Making Sense with Sam Harris - #131 — Dictators, Immigration, #MeToo, and Other Imponderables

Episode Date: July 3, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Masha Gessen about Vladimir Putin, the problem of gauging public opinion in Russia, Trump's fondness for dictators, the challenges of immigration, comparisons between Christian and Muslim intolerance, "fake news" and the health of journalism, the #MeToo movement, 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming My guest today is Masha Gessen. Masha is a writer for The New Yorker. She's been publishing there since 2014 and joined the staff in 2017. She's the author of nine books, including The Future is History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017, and The Man Without a Face, The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She writes for the New York Review of Books as well and the New York Times,

and she's also been a science journalist, writing about AIDS and medical genetics, mathematics. She once wrote for a popular science magazine in Russia, but then got fired for refusing to send a reporter to observe the great Vladimir Putin hang gliding with Siberian cranes. She's a visiting professor at Amherst College. She's won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship. And I've long wanted to get Masha on the podcast. I've been a fan of her writing for years. We cover many controversial topics here, Russia and Putin and Trump, but also the Me Too movement. And we touch concerns about immigration

and the differences between Christian and Muslim intolerance a bit, fake news, the health of journalism, and I found it very satisfying to get Masha's point of view on the podcast. So without further delay, I bring you Masha Gessen. I am here with Masha Gessen. Masha, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So there's a lot I want to talk to you about. I will obviously properly introduce you in the intro and link to your books, but I don't think we'll be focusing on your books here. I want to cover many of the topics you cover so well for The New Yorker. And these may seem unrelated. I want to

talk about Russia and what's going on there and the relationship between Russia and the U.S. I want to talk about the Me Too movement. And perhaps, well, if we have time at the end, we can talk about immigration, which you've touched on recently. And these might seem unrelated, but they really are almost unified in the character who currently occupies the presidency of the United States as problems that are both real but also easy to exaggerate or misconstrue as a kind of political overreaction to Trump. And I'm increasingly worried that any false note here, any dishonesty in how we treat these issues becomes just so counterproductive that, you know, in the aggregate, just seems guaranteed to get him reelected. Let's just, before we dive into

all of that, let's just start with your background, because you have a fascinating story. For those who don't know you, how is it that you came to be writing what got my start as a journalist in the gay press in the 1980s. I spent several years writing about AIDS, which was great training. And then in 91, I went back to the Soviet Union, still the Soviet Union, on assignment. And that sort of shifted my entire journalistic career. And eventually I moved back to Russia and lived there for more than 20 years. And then I was, and I became both, I kept writing for American publications and writing books in English, but I was also writing for Russian magazines and then edited several Russian magazines in succession. magazines and then edited several Russian magazines in succession. And then I was kind of driven out of the country at the same time that many people were driven out of the country during the crackdown that began after Putin's re-ascension to the so-called presidency in 2012. So I came here at the end of 2013 and gradually sort of stopped writing for Russian publications

and then became a staff writer at The New Yorker. So let's focus on the Russia piece first. Why were you specifically forced to leave Russia? Was it just the reality of what it was like to be gay and Jewish or both gay and Jewish in Russia at that point? Or was it because something you were doing journalistically? Yeah, actually being Jewish, I think, had nothing to do with it. But, you know, there are a couple of ways to look at it. One is that is just that the reality of being queer in Russia and being a queer parent in particular,

queer in Russia and being a queer parent in particular, I was threatened specifically by name in the media, by politicians, with having my children taken away and my oldest son is adopted. So that was not an empty threat. The social services could have gone after me and could have sought, probably successfully, to annul the adoption. So that sent me into a panic and basically packing all of our bags. Another way to look at it is that a large number of people who were active in the protests of 2011-2012, and I was very active in those protests,

I organized a thing called the Protest Workshop, which was modeled after ACT UP. It was a large sort of clearinghouse for protest actions. So I sort of was coordinating a lot of the street-level stuff that was happening in Moscow in 2011, 2012. Everyone who was visible in leading the protests at the time was either jailed or killed or driven out of the country. And obviously, you know, being driven out of the country is the best case scenario in that case. Now, these are protests against Putin generically, or these are protests over some specific issue? Well, that depends on who you ask. I think that the protests were framed by most people as protests against rigged elections.

I think that the catalyst, to a large extent, the catalyst was sort of the blatant spectacle of the transfer of power from Dmitry Medvedev, if you remember such a character, back to Vladimir Putin, in what they made clear was a prearranged transfer of power. And the voters were expected to rubber stamp it. Now, it's not like Russia had had real elections for more than a dozen years. You know, elections had become an empty ritual. But somehow I think that the exposing how empty that ritual was, was insulting to people. I mean, there's a way in which things

can become obscene when they're exposed, even if everybody knows that they exist, you know, kind of like genitalia. It's a common knowledge problem. In game theory, it's often referred to by that term of jargon. It's different if everyone can know it, but once everyone knows it, everyone else knows it, it's impossible to not react to it. cop that looks at you knows that you're drinking alcohol out of that bag, but because there's a bag there, they can decide to ignore it. But if the naked bottle of alcohol is out there, well, then they can't ignore it. And it's that sort of thing. That's an interesting analogy. I'm not sure that it holds because it suggests that Russian citizens generally feel like they have civic duty that they need to perform if they're forced to do so. I'm not sure that that's actually the case. I think there was something sort of deeply offensive to people's sensibilities when it was made clear, you know, how little they mattered, even though each one of them individually felt that they mattered very little.

Yeah. So that's how the protests were framed. For me, you know. They were really anti-Putin protests. I mean, that's what drove me. I didn't want Vladimir Putin to preside over free and clear elections because I don't actually think it's possible. But I thought that if the rest of my compatriots were willing to, for once, pay attention to the fact that the entire electoral system had been dismantled, then that was a good thing. And certainly, you know, the protests were incredibly inspiring and invigorating. Well, so what do we actually know about Putin that is uncontroversial? I mean, we're living in this surreal moment now where Putin appears to be popular, at least among Republicans in the U.S., and we have a president who will not say a bad word about him. And I want to talk ultimately about the consequences and implications

of that. But what can you say as a journalist about Putin that you really feel is not, in fact, disputable? That's kind of a huge question. I mean, you know, I wrote a fairly long book about Putin that was essentially a compilation of things that we know about Putin. If someone were to say, well, listen, he's, you know, all leaders of countries, you know, have to take a hard line from time to time, and he's not better, but he's certainly not much worse than any other prominent leader on the world stage. And it's not a terrifying obscenity that we have a president of the United States who treats him as a normal

leader. What would be the first things you would say to, you know, what would you pick out of Putin's bio that would argue against that kind of carefree attitude? Putin is a bloody dictator who jails and kills his opponents and has waged several illegal wars to the tune of hundreds of thousands of lives. to the tune of hundreds of thousands of lives. And so I do not think it is okay to treat him as a normal leader, no matter how much the current American president aspires to be like him. And what's the status of public opinion generally in Russia now, insofar as you can gauge it, both toward Putin and toward the U.S. and Europe. Because what we see, at least what someone pretty far from the facts, like myself, sees in the media is the suggestion that there is an extraordinary degree of anti-U.S. and anti-European sentiment there, and that some of this is kind of framed as of a piece with Putin's popularity as a leader, that he's kind of bringing back the strong country of Russia that has been so

demeaned really since the fall of the Soviet Union. How would you describe public opinion in Russia? Well, I wouldn't describe public opinion in Russia. What I would say is that in a country that has no public and no opinions, it is very difficult to talk about public opinion. And I mean that literally. Putin, over his 18-year reign, has presided over the near-complete destruction of the public sphere. You can't have public opinion without a public sphere. You can't have public opinion without a public sphere. If only a particular position, a hysterical, mobilizing, you know, country under siege position as it happens, but really any position becomes the singular position that dominates the entire public sphere, book is How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, because the lived experience of being in Russia now is the lived experience of being under totalitarianism, even though Russia doesn't have a totalitarian regime. It doesn't have a regime of state terror. But what it does have is a total domination over the thoughts and feelings and perceptions of its citizens. So there is no such thing as public opinion.

But that view, the view that dominates, that emanates from the Kremlin and that dominates the public sphere or what passes for a public sphere in Russia, is the opinion that Russia is a country under siege and that it is at war with the United States. And that war is being fought by proxy in Ukraine and in Syria. So that, well, that's scary because even if you can imagine most Russians are not happy with how Russia is being governed, if you think that there's a consensus that really the real enemy is outside and it's the U.S., it paints a picture of the potential for a dangerous level of support for a ramping up of aggression. I remember hearing at one point that the prospect of nuclear war with the U.S. was being kind of casually referenced in the context of some political campaign. I don't know if it was Putin's or someone else's in Russia. There's nobody else in Russia who runs political campaigns. But, you know, the idea that the prospect of nuclear war in particular between Russia and the United States could be a kind of happy talking point over there.

First of all, do I have that? Is that factuallyhrined in Russia's military doctrine that I believe was changed in 2012. Don't quote me on that. It may have been 2013. But the Russian military doctrine reserves the right of first strike in response to any attack, including a non-nuclear one, that threatens the integrity of the Russian Federation. And the Russian military doctrine also identifies the United States and NATO member countries as its primary strategic enemies. Well, I can only imagine we have a similar doctrine, right? We haven't disavowed any possibility of first strike on our side, have we?

I would have to check, but I believe that according to the military doctrine, first strike is actually reserved for immediate nuclear threat or nuclear strike. And that is a difference. Right. So the bar is higher. So the belief that America is the enemy is, insofar as you can, you say you can't really judge public opinion, but you feel that this notion is fairly well subscribed, however cynical people might be about the information that comes to them through state-run media? I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying, or maybe I'm not making myself very clear. That's quite possible. I'm not saying that public opinion can't be judged, and I'm

not saying that people are cynical. I'm not saying that public opinion can't be judged, and I'm not saying that people are cynical. I'm saying that public opinion actually doesn't exist. I'm saying that people have been robbed of the ability to form their own opinions, right? So it's just not a thing that is. So all we have to deal with is what we see in the Russian media. You believe you can't gauge

how much the products of the Russian media that we see in the Russian media. You believe you can't gauge how much the products of the Russian media that we see significantly influences the view of people on the ground in Russia? No, no, no, Sam. I'm saying people don't have views. But how is that possible? If we're going to ask everyone in Russia whether they thought America was a good place or a bad place, and they all answered that question one way or the other, you would say that the answer would be meaningless? Yes, I would say that the answer would be meaningless because you can predict with 90% accuracy,

or actually 86% accuracy, as the polls show, that people will say exactly what was last on television. So if the television is talking about the United States being the enemy, then if you conduct a public opinion poll, then you would get 86% of people saying, yes, the United States is our enemy. If tomorrow we become best friends with the United States, people will say exactly that. That's what a totalitarian society looks like. And that's what I mean when I say that people don't actually have views or, you know, they are, it is a matter of survival in a totalitarian state to be able to accurately mirror the signal that comes from above.

Well, that's interesting. It's sort of, well, so I'll just put the question to you. Given that, It's sort of, well, so I'll just put the question to you. Given that, is there potentially a silver lining to Trump's approach to Russia? The fact that we have this glad-handing narcissist who simply does not care or maybe even seem to know about the human rights violations of the people he's creating photo ops with. The fact that Trump is taking that approach to Putin, and we'll leave aside the Russian hacking scandal and everything else that might trouble us, is there a potential silver lining there in that relations can thaw between the U.S. and Russia, and then a different message gets passed to the Russian population and we essentially de-escalate a very tense situation,

albeit with various casualties. I mean, it doesn't help people in Syria, it doesn't help people in Russia all that much, but it does possibly close the door a little bit to the prospect of some horrible conflagration between Russia and the U.S.? I don't see how that happens because, you know, the imaginary mortal combat between the United States and Russia is not a function of American politics or American behavior. It is a function of Putin's need to have a mobilizing idea.

The only mobilizing idea large enough to fit sort of the superpower ambitions left over from the Soviet Union is the idea of conflict with the United States. Putin has absolutely no interest in having that conflict diffused because his entire politics is constructed around that conflict. So that's interesting. So we have this summit or this meeting coming up between Trump and Putin.

Let's say that is yet another instance of just happy talk between the two leaders. How will Putin represent that internally to Russia? He will show that the American president has come asking for a meeting, that that acknowledges that Russia is regaining its superpower status. I mean, that is the ultimate ambition. The ultimate sort of insult, as Putin has framed it, is Russia's loss of its place as one of the two poles of power in the world. And Russia's ambition is to reclaim that place.

And so Trump's desire, his near begging for a summit with Putin, is a reflection of Putin's success. And that's how it's going to be framed in Russia. So if we had a different president and a different policy, what would you want the U.S. posture to be with respect to Russia now? Is there anything that would, in your mind, reliably move us in a productive direction or put pressure on Putin that would be not merely edging us toward conflict, but actually destabilize him within Russia? I don't know that that's possible. And so I don't think that that's how we need to think about foreign policy. Republicans are terribly fond of talking about values-based foreign policy, which they haven't practiced since, you know, at least the times of Reagan, if ever.

But I think that that's actually how we need to be thinking about it. And that requires a real reframing. You have to admit that it's extremely unlikely that any American actions will actually influence Putin's politics. Putin's politics are determined by his own logic of survival. not how do we destabilize Putin, but what is the right thing to do? Or perhaps more productively, what are the wrong things to do? It is wrong to sit down with a dictator who murders his opponents. It is wrong to seek to have common ground with a dictator who murders his opponents. with a dictator who murders his opponents. It is wrong to even entertain the possibility of an alliance with a leader who is waging illegal wars. So everything you just said,

at least for me, could be said about North Korea. Do you view them as similar situations? Absolutely. Yeah. So let's just talk about Trump and in the U.S. context. Well, first of all, what do you believe is true that explains Trump's unwillingness to notice anything unsavory about Putin? The Mueller investigation runs its course. We find out

everything. We're going to find out. Is there a there there in your mind, whether it's financial entanglements or something more unseemly? What do you think is true? And what do you think the consequences are of our, seems that half the U.S. population simply doesn't care what may or may not be true and just views it as a witch hunt. So, first of all, I don't think that you can ask, you know, what do you think is true? There are things I know to be true and there are things I know that I don't know. Right. But given what you know to be true, what would not surprise you? I mean, first, obviously, I would like I appreciate the bright line between what you think you know to be true and everything else is conjecture. But conjecture is as much as you're comfortable with, I guess.

Well, so what we know to be true is that Trump has never met a dictator he didn't like. So in a sense, we don't need the Mueller investigation to explain his evident affinity for Putin. He has a desperate desire to be liked and affirmed by the dictators of the world. He has an understanding of power that is as close to the understanding of power that, you know, that is reflected by Duterte or Putin or, you know, the leaders of North Korea and China or even Bibi Diantanyahu as close, you know, that's his understanding of power. That's what he understands. He does not understand sort of the imperfect, incomplete power wielded by elected officials in actual democracies.

power wielded by elected officials in actual democracies. Yes. The strongman archetype of the leader is the one he recognizes and seems to want to embody. Yeah, and he wants 100% of Americans to support him. He thinks that that is the desired outcome. He doesn't understand that that's what happens in a totalitarian society. So how much have you gone down the rabbit hole of thinking about, reading about, wondering about more of a ulterior motive for not criticizing Putin, his own financial needs for his real estate branding empire. Well, again, evidently, we don't need to find an ulterior motive to understand what's going on here. A crucial difference would be in revealing the latter. You know, that would seem impeachable. A fondness for dictators, while perhaps it should be impeachable, is not the kind of thing that can be made salient enough, it seems, to his fellow Republicans that they will even comment on it, much less act against it.

I don't think anything is impeachable until, you know, at least the House of Representatives is majority Democrat. Yeah, well, that may be the case. So, you know, again, it's like, if you're asking me about sort of the instrumental, the instrumental truth, I'm kind of not terribly interested in that. I think we have a fairly clear understanding

of the Trump phenomenon and his affinity for dictators. I mean, I'm not saying that the Mueller investigation shouldn't proceed. It should absolutely proceed. And I think the more we learn from it, the better. I don't expect it to be revelatory. our own democratic institutions might not be up to the challenge of fully reining him in.

I mean, just let's imagine for argument's sake that he gets reelected in 2020. You've written somewhat about this, that just what it's like to be in a totalitarian society or society that is losing its democratic moorings. Again, it's hard to imagine that we're here and that we have such a difference of perception across the aisle politically. We have something like half of American society that doesn't seem to notice or care about all of the things you and I notice and care a lot about in Trump. I mean, it's the fact that we have a leader who has all of the things you and I notice and care a lot about in Trump. I mean, it's the fact that we have a leader who has all of the instincts you just described, who's, you know, more concerned about applause and the size of his crowds and hankers for military parades. And everything out of him seems like just the most benign interpretation is just the dumb ejaculation of a teenager's ego, essentially.

But, you know, I think you are concerned that it's more sinister than that. So what do you, how do you view American democracy in the age of Trump now? Yeah. So I don't, you know, I don't think there's anything more sinister than the dumb ejaculations of a teenager's ego, that's beautifully put, in power. Yeah. Right. In fact, you know, democratic institutions are not designed for bad faith actors.

They can't withstand it. They depend on everybody more or less playing by the rules. And, you know, the sort of the bad faith acting did not begin with Trump. It certainly began much earlier with the gridlock in Congress. And now, you know, we're reminded once again of the shameful spectacle of the non-confirmation of Merrick Garland. But what we have seen, for example, with the travel ban over the last year and a half, I think is a very good example of what happens when, on the one hand, you have democratic institutions that are designed to be collaborative and deliberative, and on the other hand, a dumb blunt force,

the dumb blunt force will actually win, right? If one side tries to find an imperfect solution and a temporary consensus, and the other side is not at all interested in any of that and just wants to push through, it will succeed in pushing through. Well, on the travel ban, I would think some of my audience would want to know what I think about that. I've commented on it elsewhere. As you probably know, I've been very worried about the spread of jihadism and Islamism and those contagious ideas that jump borders whether or not people move across them. And I think the travel ban is an idiotic response to a real challenge. So, you know, I don't support it, but, you know, my non-support of it is in no way minimizing the challenge we have with Islamism.

with Islamism and there's nothing to envy in Europe now with unchecked immigration leading to this rise of right-wing populism. And I mean, we're just by dint of good luck surrounded by oceans and not having to respond to precisely that same problem. But I do think that even acknowledging the challenges in Europe, I think the travel ban is certainly the wrong approach here. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Well, I think that we agree that the travel ban is the wrong approach. I think we disagree on the comparison you just made between the United States and Europe because I don't think that, I mean, to the extent that you can link the rise of the right in Europe

to the influx of refugees, you can do the same thing here. Even the specter of immigration in the public imagination is enough to fuel the fear that in turn fuels Trumpist politics. The fact that the United States took 11 refugees last year doesn't change this sense of coming doom. And that, of course, is also true of several European countries that took a piddling number of refugees but are seeing the far-right rise in response to perceived threat. It doesn't help that you can actually find the cases where

the fears can seem justified in Germany or in England. I mean, it's just that there's clearly a less-than-ideal situation, which the basic problem there is forget about the recent refugee crisis. It's just a problem with the failure of assimilation there, which you have to take England as the clearest case. among not even immigrants, but second-generation British citizens who happen to be Muslim, asking whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, the response is zero percent finding it morally acceptable. That's a public attitude that suggests a failure of assimilation that should be troublesome. Now, granted, the farthest of the far-right populace are not so concerned about tolerance of homosexuality, one presumes, but that's an example of the kind of lack of assimilation that could worry reasonable people and think that,

we've probably had enough of this immigration stuff for a while until we can figure out how to get the various communities in our society to agree about, you know, how to live in a civil society. You know, I mean, as a homosexual Jew, I am not willing to exchange sort of my, let me put it this way, as a homosexual Jew, I am not willing to sacrifice Muslims' sense of safety and security in the society in which I live for my own. And I think that's very much sort of the function of the rhetoric that we hear both in this country and much more prominently in Europe. Well, certainly some of the rhetoric, but there's also, there's a problem of assimilation. There's a problem of Islamism, the expectation that Islam will become an ascendant political force and that the West will eventually bend the knee and Sharia law will be implemented globally, right? This idea that is subscribed by some percentage of the Muslim community,

idea that is subscribed by some percentage of the Muslim community wherever there is a Muslim community. That's a problem of a clash of ideas and worldviews that we have to figure out how to solve. And we shouldn't be eager to import those ideas, those convictions, as quickly as possible into our society, no more so than we would want to import any other totalitarian fantasy into our society if we can help it. That's the concern. I mean, if you tell me that we have 100,000, and this is a bit of a departure from the topic I wanted to hit with you, but just it's kind of interesting that we're disagreeing here. If you tell me there's 100,000 refugees from the Middle East that really need a home and we're going to move them all to San Diego,

and you tell me that they're all Christian, beleaguered Christians who require movement to the West to be safe from their highly sectarian neighbors. That's a completely legitimate claim upon asylum, it sounds like to me. And it comes with an assurance insofar as we know who these people are, that none of these people are jihadists, right? None of these people have any fondness for al-Qaeda or ISIS. And that's all good news. I think you would probably acknowledge that. No, I wouldn't. You wouldn't say that a fondness for ISIS is bad news?

Let me know that I've claimed this identity of the homosexual Jew. You know, I feel much more threatened in this country by the increasingly powerful Christian right than by the powerless and marginalized Muslim community. Well, sure, but... They may be equally intolerant of who I am, but the ones have the power and the guns and the others don't. So, no.

Both of those can be true. I mean, so you're just not acknowledging that there's a... I'm not acknowledging that it's good news. I'm saying that, you know, I think that both groups have valid asylum claims. But, you know, I am not going to get any more excited about an imaginary group of fundamentalist Christians than I am going to get about an imaginary group of fundamentalist Muslims. Well, I didn't say they were fundamentalists, but you wouldn't acknowledge that there's a difference in the level of theocratic hostility toward homosexuality. Absolutely not. There's no difference across Christianity. Because that is simply not true. Look, I just, you know, I just, I just, I just...

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