how we have now begun to define ourselves as political beings.

00:16:38.780 So again, if you go back to that Huntington distinction, it did used to be, it seemed to

00:16:43.860 be that people viewed themselves more in ideological terms, liberal, conservative, that the issues

00:16:49.620 were really essentially around, you know, the kind of the role of the state in our lives.

00:16:54.240 So you are left of center or right of center, depending on largely on your view of the role of

00:16:58.440 the state in our, in the economic life of the nation.

00:17:02.060 And that divide was very important, but it was one that you could talk about, you could

00:17:06.800 argue about, you could negotiate over and you could split differences.

00:17:10.500 You know, there was, you wanted to spend more money.

00:17:12.360 I wanted to spend less.

00:17:13.380 Well, there was a number in the middle.

00:17:15.260 What has happened in those very good research from the Harvard Kennedy School, this woman,

00:17:21.100 Pippa Norris and Roland Engelhardt have done, which shows that people about the 1980s, this

00:17:28.780 began to happen in significant numbers, started to define themselves not by the, on over economic

00:17:34.720 issues, but over cultural issues.

00:17:36.380 You know, their identity derived not from their economic class, but from national origin, race,

00:17:44.780 gender, sexual orientation.

00:17:46.720 And so we, we've organized ourselves almost more into tribes and those, those identities

00:17:52.100 are more ascriptive identities.

00:17:53.860 They're given identities.

00:17:55.580 And so the problem with that is it's very hard to negotiate or to compromise or to even

00:17:59.800 talk about these issues.

00:18:01.420 It's, you know, it's, it seems as though you are one person is assaulting the other side's

00:18:06.200 identity.

00:18:06.660 They're looking down on, they viewed one side or the other is immoral.

00:18:10.620 And all the battle line issues tend to be like that, you know, abortion, gay rights, even

00:18:15.220 things like immigration is really a debate over national identity.

00:18:18.840 And so it's not easy to compromise.

00:18:20.940 And what that has done is it's made it impossible for there to be that open common space.

00:18:25.940 I mean, the, the liberal tradition, and now again, I just mean liberal, small l, meaning

00:18:30.000 really the democratic tradition assumes you can have debates because there are common facts

00:18:35.420 to which we have access.

00:18:36.580 We are assuming, you know, each side is amenable to changing their views, but we have become

00:18:42.400 in America more like Sunnis and Shiites, you know, where we're like, you, you, you can't 0.99

00:18:47.120 really have a debate because one side views the other as then insulting them.

00:18:50.560 And then, uh, and there's no compromise possible because you'd be surrendering your very identity

00:18:56.180 to this other side.

00:18:57.400 Each side in a sense thinks that to let the other one win would be to dramatically change

00:19:03.180 our core conception of what the country is.

00:19:05.260 Now, if we are locked in that kind of a debate, it's not even a debate into a kind of a cultural

00:19:11.800 contest conflict.

00:19:13.560 It makes one despair at the prospects of liberal democracy, which does depend on reasoned debate

00:19:18.780 with common facts.

00:19:20.760 This is what has worried me most about Trump.

00:19:22.800 It's this erosion of the norm around facts.

00:19:27.700 This is what's been so destabilizing about him and his surrogates.

00:19:31.920 Obviously, the people like Kellyanne Conway or Sean Spicer, who will get on television

00:19:37.800 and lie in a way that is so childlike.

00:19:42.780 I mean, it's the way that Trump lies.

00:19:44.800 There's no pretense of making your lies square with common reality so that it's just this...

00:19:51.960 It's really an appeal to tribalism, I think.

00:19:54.260 It's really, and it's appealed to people saying, don't forget we're a team and those guys are

00:19:58.840 bad.

00:19:59.160 You know, as you're right, they don't even pretend to have a very good explanation or

00:20:03.000 answer.

00:20:03.480 It's just an appeal to tribalism.

00:20:06.460 In this case, it's hard for me to understand what the tribe is because it's not a religious 1.00

00:20:11.200 tribe, although some numbers of religious people have gotten behind Trump.

00:20:15.540 It's not an establishment Republican tribe.

00:20:19.820 It doesn't even seem...

00:20:21.100 I mean, all of the policies to which they seem to have been committed in the campaign, any

00:20:27.100 one or a collection of them seem fungible.

00:20:30.040 Like, if when Trump goes back on a promise, people seem to sort of just shrug and say,

00:20:36.160 well, you know, of course he was going to go back on a promise.

00:20:37.940 That was just an opening negotiation gambit.

00:20:40.540 I don't know what the value is to which everyone is captive here, apart from just the theater

00:20:50.080 of it.

00:20:50.880 The fact that this is good television or that he has destabilized the system in a way that

00:20:56.040 continues to be entertaining.

00:20:58.740 There's a kind of...

00:20:59.320 It's almost like a nihilistic attitude with respect to the status quo.

00:21:04.100 People just want to see this wrecking ball swing freely through the system.

00:21:10.220 Do you have any more insight as to what you think is going on there?

00:21:12.860 Because I can't get people to make reasonable noises in defense of Trump when he either does

00:21:19.280 something crazy and impulsive on his side or even just reneges on a promise that yesterday

00:21:26.420 his fans or supporters said was important to them.

00:21:30.120 Well, I think you're absolutely right.

00:21:32.020 But the only thing I would amend is you keep saying people support him.

00:21:36.800 So we know now a lot about the people who support him.

00:21:39.800 And now I'm not talking about the people who voted for him.

00:21:41.860 Republicans are very loyal.

00:21:43.380 He got basically the same percentage of Republican support as Romney did.

00:21:47.860 We really have become two teams.

00:21:50.240 But if you look at his core support, the 35 percent approval rating he has now, those people

00:21:56.200 are overwhelmingly non-college educated white.

00:21:59.580 And the tribe is a kind of white working class or non-college educated, non-urban group that 0.85

00:22:10.480 believes that they have been passed by, despised, condescended to, overlooked, that the America

00:22:19.800 they see is one that is filled with uppity working women and minorities who may be getting ahead 1.00

00:22:27.120 because of affirmative action and immigrants who are coming in and technologists and financiers

00:22:32.740 who have rigged the system of meritocracy.

00:22:35.820 That series of cultural resentments is very powerful and very real.

00:22:42.100 There's, you know, there are some real economic basis for it.

00:22:44.900 There are some, you know, some of it is just stoking prejudice.

00:22:48.720 It's some weird combination of all that.

00:22:51.000 But that's, it seems to me, the core.

00:22:53.520 And those are the people Trump really knows how to play with and Steve Bannon knows how

00:23:00.340 to play with.

00:23:00.800 So I don't think it's completely, you know, it's not just all the theater and the celebrity.

00:23:05.680 There is a very, there's a real core here, which is, you know, about more about social

00:23:10.840 class than we like to talk about in America.

00:23:12.880 Some of it to do with race, some of it to do with religion.

00:23:15.500 But it's this whole combination of feelings.

00:23:19.380 And you see something similar in Britain with the pro-Brexit, anti-Brexit.

00:23:23.860 Again, you found that education and urban-rural were the two big divides.

00:23:29.000 And it is, when you talk to these people, as I have, we're doing a documentary called

00:23:34.440 Why Trump Won.

00:23:35.820 And what's interesting, what's really, you sense is the feeling of resentment, the feeling

00:23:40.440 that they have been condescended to, the feeling that they have been, you know, that the

00:23:44.400 whole country is being run by other people.

00:23:47.320 How do you feel that journalism is faring now in the aftermath, in the era of fake news?

00:23:54.120 I think it's pretty plain to see that journalism was culpable for treating the election and the

00:24:02.020 whole campaign season as a horse race and giving Trump, I don't know, it's been estimated

00:24:06.820 more than a billion dollars free television.

00:24:09.400 But it seems to me that in the aftermath, the attitude of journalism has changed noticeably.

00:24:15.740 But how do you think we're faring now?

00:24:19.360 So first, on the first point, I have to defend CNN a little bit in the sense that, you know,

00:24:25.540 people forget that Trump very early on became the Republican frontrunner in the polls.

00:24:30.900 There were a bunch of people like Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight and pundits who were saying,

00:24:37.100 don't pay any attention to the polls because the polls don't actually predict who's going

00:24:41.480 to get the nomination.

00:24:42.100 It's actually money and it's organization and endorsements.

00:24:46.500 But Trump, remarkably early on, became the dominant figure in the polls.

00:24:52.180 So that's number one.

00:24:52.920 He was the Republican frontrunner.

00:24:54.640 And two, he started very early on to say completely outrageous things and propose completely

00:25:01.480 outrageous policies that nobody had ever proposed.

00:25:04.280 I mean, he was proposing, you know, mass deportations of 11 million people.

00:25:08.340 He was talking about building a wall.

00:25:09.660 He spoke sort of favorably of the internment of the Japanese Americans.

00:25:13.500 Then he comes up with the Muslim ban.

00:25:14.880 So that's news.

00:25:16.480 You know, you may not like it, but you have the Republican frontrunner proposing stuff that

00:25:21.840 no presidential candidate has proposed in 75 years.

00:25:24.920 And, you know, we can't pretend it wasn't news.

00:25:27.720 Now, all that said, I agree with, I think, what you're saying, which is that we got caught

00:25:31.760 up in the theater of it.

00:25:33.320 And look, just remember, the print media, the media, the television media in particular,

00:25:38.220 is not a non-profit charity.

00:25:41.060 If we are putting something on, chances are you want to see it.

00:25:45.100 It's on because there is a public appetite for it and it's a very competitive industry.

00:25:50.360 If you don't do it, somebody else will do it.

00:25:52.620 So that would be my defense of the media.

00:25:56.360 But on your larger question, look, I do think now the media, if you want to look for some

00:26:01.940 good news, I would say the resilience of the American system has been somewhat satisfying

00:26:07.400 to me to watch, which is the courts are functioning well and are not being cowed, despite the fact

00:26:13.240 that you have a president who, in an unprecedented way, is attacking the judiciary and often actually

00:26:18.320 attacking judges by name, which I really don't think has happened, the non-political bureaucrats

00:26:24.600 that make up the kind of, you know, the heart and soul of government, whether it's the FBI,

00:26:30.300 the Justice Department, they are holding up pretty well.

00:26:33.120 They have not been intimidated.

00:26:35.040 And the media is rising to the occasion.

00:26:37.260 I think you're seeing a renaissance of real investigative journalism.

00:26:40.240 You're seeing people commentary.

00:26:42.500 I think conservative intellectuals, for example, you mentioned a few, like David Frum, have really

00:26:47.180 risen to the occasion, even though it has cost them.

00:26:50.380 I mean, George Will was, as far as I can tell, essentially fired from Fox because he was

00:26:55.920 outspokenly anti-Trump.

00:26:57.840 And I think that that piece of it, the media, I think, has handled pretty well.

00:27:03.480 There is a problem on the Trump phenomenon.

00:27:05.880 So the way I think about it, there are three sort of baskets of things you're trying to,

00:27:10.620 I at least am trying to figure out.

00:27:12.180 One is, what are the things Trump is actually proposing and how do you evaluate them?

00:27:17.460 I said, you know, like the FAA thing or whether it's the tax policy.

00:27:20.620 And, you know, I think you have to try to evaluate those fairly by saying, are they good?

00:27:25.340 Are they bad?

00:27:26.420 A lot of what he proposes is very weird, haphazard, badly thought through.

00:27:31.500 But you still have to ask yourself, OK, but, you know, is this, if it were properly laid

00:27:36.300 out, would this be a good idea or a bad idea?

00:27:38.540 So there's that one cluster of things, and a lot of it is surprisingly not very populist.

00:27:43.340 It's actually pretty standard, fair, Republican stuff.

00:27:47.060 The second is the circus of Donald Trump, the sheer kind of weird, you know, bizarro way

00:27:55.200 in which he operates, the vulgarity, the personal attacks, you know, and that has a kind of seductive

00:28:03.220 theatrical aspect to it.

00:28:04.600 But then there's the third part, which you focused a lot on, which I think is the most

00:28:09.180 important part.

00:28:10.120 And unfortunately, it is the fact that Trump is, in many of his actions and rhetoric, a

00:28:15.560 danger to American democracy.

00:28:17.640 And, you know, when I talk about the third, I try not to forget the first and the second,

00:28:23.700 but it does overwhelm because the fact that you have a president who is willing to routinely

00:28:29.980 do things like attack the independence of the judiciary, attack the free press, talk about

00:28:36.580 prosecuting journalists, talk about maybe we should be changing the protections that

00:28:41.000 journalists and the free press have.

00:28:44.280 Clearly, talking to various members of the investigative branches of the federal government and trying

00:28:50.320 to get them to bend to his will, you know, whether or not it constitutes obstruction of justice,

00:28:56.120 all of which is, strikes me, patently, obviously, dangerous for democracy, dangerous for liberal

00:29:02.680 democracy to have a president, you know, having nine meetings with the director of the FBI in the

00:29:07.680 hundred days he was in office when Obama had two meetings with that same director in the, you know,

00:29:12.760 six years that they were, they overlapped.

00:29:14.560 It tells you something and it's doesn't, and it's, it's not something pretty about America.

00:29:19.100 So how do you talk about that third cluster of events in a way that, uh, that, that doesn't

00:29:25.720 sort of overwhelm everything?

00:29:27.280 That's, that's been one of my challenges.

00:29:29.900 It's a real challenge because the moment you begin talking about it, honestly, you begin to sound

00:29:36.760 like one of the, the hyper-partisans we just complained about where you're, you're calling the

00:29:42.920 other side dangerous or immoral or un-American. And it seems like these are not the kinds of

00:29:51.200 claims about the other side that seem open for compromise or negotiation or a meet in the middle

00:29:57.180 approach, because we are talking about someone who is undermining the norms of our democracy,

00:30:02.420 as you say, and that is dangerous. And yet anyone who's just either not paying attention or on the

00:30:07.960 other side, understandably thinks it's dangerous to talk about the president this way. It's hyper-partisan

00:30:14.400 to talk about the president this way, but you can only walk on eggshells for so long here before you

00:30:20.060 have to concede that he is not a normal person in the role of the president. He is someone who is

00:30:29.060 not observing the most basic criteria for being informed, caring about whether or not he's informed,

00:30:37.660 to take one thread among a dozen we could take here. But however the, the Russian hacking investigation

00:30:45.060 comes out and whether collusion between the Trump campaign or Trump himself and the Russians can be

00:30:51.020 proved or not, leave all of that to one side. What is unambiguously so is that we have a hostile

00:30:57.720 foreign power that worked mightily hard to undermine our democracy. And we have a president 0.65

00:31:05.740 who has either denied that to be so or has more or less ignored it and done nothing to really get to

00:31:14.900 the bottom of it simply because he's concerned about how it makes his electoral victory look. And he's

00:31:22.140 never said a bad word about Putin, right? Who is, you know, someone who has his political foes and

00:31:27.280 the occasional journalist locked up or killed. If he had done nothing else wrong in his career as

00:31:33.560 president, those facts alone are so alarming that we're nowhere near normal here. And so to talk about

00:31:41.140 this in terms this stark is not yet another example of hyper-partisan demagoguery.

00:31:48.640 Yeah, it's, it's a very, very interesting point, which is how do you convey that this really is,

00:31:55.680 this is different. This is not normal. This is the, these are, this is a violation of standards. This is

00:32:02.260 not within the historical range. I mean, if you, you know, one of the ones I think we don't pay enough

00:32:07.240 attention to is you have the president of the United States who is essentially in no significant way

00:32:12.980 disassociated himself from his various, uh, many, many, many commercial enterprises, uh, continues to

00:32:21.760 benefit from them and is actively promoting many of the, those commercial enterprises. We now have,

00:32:28.300 you know, we have now dollar and cent figures on the 30, 20, 30, 40% rises in revenues for all these

00:32:36.460 clubs that he keeps attending, that he keeps going to. You know, what he's in effect doing is essentially

00:32:42.240 commercial advertising for Mar-a-Lago and for the Bedminster club and things like that. We have no

00:32:47.720 idea what the, the nature of his meetings with foreign, uh, uh, leaders is, but what we do know is,

00:32:54.160 again, he has not disassociated himself from much of the, the kind of licensing operation that takes

00:32:59.920 place the Chinese award 35 trademarks and one day to him, 15 to his, uh, to his daughter to talk about

00:33:06.620 all this is not just, you know, to be, to be partisan. It is to say, this is really something

00:33:11.220 Mitt Romney and John McCain, uh, and, and George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush did not do, would never have

00:33:18.920 dreamed of doing, uh, and is something that, you know, we have to talk about because this is how a, you know,

00:33:25.700 this is how a banana Republic runs and we don't want to adopt those. We don't want to define these 0.99

00:33:31.580 standards down so much that they go away. You know, part of what I think I'm in the job of is 1.00

00:33:36.560 the kind of preservation job. That is the preservation of these norms of liberal democracy,

00:33:41.260 because I don't want to create a situation where we get so used to it that the next guy who comes

00:33:48.160 around says, Oh yeah, you know, I don't need to resign from any of my companies. I don't need to,

00:33:51.900 uh, release my tax returns. I don't need to do any of this. And I,

00:33:55.700 you know, my, my wife and my daughter and, uh, son-in-law can be my principal advisors.

00:34:00.460 No, no, no. We have to make sure that Trump is an aberration, not the beginning of some kind of,

00:34:05.880 you know, kind of, uh, Gaudismo rule in the United States.

00:34:10.660 Now, is there any benign explanation of all of this? Take the two pieces that you and I have put

00:34:18.420 in play here. And again, there's, there are many more pieces we could talk about, but just take two

00:34:22.980 things. The fact that he still has all of his business dealings up and running, whether he's

00:34:28.660 personally paying attention to them or not. And the fact that he has never said a bad word about

00:34:34.500 Putin. Is there a, a fundamentally benign explanation of all that?

00:34:39.580 You know, the one that, that I wonder about sometimes is the, the, the, the, the business

00:34:45.400 side, I can't quite see the benign explanation because you, you, you know, there are many easy

00:34:50.600 ways. George W. Bush's ethics lawyer outlined how he could put stuff in a blind trust. I mean,

00:34:56.440 there were, there are things you could do and clearly they're consciously not doing them.

00:35:00.080 On the Russia thing, I think the odd thing is I can imagine a benign explanation involving 0.88

00:35:06.080 collusion, which is to say that Trump ran a very disorganized, chaotic, and kind of corrupt 0.80

00:35:13.060 campaign, by which I mean, uh, it was a crazy mom and pop fly by night operation. He couldn't 0.52

00:35:18.720 get any of the big consultants. Remember there were 15, 16 other candidates that all the serious

00:35:23.740 consultants had gone to them. So he's dealing with the, the, the riffraff of the Republican 0.67

00:35:28.400 world and he's dealing with a lot of unsavory characters and they're running, they're kind

00:35:33.360 of doing a, almost a freelance operation. And in that context, the Russians are trying

00:35:37.880 to penetrate and, and maybe his guys played footsie with the Russians, but he didn't know

00:35:42.840 about it. I think that's a bit, that's a perfectly plausible benign explanation on the collusion

00:35:47.980 part. The part I don't understand and for which it's harder to find a benign explanation

00:35:53.060 is what you've pointed out a few times, which is really the central puzzle. Donald Trump

00:35:58.020 has said for almost all his life, that he thinks that the one thing that he's sure about is

00:36:03.340 that the rest of the world is constantly screwing the United States and we need to get tough on

00:36:08.680 all these SOBs. And, you know, he said that from the 1980s when he was talking about the 0.97

00:36:13.360 Japanese and the NATO allies. And then he talked about the Chinese and how they were raping our 0.93

00:36:18.080 country and how Saudi Arabia was a country that we had to pull the rug from under. Everybody 1.00

00:36:23.380 except the Russians. He has only said nice things about Putin, only said nice things about how 0.82

00:36:29.700 wouldn't it be great if we could get on with the Russians. Now, you know, there's a, there is a

00:36:34.160 school of thought that feels that it tends to come more from the kind of hard left than, than from

00:36:40.220 anywhere else in historical terms. But it really makes no sense given Trump's worldview. So that to me

00:36:47.920 is in a, in a way, the central intellectual puzzle that leads me to think maybe there is something

00:36:53.680 going on here because why is he so consistently benign in his reading of everything Putin does?

00:37:00.280 You know, even that meeting in, with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the, in the

00:37:04.820 White House, it was so much more pally than anything we've seen. The, the contacts that, that took place

00:37:11.260 with during the campaign, perfectly fine if they were what they said they were. But what I'm struck by is

00:37:16.300 we have no record of any such of conversations with the French ambassador, the German ambassador,

00:37:23.200 the British ambassador, the Chinese ambassador, you know? So what is going on with Russia is,

00:37:28.160 I think, is a fair question to which some of Trump's own rhetoric points you.

00:37:34.360 So, Fareed, I want to switch gears here and talk about Islam and, you know, the current challenge in 1.00

00:37:40.720 even talking about it and the role it's playing in creating so much chaos in the world. And as you

00:37:46.640 rightly pointed out, mostly for Muslims, you and I have disagreed both in public and in private about

00:37:53.080 how to talk about the problem of Islamic extremism. So I want to see if we can make a little progress 1.00

00:37:58.360 on this disagreement here. And so let's just come to it in a kind of stepwise fashion. First,

00:38:03.440 I noticed that recently you've written that you are a Muslim, but you're not able to practice it.

00:38:09.360 If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - June 23, 2017

#83 — The Politics of Emergency

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