Making Sense with Sam Harris - #206 — A Conversation with David Frum

Episode Date: May 26, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with David Frum about the shifting political landscape. They discuss the secularization of politics, distrust of the media and other institutions, voter suppression, the 2020 elections, what happens if Trump gets a second term, the role of money in politics, conspiracy theories around Covid-19, the Michael Flynn controversy, the prospect that Trump will refuse to leave office, 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, 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.

And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked.

I am here with David Frum. David, thanks for joining me again. What a pleasure to be back. So you have a new book. You have been hammering Trump hard, and it is necessary work. Is this your second book focused on Trump? Yes. I've written quite a few books, but I wrote a book that came out 2018 called Trumpocracy, which was a study of Trump's power. And this book is called Trumpocalypse, and it's a study of the Trump finale and what comes after. Yeah, well, it's great to have you on to talk about this, because as you know, and everyone will know, we are under the shadow of a presidential election

that seems especially consequential. I guess whatever your view of reality here, you must think this election will matter unless you're a nihilist, or maybe especially if you're a nihilist. If you want to tear everything down, there is a good way to do it by voting wrongly here. The problem I keep failing to adequately confront every time I talk about Trump, and I think you know I do that vehemently, although now sparingly, is that it does seem somewhat hopeless to convince anyone of anything. I'm painfully aware of how boring it is to simply sing to the choir, and I want to do some good in the world here with conversations of this kind. I want to convince people to see Trump as we do, because I think we have an accurate view of him, and it matters to understand what has happened here and what it would mean to double down on this error. What can we say at the beginning here to try to inoculate our listeners against some ways

of misunderstanding the conversation? There will be an assumption on the part of many that this is a partisan bias where we will be expressing against Trump. What can you say to that point? Well, let me say, I have spent my life, and it's now a lengthening life, in the conservative and in the Republican Party. As a teenager, I was supported Ford over Carter in 1976. The first time I was ever involved in an American election, I'm originally from Canada, was in 1980 when I knocked on doors for Ronald Reagan in my college town. I served in the George W. Bush White House. I've been involved with

conservative parties in Canada and Great Britain. And this is my world. So I'm coming from inside this world. For me, the theme of the Trump years has been the discovery, and I think this is so true for everyone who thinks about politics. We all have a lot of commitments in our lives, and they're often potentially in conflict, but we're not forced to confront that. And then comes a moment, we say, well, I believe this, and I believe that, and I have to choose. So maybe the way to start talking about this in a way that's useful, as you recommend, is not to talk about what we don't like, but to talk about what we do. What do we cherish? Why are we here? is not to talk about what we don't like, but to talk about what we do. What do we cherish?

Why are we here? So let me talk about what is important to me, and I hope that that will resonate with some of the people who are on the fence that you described. I grew up in the Cold War. I grew up, as I mentioned, in Canada, under the shield of that mighty American system

of global defense that protected all of us. My family's Jewish. I'm Jewish. On my father's side, particularly, we lost the vast majority of our family to the Nazi Holocaust. We understand intimately what a world that is not, where justice isn't safeguarded by power, how justice in a world not safeguarded by power, justice becomes a victim. I was formed by the extraordinary explosion of global prosperity in the 1970s and 1980s through free trade and free interchange. The happiest moment of my political life was that moment in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and went from South Korea and Chile and South Africa and Eastern and Central Europe. It seemed like we were moving

the whole planet to a world, a place of greater security and prosperity. And I think that altogether adds up to the most stupendous human political achievement of all time. Now, everything has costs. It didn't serve everyone equally well. And as that development advanced, it got bumpy. And we went through the 9-11 crisis and the war in Iraq, which I was a supporter of, that alienated so many people, and then the global financial crisis, and then the strains and stresses of mass migration and unequal prosperity. And so it's not crazy that there was a reaction to that.

Donald Trump positioned himself at the head of that parade. And I said, I get that in 2016. I spent a lot of time in the 2000s warning Republicans that their message was not responsive to where Americans were, where even their voters were. But Trump now is putting at jeopardy everything I cherish, down to such basics as the integrity and competence of the U.S. government. Yeah, you know, an analogy comes to mind, which would characterize my view of that jeopardy and also how a criticism of Trump need not entail any partisanship. Republican or have been a Republican. So, you know, obviously your partisanship, if anything, runs the other way. I have never voted Republican, but there's absolutely nothing I have said or will say about Trump that would apply to someone like Mitt Romney or John McCain or any other normal Republican. So, again, it's just, it's not coming from a partisan place in me at all. And

the analogy occurs to me that captures this and some of the risk you just cited. I mean, imagine you're on an airplane cruising at 30,000 feet, and at some point near the end of the flight, you see the pilot come stumbling out of the cockpit, and he appears just visibly drunk or insane. You know, let's say he gropes one of the flight attendants. He gets on the PA system, and he begins bragging about how rich he is, and maybe he starts castigating the passengers for having insulted him. You know, he might say, if you want me to land this plane, you have to be nicer to me, right? I mean, something completely out of keeping with the role and responsibility he has to safeguard the lives of people on that plane. Then he'll,

you know, just to continue this analogy, he could launch into a conspiracy theory about how the airline is really run by a shadow group of maintenance workers who have been undermining him, right? And he thinks they've been monkeying with the instruments in the cockpit. And he could fire the co-pilot. He could send him to the back of the plane and tell him not to move, right? And he could do a dozen other things like that in the span of an hour that prove beyond any possibility of doubt that this isn't a normal situation, right? He's not a normal pilot. And now, when it comes time to land this plane, the danger of something going wrong has been horribly magnified, and you are worried about this, quite reasonably so. And you're appalled to find that control over so many lives,

yours among them, has been given to somebody who is quite obviously unfit for the job, monstrously unfit for the job. And now you find yourself worrying about this out loud. And notice that there are people on the plane who are inspired by this pilot's antics and goading him on, right? He's now threatening to punch some old woman in the face and people are yelling he should do it, right? And then people are turning to you as you begin to worry about this out loud, and they're claiming that you have pilot derangement syndrome, and they should just stop whining and enjoy the flight, and that Captain Trump is making flying great again, right? So this is your situation. You're worried about obvious incompetence and distraction from the task at hand, and coming

at a moment where everyone can least afford it, right? I mean, just we're in the middle of a global pandemic and a global economic emergency, right? Now, the question is, and I'm posing this to our listeners, how much of your concern about not dying in a plane crash is due to political partisanship? Just, it is obvious that that's not even a variable, right? And that, you know, you may disagree with me and David here, right, in our view of Trump and the situation and the importance of institutions and political norms. And I mean and we'll get into that. But the conversation we're about to have is coming from a place of concern about our society being able to respond intelligently to real risks. And again, it is our view that we're being led by somebody who is obviously a fraud and a con man and an incompetent and a

morbidly self-interested person. And that has been obvious from day one, but it's becoming completely untenable to deny that fact, even for the span of a minute here. So with that long preamble, David, you've described in your book Trumpism, i.e. support for the president and the kind of social movement that has kept him rather impervious to the kinds of criticisms we will launch here. You've described it as an affinity fraud. What do you mean by that? I mean that people who study organized crime or white-collar crime will note that fraudsters often take advantage of people who are in some way similar to them and sympathetic to them. So Bernie Madoff, the great Ponzi scheme on Wall Street,

he stole from people like Elie Wiesel, people who were involved in fellow Jews, people who were involved in collective Jewish life. And Madoff, with his stealing, would often be very generous to Jewish institutions. And when you look at victims, overwhelmingly, unfortunately, Jewish. And what you will find often with other kinds of scenes like that, that people pray on their own. They create an affinity, and they take advantage of that. And that is something that Donald Trump has done with many conservative-minded Americans, who would normally, you know, when you think about the Republican Party, I mean, historically,

the Republican Party famously, you know, what's the joke? Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line. So it's a very orderly political party. It chooses people with long histories in the party. You sort of rise through the machine. Typically, it's never among Democrats. They are always choosing outsiders, you know, of arkansas in their 40s a guy who makes it from the illinois state senate into the u.s senate and has been there for a couple of years and you know romantic outsiders the republicans pick well let's take the guy who

was vice president last time and make him our nominee this time you bump your way up it's like procter and gamble in in 1953. And all of that orderliness, that quest for predictability, I mean, Donald Trump is none of those things, but he benefits. I want to say something about the title of this book, and it's relevant to what you just asked. So most of us use the word apocalypse to mean locusts and famine and hornets and disasters of all kinds. And we are certainly suffering through those, this global pandemic and this terrible economic shock. But literally, an apocalypse means an unveiling, a revelation. It comes from Greek words that mean to take the cloth

off of something. And when Jewish and early Christian writers began to use the idea of the apocalypse in their writing, they were revealing the future. Now, the future they chose to reveal was a pretty horrifying one, but it was horror that wasn't horror for its own sake. It was leading to the end of days. And so the Trumpocalypse that I want to write about is one that shows us something about who we are and where we go. As you say, I mean, there is a substantial minority in this country, maybe a little less than it was three months ago, that sticks with Trump, that sees something in him that speaks to them. And I think that loyalty is a danger, not just immediately, but in the long term to

a lot of institutions that we should all cherish. And what I wanted to write about was the nature of that danger. And then how do we prevent that kind of disaffection from being a threat to the country in the future? Not how do we brainwash people or convert them, but how do we make the disappointments that are maybe inevitable in modern life less dangerous to the political system that upholds modern life? Yeah, well, let's talk about that affinity. And maybe we're talking about 30% of Americans. There seems to be a core that now has outside political influence because they seem to be so unpersuadable, which is to say unmovable based on the 10,000 pieces of information that should have pried them loose from their affinity to Trump. What do you think the organizing principles are there? I mean, it's clearly not racism as often

alleged by the far left. I mean, I'm not suggesting that there aren't racists who support Trump. In fact, I would imagine almost every racist does. But I find it very hard to believe that's the organizing principle. One thing that is clearly happening, and it's even creating a larger footprint in our society than support for Trump, is a distrust for institutions. By institutions, we're talking about the press. We're talking about normal arms of government that heretofore seemed important, like the State Department. We're talking about science and scientists attempting to communicate it. How do you view the relationship between institutions and the rest of society right now?

This is a problem that I described in a book I wrote a long time ago as the man in the white lab coat issue. So if you watch an American movie made between the end of World War II and the end of the 1970s, whenever there's a man in a white lab coat, he's there to explain how the plot is going to set in motion. He's going to explain how you can shrink a submarine so it's small enough to go inside the bloodstream. He's going to explain how time travel works. He's going to give you the device that'll save James Bond's life in the last act. Sometime around 1978, 79, whenever you see a man in a white lab coat, he's got some moronic idea that's going to get us all killed. Let's clone dinosaurs. And the last time we see him, he's disappearing down the

throat of the dinosaur. Although in his defense, I'm in support of cloning some dinosaurs just for the fun of it. But he, so yes, we've been through that shock and it's become especially intense recently. And I wrote about this in my first book about the Trump presidency. I'm trying to think, starting in about 1998, whenever people we socialized with, the people we went to school with, our type of people, whenever they had a brainwave, let's sell stock in a pet food company that moves pet food by air. Let's do the Iraq war. Let's securitize home mortgages. Every one of those brainwaves turned out to be an absolute calamity for most of the people around them.

So a lot of the trust that we would like to see under institutions was squandered by mistake. And people came by their distrust honestly. And Donald Trump used that. Not that he's a trustworthy person at all. He's the world's least trustworthy person. But he had a shrewd all. He's the world's least trustworthy person, but he had a shrewd eye for people's vulnerabilities. So one of the things that I am in this new book talking about is how do we regain that trust? And how do we make practical changes in a way that stabilize democratic

society? And not just the states, because we need to see Trump in a more global context. And a lot of the way forward, human life is tragically short. But the fact is people have been living longer and longer. And as they live longer, they are carrying forward quarrels from half a century ago into the present. I mean, Newt Gingrich is still talking about Woodstock.

He's still mad about it all these years later. And maybe Woodstock was a good idea. Maybe it was a bad idea. It was like the one guy who didn't get invited and held it against them. Right, right. The Vietnam War. They're still arguing about that.

All, you know, this half century, now more than half century later. And Donald Trump uses all of these cues from like the Nixon campaign of 1968. And it's yesterday's world. And we need to build a politics for tomorrow's world. And that means sometimes that some of the things that you talk about that seem to be so-called left-wing issues, like making healthcare more universal, can only be effectively executed

in conjunction with things that would be considered right-wing issues, which is having some kind of restraint on immigration. That a lot of the solutions to problems like climate change are going to involve ideas that actually look right-wing, like pricing and more use of nuclear power. And we are going to need a new generation of political leadership that is not stuck in categories left over from when there were three channels on TV. Yeah, that's an important point. We've been noticing this in many ways, that the old way of talking about left and right

politically and the boxes that one needs to check to be a member in good standing as you move left or right of center, that seems to have been getting scrambled in a variety of ways. And it just makes it difficult to talk about what's happening and predict how people will respond to news events. Trump himself is an existence proof that politics as we knew it prior to 2016 no longer makes any sense. And the idea that the Christian right is behind this guy as though he were some apotheosis of their values, it's a reductio ad absurdum of

everything they pretend is their values, and yet it is visibly manifest. So it's a very strange time to even categorize political thought. One of the things that defined politics when a generation ago, in the 1990s, was the United States was an exception to the rule. That is, societies became technologically developed,

became wealthier, they became more secular. And so when you looked at social science from 1995, the United States looked like a real, I mean, it's completely different from Britain or Germany or the Netherlands or Australia or even Canada, all of which were rapidly secularizing, and the United States just wasn't. And then beginning about 2002, the United States suddenly, bang, caught up. And the United States has been, and I talk a lot about this in Trump apocalypse, about the loss of religious affinity that has happened in the past decade and a half.

the loss of religious affinity that has happened in the past decade and a half, and how much of this is about people under 30 simply not identifying with parental religion. And this may be a reaction. I mean, it raises the question, how religious was America ever, really? Because there's always a big, if you ask questions in polls like, do you believe in God? Do you believe in afterlife? You used to get 70, 80, 90%. But if you actually counted the number of people sitting in a church on a Sunday morning, it in no way accorded. Even if you asked, were you in church on Sunday morning? And then counted the people in church on Sunday morning, those two numbers didn't add up.

But there were a lot of people who were Christian identified, religiously identified, but it may not have been central to their life. people who are Christian-identified, religiously identified, but it may not have been central to their life. And then the assertiveness of political religion since in the 21st century, we talked before about commitments coming to contradiction. A lot of people are like, yeah, I'm a Methodist. I don't go that often, but I think they're doing good work. I guess I'm a Methodist. Then they suddenly confront, wait, wait a minute. I see Derry Falwell Jr. on TV. I'm not that. That's what it is. That I am not. And so you are seeing the secularizing society. I think one of the reasons that the so-called Christian right has been so committed to Trump is because they are reckoning with this dechristianizing among their own

followers. And in fact, they are moving from something that was a religious movement in a way to something that is now purely a cultural movement, where you no longer can tell the difference in what is Christian here and what is Southern, or what is rural. Hmm. Yeah. Or what is Christian and what is an animus against so-called elitism, right? Or against the coasts, or against you know, against the libtards in their big cities who are too woke and too, in the context of the current pandemic, you know,

terrified to get out there and get this happy virus. So how does a mask become a symbol of cultural war? Exactly. There have been some very startling images broadcast to us, at least on social media, of, again, it's just amazing that the perception of this global health crisis and economic crisis has been so politicized. But two images have jumped out to me in recent weeks. One is just the confrontation between pandemic protesters, that is people protesting against lockdown, and healthcare workers, right? So they're literally shrieking epithets at frontline healthcare workers who are in their scrubs and masks. And then there was another video that went pretty viral. You might have seen this of a local news reporter covering a protest. I think it was in New York, New Jersey or New York.

And just the level of hatred being expressed by otherwise normal people toward a random member of the press was really alarming. Again, it could be something manipulative about how this was set up, but it seemed to be a member of a local news affiliate walking the sidewalk among... This wasn't a Klan rally. I mean, this was just ordinary people protesting the lockdown. But when they saw that a member of the press was among them, it was just awful the degree to which they were visibly living in an information space where, you know, the pandemic was essentially a hoax. It was just a, it was an attempt to kind of engineer an informational coup against the

president, right? This is all about discrediting Trump. This is why people are pretending this is something other than the flu. So this is where we are. I guess let's start with, we have to talk about Trump and the election and the reasons for our concerns, but it's very hard to talk about anything if we can't find a shared space of facts and vetting of information whereby we can talk about what has happened on a Thursday on Earth. What do we do with respect to the degree to which the press is now reviled, especially in Trumpistan? How does the press get its act together? And how does the press even cover Trump critically, obviously, without discrediting itself in every moment it attempts to shine a light on each one of the president's innumerable missteps? Well, this is one of the ways, and I talk about this in Trumpocalypse, but how we have to bring

ourselves into our present time. When people of a certain age, certainly my contemporaries, we talk about the press. We mean the New York Times, we mean the CBS Evening News, we mean CNN, we mean institutions like that that are self-consciously press organizations that are funded by advertising and reader pay and that have a legacy that stretches back in time. So how do most Americans get their information? Facebook, number one, YouTube, number two. The New York Times is maybe in the top five list because it is a provider as a secondhand provider of content to those streams, Reddit. And the Americans who are most likely to say, I don't trust the media, in fact, are the people who are most reliant on media. They don't read a book. They're not interviewing scientists. They

are following what they see on Facebook. And Facebook is media. Even though Facebook is not creating the content, it is certainly making decisions, maybe robotically, but it's making decisions about the content you get. So we need to bring our concepts of the world into alignment with the world we live in. And we live in a world in which the media are very trusted, dangerously so, and in which they are losing their own ability to assess the quality of what they are providing, where they truly are acting like mediums, like connectors between one thing and another. So that, I think one of the problem here is not a loss of trust of media. The problem is that we have media that no longer see it as their job to evaluate the

truthfulness of what it is that they provide. So that is an internal problem. So I always say, whenever you talk about the media, don't use general... Say, do you mean the New York Times? That's one set of issues. Do you mean CNN? And that's another set of issues. Or do you mean Facebook and Fox News?

Because that's something else. And if you have a concept of media that excludes the most important media companies in the country, it's not a very good concept. Yeah. They are clearly distinct categories because you take Facebook and Twitter and the rest of social media, these are platforms which are trying to disavow any responsibility as publishers. And it's understandable because I don't know how you, even with some real breakthroughs in AI, I don't know how you perfectly vet or really take full editorial responsibility for your content if... I might dissent from you a little bit there.

Yeah, go for it. Supposing an entrepreneur invents a company called McDonald's and he says, you know what? Look, when you used to get your hamburgers from a local store, obviously it was very important that there be some government regulation of whether the meat in those burgers was rancid or not. But we're going to serve a billion burgers a day or a billion a year. We are operating on such a scale that it's just impossible for us to verify that the meat in our burgers is not rancid. And that's just our business model. Our business model makes it impossible for us to vouch for the fact that our meat isn't rancid.

I think a lot of us would say, well, I'm not here for your business model. It's terrible. We don't need this. You shouldn't be in business. If your business model is you can't vouch for the fact that the meat won't make me sick, you shouldn't have that business. Yeah, it's interesting that there's been kind of a land grab for informational norms, which just happened and now we're anchored to a status quo that is very difficult to rethink.

So on some level, you're calling into question whether something like Facebook should even be possible. But it's technologically possible. You can link up half the world on a platform and allow people to talk to one another and to talk to everyone all at once if things go viral. And Facebook has obviously found a way to monetize that, Twitter less so. But we're asking whether that sort of thing should be allowable on some level. Is this a public square that you'd be in to take the U.S. Constitution as a norm here? You'd be violating free speech if you tried to tamp that down. It's like a room in the

mansion of human experience that's just opened up based on a certain technological innovation, you know, in this case, the internet. Or you take another example, which is different, but strikes me as relevantly similar, like all of this anguish people feel over privacy concerns around the iPhone. Should Apple be forced to build an iPhone in a way that it can be unlocked ultimately with an FBI warrant because we know a murder has been recorded on it or have good reason to believe that? Well, there are many privacy purists now who think, no, you've got strong encryption, and this is just math and technology dictating that we should have now a zone of privacy, that even if we acknowledge that we ourselves are murderers, no one can force us to open our iPhones. They can demand our DNA, but they can't demand access to our FaceTime interactions or our

WhatsApp interactions. On one level, that's just totally bizarre that we think that these are in some way norms that can't be rethought. But again, I'm sympathetic to a default to free speech, And I'm just impressed by how intractable it seems to monitor in real time everything that is hitting Facebook's servers. Because any lunatic can post a video right now communicating anything he wants, and that will be one of, I don't know, someone has the numbers here, but let's say one of a billion pieces of content uploaded today on Facebook. It's a needle in a haystack until

it isn't, but I guess a different set of expectations could be invoked once it becomes obvious that this thing is there and causing a problem. Then we could demand something of Facebook. But the idea that Facebook can't be in business unless they figure out a way to never produce a poison hamburger with all the hamburgers they're making, it does seem like a deal-breaker unless borrowing

some perfect algorithm coming online. Let me give you another example of one of these questionable business models. The way politics worked in the United States from the civil rights era till the end of the 20th century was you had these two vast political parties. They're pretty messy assemblages of lots of different kinds of people in lots of different kinds of places. And for that reason, they were not super ideological. And for that reason, they tended to coalesce around, with bare exceptions like Ronald Reagan, they were pretty

moderate people. When they became non-moderate like Barry Goldwater or George McGovern, they got clobbered. And even a non-moderate like Ronald Reagan learned he had to be a really beguiling, winning, sunny, reassuring person if he was not to frighten people with his ideology that was so strong. That began to change in the 21st century. The parties became much more ideological for reasons that had to do with American life. As they became more ideological, they accelerated with reasons that didn't have a lot to do with American life, but became part of gaming of the system. And on the Republican side in particular, the Republicans realized they had an ideology that could not command a Democratic majority. In 1985, if you were in that predicament, you'd say, well, I guess we're going to have to change our ideology if we want to enjoy the spoils of office. But by 2015,

the attitude was different, which is we don't want the conventional spoils of office like postmasterships and ambassadorships and those things. We actually have a program here that we are determined to cram through. And we are self-becoming aware we actually can't win in an open competition. So we're going to have to make the competition more closed. And one of the big themes of the book is how the Republican Party, forced to choose between its ideological commitments and a competitive democracy, has been gaming the system more and more aggressively. And it's helped to do that by the way the movement of Americans from the interior of the country to the coasts

in a system that makes these ancient boundaries so important. So you can have people, you can have all of California with no more, I mean, if people in Wyoming ever retreated on an equal footing with people in California, they would find themselves, they would feel themselves really ill used.

And then you have the system where the money flows from the coast to the interior, but the interior uses the political power. You may remember Senator Mitch McConnell talking about driving states into bankruptcy. What that's about is bankruptcy is a federal responsibility. When a state defaults on its debt,

states have been doing that since the 1830s. But if a state were ever to go bankrupt, which they can't now do, that would mean the state would submit itself to the oversight of a federal judge, i.e. somebody picked by Mitch McConnell. It is an attempt for the parts of the country that are receiving money to leverage their excessive power because of constitutional compromises and the way the system has grown up over time to take other people's economic power and use it to their own ends. So I have a series of suggestions in the book about how without radical political reform or fantasies like abolishing the electoral college, you could bring the American federal system more into line with how wealth is produced in the American nation.

My last thought on this, in 2008 at the Republican convention, Sarah Palin gave this fantastic acceptance speech. And one of the lines written by a friend of mine, he did a great job. And one of the lines she used was, she quoted a piece of writing, and I tell the story of that reading, in which she said, we raise good people in our small towns. in which she said, we raise good people in our small towns. In the book, I said, just imagine how all hell would break loose if a candidate at a Democratic convention would say, we raise good people on the Upper West Side, Manhattan.

We raise good people in Hollywood. Perhaps not quite as bad as the Upper East Side, but close. But who's paying the bills around here, folks? Right. Yeah, I mean, the degree to which the cities and coasts subsidize the heartland is an interesting

asymmetry there. And as you say, the political leverage based on representation, at least in the Senate, is running the other way. Why do you say abolishing the Electoral College is just a pipe dream? Because it's in the Constitution. You need to do a constitutional amendment to do away with it.

So I'm focused very much in Trumpocalypse on things that you could do with ordinary votes of Congress real fast, not with an idea of making the system perfectly representative, but avoiding its most terrible injustices, many of which were at the state level, where in states, and not just southern states, but in Wisconsin, that the party that holds the majority, nearly a two-thirds majority in the Wisconsin state legislature, Assembly and Senate, actually, the Republicans now have about 64 of 99 seats in the Wisconsin legislature, which they won with fewer votes than the Democrats won in 2018. And that is happening because the federal courts, which used to, from the civil rights era until the 2000s, police the wilder actions at the state level,

have withdrawn from that business. And so I talk in the book about how do you restore some of the concepts of the civil rights era in ways that are feasible, not too radical, that don't require huge change, but how do you get a new Voting Rights Act that would make sense in the post-civil rights era? When the Supreme Court struck down the key sections of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, they made a good point, which is the Voting Rights Act held a state or a town in suspicion according to things it had done in the 19th century. So Hawaii got special scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act, as it then was, and Wisconsin did not. By the year 2013, Hawaii was a very good actor for voting rights, and Wisconsin is the worst actor north of the Mason-Dixon line. And it's just weird that you would say,

okay, Wisconsin gets an easy ride because of what happened in the 19th century. So agreed, the court was right. You need to rewrite this thing. But then having struck down the key sections, nothing happened. And so states are now free to do whatever they want. And because of the Republican success in the elections of 2010, which were immediately followed by the census of 2010 and the redistricting of 2011 in the throes of the terrible aftermath of the Great Recession, they built an especially reactionary set of state and federal maps that disempowered everywhere in America where new products are invented, where songs are written, where science is done. I compare and so I talk about this, about how all the productive parts of the country are systematically disenfranchised. And that's, you know, if you want, from a Republican point of view, if you want the Republican Party ever again to be the party of enterprise, it has to get out of the business of being the party of the deindustrializing

and places where coal used to be mined, and reconnect with where the future is happening. Trumpocalypse is full of ideas for making the political system more responsive to the country. That's one of the ways that you protect the country against the future of Donald Trump's. Let's remember, he got 46% of the vote. He got barely more of the vote than Michael Dukakis in 1988, and a lot less of the vote than Mitt Romney

and Al Gore and John Kerry. And if you bring the political system into harmony with the country, the biggest beneficiary of that will be the Republican Party itself, because you will take away from the party the option of defending enterprise by appealing to the most disaffected parts of the country. So how sinister do you think this actually is behind closed doors? reactionary attempt to gerrymander and suppress voting rights. You take an article that would be written in a place like The Nation or Rachel Maddow's take on just how dark this gets behind closed doors. How off the mark, if at all, is that? When Mitch McConnell is talking to whoever, is that? I mean, when Mitch McConnell is talking to whoever, I don't know, back in the day, Paul Ryan, about just how to win, stay on this point of suppressing votes or managing to shore up support for Republican candidates in ways that anywhere left of center just seems illegitimate. in ways that anywhere left of center just seems illegitimate.

How nefarious is what in fact is true? The right to vote has always been bitterly contested in the United States. At a certain period in history, we learned a happy story of the ever-spreading progress toward the vote, toward ever-greater democracy. And it's inscribed in the great amendments to the Constitution, the 13th Amendment ending slavery, the 14th Amendment extending civil rights without regard to race, the 15th Amendment extending the right to vote without regard to race, and through votes for women, and through the extension of the vote to the District of Columbia and 18-year-olds, and up, up, up, up, up.

But that's not how it happened. It was always going forward and going backward. But that's not how it happened. It was always going forward and going backward. It has always been, through American history, a familiar tool of politics to try to prevent your opponents from having the right to vote. And to this day, the United States has the weakest constitutional protections of voting rights of any of the democratic countries, partly because the Constitution is so old and so much of it was written before Americans agreed that everybody should vote.

And so one of the things I think we need to make, and this may be the service Donald Trump has done, is I think it is not impossible that we will look back and say, that was a very upsetting experience, but it actually put us back on the right footing because Donald Trump made explicit and made kind of cheaply corrupt a lot of things that were already that were going wrong in the country without him and so we need to commit ourselves so you know what we're a democracy we all we all think we are I mean sometimes you'll hear people Republicans say it's not a democracy it's a republic I think a lot of people react to that was I always thought it was a democracy didn't

you think it was a democracy if it's not a democracy shouldn't it be a democracy. Didn't you think it was a democracy? And if it's not a democracy, shouldn't it be a democracy? So let's be a democracy. And let's say, you know, you can compete in all kinds of ways. You can find, you know, more appealing candidates with better resumes. You can, ads on TV. I mean, you can dig up dirt your opponent did when she was a college student. You got all of that. But what you can't do is compete by preventing people from voting.

And what you certainly can't do is write voting systems where if you get 45% of the vote, you get 60% of the seats. We're not going to let you do that. That option is now off the table. And if Donald Trump helps us to do that and other things too, you know, Donald Trump has taught us how the United States has compared to any other democracy, a super politicized system of law enforcement. There is no other democracy on earth where decisions about who to prosecute and who not

to prosecute are made by such political people as in the United States. We need to fix that. And Donald Trump has forced us to concentrate. I think we basically lived through a big tidying up of the American political system after Watergate and the related scandals in the 70s. And then those reforms have just been losing their impetus, losing their effectiveness over the past 20 years. I think we are going to need post-Trump kind of moment of reform like that, which we had just before the First World War, just after Watergate, really renew institutions.

And not just voting institutions, but those that enforce law, those that make our social welfare systems work, and those that preserve the climate and the environment for future generations. Trump has definitely pressure-tested our political system and the rule of law to a degree that I think very few people anticipated. I think one surprising discovery is how much the sane functioning of government relies not on actual laws but on political norms. You don't do that sort of thing, right? So it takes someone who has absolutely no political scruples to do that sort of thing for us to realize,

oh, there's actually no wall there. There's no guardrail. There's nothing keeping us from the howling abyss if we move further in that direction. And Trump has exposed so much of that landscape. I want to get into some of these up-to-the-minute controversies around Barr and the so-called Flynn controversy. But before we jump into those details, you, if I'm not mistaken, at least in the book, I don't know if anything's changed, you seem very confident that Trump will lose in November. Yeah. I really would like to share that confidence because if for no other reason, I will sleep better at night. Why are you so cheerful on that point?

Well, I thought he was probably going to lose even before the pandemic struck. And I think now in the face of just the terrible economic distress that has been presented on so many people, I just don't believe it. I don't believe it. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. I just don't believe it. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.