Making Sense with Sam Harris - #296 — Repairing Our Country

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Jonah Goldberg about the state of American politics and civil society. They discuss the hyperpartisanship of the Left and Right, what Trump has done to the Republican party, the breakdown of trust in institutions, the “new catastrophism” enabled by social media, the problem of populism, 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.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Okay. Well, what's going on out there in the world? I hadn't spent much time thinking about the British monarchy. I guess I've always had a good American skepticism about the validity of the institution. But Andrew Sullivan just wrote a really wonderful short piece, Mourning the Loss of the Queen, that gave me, I think for the first time, an appreciation of the value of a constitutional monarchy. At one point he quotes C.S. Lewis, who wrote,

Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead, even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served. Deny it food, and it will gobble poison. I disagree with Lewis about many things. I've always thought his defense of Christianity was fairly risible. And I'm not even sure I agree with this quotation entirely, but there's something interesting there. And Sullivan continues writing, the crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible

but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. However shitty the economy, or awful the prime minister, or ugly the discourse, the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time, in a living, breathing, mortal person. So, anyway, this, as I said, gave me something to think about as though for the first time. It strikes me now that a monarch, when she or he is actually functioning as intended, is the opposite of a scapegoat. In the Bible, in Leviticus, the scapegoat is literally a goat that's imagined to contain all the sins of a

community, and then is cast out into some wasteland to die, taking the sins of everyone with it. Now, of course, the phenomenon of scapegoating is something that happens with people, too, albeit unwittingly, and one can often see this. You can see a community on the verge of violence or just intolerable conflict can focus its destructive energy on a single person and use the obliteration of this person, whether in reality or just reputationally, as a way of resetting itself. Everything can go back to normal now that the witch has been burned. The philosopher René Girard wrote about this some, and one can see a lot of this online now.

The way a community increases in solidarity by sacrificing individuals who commit some sort of blasphemy. Perhaps this point's been made many, many times because it seems somehow obvious, but the monarch in a constitutional monarchy seems like the opposite of a scapegoat, and Queen Elizabeth seemed to serve this role unusually well. of many of the virtues it didn't even have, right? Virtues like discipline and dignity and self-restraint, right? The sacrifice of self to the institution, which the queen demonstrated to an incredible degree. She was a kind of anti-celebrity. She was perhaps the most famous woman on earth, but she was really a cipher. She subordinated everything to the role that she was meant to play. It simply wasn't about her. In place of her personality,

she functioned as a kind of symbol of service to her country, and of patriotism, and of civility, and of civility and continuity and stability. So in venerating the crown, people were venerating all of these things. And as Sullivan points out, all of these things are markedly absent in society at this point. Anyway, culturally and personally, all of this is quite foreign to me, but I can understand it. And I can understand why so many people felt so personally touched last week by the Queen's death. Which brings me to something that happened on social media that seemed to typify all that's wrong with social media itself and with our larger culture. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University wrote the following on Twitter when the queen was on her deathbed. She wrote, I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping, genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating. And then she wrote a series of

tweets defending this tweet after Twitter removed it. So anyway, this professor became Twitter famous when Jeff Bezos reacted to her tweet, I think. I'm not even going to name her. My intention, needless to say, isn't to make a scapegoat of her. I think I just want to point out that she's probably not this terrible a person in real life. I think the existence of Twitter is largely to blame for what's happening here. She's clearly a diversity, equity, and inclusion expert. So she's talking to a cult and being rewarded for it. And social media is what is providing the incentive here, as well as the

mechanism for her to broadcast this opinion. And it's providing the mechanism for everyone else to discover just what an aberrant person this woman is, or seems to be, and to react to that. And there's no possibility of anyone persuading anyone of anything. So our conversation more and more is conforming to the epistemology of the mob. And by mob, I mean not mafia, but the crowd. And the mob is unreasoning, more or less in principle. And it's unprincipled. It has no limiting principles. It has no mechanism by which to detect or even care about its errors. It's just pure advocacy and agitation. It's continually shrieking about the worst of its opponents and is determined to see the worst in them. Now, I've experienced this both from the right and from the left, and it's not fun coming from

either side, obviously, but what one sees once one ceases to take it personally is the dysfunction of it, how people aren't even making contact with the problems they're purporting to respond to, all the while growing increasingly certain that they are responding to some kind of moral emergency, and what's more, that they're making progress toward solving it. Anyway, I really think life is better than it seems online, and yet I'm increasingly worried that the distortions of reality one gets online is feeding back into the world and making people more cynical and more distrustful and more despairing of making progress. I think social media is making us less capable of living good lives

together. Anyway, this is in part the subject of today's conversation. Today I'm speaking with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch and the host of the Remnant podcast. He's a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an LA Times columnist, a CNN commentator, and the author of three New York Times bestsellers. And he also worked at National Review for two decades. And today we speak about the whole catastrophe, really, focusing mostly on the state of American politics and civil society. We discuss the hyper-partisanship of the left and the right, what Trump has done to the Republican Party, the breakdown of trust in institutions. We discussed

this new catastrophism enabled by social media, the problem of populism, and other topics. And despite all of those dire things, I thought we ended on a refreshingly hopeful note. And now I bring you Jonah Goldberg. I am here with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks for joining me. It is truly a pleasure and an honor to be here. Thanks for having me. We've never spoken. I've spoken to some of your friends and colleagues, most recently David French, but I've admired your work from afar for years now. And perhaps you can summarize your background politically and as a writer. How do you describe your Pilgrim's Progress at this point? Sure. Let's see. I sort of grew up in a pretty political family.

Both my parents were at one point or another journalists. My mom was something of a famous troublemaker. She was involved in that Lewinsky scandal stuff and some other scandals, to be honest. And I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We were always politically conservative, so we were a bit like Christians in ancient Rome in that sense. My first job in Washington was at the American Enterprise Institute as a research assistant. I was there or adjacent to it for much of the 90s. Then I came over to National Review, where I was the founder of National Review Online and the founding editor of National Review, where I was the founder of National Review Online and the founding editor

of National Review Online. And I was at National Review in one capacity or another for 20 years. In that time, I was a contributor to Fox for about 11 years. And my conservative bona fides, the only reason I'm bringing this up is I'm making assumptions about why you want me to lay this stuff out, are pretty solid. I mean, I joke, and it's funny because it's true, I met Pat Buchanan at my bris. Hopefully he didn't perform the bris. No, I have friends who think that maybe this explains some of his problems with Jews. It's like, my God, what do these people do?

And then in the run up to, in 2015 and 2016, I was one of many conservatives who was deeply troubled by Donald Trump and thought this was a bridge too far and was troubled by the rise of populism on the right. And then the ranks of people who saw the world the way I did shrank quite rapidly over time until it was me, David French, and maybe a dozen or so other people written three books. I'm very interested in intellectual history, particularly conservative intellectual history. And I'm a syndicated columnist, been running for the LA Times for about 17 years, I think.

And you have the dispatch. Your main platform now is the dispatch, which you co-founded, right? Yes, and thank you for bringing that up because my co-founder would scream at me if I didn't mention it. A couple of years ago, Steve Hayes and I, Steve was formerly the editor of the Weekly Standard.

We launched the dispatch, which is an unabashedly right of center, but fact-driven place that is trying to prove that you can do honest, serious reporting and analysis from the center right without doing a lot of the fan service you see on a lot of the parts of the right. In some ways, when I try to explain it to people of a certain age, I compared a little bit in terms of the editorial philosophy to the New Republic in the 1980s and early 90s. You knew it was coming from a generally liberal perspective, but it also had, in a more classical sense, a liberal attitude of rejecting sort of Kant and piety, of being willing to call BS on its own side, and trying to do reporting with some famous failures. But trying to do reporting that was trying to engage in making serious arguments that took the other side's arguments seriously.

And that's sort of the spirit that we would like to have at the dispatch. It's been going very well. We're leaving Substack soon because we launched on Substack as a full publication. But since our launch, I believe it's still true. Maybe there's something going on in the last six months I haven't looked at, but since launch, we've been the number one revenue generating product on all of Substack. It's gone very, very well. We've assembled a great team of about, I don't know, 25, 28 people and we're growing even more every day. That's great. That's great. Congratulations. Thank you. I do think it's a troubling

sign of the times that we're all having to rebuild civilization in this piecemeal way on our own. And we'll talk about the failure of institutions, which I know is a concern we share. But yeah, one of the reasons why I like you putting your conservative bona fides up front is that, one, you know, I don't have them, right? I have been traditionally a liberal. I have never voted Republican for anything on any point, I don't think, certainly not for president. point, I don't think, certainly not for president. And yet, I'm often attacked as a partisan whenever I say anything negative about Trump. And my argument has always been that there really is nothing intrinsically partisan in noticing his unfitness for office and the corrosive effect he's had on our politics, which is to say that there's almost nothing,

really absolutely nothing I say about him that I would be tempted to say about a Republican like Mitt Romney. And it is also true that I spend more of my time criticizing the left at this point for all of its obvious failings. So it's just good to have someone like yourself or David French or David Frum or many of the never Trumpers to talk to on that particular point. And it's also interesting that it's just, you know, while we are coming from different places politically, I think we will agree about almost everything with respect to the failings of trumpism and the failings of the far left and it's just it there really is a reshuffling of political intuitions here on many fronts and so yeah anyway i think it's i think it's a good point and i've made a similar point many times it's like if you're willing to reject the the sort of the groupthink of either political party and stand up for, I mean, we're going to talk about institutions, but the sort of simple liberal institutions that

define much of what it means to be an American, at least in a political and in some ways a cultural sense too, if you're classically liberal at heart where you're willing to engage in good faith arguments and deal with with inconvenient facts in a good faith way that that makes you something of an outlier from either side these days and i'm not trying to do a symmetry between know, it's not a lot of people understandably hate the both sides thing, but there is this, there is a remarkable, you know, mirroring going on among the sort of the hard left and the populist right in terms of embracing identity politics kind of arguments, tribalist kind of arguments. And, and so there are people, you know,

like you, again, we've never spoken, but like, people like you, people like Jonathan Haidt, I can, you know, list a bunch, Yasha Monk, who probably profoundly disagree with me about various public policies, but agree with me about, sort of,

on the epistemological level, and agree with me on the sort of basic, systemic, or I agree with them on the epistemological level and agree with me on the sort of basic systemic, or I agree with them on the basic sort of systemic level about what are the institutions, customs, norms, mechanisms, whatever you want to call them, that preserve and define a free society. And that creates this weird sort of trans-ideological kind of fellowship that i do think is is oddly i don't i don't know if it's totally new in american politics but it's it's if it's been around it hasn't been it it's it feels new at least in my lifetime yeah it certainly feels new

and i i don't know how distorting a lens social media has thrown over it, but it does feel new. And I want to talk about the pathologies as we see them on the right and among Republicans, but I don't want us to exclusively focus on that. I really want us to talk about what it would mean to repair our society at this point, because I think many of us are asking whether we're witnessing the beginning of the end of our political and social order in some sense. And the breakdown of trust in institutions is certainly part of that. And perhaps the most galling part of that is that in many cases, the loss of trust has been well-earned, right? I mean, it's not just that people's attitudes have changed. It's just that there has been a breakdown of competence

on so many fronts and in so many crucial moments that it's fairly phantasmagorical at this point. And it extends from everything from public health messaging from the CDC and the FDA, to scientific and governmental institutions in general. It encompasses the media in all its forms, from journalism to Hollywood. There's now a serious question about whether we can run free and fair elections. And even if that's not really in doubt, there is a serious concern that large segments of society will no longer trust the results of free and fair elections when we do run them. And there are new institutions that are proving corrosive of social order. I'm thinking in particular of social media. does this in part by amplifying our doubts about everything and exaggerating the severity of real problems, but also by inventing imaginary ones. And it has just been a factory of lies and

misinformation at a scale we've never seen before. And so, you know, to my eye, what we have now, we have people on the far left who think that racism and other forms of bigotry have in some sense never been worse. And you've got someone like J.K. Rowling, who is their idea of a moral monster. that at the far extreme of the far right, way out there in Trumpistan, they think the world is being controlled by child raping cannibals. So there's a kind of a radical core of craziness that is touching a lot. I mean, it shouldn't have as much political surface area as it does, but it really is distorting. And again, it's hard to know how much social media is magnifying this and how much that the mere magnification of it is itself feeding back into creating, you know, real problems. And so there's like a new religion of catastrophism that is, you know, in many cases an exaggeration, I think, but also the exaggerations result in a level of

cynicism and distrust that can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. So I guess that's my general picture of what we're living through now. I don't know if it departs at all from yours, but what is your view of American society at the moment? Yeah. So let me put it this way way i have days where i agree with you entirely and then i have days where like maybe i'm too online i'm too in a bubble maybe i'm taking the the shadows on the wall of plato's cave too seriously which is a lot of you know the social media stuff if you you can do these gut check things like when you see a wildly viral tweet that has 5,000 likes or 10,000 likes, and then you say, okay, that's as many people as would fill a decent sized high school football stadium in

Texas. And you're like, it gives you a sense that, you know, there's just a lot of stuff going on in America. Most people aren't on Twitter. Most people aren't taking their cues from it. The sort of Pareto distribution of how many people are extremely online and tweeting constantly, particularly political tweeting, is very distorting. And I think it creates real problems for Democrats and Democrat affiliated or you know sympathetic mainstream media you know we can get into it but you know in a sane political climate you know you know james carville would have and i'm not a huge james carville fan obviously but like james carville any old style serious politician the second they heard some Democrats say, defund the police, they would have gone on the phone and say, shut up. Are you crazy? And at the height of the defund the police

stuff, all the polling said that something like 80% or upwards of people of color wanted the same amount or more policing. No one wanted no policing no one but this was one of these ideas that transmitted through the sort of pure petri dish of blue check mark bubble twitter online stuff and went straight into the blood veins of of you know msnbc and at the time cnn and then so even though it was a bullshit thing on Twitter, it becomes real because it goes on TV and then politicians are asked about it and have to take a position.

And so it's difficult to figure out whether some of this stuff matters or not because it gets into the bloodstream even though it shouldn't. And then once it's in the bloodstream, it becomes a real thing i i think one i wrote this book a few years ago called suicide of the west and and part of part of my argument about where we are is that we we increasingly in part and i think part of this

has to do with the breakdown of civil society, the breakdown, you know, the whole bowling alone thesis, the cocooning that we're doing, where we're basically hiding in front of screens rather than engaging with human beings in real life. And one of the things that has led to is following politics like it's a form of entertainment. And there's a thing that happens. I mean, you know this stuff better than I do, but there's a thing that happens in your brain when you follow entertainment. We allow ourselves to root for murderers, bank robbers, torturers, when we see them on the screen so long as it's been clear that they're our hero or our anti-hero or whatever. And we forgive all sorts of behaviors that we would say should put you in jail, nevermind, make you a pariah. And the problem is, is that when you start following politics, like it's a form of entertainment, you start the sort of tribal mind kind of takes over and you start judging things

about whether your team is winning or losing, and you no longer care about the, the, the norms, the institutional rules and all that, because in movies, you don't care about that stuff. You just want the hero to get the MacGuffin. And in politics now, so much of, I'll give you an example. It'll feel partisan, but I know we're going to do a lot of Trump bashing, so I'll get the equal time. And Barack Obama said, I think it was 24 times, maybe it was 28 times, that he literally did not have the power to do DACA, the deferred thing with the Dreamer kids. And he said, look, I'm not a king. The Constitution does not give me this power. We don't live in the kind of society where I can just rule at a whim.

And he said that for like a year. And then he realized that he couldn't get it through Congress. So he did it anyway. And the response from the leaders of the, you know, of the sort of the influencers and leaders of our political class, the journalists and so forth, if they weren't like objectively partisan Republicans, they all cheered about this courageous, you know, act of, of political morality without caring that according to the president's own terms, he had just done something tyrannical and monarchical. Now you can agree with the policy. That's not my point. It's like the student loan stuff. The student loan thing that Biden is

proposing is lawless. I mean, it's like literally lawless and no one seems to care. And I think it's sort of emblematic of the way we follow politics because so many of the things that Donald Trump did were either certainly were either literally lawless or certainly in open and complete defiance to all traditions and norms of the job. And that's what his biggest fans loved about him. And it's particularly problematic as a conservative because look, you guys on the left, you own the fact that you believe you're the forces of progress and the forces of change and the forces of reform and rewriting the face of society. That's your bag and that's fine. That's an ancient and honorable thing to believe, even if I have disagreements with it.

But conservatism at a metaphysical level is supposed to be about preserving those things that need to be preserved, about loving this country as it is, not just for as it should be, for thinking that fidelity to the Constitution matters. And if all of a sudden the right joins this game in an even uglier, you know, fascistic kind of way and just simply says it's all will to power, it's all about winning, it's all about whether my guy can punish your guy, then that's really bad for America. It's fine when one party, it's not fine, but it's tolerable when one party is the gas pedal and the other party is the brake. When both parties are the gas pedal, the whole thing can just fly apart.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so one thing I think I hear you arguing for is that we maintain a sense of proportion. And in the spirit of doing that, I think we have to recognize that there are asymmetries on both sides of this continuum. So it's really like the game of both-side-ism doesn't quite work. And so there's one asymmetry, which accounts for why I've spent more time focused. As much as I bang on about Trump, I've actually spent more time focused on the problems of the left. And it's because the left has really captured culture and institutions in a way that the right hasn't. The morons who marched in Charlottesville don't have significant cultural power. The morons who marched in Charlottesville don't have significant cultural power, but their equivalents on the left really do in that their arguments and their moral intuitions have filtered into institutions that I actually care about. Right. So that, you know, the New York Times isn't being vitiated by Ku Klux Klan ideology, but it is being vitiated by a sense that racism is at the bottom of

everything. And what's more, it's intellectually and ethically trivially easy to the point of absolutely stultifying boredom to point out what's wrong with the far right. I mean, what's wrong with being a member of the KKK? Well, do we really have to do a podcast on that? Whereas what's wrong with the far left is genuinely confusing to smart, well-educated, well-intentioned people. What's wrong with Black Lives Matter? What could be wrong with that? How is the video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd not proof positive that we have an omnipresent problem with racist, sadistic cops killing young black men, right? I mean, that's just confusing to vast numbers of smart people. And so there's much more to pick apart there. But the other asymmetry that is truly enormous is in the political derangement of the

Democrat and Republican parties at the moment and the way in which the Republicans have been captured by a personality cult under Trump. And this is something that, again, people who defend Trump always get wrong. I mean, they'll point out the kinds of things you've pointed out, sort of like ordinary opportunism and cynicism and hypocrisy that happens within the ordinary norms of norm violations politically. So, you know, Obama said he wouldn't do this thing, and then, you know, 24 times, and then he did the very thing he said he wouldn't do. And so if you line those indiscretions up with the kinds of things Trump has done, well, then it seems like, okay, this is both sides' problem. You know, politicians always lie, right? That, you know, what's new about that? And many people saw in Biden's recent speech, you know, he's doing the very thing we've accused Trump of. He struck a

very discordant, semi-fascistic note in condemning a large part of American society. But it's just the wrong scale of comparison. And so here's an analogy that comes to mind, which is not perfect, but it gets at, it certainly doesn't capture the multiplicity of problems with Trump and Trumpism, but it captures the scale and maliciousness of the dishonesty that is really underwriting the whole enterprise. And so I would ask our listeners to imagine that, especially any listeners who are still with us who would defend Trump here, imagine that rather than having President Biden, we had a President Jussie Smollett. Now, that may seem insane, but that's precisely how insane I think it is that we had a President Trump. I mean, just imagine, for those who don't recall, Jussie Smollett was this actor who faked an attempted lynching on himself. He claimed that two MAGA people attacked him and put a noose around his neck

and poured some flammable liquid on him and tried to kill him because he's black and he's gay, and they said this is MAGA country. And inconveniently for his allegations, it happened to be 20 below zero that night in Chicago, and the idea that there were two guys running around in MAGA hats looking to lynch somebody seemed pretty far-fetched, and his story unraveled. But he got on national television and talked about how harrowing it was to have been almost lynched, and he told what really is at bottom a vicious and society-shattering lie at scale, right? Now, imagine if he had been politically rewarded for this. Imagine if he was holding rallies with tens of thousands of people and whipping them up into a frenzy over the lie that he was almost lynched. In my view, that's really the scale of derangement we see among Republicans at the moment.

This lie that the election was stolen, the lie and the fact that we had a sitting president who wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and the party has defended him on this. That's what's just so far beyond the pale here. And it's quite divorceable from all of the policy concerns that are rational, that would cause people to have defended Trump in the first place. I mean, it's totally rational and defensible. And it's not necessarily my position, but we can argue about, you know, whether we want to have less immigration or different immigration, whether we want more

economic nationalism, whether we want fewer foreign entanglements, all of that is fine. But it seems to me what can't be argued for at this point is that it's acceptable to have had a president who is lying at this scale, this maliciously, and deranging our politics that fully on that basis. deranging our politics that fully on that basis. Yeah, look, I agree with you entirely. I wasn't trying to do a... Just to be clear, I wasn't alleging that. I was just trying to connect the dots the way a Trumpist would. Yeah, no, I... Let me stipulate, I agree with you entirely in the sense that, you know, I mean, my late friend,

P.J. O'Rourke, probably understated it, but it gets, directionally, it's the right point. In 2016, he said, look, I'm paraphrasing, but he said, look, Hillary Clinton is unacceptable within normal parameters. Donald Trump is unacceptable outside of normal parameters. And I think that's right. Trump himself is sui generis in a lot of ways in so far as he is... I've been issuing this challenge for seven years now to have somebody give me a definition

of good character that Trump can clear. And no one has done it successfully. And many people have written thousands of words claiming that they've done it. And then you look for the actual sentence that says, here's why Jonah's wrong. And it's like David Horowitz says, well, Trump is incredibly loyal to his family. Well, first of all, even if that were true. It's not even true. It's not true. But even if it were true, really like that is a threshold thing to say he has good character i mean like we normally think that that's sort of like priced in to like

normal behavior but it's not true you know this is the guy who cheated on his third wife while she was nursing their newborn with a porn star i mean he is he's famously vicious to his kids not not his daughter but his sons there's one story that he uh we don't have to do that i can go on autopilot about this stuff but he was once when it was when his wife his first wife suggested that they named their firstborn don jr he said we can't do that what if he turns out to be a loser and there is literally i mean i mean this very sincerely there is no definition of good character um no matter how far out you want to, you want to take it that Donald Trump can get a passing grade on. And I'm one of these, you know, fuddy-duddy conservatives who used to think that like

emphasizing good character was an important thing to do in politics. Maybe not to the point where it was the only issue, but to me it's important. Good character also should not have an ideological valence. And this is just a sordid, narcissistic guy who, you know, I guess this is a good way to, I don't know if you've had my friend and colleague Yuval Levin on, but he wrote a wonderful book called Fractured Republic on the role of, I'm sorry, another book called A Time to Build on the role of institutions in America. And I think he has a fundamental insight that gets at the broader landscape of why we're in the mess that we're in and why institutions are so sick. Normally, institution is a lot of thing for

economists. It's just a rule. But when we talk colloquially about an institution, we think of an organization or some other form of, of association that molds character, right? I mean, the sort of cliched version of it would be, you know, you get some irresolute slacker or hippie, you put them in the Marines, They turn them into a Marine. You have undisciplined little boys. You put them in the Boy Scouts. They end up helping little old ladies across the street. You go into the monastery, you come out a priest, right?

There are things that institutions do to shape the individual for the greater good of the institution and in the process make the individual a better person along the way or at least that's the hope and the problem that we have today is that we no longer see or too many people no don't see institutions as platforms to perform upon, to extract essentially rents or status from the institution for their own self-aggrandizement, their own glorification. And you see this in journalism all over the place, these journalists who use their association with the New York Times or the Washington Post or wherever. And then they go out and they tweet and they create their own cults of personality, their own brand. We can have a perfectly legitimate

conversation about Colin Kaepernick and certainly say that the cause he was associated with is a righteous cause. That's all fine. But there's no disputing that he used the NFL as a platform for his own issues. Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, you can go through a long list. And Donald Trump is, I don't know, the nay plus ultra of all of this. He used the presidency as a platform for his own personal cult of personality in ways that where he was commenting on things that the government was doing as if he was a pundit. He was using the mechanisms of power and of government to create an independent, informal base of power and adulation when normally, you know, what presidents do,

whether it's Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan or whoever, they bend their needs to a large extent to the needs of the presidency itself. It's a job that requires remarkable amounts of self-sacrifice. And Donald Trump rejected that entirely to make it all about him and the glorification of him. And that is something, I mean, I don't know enough about Andrew Jackson to say that we've never had this before, but it's certainly, we've never had it before in the age of modern media or anything like it.

And he's done lasting and permanent damage, not just to our institutions in the country, but also, you know, my ballywick, which is conservatism, because conservatism is now being redefined into a kind of right-wing populism, which is antithetical to actually being a conservative. Well, it's often said that Trump is a symptom, right? Really, the problem isn't Trump. The problem precedes him. I think there's some truth to that, but he's also a cause of further symptoms, right? I mean, he's the product of hyper-partisanship on both the right and the left, but he's also made that partisanship much worse. And he's also a symptom of the loss of trust in institutions, but he's also made everything on that front worse too. So there's

a dialectical nature to all of this. So he's made the right worse, and he's also made the left worse. And then the left becoming worse has given much more energy and justification even for Trumpism, right? So it's like almost everything that Trumpists decry on the left is something that is worth worrying about on the left, right? And as the left turns up the volume of their moral panic over pronouns or whatever it is, it's understandable that it's causing the right to go berserk. But this mutual reinforcement is really unhealthy. I agree entirely. So there's a quote from Orwell, which I use often to make this point. Orwell, I think it's in Politics in the English Language, where he says, a man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, but then fail all the more completely

because he drinks. And I think that's sort of the dynamic. We had problems that led to Trump, but Trump made all of those problems worse. It's almost Tolkien-esque how this creature brings out and distorts the worst in his enemies too, and provides justification to hate the enemies even more. And it's, it's very depressing if you get too caught up in it. Well, what's been your experience? At first,

remind me, I called you a never Trumper. I imagine that was the case. When did you get off the train? I imagine, in fact, that was the case. When did you get off the train? content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.