Making Sense with Sam Harris - #114 — Politics and Sanity

Episode Date: January 22, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with David Frum and Andrew Sullivan about the Trump presidency, hyper-partisanship, how democracies fail, immigration, the lowering life expectancy in the U.S., racism, social media, the opioid crisis, marijuana legalization, religion, what a healthy politics might look like, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Today you'll hear the audio from my event in D.C. with Andrew Sullivan and David Frum. I love the event, I love the conversation. But here are the two mistakes I think I made. The first is I brought politics to D.C., which was a totally natural thing for me to do. When I go to a city, I'm first trying to find local guests so as to spare people the hassle of traveling. And in D.C., it's quite natural to think of people in politics. And having speakers of the caliber of David Frum and Andrew Sullivan there, it was natural to grab them. But the reality is, if there's any city in the world that would have loved to have me avoid politics altogether and talk to a physicist or a biologist. It has to be D.C. And honestly, that hadn't occurred to me until after the fact.

So I should have taken David and Andrew to some other city, and that would have made much more sense for the local audience. But also, as you'll hear, David and Andrew are people with so much to say that I found myself moderating a conversation between them, largely. Which, again, was totally natural for me to do and felt fine at the time because I was interested to hear what both of them had to say. But in the aftermath, I realized that most of the people who came out that night came to see me. In fact, most of the tickets to the event had sold before I had even announced who my guests would be. So, from the perspective of someone who came out to hear me talk, that person got shortchanged.

Again, this is something that I'm learning as I go, but I believe these are legitimate concerns. So, going forward, I think, unless there's some real reason to have two guests on stage, I will opt to have just one. It'll either keep me from focusing too much on one guest, as I think I did in my event with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro, where Ben and I got into a mini-debate and sidelined Eric for a while, and it will keep me from falling into the mode of merely moderating between two other people, however interesting. But that said, I don't think any of these flaws really affect the podcast, and if you enjoy Andrew and David as much as I do, you will enjoy listening to them at this event. There were some intense moments. There was some heckling for my guests at various points. Got contentious between us toward the end.

We agreed about more or less everything for the first hour, and then several topics of debate came up, mostly in the Q&A period. There was a legalization of marijuana, which David and Andrew strongly disagreed about. There was a question about the validity of religion, where they both strongly disagreed about. There was a question about the validity of religion, where they both strongly disagreed with me. There was a question about Kissinger, I believe, where Andrew and David found themselves at loggerheads, and a few others. It was a little

inconvenient that we couldn't deal with each one of those topics at length, but anyway, there was enough there for you to see where we all stand, and we all certainly had fun. One point of subtext that didn't actually get explained on stage, Andrew had just released an article in New York Magazine that day for which he was getting totally hammered on social media about the Me Too movement. So he was a little shell-shocked there, and I think there was one reference to it that got a laugh from the crowd because everyone knew what was going on there, but it actually never got discussed. So in case you don't know who they are, David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and he is the author of the new book, Trumpocracy, The Corruption of the American Republic. That's his ninth book. I have read it, and I recommend it.

And David's been on the podcast, I think, twice before. He's been in conservative media for quite some time. He was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He's been a lifelong Republican, and he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002. He holds a BA and MA in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard, and the man certainly knows a lot about politics. And my second guest was Andrew Sullivan, who's also been on the podcast before, and we've debated various things in print over the years. Andrew is a writer-at-large for New York Magazine. He holds a BA from Oxford University in Modern History and Modern Languages and a PhD in Government from Harvard. He was the editor of The New Republic from 1991 to 1996 and the creator of The Daily Dish, which was one of the first political blogs, which he ran from 2000 to 2015. He's a winner of three National Magazine Awards,

and he was also the weekly American columnist for the Sunday Times of London from 1996 to 2014. If you don't know it, Andrew's commentary was very influential in helping our nation come to its senses around marriage equality. In fact, he wrote the first cover story and first book in favor of marriage equality in 1989 and 1995. He wrote a memoir about the AIDS epidemic, titled Love Undetectable, in 1998. And after that, he wrote the book The Conservative Soul in 2006. And so, I now bring you David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, live from the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, I have two guests tonight who have great bios. I have their bios here, but I realize they actually need no introduction in this town. So please welcome Andrew Sullivan and David Frum. Thanks for coming. So I just heard from my wife that my youngest daughter, who just turned four, was asked yesterday who her favorite monsters were.

And she thought for a while, and she said, Grover and Donald Trump. Now, this is after, at two and a half, saying she was going to vote for Donald Trump. Now, this is after, at two and a half, saying she was going to vote for Donald Trump. So she's made progress. Now, I promise we are not going to focus exclusively on politics. And if I don't keep that promise, there will be a long Q&A, and you can move on to other things if that interests you. But clearly, with the two of you,

we need to talk about Trump and his consequences. I want to start by attempting to nullify any kind of charge of partisanship that would be leveled at us, however incongruously. Maybe I'll start with you, David. David, if you don't know, is just about to release a big and wonderful book on the Trump issue, the Trumpocracy. And that is for sale along with our books in the lobby afterwards. We'll have a book signing. So I'll be grateful very, very easily. We're the cheapest states ever. So, David, just deflate this notion that any expression of concern of the sort that we will articulate here about politics and Trump in particular must be an expression of ideology or partisanship here? Well, first,

I don't know why I should be so worried about that. Because when you express a moral attitude or a political attitude, I don't think you have to. It's either true or false. It's either plausible or not. It either holds water or it doesn't. So the why question, that's just psychoanalysis. We all have our motives. I come to this as someone who's a very conservative person who's been lifelong involved in the conservative movement, not just in this country, but in my native Canada. I've been very involved in Britain as well. And I've been a pretty consistent supporter. In fact, a perfectly consistent supporter of those parties. And I think a lot of my reaction to Donald Trump is not, is at the deepest level, not a political one. He's cruel. He's cruel. He's cruel to animals. He's cruel to his children. He's cruel to people who depend on him. He's cruel to the men and women who come into his orbit. And I think that's the

beginning of my reaction to him. I think it's maybe the opposite that needs to be explained, that it is not the revulsion against him, which is now shared by more than 60% of American society. That's not the phenomenon that needs to be explained and where you raise the question of, is this partisan? Is this ideological? It's those who support him. Some support him because, unfortunately, human beings are more excited by cruelty than maybe it's comfortable to admit. Unfortunately, human beings are more excited by cruelty than maybe it's comfortable to admit. That's how the gladiatorial games in Rome sold out. You could fill the whole Colosseum with people watching cruelty. There's something that's exciting about it. But a lot of people, because of partisanship or ideology, are able to close their eyes to what they see.

Maybe this is an entirely vain hope, but what would it take to have a conversation on this issue of the sort we're about to have that could change minds? I mean, we're talking about 35 percent of the population and an environment of hyper partisanship, unlike any we've seen before. What do you think about, Andrew, the prospect of actually changing minds on this issue? What would it take? I don't know what it would take. I've been staggered and dismayed by the number of people who are prepared to side with a figure so repellent in so many ways,

except for one thing, which is tribalism. This is not, partisanship is sort ofanship is a bit like supporting your football team. It isn't existential. It isn't integral to your entire being. But America is now essentially not one country. It's two tribes, warring in a zero-sum game in which one party seeks to undo everything of the last administration,

in which the notion that you might actually accept that there is a place for two parties in this system and that they should take turns, that in fact that's a strength of a bipartisan system, this has been completely wiped away by these deeper, more primordial loyalties. Is he with us or is he with them? And the bulk of the blame of this does go absolutely to the Republican Party's transformation

really in the 90s particularly, I think, and onwards, into believing that the other party has no right to govern at all, that it's illegitimate. Whereas I was a happy supporter of Republican presidents and conservative prime ministers until I thought, you know, it's good for Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to have a shot. This is good. It'd be good for us to be out of power for a bit. Because the point is really the whole system, not this particular interest. And then you realize the Republicans have become something like a cultural tribal force in which they had to run everything. And they still do. Yeah. Well, listen, let's talk about the system, because it is just a fact that democracies fail. And this is something you cover in your book. And it's a fact that

we are not very sensitive to. I feel like, I mean, just speaking personally, I feel like the first moment in my life where I realized I was living in the stream of history, like real history where bad things happen in surprising ways, was 9-11. That was the first moment where I realized, okay, the big bombs could start falling anywhere, and you can't take anything really for granted. But yet I feel like I, up until the moment of Trump, have been asleep on this particular point, that I've taken our institutions and their strength for granted. I've taken democracy for granted.

And so connect some of the dots about what's at stake here. Well, I think one of the reasons it's easy to be blind to the danger around you is that we imagine the danger, the only kind of danger to worry about is the danger at its most extreme. Unless it's Hitler, it's fine. And I keep trying to persuade people, you know, there are a lot of stops on the train line of bad before you get to Hitler Station. the train line of bad before you get to Hitler Station. You can't say, let's study the worst example of democratic breakdown in the history of the world and then say, okay, well, obviously,

our situation is nothing like that. And I started writing about this in order to explain why that analogy can be so completely mistaken, and yet the danger can be real. Because when democracies corrode, they can corrode more gently. You know, you asked at the beginning, you asked Andrew about changing minds. In fact, minds are being changed every day. And the Gallup polls reflect that. It's not a cataclysmic event, but every day, a couple of thousand people in America change their mind on this issue. They become disillusioned. That's happening. That's

why we're in a dangerous situation, because Donald Trump and the people... If Donald Trump were popular, he would rule popularly. Because he is not, and because the people around him fear that in a real election, they might not do so well. In fact, they didn't do so well the last time. They keep telling you they did, but they didn't. You know, if the ball had bounced a little bit differently, and we're just looking at the total vote, Donald Trump got about half a point more of Michael Dukakis, and nobody writes essays about the Dukakis voter, and what's on their minds, the Dukakis voter? and what's on their minds, the Dukakis voter.

He's like, Dukakis plus half a point. They deny that. His mental condition probably forced him to, but he also is aware of it, and the people around him are aware of it, and that's why they need to circumvent a lot of normal political processes. Precisely because they know that minds are changing against them, they're going to need to use power in other kinds of ways.

But then what do you make of all the enabling we have seen from mainstream Republicans? So the crucial minds that need to change are the Republicans in Congress, and what would it take for Paul Ryan, to name a name, to just disavow this president? I mean, is it just pure opportunism? Explain this.

Or is there something deeper and less cynical? No, or something deeper and more cynical. Human nature apparently is worse than I realize. If you start with that assumption, then life can hold nothing but pleasant surprises. If you start with a bad assumption, then things get better. Paul Ryan's made this deal, and he's getting things from it. As Steve Bannon has moved off, we've seen that what is integral to Trump

was not the set of issues that he wrote in 2015. What's integral to him is the power that he seeks to hold in order to protect himself from legal danger and to enrich himself and also to meet his psychic needs and maybe to glut some of his deep inner hates. He's not so interested in the details of any of these bills he signs. So the people who do care, they can strike a bargain with him. As the popularity of the Republican Party continues to corrode, Donald Trump will more and more become the only game in town. They will have to defend him.

That's the next danger that I see. The Republicans are going to take bad losses, it looks like, in November of 2018. They may lose a house. They may lose two houses. If that happens, there may be individual intellectuals and donors who turn on Donald Trump and say it's your fault. But the logic of the situation will force his party to cling to him more desperately. Because remember, you cannot, just as it took three houses, three branches of government, the House that sent the president to pass the tax cut,

it takes only one of them to defend it. So I want to talk a little more about what it looks like for democracy to begin to erode. And there are many signs here that we're not in normal territory. But one is just with respect to the norms of political discourse. And the most infuriating retort to everything I say when I worry out loud about Trump that I've encountered is, he's just trolling, like as though that excuses any possible indiscretion, whether it's, you know, threatening nuclear war or singling out some private person on Twitter for abuse. You know, we have the president of

the United States going after someone. This notion of just trolling, which there's a kind of There's a notion of just trolling, which there's a kind of nihilistic delight in him eradicating the norms of civil political discourse. And you must spend as much time on social media as I do. I'm trying not to. Yeah, well... Certainly today.

Yeah, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. What do you think about this idea? There's a sense that, I mean, this just seems genuinely new, where you have smart, these are not stupid people, these are smart people who delight in a kind of wrecking ball-like chaos. Yes, because something really happened, it seems to me, in this moment. Now, if you're an old-school conservative and you've studied political thought, you're terrified of what happens in democracies as they continue. Aristotle and Plato and the ancients

understood that democracy is inherently unstable and will almost always devolve at some point into a tyranny. But those two things are deeply connected. What happens is that people have simply decided they're not interested in rational deliberation. Emotions are much more important than arguments. They're much more interested in people rather than principles. And at some point, they made a decision

that they would rather abandon self-government and give it up to the one man. This is something that they all predicted in the ancient world, but essentially when democracy is fully extended, when everyone is equal to everyone else, there are no intermediary things, there's just the masses and the celebrities, then there will some point at which the masses will elect a celebrity to govern for them and feel great calm in that. And when they've made that decision, it's a personal commitment to that person, which is at a level that cannot be argued out of. This is a cult, and he represents a rebuke to the elites that didn't think he could happen, that have failed dramatically on a whole variety of fronts over the last 20 or 30 years.

And it's a sign that they really don't care if the system of government survives. That's an incredibly dangerous moment in democracy. That one of our major parties and a whole slew of intellectuals who should know better have decided to go along with this just shows they don't understand what they're dealing with and how powerful and dangerous this is. You know, to echo Andrew's point, the people belong to the generation of my parents who came of age after World War II. For 30 years, they saw life just get better and better and better for the ordinary person. That incomes rose, the housing got better, the opportunities got better, the schooling got better. That people whose parents had not finished high school were able to complete

college, and they had tremendous confidence in the system that made all of this possible. I sort of sum it up by if you watch an old movie, whenever a character steps forward who's wearing a white lab coat, you know he's got the answer, especially if he has a German accent. He will tell you how the time machine works, how you've got the tiny little submarine inside the bloodstream. He has the answers. And starting sometime in the middle 1970s, whenever you see a man in the white lab coat, he's like a hubristic maniac. We will see him, his last scene will be vanishing down the gullet of a Tyrannosaurus Rex that he thought it was a good idea to bring back to life. And so we have a loss of confidence in a lot of

institutions. But here's something to say, and I think maybe this is the very first thing I should have said here. I think one of the things that is sort of exciting and inspiring about the, when I say the moment, I don't mean the big moment, I mean literally the hour that we're living in, is the counteract to all of this is a revival of civic spirit. I mean, I never thought I would be sitting on a stage on a theater on a Friday night and have people listen to these musings when they could be doing it. And I don't, I think, I don't know if narcissistic personality disorder is infectious. I hope not. But I haven't caught enough of it yet to think that people are here for any of us.

I mean, they're here because one of the reactions to this president, I quoted in the book, it's an email I got from somebody, that he had reacted to the election of Donald Trump by resolving to be a better citizen. And you see that, and you're doing it. And thank you. And that's what's going to make the difference. If only that were generally true, I'm more pessimistic than you. It didn't last long, that hopeful feeling. It didn't last long, that hopeful feeling. I'm here to squelch any single hint of optimism here.

I would say a couple of things. I've been amazed at how many people are perfectly happy with a president that has contempt for the courts, that talks about shutting down the free press, that wants to use the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents. Actions that are inimicable to liberal democracy. I'm amazed by the number of people that much prefer to emote about their identity or the people hating them or the people they hate as opposed to thinking about

what are the best solutions to this particular problem. I think identity politics has definitely made all of this worse, and that when the right decided to adopt identity politics in a particular moment in time, they compounded all of its problems. So that essentially you're not voting for a set of policies against another. It seems irrelevant what he's doing. The people seem to support him. He's pursuing a classic Randian policy when he ran as a populist person standing up for the forgotten men and women, but no one cares. Now, one of the reasons is he's just a white man who represents the last stand, really, of a white majority country, which is going to become a non-white-majority country,

whatever you mean by white. And that is the first time in human history that's ever happened. When it's happening at a time also of mass immigration and declining and stagnant living standards for most people, it is a very dangerous moment. And everybody should be attempting at such a moment to mitigate those issues, to lean against those issues, where the political temptation, of course, is to fan them for extraordinary power. And that's happening now on both sides. So you're not voting on a set of issues. You're voting because you're gay. You're

voting because you're black. You're voting because you're white. You're voting because you're a woman. These are not arguments. This is not a democracy. Well, I want us to touch identity politics, because I think that is especially problematic on the left now, and it will be the reason why the left will fail to contain this problem. But I want to stay on this point of explaining the Trump phenomenon. And it seems to me it's not, it can be fully explained perhaps almost without reference to who Trump is himself. It's like he's, I've said this before, but I've been thinking of him for a very long time as a kind of evil Chauncey Gardner. Chauncey Gardner. He's a person who has stumbled into a situation that is misinterpreting his chaos as these genius manipulative gifts. But he's in some deep sense exactly as he appears, and yet he's paying absolutely no consequence for being uninformed and imbecilic and callous. And David, you say something in your book about that it's not so much him,

it's the enemies he's picked that explains his rise. I mean, it's his counter elitist stand across the board, which has drawn so much support. Like everybody, I was riveted by the Michael Wolff book, of course. And as someone who's releasing a book the week after, you feel a little bit like whoever had to go on the Golden Globe stage after Oprah. But I think the image of Donald Trump as a drooling, imbecilic, senile-tending maniac. I mean, I think that can't be true. He has gifts. And one of his gifts, one of his most important gifts—

I'll grant you one gift. Whatever you're about to say, I'll give you for free. There's not one more gift. He's got the bully's instinctive ability to see the psychic weak spot in his target. To Jeb Bush and to Marco Rubio and to Ted Cruz, he found that thing that, you know, for Donald Trump to call Ted Cruz a liar, I mean, it seems audacious, right? But what he saw in Ted Cruz was that Ted Cruz is not the person. He had constructed an identity, that Ted Cruz was a very sophisticated graduate of America's, you know, most expensive educational institutions. You know, someone who has a deep knowledge of the law. You know, someone who's got a very modern marriage.

You know, his wife was the head of the Goldman Sachs office in Texas. This guy was not the person that he presented himself to, the evangelical voters. He saw it. There was a central lie at the heart of the Ted Cruz message. And Donald Trump saw that, and he hammered that point. And he saw that there was a kind of psychic weakness in Jeb Bush, that he could, that low energy was a way of saying, I'm going to attack you, and I'm going to attack you, and I'm going to attack you. And what you're going to do is take half a step backward and stand on your tippy toes to look taller, but you're never going to meet me. And what he did to those opponents, he's done to the American political system. He's found

its points of vulnerability, and he has twisted them. He wants you to believe that he's popular. He is not. But what he is very skilled at is being able to put together something close enough, enough popular support to overwhelm the institutions and to keep that support revved up by constantly making them united in what they hate and make everybody else be divided in what they are trying to defend. There's another simple gift he has. Or rather, ability, which politicians in the past, in the West, have not done.

Now, they've done it in code, and they've done it with different issues appealing to certain instincts, but no one's gone out there and openly said, vote for me because you hate or are afraid of black people. Vote for me because you're afraid of foreigners coming in with different color skin. Actually, go out there and there are levers you can pull in politics. There are appeals you can make to people's worst lizard brain instincts. And in most liberal democracies, every politician knows we don't do that because we know not how awful it

is, but how powerful it can be. And he just was the first person to say, I don't care. I'm going to say these things. I'm going to call it a shithole country. I'm going to put that in the evil Chauncey Gardner category. Yeah. So any politician can do that. You can do that any day. We were vulnerable to somebody who just simply did not have the scruple or the political calculation. Simple as that.

Yeah. And then what he's done, and he has got more quick gifts than that. He's able, actually, he did a self-hostage taking. I mean, how is it that you get a Lindsey Graham, who was one of Donald Trump's severest critics, and a person who was committed to a set of political views about as far within the Republican Party as you could be away from Donald Trump, and make him not only his defender, but the person who would be one of two signers of a criminal referral of one of Donald Trump's opponents, and break all the

rules of the Senate that Lindsey Graham loves, or not the rules, but the habits of the Senate that Lindsey Graham so loves, he's a real institutional senator, that you would send this thing out without even informing, never mind consulting your Democratic counterparts? How did he get Lindsey Graham to do that? And the answer is, well, Donald Trump has sort of shackled the whole Republican Party to himself. If he goes down, they all go down. And indeed, they sort of know that he's going to be the last man to sink because he's got a four-year term and they're all facing nemesis. But again, isn't that a situational truth? That's just what happens when you have 35% of the country and whatever percentage of the

Republican Party that is, that simply will not disavow you no matter what you do. It just seems like anyone could successfully exploit 35% that is unmovable and scandal-proof. In a two-party system with an electoral college, exploiting 35% is actually quite tricky. You exploit 35%—I mean, Herbert Hoover got more than 35% of the vote in 1932. It didn't do him a lot of good. What Trump understood and what previous Republicans have not faced up to is that the Republican message has become, over the past generation, but especially since the Great Recession, more and more out of sync, not only with the country, but with the Republican parties on voters. That was the thing that Donald Trump understood that the others did not, that your own voters don't. My joke about this, I kept saying through the cycle, was that the

Republican base was signaling they wanted more health care security, less immigration, and no more Bushes. And what the party offered was less health care, more immigration, and one more Bush. And they couldn't have missed it more. And he saw that. But what Paul Ryan and the others believe is if only we had better communications or explained it more, or if only put a little bit more of this special sauce on it, we could somehow build out. Instead, we're not going to change our core message, but we can. In fact, that was the thing that so many people said after 2012. We're not going to in any way change our core message, but we will season it. What Donald Trump intuited was, if you've got 35 percent, that's only a problem so long as you've got a political system that requires you to have a

majority. But what if I can short-circuit that? What if I can sort of weaken the political restraints and you can actually govern with less than half of the country, maybe a lot less than half. And what does this look like? I think Americans pay too much, when they think of democratic breakdown, they pay too much attention to the spectacular example of what happened between the wars in Europe. I sometimes try to direct people to what's happening now in Central Europe. But one of the ways we have, there's an example right here at home, which is what happened in the half century after Reconstruction. I mean, here's a statistic that when you hear about this gerrymandering in North Carolina to keep in mind. So in 1872,

after the Civil War, the state of South Carolina had about 700,000 people, of whom 100,000 cast a vote in the presidential election of 1872. In 1924, half a century later, the state's population has grown from 700,000 to 1.7 million. The number of votes cast drops from 100,000 to 50,000. And South Carolina was still an American state. It had a governor. It had a state legislature. I think you'd have to be a pretty informed person of the state's history to say it wasn't really

that much of a democracy in 1924. But it looked like one. It had elections. It had newspapers. It had courts that functioned more or less approximately fairly, at least for the white half of the population. That could be the future. One of the things that Donald Trump has forced, and he's forced on, I think, a lot of us on the right-hand side of the spectrum, is a deeper encounter with the American past, things that we thought were past and buried, that were maybe just dormant

and that are coming to the fore again. But the problem is, it seems to me, and I'm not, obviously, there's no defense of Trump. There's not a single redeeming characteristic. But, I mean, I've tried very hard. I've kind of prayed about this because you're not supposed, of course, you're not supposed to hate somebody quite like that who's in your mind all day. What I resent most about this is the psychic terror that a mentally disturbed person can impose upon you every minute of the day. My definition of a free society is where you can spend a week

without thinking about the person who's running the country. Yeah, yeah. But he's also exploited a situation, whether he did it purposely or, I don't know. But look, we've had 30 years, for most people in this country, getting nowhere. But he's also exploited a situation, whether he did it purposely or... I don't know. But look, we've had 30 years for most people in this country getting nowhere economically. The vast majority. We've also experienced an unprecedented, well, not quite unprecedented,

but only once before this volume, of immigration from one country primarily that has completely altered the demographics of this country in ways that people, especially older generations, are simply bewildered by. The last time that happened, we had the 1924 Immigration Act, which basically shut all immigration down. If you are a Democratic Party

and your only response to this question, which, by the way, also must affect the wages in terms of competition, and your only response to the situation is all of you people are racists and we're not going to even discuss you, discuss the issue, then I think that's why people land back with him.

And I think the Democrats' inability to listen to those white working-class voters in the middle of the country has been an incredible big... It's big an enabler to his capacity as president, as Hillary Clinton was an enabler to his candidacy. Yeah, well, just to take that single issue, the idea that immigration is all upside with no casualties, that's clearly a lie. And the fact that millions of people were suffering the actual truth of that equation, and that's unaddressed on

the left. Not just unaddressed, but you're a racist. You're a racist if you worry about it. This is how the far left has now occupied the entire territory on questions of identity and is actively alienating the very people we need to talk to. And they don't think, they somehow think they can't, the people out there don't see what's going on.

They think they don't hear what they're being called. They can't hear the lazy bigotry of elites about white working class. They don't hear someone on television use the word white male as a bald insult in itself. Right. And that reverse racism has definitely pushed people up against the wall. I think if there were a credible center-left party which adopted serious policies to address economic inequality

and curtail immigration, I think they could win very easily. I think they could win very easily. So how do you, I want to hear how you both view perhaps the rosiest future here of the left and the right. What do conservatives and liberals do well now to put us back on our proper footing? One of the beginning of answering this question is to recognize what a frozen political world we've lived in for the past quarter century. I mean, imagine somebody standing in the year 1990 and looking forward 25 years and backward 25 years.

Rip Van Winkle falls asleep in 1990, wakes up in 2015 and says, who's running for president? Bush and Clinton. Oh, what are they talking about? Oh, health care in Iraq. Okay, you go back 25 years from 1990, you're in 1965. The most powerful person in Washington, D.C. is the head of the AFL-CIO. The second most powerful is J. Edgar Hoover. There are liberal Republicans. There are urban riots. It's a different world. And I think in a dynamic country like this, what happened between 1965 and 1990 in politics is normal.

And the stasis, because when you think about how much everything else in the country changed between 1990 and 2015, there's no internet in 1990. You know, in 1990, life expectancies are still rising for Americans. And they stop rising after. It's a different world. But the politics were frozen. Whatever else he's done, I think Donald Trump has unfrozen those politics. And so when you ask at the beginning this question about partisanship, I think for those of us who are of a certain age, it's going to be hard to understand. You know, those maps are about to start moving really fast.

fast. And the question of who is on the right and who is on the left and what those things are, it's going to mean, I think, more different in 2025 from 2015 than it meant in 2015 from 1990. I think Andrew points to something. New things are going to become issues. Immigration will remain a huge issue. When we think how much we talk about wages and how little we talk about life expectancies, but Americans are living less long. White Americans. White Americans. White Americans are living less long. But other Americans, just generally, life expectancies are improving for non-white Americans way less quickly than they are for people in the rest of the world. And that is in peacetime. There are only two other places where that has ever happened, or there's only one other place, and that is in the post-Soviet republics after the breakup of

the Soviet Union. During the Depression, American life expectancies continued to improve. That, how does that not, I mean, it's an amazing degree of how the political world is so insulated from everybody else that people dying earlier. Is the opiate epidemic the main cause there? It's a main cause, but Americans are less likely to wear seatbelts than people in other developed countries. They eat worse. They shoot themselves accidentally at rates dramatically higher. They have more other kinds of accidents. You know, you could, the drugs are certainly part of it, but they're not all of it.

And the fact that that is not maybe the issue uppermost in people's minds, that that is not issue one, I find that amazing. I think it has to become issue one. And the problem here, though, is ideology. What happened is that politics became one ideology versus another, and they never changed. So that those of us who, for example, started out, and I still think of myself as a small C conservative, but those of us who started out believing that the problem of the 70s was overweening government, too high taxes, needed to be reformed, needed to be opened up, too many tariffs,

that was a completely legitimate position because those are the problems of the time. That has now run its course. It has succeeded and therefore now is a failure. What has happened is that the neoliberalism that was needed in the 70s is actually poison in 2017. It is not addressing the issues. And yet, Ryan and the Republicans put this bill through

that's entirely not about reality, that's entirely about ideology. And also, people are punished, severely punished, both socially and politically, if they change their minds. The worst thing you can do, apparently, is to decide, this time I'm going to support a Democrat rather than a Republican. Then there's no incentive for you, no incentive for anybody in this system to come out and enter the center. enter the center. Okay, so you take the extremes, you take the pathology of identity politics on the left that we've touched on briefly, and you take the extreme of the right that you describe in your book, which is, there are so many stats there, but I think one of them was that

70% of Republicans are still taken in by birtherism. They still think Obama was made- They They still think Obama may not have been. If you add those who are sure he wasn't, it's like 40 and 30. You get up to 70. So this just seems discussion-proof. So how do we move towards some kind of normalcy? Well, remember when you see all these statistics

about what Republicans think, remember every week there are fewer Republicans. This is a, this is a, a, a, a. So it's a 70% of 70 people in the end? You, you can mark that. So it's, it's like, um, I, I, it's a Friday night. We don't want to bring up fractions, but, but if the denominator is, is going down, you can't just look at the numerator. The denominator is going down. But, I mean, it's certainly true that you have this radicalized Republican world. We are going to see, you know, let's talk about you and me maybe in this context. Because I should say Andrew and i have known each

other i i won't embarrass him because he's so youthful but we've known each other a while um and in fact uh we're just reminiscing about this i've known andrew for a year longer than i've known my wife but my point is simply that i I'm sorry, I'm embarrassed. He doesn't look it. Thank you, David. But the point here is that we both started out in a certain place and changed our minds. And my... I mean, I supported Clinton in 92, which meant I was sort of excluded, suddenly,

from any sort of respectability in conservative circles. Then when I turned against the Iraq war decisively and apologized for my role in it, sorry to bring that subject up, but nonetheless, then I was completely cut off. And this is also true now increasingly, unfortunately, on the left. If you don't sign up to the entire brigade of identity politics, you are banished. And so the ability for us to actually, the very processes of thinking, of changing your mind, of weighing different things,

of seeing something the other side might have thought of. And openly doing that has been stigmatized. And you are praised constantly. And all the rewards in both our intellectual media, I'm talking about the intellectual life and media, you are praised and rewarded, whether you're in a university or in a right-wing think tank, for your loyalty to the party line. David actually was sacked from AEI because he actually thought that Obamacare was a perfectly decent, if flawed, possibility, and it was not the hill for Republicans to die on. And he was fired. This has become a group mentality within Washington itself in which no independence of thought

no independence of party is ruled in any way legitimate one thing that has always struck me as incredibly strange is that if you know someone's position on one topic let's say climate change

the link between human behavior and climate change, you know their position with a high order of confidence on a dozen unrelated topics, whether it's gun control, or what's the relationship between climate change and gun control? And yet, you know, you could win money all day long if you could just find a casino that would take these bets. So... Yeah, and the climate change thing is, look, it's just, I've always been a skeptic about any sort of left-wing cause, let's put it that way. This is not a left-wing cause. This is science, clearly, and the only, and there are obvious things we can do.

And some of them we are doing. There's no instant solution to this, but some of them we are doing. I do not understand. There is some... It's psychotic that this is regarded as... And there's no other civilized country in the world where a political party actually denies the existence of climate change.

No political party in the world. No right-wing political party in the world except for this pathological, ideological, alienated and angry fringe. We're going to agree that there's a lot of things about the politics that are obsolete. That linking up, that's the party system. That's what parties do. That you have to organize different people

who have different points of view to cooperate on politics. And this happens in any political system, that people have a set of concerns, and so people from Los Angeles are able to work, collaborate with people from Boston on different kinds of issues, because that's what party mechanisms do. I don't think, and I think there are always going to be people who are more liberal and who are more conservative, that's linked to the structure of the human brain, there are people, and people are going to have different

interests, there are going to be people who work for the government sector. There are people who work for the private sector. They're going to have different interests. The special problem we have right now is we're all supposed to be committed first and foremost to the rules of the game, rules that protect your view when my guys are in power and that protect my rights when someone else's people are in power. And that's what's in danger right now. I mean, I think when the day will come, I hope, when, you know, we can go back to, you know, taking out the wet mackerels and hitting each other with them over what the corporate income tax rate would be. And I will probably agree with Paul Ryan about where the corporate income tax rate should be. But I don't agree with him so much that I'm willing to corrode the American

constitutional system in order to get my way. I mean, 21 percent is... Which, to my mind, is actually the definition of the conservative. 21 percent is better. You want to conserve and keep this valuable and rare experiment in liberal democracy, in the history of the world, alive and healthy. And that means adhering not just to its formalities, but to its norms. And one of those key norms is understanding that the other party or the other point of view does have a chance and should have a role in government. And this is the genius of our system. And Andrew spoke a little while ago about things that, you know,

can you say something positive about Donald Trump? And I think one of the things you can say is, if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast

is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org. Thank you.