Making Sense with Sam Harris - #334 — The Low-Trust Society

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with David Brooks about the state of American democracy and the liberal world order. They discuss the weakness of moral individualism, the loss of social trust, the dangers of identity politics, what happened to the Republican Party, the hatred of elites, the 2024 Presidential Election, the Trump indictments, the war in Ukraine, moral force, the roots of liberalism, the various flavors of Trump support, the Biden presidency, Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal, Biden’s prospects in 2024, Nikki Haley, economic inequality, the problems with meritocracy, the state of media and social media, the lure of conspiracy thinking, the politics of recognition, our handling of the Covid pandemic, our difficulties acknowledging uncertainty, our withdrawal from Afghanistan, the limits of American power, 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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Well, I have a significant housekeeping to do, but I think that will be a standalone podcast. So look for that next. Today I'm speaking with David Brooks. David is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and also a columnist for The New York Times, and a commentator on PBS's NewsHour. He's the author of several books, including The Second Mountain and The Road to Character, as well as the forthcoming book, How to Know a Person, The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. David has been awarded more than 30 honorary degrees. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he teaches at Yale University. David and I spoke

about the state of American democracy and the liberal world order. We discussed the weaknesses of moral individualism, the loss of social trust, the dangers of identity politics, what happened to the Republican Party, the hatred of elites, the 2024 presidential election, the Trump indictments, the war in Ukraine, moral force, the roots of liberalism, the various flavors of Trump support at this point, the Biden presidency, Hunter Biden's laptop, Biden's prospects in 2024, Nikki Haley, economic inequality, the enduring problems with meritocracy, the state of media and social media, the lure of conspiracy thinking, the politics of recognition, our handling of the COVID pandemic, our difficulties acknowledging uncertainty,

our withdrawal from Afghanistan, the limits of American power, and other topics. And now I bring you David Brooks. I am here with David Brooks. David, thanks for joining me. Oh, great to be back with you. So you've been on the podcast before, and I am certainly a fan of yours and read your work, as it appears in the New York Times and the Atlantic. Perhaps you appear somewhere else, and I'm not aware of it, but maybe you can just summarize how you view your career as a writer and a journalist at this point? What kinds of things have you focused on and what are you doing of late?

Well, to start at the beginning, when I was seven, I read a book called Paddington the Bear and I decided I want to become a writer. And I've been writing pretty much every day, except maybe 200 in the intervening 50 years. My joke is in high school, I wanted to date this woman named Bernice and she didn't want to date me. She dated some other guy. And I remember thinking, what is she thinking? I write way better than that guy. So those were my values, that you should date the better writer. But those were not her values, apparently. So I worked for the college newspaper, the University of Chicago. And then I was a police reporter on the south side of Chicago. And I got a lucky break, we can talk about, when William F. Buckley spotted

me and gave a speech to the student body of Chicago. And it said, David Brooks, if you're in the audience, I want to give you a job. And I sadly wasn't in the audience. I was actually debating Milton Friedman on national TV. And if your listeners want to watch my first TV appearance, it's, yeah. Nice. 21-year-old me getting slaughtered by Friedman. So is that on YouTube? That's searchable? If you YouTube David Brooks, Milton Friedman, you will see me in a big Afro and these 1980s glasses that look like they're on loan from Mount Polymer Lunar Observatory.

And then I toured through the sort of conservative world, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, Washington Times, eventually landing in 2003. And my joke is I was hired as the conservative columnist at the New York Times, a job I likened to being the chief rabbi at Mecca. And the one constant I would say, just to get us up to the present, is that I was always been a fan of a period of nonfiction between 1955 and 1965, when you had a series of writers who were a little above journalism, but not quite as specialized as academics. Crystal or Daniel Bell or Irving Howe, Richard John Newhouse, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Hannah Arendt. And so they took on big subjects. Reinhold Niebuhr took on, he wrote a book called The Age and Destiny of Man, which covers

a lot of ground. So I always wanted to be in that lane, like slightly off the news from a regular journalist, but not quite specialized like an academic. And I've done these big pieces where I attempt to just figure out what's the temper of our times. And how would you describe your politics at this point? My politics are weirdly unchanged. I have two heroes. One is Edmund Burke, and Burke is a believer in epistemological modesty. The world is complicated, so we should be really complicated in what we can know and change. And when we do it, it should be constant but incremental. And then my other hero is Alexander Hamilton, who was a Puerto Rican hip-hop star from the Heights. He was, for me, I was raised by my grandfather, really, an immigrant. And so I have that immigrant mentality that government should be energetic on behalf of people so they can rise and succeed in America. And so Hamilton really starts the tradition, the Whigs in the 19th

century, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, continue it, Abraham Lincoln, with the Land-Grant College Act and the Homestead legislation. And I think the Whig tradition really intellectually goes up to Teddy Roosevelt and maybe John McCain, but it's a tradition that dies out. But there are six of us left, and I'm happy to be a Whig. And there was a phrase I ran across from Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher, who said, I'm happy to be at the rightward edge of the leftward tendency. And these days, I'm so repulsed by the Republican Party, I guess I'm supporting and rooting for the Democrats, but I'm on the rightward edge of the Democrats. Right. Right. Well, I've always considered you right of me. I mean, I certainly have never been

tempted to be a Republican. I don't think I've ever voted for a Republican. But, you know, I have for many years now made common cause with Republicans who see the recent events on the right and on the left, more or less as I do. saw yourself and David French and Brad Stevens and Jonah Goldberg and others who saw in Trump precisely what I saw in Trump, and we have never gone quiet on that topic. So I want to have a conversation with you that is perhaps a little more narrowly focused than the age and destiny of man, but not by too much, because I want to talk about the state of American democracy and the liberal world order, really. And I want to start with an essay you wrote back in 2020, which was, you published it right before the presidential election, in The Atlantic. The title is America is Having a Moral Convulsion. And really, it's a wonderful and quite depressing piece, and I just want to revisit it because I stumbled upon it a few months ago

and was wondering how your thinking about our situation may have evolved since, whether this is the intervening three years have just confirmed all of your worst fears or magnified them, or if anything has changed. But in that piece, you focus on the breakdown of social trust, mainly in America. And you argue that our trust in our institutions and in one another was in something like a death spiral, really just a catastrophic decline. And you paint this very vivid picture of lost promise, where what seemed to be the high-water marks of capitalism and democracy and pluralism and diversity and globalization at the end of the 20th century

were followed by this more or less unraveling of all of that, you know, and the apparent promise of all of that. And just to get you started, to remind you of where your head was three years ago, I just want to read a short paragraph which can serve as a nice starting point here. This is you. It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people

would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn't pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them. We didn't predict that oligarchs would steal entire nations, or the demagogues from Turkey to the U.S. would ignite ethnic hatreds. We didn't see that a hyper-competitive global meritocracy would effectively turn all of childhood into elite travel sports,

where a few privileged performers get to play and everyone else gets left behind. And so that touches on so much that concerns me about our current moment, both domestically and for its implications for maintaining what many of us perhaps naively have thought about as the rules-based international order. So just, I give you that as a starting point. Tell me, how do things look to you three years on? does that do to people? And one of the things that distrustful people try to make themselves invulnerable, they try to armor up, they want to feel safe. They see threats that aren't there. In a period of distrust, you get surges of populism, people who feel betrayed. And so I think that's all true. But I think if I could step back, that piece poured out of a moment I think a lot of us live through. I live through it very materially. I was with the Wall Street Journal and I was a foreign correspondent in the 90s.

And so I covered the end of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Mosul peace process, the Maastricht process, the European unification. And this was all good news. And so it was a period of convergence when people seemed to be coming together when barriers seemed to be falling. And at the end of my time in Europe, I covered an event of the Yugoslav Civil War. And it turns out that that little event with authoritarian strongmanism and ethnic conflict turned out to be the more important than all the other stuff I covered in predicting what would happen over the next 25 years. And so the end of convergence ended,

and we entered 25 years of really ethnic conflict, authoritarian rising, and really a closing up, a disassociation across all sorts of societies. And the thing that troubled me the most, and still troubles me the most, is the freakish breakdown in social and relational fabric of American society. The rise of depression and suicide is well known, but the number of people who say they have no close personal friends has gone up by four times. The number of people who say that they have broken with a member of their immediate family has risen. There's been a third increase in the number of people who say that they have broken with a member of their immediate family has risen. There's been a third increase in the number of people living without a romantic partner. And if you ask the number of people who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category

is up substantially. If you ask high school kids, do you feel persistently hopeless and depressed? Well, that's risen from like 20% to 45%. So we are still in the middle of some sort of societal, emotional, and relational crisis. Now, there are two things to be said to cheer us all up. One is, and this has been a surprise to me, it is a pillar of the literature on trust that low-trust societies are poor societies, that if you can't trust the people around you, you can't do business deals. And yet, I would have to say American capitalism has sailed on in pretty nice fashion

and picking up steam. Europe and America were roughly even in GDP per capita back when I was over in Europe. And now the US is just crushing Europe. Our economy is just way stronger. We're number one in investment. We're number one in innovation, one or two, along with Switzerland. And so the American economy has gone from strength to strength. As we speak, we're seeing a big turnaround in the fate of nations, if you want to put it that way. China, which seemed to be expanding and rising and seemed to be the rising power, has hit hard times and seems to be struggling, to say the least, economically. Meanwhile, if you go to Ohio, you've got gigantic multi-billion dollar investments from

Amazon, from Google, from Intel. And so we're seeing a renaissance, especially the American heartland, the American Midwest. And so I'm a little surprised the American economy has really surged at a time, even despite the low social trust. And so that's one thing that's making me feel a little better. Maybe it's not ruin all around. Well, I want to talk about politics. And there are many threads here. There's this, what we might call meritocracy and its discontents.

and its discontents, the problem of trust, and this is something you make clear in several of your essays, is linked to the problem of being unable to have a fact-based discussion about more or less anything of substance now. So when you look at what happened during the pandemic, what we witnessed was a more or less total failure to come together as a society because we simply couldn't have a convergence of belief about what was actually happening and much less what to do about it. So there was a total lack of cultural cohesion, and I think we're still living with the aftermath of that and the attendant cynicism and political populism that just seems to be further fracturing our society. So the trust in institutions piece is enormous and perhaps mirrored by a failure of interpersonal trust. And obviously there's a piece around diversity and identity politics that seems to

argue that trust can further break down here. I guess, I mean, just speaking personally, I noticed that this is, I feel very late to some of these topics, because when I look back on my professional output, it really has been almost entirely an argument for what I think of as enlightened individualism. And much of your work, I think, suggests the obvious limits of individualism. And when I say enlightened individualism, I mean enlightened really in both senses of that term. individualism, I mean enlightened really in both senses of that term. I'm thinking of the Western birth of science and secular rationality. I'm also thinking of the more esoteric Eastern spiritual sense of enlightened, in the sense that suggests contemplation and self-transcendence. So I've been arguing for science and scientific skepticism in the culture wars against organized

religion for many years. And simultaneously, I've been championing the virtues of meditation and philosophical reflection and personal ethics. And I do think that all of these things are indispensable for living a good life. But I'm actually humbled by the degree to which all of our independent efforts to live well and to think clearly just can still totally fail to cohere at the level of society at large, right? So it's really, it wasn't until Trump and the pandemic that I believe I fully recognized how much we need institutions and political norms and economic incentives that make us better collectively, right? That make it much easier for selfish people to behave well rather than requiring, you know, sainthood for someone to act,

you know, halfway decently. And so much of the time I see that we've built systems that are incentivizing all the wrong things. And you really do have to be basically a saint to behave well in certain contexts. And what you see most of the time is quite normal people psychologically behaving in ways that make them indistinguishable from sociopaths. And I think social media is the primary example of this. And so I deleted my Twitter account because it just seemed that staring hour by hour into that funhouse mirror was not only giving me a false sense of how grotesque my neighbors were, but it was actually making me a kind of grotesque my neighbors were, but it was actually

making me a kind of grotesque. And so I just had to pull the plug on it. So anyway, this is just to lob a softball to you, but I see your wheelhouse, perhaps among several others, as being one where you have recognized that we not only need lives of personal integrity, we need cultural contexts and institutions and norms and systems that support those lives and enable them. Yeah. I mean, I'm a liberal too, but I guess I would say, you know, I grew up in New York and Greenwich Village in the 60s, and I was surrounded by what you might call moral individualism or social individualism. You should

do what you want. And I imbibed that, and I celebrate a lot of the changes that came out. But I think in the ensuing 80 years, we've overshot the mark, and we became too individualistic. And there were some weaknesses there. One, the illusion that if we all do our own selfish thing, everything will work out for society. And to me, that didn't work out. I mean, we can all do our selfish thing and no invisible hand will create a healthy society. The second thing, and here's the conservative in me coming out, and that would be that reason and individualism and individual choice are built on institutions that precede choice. So the liberal order we treasure is built on an order that is not liberal.

And so there are certain attachments we have to our family, to our town, to our nation, to our creeds, which are not really chosen. They're just, we absorb them in the culture around us, and our commitments to those things like family, nation, community are total. And so those things are not something we choose. Those things are institutions that form us. And so we want to live in moral ecologies in which it's just easier to be good. And so let me give you a concrete example. So like, I don't know, 20 years ago, I got a job on PBS to be a pundit for Jim Lehrer on the NewsHour. And every time I said something crass and sort of self-indulgent on the air, I would see Lehrer's mouth downturn. And every time I said something he thought was good, I would see his eyes crinkle in pleasure. and every time I said something he thought was good, I would see his eyes crinkle in pleasure.

So for 10 years, he never had to say anything. I just tried to chase the mouth, the eyes wrinkle, and try to avoid the mouth downturn. And so in that way, he set standards of behavior that I didn't really consciously think about all that much, but in which it was easier to be good. And so the point is, none of us are separable individuals. We're all very porous, deeply influenced by the world around us. And so we need that world around us to have a shared ecology that'll make it easier for us to be good. And if we don't have that, we're going to defer to our default selfishness. This essay that I referenced at the top here, before the election in 2020, and obviously before January 6th, what has your sense been, I mean, the economic trends notwithstanding, what is your sense now of the right and left are, and how much Trumpism may exceed the problem of Trump himself. Where are we politically as a nation? Trump was obviously the epitome of distrust, a distrustful person who was both a symptom of our larger distrust and an accelerant, making us all distrustful and making us look at one another. I guess in the years since, a couple things have happened.

The first is I've come to see that the problem is not just politics, but our particular kind of politics we practice now. In a healthy society, people practice the politics of distribution, like how much should we raise taxes, where should we spend our money, and that seems to be a healthy politics. We don't practice that kind of politics, by and large, or at least Donald Trump doesn't. We practice the politics of recognition. We want our political leaders to humiliate the other side and affirm us. Ours is a politics looking for identity. We're looking to be admired by ourselves. Ours is a politics looking for identity. We're looking to be admired by ourselves. And that is asking too much of politics than it is possible of delivering. And so, if you're naked and alone, you feel moral landscape. There are us good guys over here and those bad guys over there. It seems to offer you community. We all watch Newsmax together and we hate the other side. It seems to offer you moral action. You don't have to sit with a widow or feed the hungry. You just have to feel properly

indignant at the outrages of the other side. But in all these ways, politics is failing to deliver what you're seeking. It's not really a moral landscape. In real life, complicated life, morality is right down the middle of every human heart. We're all capable of good and bad. In real life, community is not just watching Newsmax together. It's building a town or doing whatever you want to do together. In real life, community is meeting people, befriending people. It's not just joining this or that tribe. So in my view, we've become over-politicized and under-moralized. We've turned everything into politics, whether it's late-night comedy shows or church or sporting events. And we've become terribly over-politicized because people have gone to politics seeking the moral purpose that their moral life

is not delivering for them. What explains the apparent inversion of more or less everything that has occurred in the Republican Party? I mean, how did we get to a Republican Party that would champion this new isolationism and celebrate a figure like Putin, not care that Trump as a sitting president wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power, really not see any flaws in him as a moral actor, not care at all about the character of the person they were putting in the Oval Office. I mean, it just seems like all the toggle switches got flipped, at least with respect to how Republicans thought of themselves in election cycles prior to 2016. What do you think explains that? And do you see

any sign that it could reset in the near term? Yeah, I guess I would tell a lot of different stories, some of which contradict each other, but all of which I think are true. And so, you know, part of the story, I think, is that there was a hidden, not-so-hidden racist element on the right that surfaced, though I have to say, as somebody who inhabited a certain kind of conservative precinct for much of my life, I never heard direct racism, even in private. But do you think, just first, I find it hard to believe that that would explain the embrace of Trump and Trumpism by the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal. How did Brett Stevens get spit out of the Wall Street Journal, in your view?

Yeah, I guess I would tell another, the main story I would tell is a story that is not particularly flattering to people like me, which is around about 1950 to 1960, we shifted the definition of merit in this society. And so the median SAT score of somebody at Harvard rose from like, from say 550 to 680. And we created a new version of the meritocracy basically around cognition and your ability to be pleasing to teachers between the ages of 15 and 18. And this meritocratic class rose up in universities all across the country, married each other, invested massively in their kids.

Those kids got into the same elite schools that the meritocrats went to. They also married each other. They invested massively in their kids. Those kids went to the same schools. They went to live in a few places with booming economies like San Francisco, Austin, Denver, Washington, New York. And so basically, and this happened in the US, but it happened across the Western world, which is why populism is a Western thing, not an American thing. And so 20% of the population garnered an immense amount of wealth, but more important, immense amount of cultural power. So those of us in my class more or less control the media, or at least the mainstream media, Hollywood, the universities. And so every system has, every society has a recognition order. Who's going to confer recognition and approval

on people? And my little class controls it in this country. And so a lot of people in the society, and also in France and in Hungary and Italy and And so a lot of people in this society, and also in France and in Hungary and Italy and Sweden and a lot of other places, said that group of meritocratic elites just has too much power. They have too much economic, cultural, political, and social power. And we hate them. And so we're going to take them down. And Donald Trump is our bastard to take those people down. And those people hate Donald Trump, and therefore, whatever Trump does, I'm going to be behind. And the one thing that continues to shock me to this day is that Christians are supposed to believe in a lot of things, but one

of them is that the ends do not justify the means. And yet, the entire white evangelical world, and now I hear this every day from white evangelicals, that he's a bastard, but he's our bastards, the ends justify the means. And so, that continues to shock me on a daily basis. Yeah. So, you echo, I think you've written a book more or less on that topic, but I'm also hearing what Charles Murray was saying in his book Coming Apart about the segregation of economic rewards that have gone to a certain class of people that have really defined success in terms of a specific cognitive work and virtues, and then there's the attendant economic inequality of all of that. Where does that leave us currently politically? I mean, we're both watching the Republican primary season begin to unfold, or at least the campaigns aimed at primaries next year. Do you see any of this resetting, or you're just expecting Trump to be the candidate or some Trumpist impersonator to be in his place? Well, I guess I recall a time when

Ron DeSantis was only behind by four percentage points to Trump. And there was a time that a crucial question to me was they asked Republicans, are you primarily a supporter of Donald Trump or are you primarily a supporter of the Trump, or are you primarily a supporter of the Republican Party? And during the Trump presidency, most people said Donald Trump. But after the defeats of 2020, the defeats of 2022, the majority of Republicans said, no, I'm a disciple of the Republican Party. And so that gave me great hope that Republicans would go for somebody else. And I think that hope was dashed on the day the FBI found the documents at Mar-a-Lago. And on that day, and then in the ensuing indictments,

Donald Trump's support has risen and risen and risen. Because again, if you go back to the central narrative that we're the Americans who are fighting against the educated elites, then this allows Trump to play that narrative. And I have faith in the justice system. I think they're doing the right thing. But a lot of people out there do not have any faith in that system and do not think they're doing the right thing. So a bunch of lawyers in Washington and Atlanta and New York going after Donald Trump is just underlining the key narrative. And so Trump looks in a very dominant position to me right now. I guess just to return to my initial question for a second,

many of these educated elites obviously are supporters of Trump or supporters of the populist unrest that prompts him up. I mean, you have somebody campaigning like Vivek Ramaswamy, he's the quintessence of an educated elite, and yet he's mouthing all of the pablum that Trumpism would require of him. Do you view that as a purely cynical and opportunistic style of politics? Or do you think that, and these so-called elites have managed to squint their eyes in such a way as to actually agree with Trump and not see a problem with his style of politics? Yeah, for Ramaswamy, I think he looked at the world and said, hey, the narcissistic hucksterism is in vogue. My ship has come in. This is my great skill. For somebody like Tucker Carlson, who I knew, we worked together for nine years at the Workley

Standard. I think there's excitement, the desire to be relevant, the desire to be on the thrill, and a fair degree of cynicism. For people like Rudy Giuliani, I do think it is pure desire to remain relevant. For other people, I think there are a whole variety of rationalizations. And I will say, I periodically go on reporting trips where I interview the Republican donor class. I just want to know what they're thinking, because they've been interesting. And I would say in 2016, the vast majority of the normal GOP rich guy donors were anti-Trump. And then they ended up voting for him because they couldn't vote them for Hillary. And then in 2017, they were still sort of against him. And then as you interviewed them by 2018 and 2019, suddenly they were all sort of for him.

And it was a reminder, the power of team spirit is super strong in American life. And that if power of team spirit is super strong in American life. And that if your enemies are attacking a guy who's sort of on your team, and he happens to be cutting your taxes and putting together a reasonably strong economy, well, then it becomes pretty easy for you to slide over and suddenly you're not anti-Trump, you're just kind of pro-Trump because you want to be part of the team. I have to say now, when I look at the Republican donors, they're back to being anti-Trump because you want to be part of the team. I have to say now, when I look at the Republican donors, they're back to being anti-Trump, and they're looking for an alternative, but they can't find one. But I do think there is this mentality on, there is just a binary mentality to American politics. So I worked at the Wall Street Journal editorial page for nine years,

and I think they don't want to be seen as totally pro-Trump, but if every day they can wake up and critique Rachel Maddow, well, that's something that feels kind of natural. What, if anything, changes when you focus this question through the lens of the war in Ukraine, right? You have many, many Republicans seemingly sincerely espousing the belief that we have absolutely no business selling arms to Ukraine. We're culpable for Putin's invasion because we so recklessly provoked him with talk of extending NATO, you know, and so it was just a pure history of provocation and failed diplomacy on our part that forced Putin's hand. He did what any rational actor would do in invading Ukraine. There's no interesting moral asymmetry there, you know, any talk of a democracy that was a sovereign democracy that was invaded by a belligerent who we should support under a rules-based international order just invites

a cynical guffaw from these people with echoes of Trump saying, do you think our hands are so clean? With echoes of Trump saying, do you think our hands are so clean? I think in that context, he was talking about MBS and the murder of Khashoggi. are deeply skeptical of any argument that we should be supporting Ukraine, have come to that belief, at least imagine they've come to that belief, not calculating some weird political self-interest, but actually just feeling that they've had some kind of epiphany about the status of America on the world stage and the wisdom of retreat on some level. How do you think about Ukraine and Russia in particular and the work they are doing in American politics? Yeah, I have to say first, I'm at least proud that at least most Republicans, I think overall,

and most Republicans in Congress are pretty, very strong in support of Zelensky and what the Ukrainians are trying to do. I know Brett Stevens talked to you about this a couple of weeks ago. So I think that's one thing that should be pointed out. The second thing that should be pointed out is that it's funny how nothing ever goes away. And so the American first ideology, that's deep in American history. And it used to be in the Democratic Party, now it's in the Republican Party. And when Trump said America first for the first time, I thought, oh, that's terrible for him. That'll discredit him with everybody because everybody knows America first didn't work out in the days before World War II. But it turns out I was wrong. There are

a lot of people who are genuinely America first. But I think the thing I've learned, which I didn't anticipate, is how signing on to Trump involves an aggressive amoralism. And so if you're a liberal, you believe in, as you said earlier, the rules-based international order. And that is based on the idea that human beings have the ability to make cooperative arrangements and establish a set of moral norms that are good for everybody. And so thou shalt not invade your small neighbor. That's just a moral norm. And it's not only good for the independence of peoples around the world, it happens to be good for building a stable world order. But Donald Trump's worldview is not that, that any moral order, any set of norms, any institutional set of norms is a cover for elites masking their oppressive power on everybody else. And therefore, the world is dog-eat-dog, live with it. Or as the ancient Athenians said, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. So suck it up. And so I think that is genuinely the mentality I encounter among Trump supporters, that Putin's strong, Ukraine was weak,

what do you expect? And I think that aggressive amoralism is really a crucial dividing line, not only in American politics, but in world politics, because there are other leaders like Xi Jinping, who also believe that power is everything. And so where those of us who are liberal are trying to defend this liberal order, this set of norms, this belief that people can cooperate, and that it's not just airy-fairy, but cooperation is actually a tenacious, noble thing we do. And I think evolutionary psychology backs that up, but we have to restate moralism. And that's, you know, I've mentioned morality a lot recently in this conversation, and it sounds so pompous and self-righteous, I understand, but it's a real thing. Moral force, the moral force that

makes us cooperate one with another, the moral force that if you make an error and I'm not going to take advantage of it because I want to be a decent person, that's hard for us to talk about these days because we're sort of out of habit. But I do think that's the challenge. One of the challenges Trump throws up in our faces. Yeah, and one of the most corrosive things he has done and the movement he has inspired has done is convey the sense that there is no such thing as moral high ground, right? And any pretension that there is or might be, and much less that one might

occupy it, is just a cover for a deeper hypocrisy, right? It is just elite speak and selfishness and hand-waving and virtue signaling, and there is just no there there, right? It's impossible to ever sincerely aspire to wisdom and compassion and any other higher virtue individually or collectively because it's all just a fig leaf for selfishness and getting what you can. a fig leaf for selfishness and getting what you can. Yeah, it's just, it's awful to see how difficult it has become to even use aspirational language in a political context without provoking a reflexive, cynical response.

And see, when you talk about, to use this narrow case, when you talk about the moral imperative of backing a democracy over the rampages of an invading despotism, you know, we're not lionizing somebody like Putin who murders his political opponents and journalists, even in other countries, the fact that that just, it falls on deaf ears, and not only falls on deaf ears, it just, there's this basic sense that we should never have cared about any of those differences. Yeah, it's been a reminder to me, I agree with you completely, that how recent the liberal enlightenment project, how recent it is, I mean, one of the things that

did not exist in the ancient world was the notion of compassion, like the idea that you should feel sorry for a slave or somebody who was poor, who somebody was being, whose intestines were being ripped out of their guts, that sense that you should be humble before all that. Humility was like, what are you being humble for? Humility is for losers. Humility is for the downtrodden. Humility is not a virtue. But slowly over the centuries, we have a sense, no, humility is, to my mind, the primary virtue. Humility is an awareness of how little we know, and the humility is an awareness of how morally flawed we are, and therefore we need each other to set up norms, and that we have to rely on what, we may disagree on this, but I think

there is a universal moral order. I think Martin Luther King got his great strength from a belief that it wasn't just he who believed segregation was wrong, but segregation was wrong in all circumstances and all time. It's part of the universal moral order that slavery and segregation are wrong. And these beliefs were either revealed or slowly built up over centuries. And a lot of people accuse liberalism, Enlightenment liberalism, as being this amoral set of procedures. But it's not. It's actually based on a moral vision of human dignity,

that democracy, it's not just about voting, but it's an encountering another person who disagrees with you profoundly, and being curious enough to see into the depths of that person about why they do. And so that curiosity is a show of respect. And that show of respect is something we built up as sort of the democratic ideal. And it's funny that I have a quote in one of my recent pieces from Jonathan Haidt, my friend who's a New York NYU social psychologist. He says, moral communities are very hard to build and very easy to destroy. And so that would be the threat, the thing to worry about these days. I must say, I find that I am at an impasse in any political conversation with a Trump supporter when I can't get any acknowledgement that having a sitting president not commit to a peaceful transfer of power was a problem, a problem worth taking seriously. The fact that Trump repeatedly declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and we in fact didn't have a peaceful transfer of power. If I find myself in a conversation with a Trump supporter who won't give any assent to that point,

really just will just put a brave face on and seek to just kind of blow by it, it has no implication for anything, right? I find that I simply don't have the tools to continue having a conversation. to continue having a conversation. We can have a conversation about something else, but it's just clear that there's no way to converge politically. Is there anything you can give me that can get me to navigate that impasse? Can I get you hope? I would say my experience is multi-layered, I guess, on this one. I do think there are certain people, including people I'm close with who are Trump supporters, for whom there's no purchase. You can say X and they'll say no, why? And they won't weigh whether X is true or not, they'll just say why. And so they have a self-enclosed system of belief

that once you accept their assumptions, you can't get in and out of. But I would say one of the things I've learned is I'm done generalizing about Trump supporters. I think, you know, I was at, I ran into, this is years ago, a woman who was, if I remember this correctly, was a big Trump supporter. She was at a Trump rally. She was a lesbian biker who'd survived a plane crash and converted to Sufi Islam. And so I was like, what stereotype do you fit into? And so I would say I meet a lot of people who are, that guy's a jackass, but he's my jackass. Or I'm a one-issue voter, I'm an abortion voter, I hate that guy, but I think abortion is the primary issue for me. I found it's hard now to generalize, even more complicated today to generalize about

Trump supporters than it was in 2016, because I do think they've bifurcated. There's certainly a hard core of like 20 or 30% who are like cult members, but I find a lot of people who are sort of Trump-friendly, Trump-adjacent, Trump-skeptical, would love to see another candidate, but they have persuaded themselves that four more years of Joe Biden would be the end of the republic, and so they're going to stick with the guy. So yeah, if I can cheer you up, I find a wide variety of kinds of Trump supporter these days. How do you think Biden has been doing and what do you think of the Democratic prospects going forward? I mean, I've said repeatedly here that I really wish Biden were not running due to the obvious liability of his age. Perhaps there are other liabilities that are worth taking seriously at this point. But what's your sense of the Biden administration or the Biden presidency and the democratic side of things going into 2024? I'd say age, obviously, is a liability. I think his approvals would be like

10 or 15, 20 points higher if he was 60. But I'll say a couple of things about that. One is, I do get the chance to be in a room with him from time to time. And the extent to which he is physically decayed or mentally decayed is vastly overstated in the media. I've been interviewing the guy since he was, you know, for 20 or 30 years. I almost wrote a book about him about 30 years ago and sort of regret not doing it. So I've interviewed him over many decades and he's like a pitcher who used to throw 92 and now throws 87. So it's a decline, but it's nothing tremendous. And second, in some ways he's better because in those days when I started interviewing him, he had to cram every

fact in the universe into every answer. So they were like 45, 50 minute answers and now he stays on point. And so I think that's positive. Third, I think he's basically picked the right fights. He sees this big fight between authoritarianism and democracy, and I think he's essentially right about that. He's pretty successful as a foreign policy president, I think. gap between, as I say, the coastal elites who are doing pretty well and a lot of other people who are not. And he is actively acting to repair that gap. So a Treasury Department report, which may be a little biased, probably not too much, says that 90% of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act went to some of the poorest counties in this country. I mentioned earlier something which I think is really fascinating to me, that if you look at where the mega investments are in manufacturing plants, battery plants, chip plants, et cetera, et cetera, it's not in California anymore. It's not in New York anymore. It's in Iowa, Arizona, Illinois. I mentioned Ohio. And so that's just, to me,

tremendously good news and a sign that the market is healing, that there are all these hardworking people in these places who were deindustrialized and we couldn't take advantage of their talents. And now capitalism is saying, yeah, we're going to locate our plant in Columbus, Ohio, because there are a lot of hardworking people there. And I think Joe Biden has materially benefited, frankly, a lot of Trump voters, the people who have been left behind. And so I have a much more positive view of the Biden administration than you would think from my political profile. But I think he's basically doing the right thing. And the big thing he

screwed up on, well, a couple of things. Obviously, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the second one was there was too much stimulative spending. So we got too much inflation, but Joe Manchin saved him there. Joe Manchin cut back the stimulus. And so we had the inflation, but now the inflation is down. Our unemployment is low. Wages are rising. Inequality is falling slightly. Compared to Europe, our economy looks good. Compared to China, it looks fantastic. And so I think the age thing and the moral trauma of the last six years keep his approvals low, and I have no confidence he'll win re-election. But I have to say, I think he's been a pretty good president. What, if anything, has come spilling out of Hunter Biden's laptop that you think we should

all take seriously? I guess I have to say it's more serious than I thought it was. I think he was obviously trying to peddle influence. Whether he actually successfully peddled influence is an open question to me. I have to say I'm not a big scammer. 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

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