Making Sense with Sam Harris - #160 — The Revenge of History

Episode Date: June 17, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Michael Weiss and Yascha Mounk about the state of global politics. They discuss the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, the prospect that democracy could fail in the US, Trump’s political instincts, the political liability of “wokeness,” the Left’s failure to re-think its support of Chavez, the dangers of political polarization, the attractions of extreme partisanship, cancel culture, 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 one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, just brief housekeeping here. As always, if you want to hear about what I'm doing,

email is the best way to do that. So you can sign up for my newsletter at SamHarris.org. I've been spending less time on social media of late, and I think that trend will probably continue. Let's see here. I've got some good people coming up on the podcast. Jared Diamond. I just recorded an interview with him.

He has a new book. Judea Pearl, the father of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by Al-Qaeda back in 2002. But Judea is also one of our most celebrated computer scientists. And I've got some other good people coming up soon. As always, if you get value from this podcast, I encourage you to support it by becoming a subscriber at SamHarris.org. We're currently making changes to the website there, and there will be more subscriber-only content coming soon. But your support is what

allows me to do this without relying on outside sponsors of any kind, which if you knew how often I encounter people who are afraid or otherwise unwilling to say what they really think on a topic, for fear of losing their jobs or alienating sponsors, you would know what an unusual circumstance you've helped me create here. So again, thank you for your support. Today I'm speaking with two people, Michael Weiss and Yasha Monk. Michael is an investigative journalist who has covered the wars in Syria and Ukraine and focused on Russian espionage and disinformation. His first book was titled ISIS, Inside the Army of Terror, which he co-wrote with Hassan Hassan, and that was a New York Times bestseller and named one of the top 10 books on terrorism by the Wall Street Journal,

as well as one of the best books of 2015 by the Times of London. Michael's a regular guest on CNN and MSNBC and the BBC, and he writes a column for the Daily Beast. And Yasha Monk is a writer and academic and public speaker known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy. He's an associate professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and also a senior advisor at Protect Democracy. He writes for The Atlantic and The New York Times, and he also hosts the Good Fight podcast on Slate. Yasha has written three books, Stranger in My Own Country, The Age of Responsibility, and his latest, The People

Versus Democracy, which explains the rise of populism and talks about how to renew liberal democracy. Anyway, this conversation was recorded about a month ago. Everything we talk about is still entirely relevant, but the recording date would explain why we might not mention the most up-to-the-minute embarrassments of basic sanity and common decency you might have noticed in the media of late, or in your Twitter feed. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation. We talk about the state of global politics, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, the prospect that democracy could fail in the U.S. We discuss Trump and his political instincts at some length, the political liability of

wokeness, the left's failure to rethink support of Chavez in Venezuela, the dangers of political polarization, the attractions of extreme partisanship, cancel culture, and other topics. So now, without further delay, I bring you Michael Weiss and Yasha Monk. I'm here with Michael Weiss and Yasha Monk. Guys, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. So, Michael, you have been here once before, but Yasha, we have just met for the first time. been here once before, but Yasha, we have just met for the first time. And I brought you guys together because I think you are both extremely astute political minds, and I was surprised to learn you two have never met. So I picture you both impaneled at the same conferences.

But I thought we could talk about just areas of mutual concern. I have a few nouns floating around in my head that I think we can connect, things like liberal and illiberal democracy, populism, Trumpism, all of these trends that make me wonder about the political landscape now, both at home and abroad, and where this is all headed. political landscape now, both at home and abroad and where this is all headed. Maybe Islamism will come into the picture, but it seems that we can take very little for granted right now politically, and that we're now part of history in a way that hadn't been so obvious a couple of years ago. So I want to say we, those of us privileged to be in the West who could have imagined that they were not part of history at some point in their lives. So I guess I'll start with you, Yasha. What do you, first, for those who don't know you, what do you focus on and what are your

foremost concerns at the moment? You know, I started worrying about the state of our democracies sort of before it was cool. I saw the rise of far-right populist parties in various European countries throughout the early 2000s. You know, I observed things like the appeal of Sarah Palin in 2008 here in the United States. I did some survey work with a colleague, Roberto Foer, that showed that people give a lot less importance to living in a democracy than they used to, that they're more open to certain authoritarian alternatives to democracy even.

So I sort of connected the dots and started shouting into the wilderness saying, guys, we got to be worried about this. Perhaps our democracies aren't really stable. And people said to me, you're Cassandra. And I said, Cassandra was right, damn it. So that was sort of my life. And then 2016 came, Donald Trump won the United States, you had Brexit. Since then, you've had the rise of people like Bolsonaro in Brazil or

Matteo Salvini in Italy. And so I've sort of become over the last couple of years, one of the sort of chief populism explainers, I suppose. Are you a political scientist? What's your actual background? I'm a political scientist by background. I studied history as an undergrad and then got bored of that. So I did more history of political thought. And when I thought those texts are really interesting, but I kind of want to think about how the world should be in my own way. So I started doing sort of political philosophy. And then I thought, well, it's nice to think about what the world should be like, but actually there's really important things going on and how it's changing right now. And I don't think people are seeing that. So now I suppose I'm just a sort of general

purpose political scientist. Right, right. Okay, Michael, who are you, and what are you worried about? Well, like Yasha, I suppose I specialize in catastrophe studies. I actually, I think if there's a theme to the work that I've done as a journalist, it's looking at totalitarianism and some of its lesser offshoots. So obviously I wrote this book on ISIS, which was a deep dive into Middle Eastern jihad and the wellsprings of it, both theological but also materialist. I mean, the last time you had me on, we talked at length about why people

were joining this organization. Not always because they were fundamentalists or they had been ideologically brainwashed. There were a lot of different drivers. It's because of the poor, right? That's the only explanation. Is that correct? Nutella and Grand Theft Auto, that was the big lore. I'm glad we have a meeting of the minds here on that topic.

Yeah. And now, I mean, well, actually, I shouldn't say this. Before I was even interested in the region at all, I was more interested in communism, Soviet totalitarianism. I had done a lot of, as an amateur, I mean in college and then post-college, reading on Soviet history, Soviet literature, and also the debates that had been taking place in the West about what this represented. I have a sideline hobby in New York intellectuals who congregated around partisan review in the 30s and 40s, and I always find myself coming back to their polemics and their essays. And I never thought after, well, I suppose I didn't come into a political consciousness in 1991, but certainly when I was in university, these things were dead and buried, right? The end of history was definitely in the ascendant as a

kind of conceit in political science, even though there were plenty of people who were pushing back against it, saying this is nonsense, and history doesn't come to an end, and look at what was happening in the Balkans. movements that ought to have been consigned to the dustbin of history, but keep coming back around for whatever reason and reinventing themselves and how they reinvent themselves. So we bandy around words like fascism, and now socialism has become au courant again. But what does it really mean? And how are these things being used and deployed in the 21st century context as opposed to the 20th century. Right. I mean, maybe we should define or unpack that phrase, the end of history, which I know you touch in your book. This is due to a very influential article by Francis Fukuyama and then a book by that title. I don't know how he's weathered the disconfirmation of his thesis, but Yasha, do you want to tell us what is meant by that phrase?

Yeah. I mean, the idea of the end of history became a sort of meme before we started really talking about memes in everyday speech. And I think a lot of people caricature what Francis Fukuyama was arguing in big ways. But basically, you know, he published this article in the National Interest in, I think, the summer of 1989, saying that ideologically liberal democracy has won, that the idea of self-determination and individual liberty no longer has real competitors because the Soviet Union has been discredited, fascism has been discredited, the Islamic regime in Iran does not offer an alternative that's appealing to most people in the world. And so even though, as he put it in that article, there's still going to be historical events that will be recorded in the annual Chronicle of Foreign Affairs, you know, in the larger Hegelian sense, in the larger sense of what history is headed towards, history has ended. And I sort of always like to defend Fukuyama because, you know, when I was a grad student in political science at Harvard in the late 2000s, people laughed at Fukuyama. They didn't take him seriously. They didn't take the idea of the end of history seriously.

But I learned as not gospel truth, but certainly something that we believed in, an article by two political scientists who would never use grandiloquent claims like the end of history, saying once a country has changed governments for free and fair elections a couple of times, and once it's reached a GDP per capita of about $14,000 a year, it was consolidated. It was safe. You no longer had to worry about democracy. It would basically be a democracy forever. And there was every bit as much a claim about the end of history as what Fukuyama ever said.

And I think that's no longer true. We now have sort of the theory busting cases that show that you can have democracies that look like that, that turn into dictatorships. What are some of those cases? So the most obvious case is Hungary. I was actually there a couple months ago. So if you remember the famous speech by Winston Churchill in 1946, an iron curtain is descending across the center of Europe from Szczecin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. I sort of noticed that you can now drive along with O'Darren Curtin through Poland and Hungary to Austria and Italy and never leave a country ruled by authoritarian populists. And now, in some countries like Austria and Italy, there's clearly still democracy, and the governments are undermining that in certain ways.

In other places like Poland and Hungary, democracy is really on the line. And when I was in Sopron, a small Western city in Hungary in March, I was struck by the fact that people were afraid to talk to me. You know, you talk to ordinary people in the street and you say, hi, I'm doing a documentary for the BBC.

Can I speak to you? I'm like, no, no, no, no. And you put the microphone away and say, look, you know, I'm not a documentary for the BBC. Can I speak to you? I'm like, no, no, no, no. And you put the microphone away and say, look, you know, I'm not going to use your name. We're not going to show this, but can you just talk to me? What do you think of the government? Oh, it's terrible.

It's terrible. But if I tell you that, I might lose my job tomorrow. And even interestingly, the people who support the government are afraid to talk to you because they think if they somehow end up saying one critical thing,

or perhaps we sort of selectively edit to make them say something that they're not actually saying, they're going to get in huge trouble. So that culture of fear in the heart of Europe, in a country that's a member of the European Union, is absolutely striking. And, you know, it's because somebody came in as a populist saying, all of the political elites are corrupt. I alone truly represent the people. Trust me to solve all your problems. I'm going to return power to you.

And instead what they've done is to abolish independent institutions, to undermine individual rights, to put loyalists into the courts and the state media and the electoral commission. And even for Viktor Orban, who was definitely elected democratically in 2010, it's now no longer possible to remove him by democratic means. And Hungary is a country that does have more than two changes of government for free and fair elections in the past. It has about five. It has has GDP per capita of just over $14,000 a year. So that's the most striking case. And also what's interesting to me is Hungary and Poland, the leadership in both of these countries had come from this anti-totalitarian or anti-communist tradition, right? And they

have diverged from the inevitable liberal paradise that was meant to descend upon all of us to become more right-wing authoritarian populists. But still, within the context of how they see their national destiny, it's still being fought as though it was 1986. The people who informed, the people who worked with the Soviet satellite governments and all the rest of it, that's still used as a cudgel to smash their opponents. So that's another interesting aspect of all of this. These debates were not completely, you know, settled when we thought they were. And all of the factionalism and the intramural fighting that came out of what was. I mean, you had all of these arguments before 89,

what was the main driver of dissidents in this region? The Catholic Church played a role. Some people tend to over-exaggerate that role. Some people tend to discount it. But now, really, it's almost a fraternal split. The anti-communist movement has now shattered into a million pieces. You have your liberals, you have your socialists, you have your conservatives, center-right conservatives, and now you have your Viktor Orban's who are essentially dictators-in-waiting, if not already so. So how paranoid would it be to draw any kind of lesson from those examples for the US? This was early on when the full hysteria of Trump's election was upon us, but I remember I had the historian Timothy Snyder

on the podcast, and he's been not at all shy about drawing a very straight line between the example of any failed democracy and the prospects that ours could fail under Trump. He has these very vivid anecdotes of people going to the polls for the last time, not knowing it's going to be the last time. And yet, needless to say, the pushback you get from Trumpists is excruciating whenever you air those concerns. And again, I think the stupor of the end of history assumption has not totally lifted for me. I mean, it does feel impossible on some level that America could ever go down that path

that we just sketched or noticed in other democracies. How do you guys feel about that? Well, I think it depends on the exact nature of the parallel you draw. I respect Tim Snyder a lot, and I think he's done very important work. I also have some important disagreements with him. And one of those is about how useful it is to draw the analogy to fascism. I think fascism was in many ways quite different. One of the differences is that a lot of fascists quite openly opposed democracy. They said, look, all of this democracy,

people squabbling with each other, this sort of bourgeois idea is really bad. We need an authoritarian government. We need a hierarchical government. And then they paraded in the streets with brown shirts and, you know, little sticks of wood on fire. Now, if that was the situation, then it would be easy to recognize. Aren't there elements of Trump's behavior that echo that? I think the elements are cultural more than, I mean, look, if this was really fascism, and I'm not, by the way,

I'm not one of these people who thinks, oh, America is going to be forever immune to these diseases and pathologies. No way. It can happen here. I just don't think it's necessarily happening now. And the answer to that is, look at the institutions. We've had an election since Donald Trump. The Republican Party got pretty trounced in Congress. This investigation, which he has tried by hook or by crook to obstruct and dismantle, meaning the Mueller investigation, still made it to completion. The report still came out. Yes, there are shenanigans happening between the White House and the special counsel's office, but we still have a picture of a deeply dysfunctional presidency. So all of his attempts, whether by Twitter, whether by mobilizing the real angry fanatical base that still supports him and will support

him no matter what he does, American liberal values, the resilience in American society has bitten back. And I mean, this is not to say I actually happen to think he has a fairly okay chance of winning reelection in 2020. A lot of that has to do, though, with what the Democratic Party is going to represent. Yeah, I fear it's more than okay. At this point, I would bet on it. I mean, we still do have an independent judiciary. We still do have.

Well, so I think they are more pessimistic, right? So I think, look, we're talking about Hungary, right? And we're talking about fascism. Comparing it to Hitler, I think, is unhelpful in all kinds of ways. Yeah, completely. Comparing it to Hungary is in some important ways also wrong. I mean, one of the things that I was struck by when I was in Chopron is that people had real fear about losing their jobs because a lot of them either worked for the state or in indirect ways, the job depended on the state. They worked for a little contractor who did most of their work for the local town and things the state. They worked for a little contractor who did most of

their work for the local town and things like that. The United States are very different in those ways, right? It's a much bigger country, a much richer country, a country with more independent power centers. In Hungary, most newspapers live to some extent from government advertising. So you can not just take over the important state broadcasting agencies, but you can basically force the private media to follow your line as well by taking away advertising of a criticizer. You can't do that in the United States.

We've had a very active press in the last two or three years that's done, along with some very silly op-eds, some of the best reporting work in the history of the United States. And unlike in Hungary, people can't shut up about how much they hate Donald Trump. They're outspoken in their criticism of this government. Now, at the same time, I do think it's important to see the parallels. And I see two big parallels.

The first is in the nature of the movement we're facing right now. nature of the movement we're facing right now. So what populists do is to say that they and they alone represent the people. So they promise to represent the people, which means they promise to be more truly democratic, but they don't acknowledge the existence of any power centers independent of them, and they don't understand that people can have different political views and still retain full stake in our society. And both of those claims are very, very dangerous because it's why one populist after another starts to vilify and marginalize minorities, whether religious or ethnic.

And it's why they cannot accept the rule of law, why they cannot accept the existence of an independent judiciary. And so when you look at the rhetoric of Orban in Hungary, of Erdogan in Turkey, or of Donald Trump here in the United States, them calling opposition parties traitors, them calling the media the enemies of the people. This started even before the election, where he was open-minded as to whether or not he would accept the results of the election if he lost, right? And he was calling for the imprisonment of his rival. Lock up. And encouraging people to physically assault journalists who were covering

him critically, which is to say, honestly, enemy of the people. A lot of these tropes, which are not accidental, I don't think particularly, you know, to my mind, the most dangerous thing that this president still poses is Bannon has gone from the White House, but Bannonism is still very much there. And you see now he's gone to Europe to try and essentially export his political savvy. I mean, this whole idea, this Breitbartian notion, you know, politics is downstream from culture. It's very important. Like I say, I think Trump is much more effective as a cultural reactionary than as a political one. And that's because as a political neophyte, I mean, his first office was president of the United States. He doesn't know how the system works. He is completely befuddled by the fact that he can't simply order his attorney general

to investigate his enemies and have that done the next day. He is astounded at the fact that the White House counsel cannot terminate a special counsel investigation into obstruction of justice and Russian interference. And like the snap of his fingers, Thanos-like, this gets done. That to me suggests, and that's not to say that a simpleton or somebody who's completely uninitiated into the vagaries of American politics is not dangerous in his own right. This guy absolutely is. But again, what worries me more is the rise in race hatred, the rise in anti-Semitic hate incidents, particularly in places like New York. And people argue about, well,

is Donald Trump responsible for this? I do think he's created the mood music, the atmospherics for this. I don't like the word polarization because it doesn't really adequately describe what we're facing. But when he describes out and out fascists marching to the tune of Jews will not replace us, as there's some fine people on both sides, and traffic's in this kind of moral equivalent. He is giving license to the worst elements of the society. He is giving them a sense of impunity that they can carry on in a way that they hadn't ever been able to do before, and now they have the imprimatur of the presidency with which to do it. That, to me, is the most dangerous thing. Although, just on that point, in his defense there, and I rarely come to his defense, if you look at the full video from that press conference where he supposedly said nothing to denounce white supremacy, he does denounce white supremacy. they're so scanner shot in their attacks on him. You don't have to lie to paint Trump as a racist

or a bigot or a grifter or a con man, because he's undoubtedly all of those things. But in that case, there's a few things muddy in the waters. One is that you had Antifa very likely initiating the violence against neo-Nazis who had a permit to march, right? There was violence coming from both sides. And that's not to say that Trump hasn't, as you say, created the mood music for racism and white supremacy. But I think we have to be careful on every one of these points because the amount of energy that Trumpistan draws from every error here, they can just point to the video of him decrying white supremacy. Sure, but this is also a man who took a very long time and tried to dodge at every opportunity, the opportunity to denounce David Duke. And the reason for it was, again,

it doesn't mean that he's pathologically- Well, he claimed not to know who David Duke was when we knew that was a lawsuit. Which was complete bullshit. But understand the motivation here. This is not, and to Yasha's point about, you know, these facile comparisons to Hitler and the Third Reich and, you know, really deeply motivated, Volk-style fascism. For Trump, it's narcissism, right? David Duke and white supremacists, they support me. And I like anybody who supports me and who flatters me. So why am I going to go out of my way to denounce these people, even if I don't really like the cut of their jib?

But that itself, again, goes to this kind of cultural reaction. He's built a personality cult around himself. And I do think it's important that we don't get caught up in the details of those things. You're right that we have to be very careful about the claims we make. But I do think there's a larger story to how he thinks about politics and how he's trying to undermine the democratic system. Now, lock her up is an incredibly extreme statement.

I mean, the very basis of any democracy is that you might think of your political competitors as adversaries who you really want to be, but you have to recognize their legitimacy in saying, I'm going to go and put her in prison. It is very extreme. The fact that at one point in the debate, he seemed to call in doubt whether he would accept the outcome of the election. There's still a very real question in my mind about whether Trump would have acknowledged

the legitimacy of a 2016 election if he had lost it, and what he will do in 2020 if he does lose. So I think it's important to go back to the larger question we're asking about, okay, so to what extent are we seeing the system under threat here in the United States? Now, you have a similar set of forces pushing against it as in Hungary. You have older democracy and a more affluent democracy, trying to defend itself. So how is it going? Well, the first thing I would say is that,

as you said earlier, Michael, Trump is not a very sophisticated authoritarian populist. Now, that both means it is less likely that things will go deeply wrong in the next couple of years it also means that if we get a smarter more strategic more ruthless incarnation of the same energy it might be able to do a whole lot more damage than we've seen the last couple of years. The second thing I would say is that go back and read

the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal about Turkey in 2003, in 2005. A few years, three years, even five years into Erdogan, even ten years into Erdogan being the prime minister at the time of Turkey. And they're all saying Erdogan, even ten years into Erdogan being the prime minister

at the time of Turkey. And they're all saying Erdogan is deepening democracy in Turkey. He's finally bringing a form of moderate Islam into the Turkish government, overcoming some of the very real discrimination against religious Muslims in Turkey.

This is a Muslim form of Christian democracy that's going to give us actual democracy. Smart people thought that for many years, not seeing the ways in which Erdogan was undermining democracy and well on his way towards becoming a dictator. So let's not prejudge this.

It is not, in none of these cases, not in Venezuela, not in Turkey, does a populist come in and three years in, it's obvious it's a dictatorship. It takes a long time. And so then look at what the institutions actually are doing right now. You both have just put your finger on the thing that worries me. Because to my eye, Trump is amazingly unpersuasive. He's not ideological. He's not a clever totalitarian in the making. He is,

as you said, Michael, just a black hole of narcissism. And that is the thing that determines everything he does. And it just so happens that aligns with an authoritarian shtick as a politician. But it's just so astonishing to me that he has succeeded to the degree that he has and that he has this personality cult around him where it's not even that he has policies that people are so enamored of they just on some level they're enamored of him as this anti-norm yeah you know or this norm-wrecking machine and i don't know if it's just kind of the spirit of reality television, where people just like, they just want to tune in for the next episode, and they just like that it's exciting, and the liberal media has gone berserk in response. But the fact that we're here

with someone who so obviously lacks the real tools of political genius and insight into how things work, that's scary. I think what he was actually very masterful at tapping into is the amygdala of American politics is to say, the establishment is corrupt. The establishment is cheating everybody, right? This whole system is rigged. And what he did very cleverly, and I don't credit him with the kind of political savvy that like a Sarkov in Russia has, who really sort of has a playfulness with which he applies this authoritarian mindset. With Trump, though, it was, hey, you know, I'm already corrupt,

but at least I'm telling you, these guys, they're the hypocrites. Don't trust them. I cheated the system. Let me show you how to cheat it too, or let me show you how it really works. And this resonated so well with so many people, not even Trump supporters. But that's such an amazing point because he objectively lies more than any person anyone has ever seen. And yet that lying showed up as a kind of authenticity. Yeah, exactly. He's honest about the corruption in the system. Yeah, it's like there are no rules. Watch me break all the rules.

I'm the only one who'll tell you that. His best moment in the primaries was when Hillary Clinton was asked why she attended his wedding, and he was asked why he had invited Hillary Clinton. Right. And Hillary Clinton, with a tortured look, said something like, well, I thought it would be fun. And everybody knows

that Hillary Clinton's idea of fun is not to go to Donald Trump's wedding. It's bullshit, right? And Trump said, well, I'm a real estate developer in New York. I got to get along with all these people. So he was actually admitting to corruption of a certain form.

He certainly was admitting to taking part in the corruption of the system. But he was at one level honest about it. He said, well, I did it because I had to get along with influential people. Also, when she said, you haven't paid taxes in however many years, he said, that makes me smart. Now, prior to Donald Trump,

would any American politician stand up at a debate and say, I've never paid any tax money in 10 years or whatever it was? No. But for him, not only was that a sort of impulse response, but he really does, and this I think he was right about, there are Americans out here who don't want to pay taxes. Like, wait a minute, this guy's a gazillionaire. He claims he made all his money himself, which is not true. He inherited a lot of it, certainly born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

But he's cheating the system. The system that has cheated us, maybe what we need is a con artist and a fraud, but somebody who says, who sort of pulls back the curtain and shows the Wizard of Oz, right? Or at least pretends to, which is what he really does. He's not actually showing the heart of corruption in the American system. He is pretending to show it. That resonated very powerfully with a lot of people. And we can get into this conversation later if you want, and I'll hold my thoughts on it. But what you're now seeing on the left in this country is an attempt, I think, at least certain quadrants of the left to replicate Trumpism, but from a progressive point of view, this sort of populist rise. And you're seeing this all over Europe. In fact, I just read a piece in the FT, Financial Times, about Bannon trying to create a kind of academy for the alt

right in an abandoned or old monastery in Europe. And he said, you know, one of the things that he's alighted upon in Europe is this fusion politics. It's sometimes called red brownism, although that's complicated too, for reasons we just just discussed why we shouldn't traffic in these sort of outmoded comparisons to fascism, communism. But anyway, in Italy, for instance, left-wing populism, right-wing populism, they find a happy marriage together in Salvini, right? And Salvini, by the way, people forget, I mean, five star, or was it, Lega Nord, he founded the first Stalinist faction in Milan of that party. So he's had a kind of ideological promiscuity, similar to those in the 20th century who made

the transition from one extreme to the other. But the point is, Bannon, more than anybody on a cultural level, understands, look, the old categories don't matter anymore. It's not Republican, Democrat, it's not even liberal conservative. It's who wants to tear it all up and start again. And that can apply just as easily on the right as it can on the left. That's what I think Trump is tapping into. And I think, again, to me, the danger is the leftover reaction to Trump threatens to do the same thing. Well, there's different ways of framing that. I mean, my fear is in part a kind of left-of-orderitarianism, and we're seeing in Venezuela that that can be very disastrous.

In the American context, I think that's a lot less likely. So I'm not worried about Bernie Sanders becoming president. I'm worried about Bernie Sanders being the candidate of a Democratic Party, ensuring that Donald Trump gets a second term. So, you know, there's multiple dangers there. One point about the way in which Trump profits from this elite discourse, which is that it's sometimes puzzling, I think, to understand why things that he says that most Americans really do dislike. And there's good evidence that they dislike. But when he calls Mexicans rapists and so on and so forth, that is not something that the majority of Americans wants to have any kind of track with. But what happens is that all of the people who the majority of Americans hate condemn Trump. And they have good reason to

condemn Trump when he says those things. But they look at that and they say, do I like what Trump said? No. But if all of those guys hate him, there must be something right with him. It's a very weird dynamic, and I don't actually know how to get out of it. I don't think people should shut up about, you know, should stop condemning terrible things he says. But there is a strange way in which that helps him. Because all of the Democrats and all of the sort of more moderate Republicans standing up and saying, how dare you say this, makes people look at him and say, oh, yeah, he is the one who actually is willing to say things and who's not like the rest of them. So perhaps there's something to him. Yeah, well, I do see that directed at me occasionally by people who are smart, but there's a delight. Again, we're more than two years in and I'm still mystified by this, but it seems like a

kind of nihilistic delight in just getting a rise out of his political opponents that his fans like. This notion of Trump derangement syndrome, it's that it's created a situation where apparently there's nothing he could do that's sufficiently odious to cancel the delight that his fans feel in watching people react to it. It's kind of a superpower that he's got politically. Or in watching his critics be proven wrong. Well, yeah. Well, that's why I think it's mission critical to never be wrong. But if you say he didn't condemn white supremacy,

and then we can go to the tape and he did, that undoes a hundred good things you might have done. For me, it was more good people on both sides. I mean, the marchers in Charlottesville find me a good person. But let's take a simple example of what you were just saying, Sam. I mean, I was on Twitter, you know, a few weeks ago, and everybody was, as I was reading it, reporting that Trump had said, oh, Boeing, they should just rebrand the 737 MAX and put it back into business.

And I was like, well, that really seems ridiculous. And I actually went to Trump's Twitter tweet. And it turns out that he had said we should fix it and then rebrand it, which is a silly thing for a president to say. I don't know why the president of the United States should be giving branding advice to Boeing, but it's very much not what I had gotten the impression of on my Twitter feed. That was definitely a case when I thought, look, Trump says so many odious things. Do we really need to exaggerate his silly tweet about Boeing to get a little point on him? This really is counterproductive. And look, the extremists always manage to thrive

and exploit the failure of center parties, whether it's center left or center right, to address real problems in a society. You know, for a brief flickering moment, the British Nationalist Party did quite well, I think, in the European parliamentary elections were going on, what, 10 years ago now. And the reason was they were some of the only people banging on about immigration and its discontents in the UK. Labour and conservatives just refuse to touch the issue as too hot button or whatever. Trump, with his comments about, well, somebody's doing the raping and his ridiculous xenophobic remarks about Muslims and Mexicans, is tapping into a genuine concern a lot of Americans have about rampant immigration or about, well, what's going to

happen now that this post-Arab spring Middle East is on fire and we have, you know, it's give us your tired, your poor, we just don't know where they're coming from or what their ideological motives may be, right? These are legitimate concerns to have. He's just addressing them in a sensationalistic way, but at the same time, encoded in his commentary is, if you criticize me or you attack me for what I'm saying, you're another exponent of political correctness. Remember, in the primary, the first thing he did was, I don't have time for total political correctness. That's a valid argument when made by people in good faith who say, yeah, I think culturally there is something about,

you know, condemning a man before all the facts are in or jumping the gun, or as we say on Twitter, virtue signaling when you don't even know what the hell you're talking about. However, this guy is not the answer. He is not the antidote to it. Right. So let's, I want to, I don't want to spend all the time on Trump and I want to swing to the left and do a post-mortmortem on the pathologies we detect there. But Yasha, you said something that had a Snyder-esque echo, at least in my brain, which is should Trump get reelected in 2020? Well, actually two things. One, should he lose in 2020, whether he will accept the results of that loss and what that portends? But also, should we get him for four more years?

Is there a further erosion of democracy or institutional norms that you worry about, or is that a paranoid bridge too far? Well, again, it depends exactly on what you mean by that. Look, I mean, I remember in 2016 having debates with political scientists, friends of mine, about what would happen in the Republican Party if Trump won the presidency. And there was basically optimists who said, the Republican Party, you know, these people have a very different set of ideological beliefs.

They're going to rein him in. They're not going to go along with what he does at all. And then... Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, what happened to that? Yeah, and then there was pessimists like me who said, no, Trump has more support than the sort of old Republican orthodoxy. So

over time, he's going to be able to primary people and to run his own candidates. And it'll be a civil war in the Republican Party for four or eight years, but it may end up being a Trumpian party. We were both far too optimistic. Actually, what happened is that the party grandees just rolled over and flipped. Think of somebody like Lindsey Graham. In 2016, I would have said, well, perhaps the primary Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham primaried himself. Well, just think of the fact that Trump could dance on McCain's grave while he was in advance of his death, right? I mean, just speak badly of a dying man who is objectively a war hero and the best friend of Lindsey death, right? I mean, just speak badly of a dying man who was objectively a war hero

and the best friend of Lindsey Graham, right? Lindsey Graham, I mean, you know, Yasha, you're here for the Milken Institute. I moderated a panel with Lindsey Graham on it about ISIS and the threat to the Middle East posed by ISIS. In 2016, when Graham was one of the most outspoken anti-Trump Republicans backstage, and I've said this publicly, so I have no problem betraying the confidence. It was Lindsey Graham on one side, Tony Blair on the other, having a competition, an auction for self-pity as to whose party has lost its fucking mind more, the British Labour Party or the Republican Party. And Lindsey Graham was saying, I don't understand why we can't just chuck him out of the party the way you all do in the UK.

understand why we can't just chuck him out of the party the way you all do in in the uk wanted him gone from the gop and now has become this sort of vanguard defender of the faith it's bizarre but yeah i quite agree so so that's extreme and then you know if you jump to what's happening with the department of justice i think that's very serious i mean it is now very obvious that we have an attorney general who openly says he's the president's lawyer as opposed to the lawyer of the United States. Who has, and I don't, you know,

I don't want to get into the Mueller report and all of that. I was never somebody who, I thought it was very important to make sure that Mueller wasn't fired. I never thought that the report would show that Trump is a secret Russian spy

or anything like that. But who clearly misrepresented the nature of it. You have Trump calling on investigations of his political opponents in a situation in which some of the more reasonable people's just representing the interests of Trump, I wouldn't be entirely astounded if there is a politically motivated investigation into the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate or one of his close associates in a way that can create scandals and so on. Now, I am not saying that Trump is going to steal the election in an outright way I'm not saying that if he loses he will refuse to leave the White House he will go and undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the system all along but if he's in power for four more years and if he's succeeded

by somebody who's a little bit more popular who is is a little bit shrewder, I think it would be naive to assume that American institutions can withstand anything. It is interesting, though, and I mean, I can speak with some insight here, because I do still report on Syria and US policy towards Syria. All of Trump's instincts, complete withdrawal, take the oil, you know, let the Russians sort it out. All of these things have actually been rebuffed. And not just once, but repeatedly. You know, Trump campaigned on military withdrawal from Syria.

And, you know, frankly, let's just bomb the shit out of ISIS and go home. That's not happening. And I know for a fact it's not happening. Policy that had been that had been cobbled together by the brains trust, such as it is with the National Security Council and some of his hands. Remember, there were still at the very beginning of the administration, some good people in government, particularly at the level of the State Department, even to the level of the White House. The only reason this man, I think, wasn't indicted by Mueller for flagrant obstruction of justice is

because, frankly, professionals in the White House kept him from committing overt crimes. That's the irony. I know you don't want to get into Mueller, but that was my takeaway. McGahn basically said, I'm not going to do this. Similarly, with respect to US policy, maybe not at the domestic level, I know that's not my bag, but foreign policy-wise, one of his apologist's main lines is, well, we know he didn't collude with the Russians, we know he's no patsy of Putin. Look at how hard this country has been on Russia, whether it be sanctions or supplying Javelin anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainians, or now standing up to Putin's

proxy Maduro in Venezuela. Well, yeah, I mean, with Venezuela accepted, where Trump has been quite outspoken, the institutions of American government, I mean, with Venezuela accepted, where Trump has been quite outspoken, the institutions of American government, I mean, it's very difficult to get things done. Like, there is a Treasury Department for a reason. Doing sanctions is not, I mean, the president can dictate policy, but the implementation of it is everything. We didn't lift sanctions on Russia. We didn't recognize Crimea as Russian Federation territory. All of the worst case scenarios didn't come to pass because of the sort of the stays. And that gives me a little bit of hope and optimism.

But I do quite agree with Yasha. Somebody more sophisticated who's seen what Trump has done in terms of tenderizing the electorate and making the rise of a real authoritarian possible, that's the real danger. Because it's never the first guy out the gate. It's usually the one who follows, who has, you know, more wisdom and more experience that you have to worry about. All right. Well, let's talk about the wokeness, the wokeness on the left that is obviously on some level a response to Trump, but it predates Trump in its concerns. And

I think we all detect that there's a problem in principle with identity politics, but to point that out is to be convicted again and again of insensitivity with respect to the underlying concerns like racism and gender equality and everything else that has pushed people to identify with some subgroup first and foremost, whether defined by the color of their skin or their gender or their sexuality. And yet, at least to my eye, it is so obviously a losing hand to play in the current environment. Forget about the foundational ethics of it or where we want to be in 100 years as a global civilization. If your concern is just to bar the door to Trump in 2020, amplifying the wokeness is

a disaster. I'm going to take one narrow case. It is totally possible for decent ethical people to disagree about what our immigration policy should be. And if you are going to stand on the left and equate any concern about immigration or any concern about having a defensible border with racism. Every time, there are enough people in this country who are sick of being called racist when they're not actually racist, who will vote for Trump over your woke candidate, who's framing everything in terms of racism and white supremacy. So how do you two view the left? And I don't know if we want to talk about specific candidates

at this point, but what are the stirrings on the left do to you at the moment? I mean, I suppose, to your point about the political non-viability of maximum wokeness, I mean, Bernie Sanders is not for open borders. He's spoken quite clearly about this. He's spoken about a firm immigration policy, but firm according to Bernie Sanders. No candidate, I think, is running on this absolute kind of utopian concern or conceit that the United States should just let everybody in, no background checks, nothing. Yeah, look, wokeness to me is political correctness from the 90s turbocharged and taken to really an insane degree now. I mean, I was in university, not in the, well, late 90s to early 2000s. There was elements of this then, but it was the kind of thing, it was on the wane then. It was being satirized. You had films like PCU coming out. The Onion was taking the piss. The Onion still takes the piss, thank God. But yeah, no, I mean, we were talking earlier off set about Twitter and the kind of cesspit, almost the kind of Stasi-like mentality that persists when you, it's not even, look,

it's not even about somebody saying something really ridiculous and overtly offensive and then having the pile on effect. It's trying to inject a little bit of nuance or being even at a little variance with liberal orthodoxy can get you pilloried and publicly shamed. And though to my mind, the one saving grace of all of this, and Yasha, you can speak to this because you've written about it, very online culture as it's called, or the internet wokeness is not at all reflective of American social reality. So how do we know that? Because I feel that the fact that Trump got elected without anyone realizing he was going to win was an example of the Twitterverse being the real world and we didn't notice

it. Well, I'm not sure. On the night of the election, Nate Silver said there was a one-third chance that we didn't notice it. Well, I'm not sure. You know, on the night of the election, Nate Silver said there was a one-third chance that Donald Trump would win it. Well, one-third is still significant, yes. It's very significant. I mean, you're not going to agree to play Russian roulette two or three times,

which would give you one-third chance of losing your life, right? I mean, so, you know, the polls picked up what people actually thought. And when you poll people about some of the issues that are at the center of what you are calling wokeness, they don't have very much support at all. So I wrote a piece in The Atlantic late last year about the number of people who think that political correctness is now a problem in this country. And it is about 80% of Americans.

And by the way, it is a higher number of people of color in this country than of whites. So that's a point to spell out. I don't know if you wrote this article or not, but I remember someone, I think it's a New York Times piece, that the woke social justice warriors are, for the most part, privileged white people. This is not people of color who are lining up by and large along these ideas. Absolutely. So what's interesting is when you look at the people who, in the words of this very, very good hidden tribe study by an organization called More in Common, progressive activists,

it's about 8% of the population of those kinds of beliefs. And they are far, far more likely than the general population to be white. They're about twice as likely to earn more than $100,000 a year. They're three times more likely to have a postgraduate degree. And of course, white people who are very liberal have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the views of people of color in the United States are for two reasons. First, that a lot of black people vote for the Democratic Party for the simple reason that in its current incarnation, parts of the Republican Party really are racist. So obviously, even a black person who's pretty conservative in all kinds of ways is not going to vote for that party. So a huge majority of blacks in the United States vote for the Democratic Party.

But when you ask them to self-identify as liberal, moderate, or conservative, only 27% of them say liberal. 30% say conservative and 40% say moderate, right? Which is really quite striking. So we need to get out of the categories of Twitter. We need to understand that if you're a white listener to this who probably has a good degree, a good job, the people who you know in your world who are people of color are likely to be pretty liberal because most people in your world are likely to be pretty liberal. But that is not a good stand-in

for the majority of people of color in this country. Well, and the irony of all this is the term itself, woke, began, I think, in the African-American community. And the idea was it's to raise

consciousness about the plight of American blacks, whether it's through police brutality, lack of employment opportunity, or the relative economic status as compared to white America. It has now been co-opted. I don't know to what extent, and I haven't seen any studies on this, it's used parodically or it's used in earnestness. But it has been co-opted. I remember this because the first time I ever used it on Twitter, a colleague of mine who's black, who's very much part of what's known as black Twitter, said, why are you using this term? I said, oh, everyone's using this term now. She's like, ugh, it was only a matter of fucking time before they took this from us, too, in terms of cultural appropriation.

they took this from us too, in terms of cultural appropriation. And yeah, because when you're being beaten up or choked out by the cops or being accused of violent crimes you haven't committed, you don't have time to worry about a third gender being introduced into democratic society. You don't have time to have the kind of ridiculous arcane debates that eat up so much time right now. So two funny things today on Twitter, and I couldn't help but relate the two. One was millennial college students want to eject Camille Paglia from, I forget what the university or the academic, that's it, right? And number two, according to The Economist, millennials are not having sex. I think if millennials are having more sex, they wouldn't be worried about Camille Paglia and what she's written over the course of 25 years in a pretty

accomplished academic field. And I guarantee you, you know, the downtrodden and the oppressed, not to use that word sardonically, but truly don't give a shit about Camille Paglia and what academic organization she belongs to. So you're quite right. It is a very privileged conceit at this point. So here's something that I think is important, though, for making progress on these issues, which is that we could spend a lot of time beating up on the silliest manifestations

of this extremely online Twitter phenomenon. And that's worth doing. I mean, I think it's important to criticize it. It's important to point out some of the craziness. But I think what's more important is actually to argue about what kind of country we want and to point out the poverty and the vision of what a lot of progressives

now envisage for the United States. And it's a poverty of ambition as well. So what I see is, for example, in the thesis of the inevitable demographic majority, that's one version of identity politics. Identity politics always means very different things, so I'm careful about using the term. What I see in it is basically saying,

look, we have people of color vote for a democratic party much more than white people. They're a growing segment of a population, so we just have to sit pretty, sit tight, and 30 or 40 years from now, we'll win every election. Now, I think that's wrong for all kinds of empirical reasons, but we can go into.

Although I'm impressed with someone who can care about the self they'll inherit 30 or 40 years from now and be motivated by that. Well, there's a sleight of hand there where it goes from by 2044 we'll be a majority-minority country to, well, we're sure to win the next election if we only mobilize that base, right? So that's sort of, you know, they pretend that you don't have to be patient until 2044. I think it's not going to happen in 2044 either for various reasons. But here's the most important thing. What kind of vision is that for the country? Do we want a society where 30 years from now, I'll be able to walk down the street and observe, oh, you're black, you must be voting for the Democrats. Oh, you're white, you must be

voting for the Republicans. Is that the society we want to live in? Do we want a society in which there's a big block of deeply resentful white people, 40, 45% of the population, which is hateful. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs

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