Making Sense with Sam Harris - #376 — How Democracies Fail

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

Sam Harris and Anne Applebaum discuss the nature of modern autocracies and how democracies fail. They discuss the power of ideas, why autocracies seek to undermine democracies, cooperation among dictators, how Western financial experts and investors have enabled autocracies, how Putin came to power, the failure of engagement and investment to create political change, what’s at stake in the war in Ukraine, Trump’s charisma, the current symptoms of American democratic decline, the ideologues around Trump, the hollowing out of institutions, how things might unravel in America, anti-liberal tendencies in American politics, the role of social media, the different pathologies on the Left and Right, analogies to Vichy France, the weakness of the Democrats, the political effects of the assassination attempt on former President Trump, 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're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the

podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Anne Applebaum. Anne was a columnist for the Washington Post for 17 years, and now she's been a staff writer at The Atlantic since 2020. She's the author of five critically acclaimed books, Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between Poland, where her husband is foreign minister, and Washington, D.C. And her newest book, out this coming Tuesday, but available for

pre-order now, is Autocracy, Inc. I do recommend that you order the book now. It's quite good and not too long a read, very accessible. As many of you know, Anne is one of the most knowledgeable people about autocracy and with a specific focus on Eastern Europe and Russia. She's also an expert on propaganda and on one of the great looming questions of our time, which is how democracies can fail, which is the topic of today's conversation. We discuss the nature of modern autocracies and the vulnerabilities of democracies. We discuss the power of ideas, why autocracies seek to undermine democracies, cooperation among dictators, how Western financial experts and investors have enabled autocracies, how Putin came to power, the failure of engagement and investment to create political change, what's at stake in the war in

Ukraine. And then we pivot to the question at hand, certainly for Americans, which is Trump and the prospects of a second Trump term. We talk about Trump's charisma, the current symptoms of American democratic decline, the ideologues around Trump, the hollowing out of institutions, how things might unravel in America during a second Trump term, anti-liberal tendencies in American politics, the role of social media, the very different pathologies on the right and the left, analogies to Vichy France, the weakness of the Democratic Party, the political effects of the assassination attempt on Trump, and other topics. And now I bring you Anne Applebaum. I am here with Anne Applebaum. Anne, thanks for joining me again. Thanks for having me. So remind people, I mean, you've been on the podcast before, I think it's probably been about

a year and a half or so since we spoke, and I will obviously introduce you properly, but remind people of the types of topics of the Soviet Union and of communism in Eastern Europe. They were focused on what autocracy is, how dictatorship works, why people go along with it. And more recently, my journalism focuses on democracy and maybe how democracy declines. I see a connection between what I do now and what I did then, but it's not a happy one. Yeah. And you also have a special focus on propaganda as well, if I'm not mistaken. Yep. I write about propaganda. And that also comes out of my interest in history of propaganda, Soviet propaganda, how it worked, why it was effective, which it sometimes was. Right. Well, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much for you to work on now.

I think you must be doing a lot of knitting. As someone said to me recently, there's no news right now, really, is there? Nothing to think about. It's quite incredible. It's often heard that one wonders, one worries where the adults are in the room, and one hopes they're in there. And you are always someone who I think about on my short list of people who are one of the adults. And that's also in evidence in your new book, which is Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Let's start with your book and talk about just the phenomenon of autocracy generally in its modern variants and the tension between it and democracy. And then all of this, for my purposes, is going to take us to a discussion of American politics and the prospect of a second Trump term, which is looming larger than ever at this point. Perhaps you can just lay out the thesis in your book about the modern variance of autocracy, and we can talk a little bit about what we take for granted

in democracy and how we haven't given enough thought to the fact that democracies actually need to be maintained, and they can sometimes fail. And I mean, this is just something where, you know, we're fish swimming in water, you know, and the water has always been fairly tepid, at least in the span of anyone's normal lifespan. And so we're not really alert to just how fully things can change. Let's talk about that. No, I think we're not fully alert to just how fully things can change. Let's talk about that. No, I think we're not fully alert to how things can change and also how fast they can change. But let me start with the beginning of your question, which is what my book is about. The book describes not an autocracy, but really a network. It's not an alliance. It's not really even an axis. There isn't a secret room where

bad guys get together and make decisions. It's rather a group of dictatorships who share some things in common. And I'm talking about Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and a handful of other smaller ones — Belarus, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, maybe Azerbaijan. Others join for some issues and not for others. And these are all, they don't have anything in common ideologically. There's no ideological link between theocratic Iran and communist China and Bolivarian socialist Venezuela or nationalist Russia. But they have some common interests. And one of their big common interests, and this is one of the things that distinguishes them from 20th century dictators, or at least the biggest and most famous ones, is they're very interested

in money. They have a lot of money. The people who run these countries, their families have a lot of money. They're interested in protecting the money. They hide the money. They use Western institutions, financial institutions, to do that and have been doing so for a couple of decades now. They're also very interested in us, by which I mean you, me, and probably everyone listening to this podcast. They're interested in pushing back against the ideas and ideals of liberal democracy and undermining them, mostly, again, for the purposes of their own power and their own domestic interests. Their own opponents use that language, whether it's the Navalny movement in Russia, which is focused on transparency and anti-corruption, or the women's movement in Iran, which is focused on really very basic rights, women's rights to make decisions

about how they look and what they wear, how they live, or the opposition in Venezuela, which wants to return Venezuela to the democracy that it enjoyed for many decades. And the leaders of those countries know that the language of liberal democracy is inspiring to their opponents. And so they've, over a couple of decades, have sought to find ways to undermine it. And more recently, they concluded, again, I don't think this was a group decision. It's just something that you can see them all doing. They've decided that part of that has to be to undermine us.

In other words, to discredit liberal democracy in its homes, whether it's in Europe or whether it's in the U.S. or whether it's in some of the Asian democracies. And they've contributed in various ways, some of which we know about and have known about for a long time, to social media campaigns. They fund or support in other ways far-right movements, occasionally far-left movements, which also fight against liberal democracy or seek to undermine it.

And that's the essence and the basis of their foreign policy. I mean, it's really – it's key to who they are and what they do. And we have, because the Western world and especially Americans tend to look at the world in category, you know, we talk about, we have Latin American experts and we have Africa experts and we have Middle Eastern experts. It's very rare for people to look at how they see the world and they don't see the world parceled into geographic divisions. They see the world as, you know, there's a battle they're fighting. It's against the people who use the language that threatens them and their particular form of oligarchic and kleptocratic power. And they're willing to push back against them in all kinds of ways,

with propaganda economically and more recently militarily as well. more recently militarily as well. Yeah. So one thing you're describing there is the unavoidable power of ideas, right? So you have ideas about individual rights and transparency of institutions and the accountability of the government to its people and the rule of law, justice, right? And those ideas are contagious and autocracies recognize this. And this answers several questions we might have if we thought about it. You might ask, well, why does a country like Russia even bother is, it's still important to seem to be compliant with the norms that are kind of seeping into everyone's consciousness. I mean, I guess there are societies that control this better than others. I mean, China is probably more locked down than most at this point, but still there's this, they're quite alert to the threat posed by the contagious ideas of liberalism. And I think this goes all

the way back to Mussolini, who is reported to have said that between democracy and totalitarianism, there can be no compromise. I remember Orwell writing during the war, he was saying that it could seem a bit of a mystery why Hitler felt the need to attack England. I mean, bit of a mystery why Hitler felt the need to attack England. I mean, why couldn't Hitler just take over Europe and let England be England over there intact? But from his point of view, Hitler, even a successful Third Reich spanning all of Europe and perhaps North Africa, couldn't afford to have England be the funnel, I think he said, the funnel through which deadly ideas from beyond the Atlantic flow into the police states of Europe, right? So there's this contagion problem. But it does seem somewhat mysterious because it seems like, at least for

the better part of a generation, you'd think some of these societies could just simply not care what is happening outside their borders and just lock everything down. The trouble that they have is that the instinctive reaction to dictatorship, even among people who've never lived in a democracy or never experienced it or never read John Locke or the U.S. Constitution, the instinctive reaction to people who don't have rights is to demand rights. You know, the instinctive reaction, people who don't have rights is to demand rights. You know, the instinctive reaction, you know, in China, at the very end of the COVID lockdown, you had these spontaneous demonstrations led by very young people who were much too young to remember Tiananmen Square, you know, the democracy movements of the past, who probably had very little contact with the Western world.

And yet the language they leapt to almost immediately was the language about free speech. Why can't we say what we want? You know, why can't we make the decisions that we want? Because that's the natural reaction. Recently, I've been reading a lot about the colonial period in the United States. I've been reading a lot about the colonial period in the United States. And some of what they came to, I mean, some of their ideas about how the United States should work and how the Constitution should be written also came just from this experience of bumping up against dictatorship. You know, it was unfair that the king appointed judges and could also dismiss judges. And,

you know, judges should be independent. And some of them got that idea from Montesquieu or they read it in a book, but a lot of people understood it instinctively. And that's, I think, you're exactly right when you talk about the power of ideas. And you're also right to look back at history, because the idea that democracy is dangerous to dictatorships is very old. I mean, you can go even a little bit before Mussolini. Lenin used to talk about bourgeois democracy, and he spent a lot of time talking about how it's fake. You know, it's not real. It's not real democracy. It doesn't bring power to the workers. It's based on false consciousness, or the political parties aren't

real parties. Some of which language, by the way, you can hear today. I mean, you can hear it coming from modern Russia, or you can hear it even sometimes coming from our own far right. So that's been a part of the language of autocracy also from the beginning. And your point about Hitler in England also has a modern version. So why did Russia invade Ukraine? There are some reasons. Putin has some imperial idea in his head.

He's very grandiose. He imagines putting the Soviet Union back together. But the other reason was that the Ukrainians had made a choice a decade earlier in 2014 to evict their corrupt president who was undermining their political system and changing their institutions and to replace him with democratically elected presidents and with a more free and open system. And they had demonstrations where they waved posters calling for an end to corruption and more transparency and the rule of law. And Putin saw that and he thought, if Ukraine succeeds, if Ukraine becomes a successful democracy, then why wouldn't someone try it in Russia? Countries are very similar. They have lots of intermarriage. Lots of Russians

know Ukraine, have been to Ukraine. The Ukrainians could become a successful modern European democracy. Then surely someone would want Russia to be the same. And of course, he had to strike back at that because that would undermine his own kleptocratic oligarchic system in which he sits on top of a kind of spider web, you know, a hierarchy of dependent, codependent business people and security institutions. So it's exactly the power of democracy and the success that democracy has had winning converts, even in places where it's never existed before, that has inspired this new level of autocratic activism and this new desire even for autocratic states to help one another. You know, why does Russia support the Belarusian dictator? Well, because they don't want him to fall, because that would be bad for,

that would make Putin look bad. But why do Russia and China and Iran, which has really, it lives in a completely different part of the planet, why do they support Venezuela? Why do they help keep the Venezuelan dictatorship together? And again, that's because every time a dictator falls or every time a tyrant is defeated or every time a civic movement wins, that makes them nervous. And it's funny because, of course, in the home of democracy, in the home of those ideas, United States, Europe, a few other countries, those ideas are less and less powerful.

We don't appreciate them, but they are very much appreciated by people who live without them. Yeah. As you point out in the book, the contagion of ideas goes both ways. We'll get to the way in which Kremlin talking points seem to magically come out of the mouths of not just Trump himself, but big tech investors who are now his most potent enablers. We'll come back to Ukraine. At one point, you quote the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in the book, who said that it's a battle over what the world order will look like. It's not just about Ukraine. It's about who wins in the end over a much larger chessboard. But let's return to that. I think Ukraine will be a bridge to talking about Trump and certainly his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, and what the implications are there.

But in your book, you make it clear that Western democracy is, despite having the moral high ground politically, and we're definitely on the side of democracy in this conversation, we nevertheless still have a lot to answer for in how our own financial experts and investors and just the system we've built to build and maintain wealth in the West has not just been gamed by these autocracies, but we really have just offered our services with both hands. And there's a fair amount of opprobrium to spread around on that point. What have we done? I mean, I guess to sharpen this up, I'll just tell you about my recent walk through Mayfair in London, which has to be, if not the most, certainly one of the most lavishly wealthy neighborhoods in any city on earth. I mean, it's just incredible. I mean, I spent a lot of time in nice places, but the sense of wealth that is oozing out of those buildings is just extraordinary. Would I be right in thinking that some of this effect is due to the expropriated wealth from some countries where people are not quite enjoying life as it is in Mayfair? Right. I have a friend, actually, who once she was doing research for a book. I'm not sure she ever wrote it, but it was about one particular street in Mayfair.

And she wanted to go house by house and look at who owned them or who might own them, because in many cases, those houses are owned by anonymous companies. They're owned by shell companies or it's not clear who the beneficial owner is. And many often they're empty. I mean, they may or may not actually be used by anybody. They function as sort of Swiss bank accounts. I mean, they're a place for storing money. But yeah, in the book, I went back to a story that's pretty well known among Russia watchers, but I don't know that it's generally known, which is about how Putin came to power. And he began as the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Some people might remember that. And in that era, he began stealing.

And he originally stole from the city. Again, details are in the book. Took the money out of the country, sent it abroad where it was laundered. It was then slowly brought back into the country where it was used to acquire things, property, buildings, companies. And it wasn't just him doing this, of course, it was a whole group of people, his colleagues. And they did this with the absolutely full knowledge and assistance of Western bankers, Western accountants, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, accountants, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, in some cases, Western governments. Many people knew that this was how he, it wasn't just him, of course, how he was getting rich and how others

in Russia at that time were getting rich. And many people were happy to help them because, you know, you could make money. And there was an idea at that time, this is the 1990s, that business with autocratic states, not only is it politically acceptable, but it might even be good because engagement with the former totalitarian or former, you know, the former Soviet world or in China, the former Chinese communist world was a way of ensuring that they were integrated into the world economy. Maybe it would help open them up. Maybe it would spread ideas. Maybe our ideas would spread to them. And there was even a period when a lot of people in Russia and also in China also wanted this to be true. And there was much of the opening in that period. I mean, I think there was some goodwill on both sides. I'm not saying that everybody involved was corrupt, but it was pretty clear, again, pretty early that people like Putin were going to take advantage of this situation and in particular take advantage of the breakdown of

their country's state. I mean, the breakup of the Russian state and the sell-off of its property to individuals. And we're going to use the Western financial system to make themselves not just rich, but spectacularly rich. You know, think how wealthy the Russian oligarchs, the Russian billionaires became in a very short period of time. And they didn't become wealthy by inventing a better mousetrap or, you know, raising themselves up by their bootstraps and climbing up, you know, the economy or by working hard, they became wealthy because they stole assets from the state, you know, or they acquired them very cheaply in some corrupt way. And in effect, they were stealing from ordinary Russians

because who owned the state assets? I mean, everybody owned them. I mean, there of course are forms of privatization that are legitimate. There can be a sell-off of state companies. Everybody has a chance to participate. It's done in order to benefit the Treasury. This is how British privatization was done in the Thatcher era. But that's not what happened in Russia. What happened in Russia was that, in effect, the assets were stolen.

Ordinary people didn't benefit. The state was impoverished. And instead, a few people became billionaires or multibillionaires. And as I said, the West cooperated, assisted, served as accountants and lawyers, eventually served, I mean, almost literally as butlers. I mean, selling houses to the Russians in London, helping them buy yachts, explaining to them what art they needed to buy. You know, there became industries grew up around them. And I'm picking on the Russians, but actually, you could describe that of other places. There are leaders in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America who have become rich in the same way or in similar ways. And the international financial

system enabled this new form of corruption. Also in the book, I talk about how corruption works in other places. And I picked on Zimbabwe, maybe unfairly, because there are many countries I could have chosen. But it's a country where there had been corruption in the past, and it was kind of traditional corruption. You know, there were, you know, bosses who, you know, you had to pay people or you had to bribe people in order to get anything done, and there was a political party that effectively operated as a one-party system, and there was corruption around that.

That's not how corruption works in Zimbabwe anymore, and now it's about large amounts of money being taken out of the country, gold being stolen regimes is to clean up our own act. I mean, why do there need to be any anonymous companies for any reason? I mean, I know there are some business arguments, but they're pretty weak when you look at them. You know, why is it legal to hide your money, hide billions and billions of dollars in tax havens? That's done by people who need to do so either because they're hiding from the tax authorities or because the money's stolen. So we've created these systems, and these are man-made systems. There's nothing natural or automatic about them. And we could uncreate them. And if

we uncreated them, or to be more grammatical, if we abolish them, then we would at least cut off that part of, you know, the ability of those regimes to do that. Right, right. So, yes, it wasn't just all venality and avarice. There was this notion, I mean, it seemed plausible at the time. I mean, I don't know if it was first birthed in the brain of President Clinton that, I mean, it really plausible at the time. I mean, I don't know if it was first birthed in the brain of President Clinton. I mean, it really follows directly from the point we made earlier about the power of ideas. I mean abundance aimed at them decade after decade? How could they not want to moderate their politics in the face of all those good things? Well, to be clear, many of them did. So many Russians did in the 90s. I knew many Russians who did. Many Chinese did as well. But it is really interesting when you go back and you

listen and read what people were saying at this time. This is the early 1990s, whether it was Bill Clinton, whether it was the Germans who were great fervent believers in the power of economic investment to create political change. There is an enormous amount of optimism and faith that our ideas are so much better and our ideas are so persuasive and openness is so attractive that this will defeat whatever remains of the Soviet system or whatever remains of the Chinese communist system. And there won't even be a contest. I mean, it will be, and there won't even be pushback. It was very, it was so optimistic. And there's a version of it which also involves technology and the internet. There's a famous speech that Bill Clinton gave right about the time he was

arguing that China should be accepted into the WTO, the World Trade Organization. And he talks about, ha, ha, ha, the Chinese will never be able to control the Internet. That's like nailing Jell-O to the wall. And he makes this speech in a room full of foreign policy scholars at Johns Hopkins, which is an institution I'm very fond of at the School of Advanced International Studies. And everybody laughs and claps. and claps. And of course, he was wrong. And almost even at the time he was saying that, the Chinese were already beginning to control the internet and already beginning to think about how they were going to put up what became known as the firewall, the many different kinds of controls on what people can say. But the optimism of that moment, I think, blinded us both to the possibilities that the Internet had of being used as a tool of control and also to the possibility that if we weren't careful in the way that we invested in Russia or China or dictatorships in Africa or elsewhere, that we would empower the dictators and we would give wealth, we would allow the political leaders to become wealthy at the expense of others. And it was a very optimistic moment and we overshot. I want to turn toward Trump and Trumpism and American politics, but I think let's cross the bridge of the war in Ukraine to get there. As I said before, his pick of J.D. Vance as the vice presidential candidate seems to telegraph

an intention to pull U.S. support. I don't know how much we can read into it, but Vance at this point is famous for saying that he simply doesn't care about what happens to Ukraine. And Trump has been, we'll talk about the degree to which his entanglement with Russia is still mysterious. And while any interest in it is now much maligned, right of center is just more Russiagate conspiracy thinking. The man has had a spectacular amount of exposure to Russian influence in all kinds of ways. And it's at a minimum strange. But let's talk about Ukraine before we get there. Why should Americans care

about what happens there? I mean, I think this is really that, like, this is the level at which American politics needs to hear the question answered. Because it's very easy in the current environment to say, I mean, a phrase like the rules-based international order, I think, means nothing. You should probably give your definition of it, because to the man on the street, that is not something they are thinking about. And with a great ocean on either side of us, most Americans don't really think we have much of a stake in what happens over there. And over there is pretty much all of the world apart from what's in our borders. So what's at stake in Ukraine?

So first of all, look at why Putin invaded Ukraine. I spoke about it a little bit already. It was because Ukraine represented an ideological problem for him because it was a democracy. But there was another aspect to it as well. He invaded Ukraine in the manner that he did, which meant occupying territory, setting up concentration camps, kidnapping children, changing their identities, using really a level of cruelty nobody has seen in Europe since the Second World War. He did that partly to say, I don't care about your rules. I don't care about how you think the world should be run.

I don't care about the UN Charter, which says that large countries shouldn't invade small countries. I'm going to intervene wherever and however I want, and I'm going to start here. I'm going to do it here, and I'm going to see whether you are going to stop me. And of course, he did it believing that we wouldn't stop him. That was part of the plan. I think he was very surprised when not just the United States, but a consortium of countries, NATO, but others also, South Korea, Australia, Japan, have come together to block that Russian invasion. And they've done so partly because of the atrocities that Putin commits in Ukraine, and people are simply offended by them, but also because if Putin's idea of how the world should

work holds, then it's not just Russia that will be able to do what it wants wherever it wants. If he can prove that you pay no price for invading your neighbors, then why shouldn't China invade Taiwan and take over the international semiconductor market? You know, or why shouldn't Venezuela invade Guyana? Why really should any state, you know, hold back from using military force to do whatever it wants? Should any state, you know, hold back from using military force to do whatever it wants? And really, why should any state respect American property around the world or American investments? And if that's true, then why should, you know, why should Europe, why should our former allies go along with the trade deals and organizations that we've created according to rules that

benefit us? You know, why should our companies enjoy any special access to anybody's markets, which they do now? You know, there's a, the system that the United States created brings economic benefits to the United States. It brings political benefits. It also brings a kind of, I think it's Americans underestimate how important our allies are, our democratic allies, are even to our own democracy. The fact that we are allied with other democracies and that those are our main trading partners and that we see ourselves in the world, we define ourselves, certainly during the Cold War and up until recently, most Americans define themselves as a democracy. We're doing something good in the world. We believe in freedom. And these are our friends, the other free nations. And that was part of the definition

of who we were, who are our allies. If that changes, first of all, as I said, there will be military consequences in many parts of the world. They've begun already. There will be economic consequences in any part. But I think there's also an important psychological conquest. If America is just a transactional power run by people who conduct foreign policy in their own personal interest, like the Russians do, when Putin does foreign policy, it's not for the benefit of Russians. Ordinary Russians don't benefit from his war in Ukraine. He benefits. And it's all about him. It's about what I do, what I can achieve for myself. If America is led by people like that, people who think American foreign policy is about making me rich or making my family rich or enriching companies who support me, and that's all it is, then I think America begins to suffer in many different ways. We begin to take on the character of these other oligarchies, these other kleptocracies. We begin to lose some of what makes us unique. And eventually, I think we begin to lose some of our rights and freedoms.

You know, a Ukrainian friend of mine recently was describing to me how kleptocracy almost always precedes autocracy. And by kleptocracy, I mean a regime that steals. So, leaders who use their political power to make themselves personally rich while they're in office by stealing the assets of the state, by changing the rules so that their friends and their family get wealthy. Central Asia, typical, you know, we see it there. We see it in the post-Soviet world. We see it all over the world, actually, Africa, Latin America. Otherwise known as graft. Otherwise known as graft.

But the fancy word is kleptocracy. But once you have a kleptocracy, you need to defend it, right? And so there will always be, as I said in the beginning, people who begin to say, wait, this is unjust. Why are you able to use taxpayers' money for your own politics? Or why are you able to steal and we aren't? And there will be a transparency movement or an anti-corruption movement or a movement for more justice. And then the leadership needs to say, right, we need to clamp down on this. We need to block it. You know, we need to stop people from being able to know what we're doing. And we need to erect walls and we need to get rid of gatekeepers and ethics monitors. And we need to undermine the court system because we don't want to go to jail. progress in a lot of states is actually what was happening in Ukraine up until 2014. And this is why my Ukrainian friend was so attuned to it. The thing that the Ukrainians stopped in that year

with their, if you will remember, that was the year of the Maidan revolution. The thing that they stopped was the decline of their country into dictatorship. They wanted it to stop. But by the time they did it, it was very late. I mean, a lot of institutions had been undermined. A lot of institutions had been undermined. A lot of money had been stolen. They had these oligarchs who are, and some of them are still kicking around. But it's a natural progression

that when you have leaders who see their, you know, why are they in power? They're not in power to do good things for America or to enhance America's role in the world, you know, or to spread American influence. They're there for their own personal benefit. Then you begin to have a different kind of country and a different kind of political system. So I think, I mean, it's a pretty short, pretty short move from, you know, we see that Ukraine is a challenge to us and we think it's important to defend them

to, okay, we live in a world where we don't want to defend anything and nothing matters. You know, the transfer from one of those modes to another, you know, involves changing the nature of who we are, I think. And I think that's been clear in the conversation about Ukraine. And listen to who, what kinds of people, especially in Silicon Valley, are talking about why we shouldn't defend Ukraine? And ask yourself, why are they interested in, what makes them so interested in this subject? Well, yes, I'm thinking of one person in particular. We have David Sachs, who's a venture capitalist and now popular podcaster. I think I've only met him once, so obviously I don't know him well, but we have friends in common. And he's now, as of, I guess, two nights ago, addressing the Republican National Convention, saying that Biden provoked, this is a quote, Biden provoked the Russians to invade Ukraine with talk of NATO expansion and rejected every opportunity for peace in Ukraine, including a deal to end the war just two months after the war started.

So how do you respond to that talking point? So first of all, it's not true. I mean, I've talked about this a lot in other places, but the original expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe was tolerated by Russia. There was no plan to expand NATO to Ukraine. The Russians had agreed that Ukraine could be connected to European institutions on a number of occasions. Only later did Putin change his mind. Multiple efforts to engage Russia and include Russia in conversations with NATO and with NATO leaders happened over many years, many times. Biden himself, in his first year in office, made big outreach to Russia. There was meetings with Putin in, if I remember correctly, it was in Geneva. So there was no desire to provoke Russia. There was also no moment in recent history when NATO was on an offensive posture in that part of the world. NATO is a defensive alliance. It doesn't invade other countries. It's there to protect and defend

countries, its members. It doesn't operate on the offensive. And the Russians know that NATO wasn't going to invade them. And we know that they know because, for example, recently they have, Finland joined NATO recently. And Russia has recently taken its troops and equipment away from the Finnish border because, of course, Finland's not going to invade Russia. NATO's not going to invade Russia. They know that. So this is all, these are just Russian talking points that are part of their justification for the war. Also, no, there wasn't a moment at the beginning of the war when it could have been solved. also, no, there wasn't a moment at the beginning of the war when it could have been solved.

The Russians demanded early on that Ukraine give up essentially and demilitarize, which would have been effective. Ukraine saying, OK, we agree we're going to become part of Russia. So there wasn't a moment like that. I mean, these are just false stories. I mean, the question for me is why David Sachs, who really has no interest in foreign policy, as far as I can see, no stake in this conflict, no role in it in previous to, you know, a year or two ago, why he's so interested in the subject. And, you know, my guess is that he or others around him have business interests in Russia that they would like to pursue. That's the only logical, the only logical solution I can see. I mean, we know that Sachs is close to Elon Musk, and we know that Musk has spoken to Putin. He said he has anyway. And we know he may have business interests in Russia.

I mean, just imagine what they are. And maybe that's the explanation. I mean, I don't have a better explanation because there is no prior moment in David Sachs' career when this would seem to be something that was important to him. But yes, he's attached himself to this issue. And of course, he and Musk were among the primary backers of the Vance candidacy. They were very keen for J.D. Vance to be the vice president. Almost simultaneously with the announcement of the Vance candidacy, Musk also announced that he would be giving $45 million a month to the Trump campaign, which makes him one of the biggest donors to the campaign. Again, was there quid pro quo? I don't know. But there is, you know, it's clear that Trump did something that appealed to Musk. be conspiratorial. But these are strange things. Why people who have no intellectual interest,

prior involvement in this part of the world, suddenly care about it? And when we have a president who is famously transactional and famously uninterested in the idea of America as a democracy or the idea of America as the center of an alliance of values or, you know, doesn't care about America playing a role in the battle of ideas in the world, you have to ask, you know, what does influence him? You know, well, he's very interested in money. Yeah. Okay. So let's turn to Trump. I think I'll come back to what might have radicalized Elon and Sachs in a minute because I do think, you know, I don't actually know whether they have, in addition to this, conflicting business interests. My theory of mind for them is even simpler, and I'm in touch with some of the psychological forces

personally. And it's just that in Sachs and Elon, you're talking about two guys who are just far beyond the end of their rope with respect to the kind of social justice moral panic that has happened on the left that has absorbed everything in American politics, you know, left of center. And so there's some other variables here that we could talk about that really do account for the fact that many smart people who you would think would be allergic to Trump and certainly to the populist wave that he's riding nevertheless are supporting him at this moment. So let's talk about Trump. is to, that we'll be able to cut through the inability of many people, or even many, many smart people, well-intentioned people, not morbidly selfish people, to see what is wrong with Trump and Trumpism. I mean, because I might, you know, I have some people very close to me,

some of my closest friends, who simply do not see Trump the way I do. And one of the reasons is, in fact, that he's funny, right? And that covers for a lot. I mean, people find it difficult to take him seriously when they should. And they also take him, you know, his enemies take him deadly seriously when it actually seems that he was probably joking, right? And his fans recognized that he was joking. And then this moment destroys the credibility of mainstream institutions and political opponents who just aren't in on the joke, right? So for instance, he said at one point in an interview that he would be a dictator for a day, right? And this was taken to be just a shocking disclosure of his real authoritarian ambitions, more or less everywhere left of

center, right? I mean, it was like the mask slipped, right, or he pulled it off and glowered at us for a moment. But most people heard that comment differently. I mean, I think, you know, I think everyone heard it with a frisson of norm violation, but it was more like their uncle, you know, was going through security at the airport and he makes a dumb joke about being a member of Al-Qaeda. And then the TSA completely freaks out, but it's still obvious that he's just their uncle and he's not a suicide bomber. And the freak out from the authorities says everything about a climate, this climate of irrational fear and nothing about their uncle, right? And many people perceive Trump's norm violations in this way, right?

He's just riffing. He is not an aspiring autocrat. He's just someone who doesn't give a shit, right? He's, yeah, yeah, these people come from shithole countries. Presidents shouldn't say that. But if we're being honest, some of those countries are shitholes, right? So it's just, you're taking him too seriously. And this is very hard to cut through because it actually, as I said, I've been reading Orwell of late and I stumbled upon his review of Mein Kampf. Oh, it's a fantastic piece of writing. Yeah. I know exactly what you're going to say.

Yeah. I mean, it's glorious. But what I had forgotten about is he wrote this in 1940. And I forgot about this because, I'll just quote Orwell now, I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Right? He's writing this in 1940. Ever since he came to power, till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived

into thinking that he did not matter. But ever since he came to power, I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is, there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse, he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. There's something fairly Trumpian about that portrait. First, there's this sense of just not taking him seriously until he comes to power because he's just a comical figure,

but he remains comical and endearing and entertaining. The truth is I'm not actually comparing Trump to Hitler. I don't think Trump is Hitler. You can tell me if you disagree, but I think there's a big difference in the fact that he's not ideological and he has no apparent grand ambitions beyond anything other than his own self-aggrandizement. So he's a much ethically and just how his personal vanity, how his personal avarice is just absolutely the wrong thing to put in power in this country. We can talk about the implications of that, but I just wanted to first broach this

issue of just the way he presents makes it very easy for people who you would think would be allergic to him and who would see the downside of having this, you know, malignantly narcissistic, arguably sociopathic personality. I mean, he is just a black hole of selfishness. The idea that you would put him in power and that it would just be a good time because he's such a good entertainer, this is the first obstacle. People are just busy being entertained by him. So it's funny, I'm doing this from memory, but as I remember that essay ends with another idea, which is that Hitler understood something as well, which is that people can only take so much of conversation about sanitation and welfare policy and, you know, do-goody ideas about how to make the state better. And that what they really want, at least some of the time, in the expression I remember, is drums, flags and loyalty parades.

And Trump is also represents a pivot from a conversation about policy, which is hard and nuanced and difficult. And, you know, should we have high taxes or low taxes? And what's the advantage or disadvantage? And should we build more roads or more schools? And there's, you know, there's no right answer, really. And he pivots from that to bombast identity politics, you know, flag waving and red hats. And that's a lot easier and more fun for people. And so I think I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm saying there's that aspect to it, too, that the stuff of politics, which has been the most important part of politics for the last several decades, and particularly in the 90s when the Cold War was over and people became very policy wonkish, if you remember that was the word that was invented for the Clinton era,

that politics was about arguing over things. And you had to be kind of an expert to understand it. And the big themes of the Cold War, you know, were the democracy fighting the communism, that was discarded. And a lot of people felt they wanted identity politics and they wanted big arguments and they wanted to be part of a movement. And Trump and the left, I think, both saw that in different ways and tried to bring it back. I would also say, you know, obviously Trump isn't Hitler. And I think it's really important to emphasize that, that nowadays when democracies fall, when they begin to fail, and this is true of Russia, but it's true of Hungary as well. It's true of Venezuela, just to take an example from the left.

They don't fall in the way that we think of Nazi Germany. So there aren't stormtroopers on the street, and there aren't men goose-stepping across the square, and there isn't a coup d'etat, and, you know, I don't know, the president shot in the palace by some lieutenant colonel. That's not how they fall. They fall through slow decline, through the hollowing out of institutions, through, you know, elections that aren't really elections because all the candidates are picked in advance, or through thanks to court systems that aren't really court systems because the judges are so partisan, everybody knows what they're going to decide. Or through media that's not really media anymore because it's part of some kind of big oligarchic game and it's all owned by

people who are business colleagues of the president or friends of the president. And the alternatives are so weak that they hardly matter. And that's how democracies fall. And if you look at how, as I said, how did Hungary decline? How did Turkey decline? How did Russia decline in the 90s and 2000s? How did Venezuela decline under Hugo Chavez? When you look at those stories and when you look at what's happening in the United States, there is a lot of similarity. So what I'm afraid of with Trump is not that there's going to be, you know, Auschwitz in America. That's not happening. And that's, you know, that's why Hitler is always the wrong comparison and why I never, although some of my

friends disagree with me, I would never use the word fascist because I don't think it's useful. It just evokes the wrong mental pictures. But what you will have is institutions that have been designed and set up, you know, to balance out power, to create checks and balances. You will find them declining. And it's, by the way, already happening. them declining. And it's, by the way, already happening. You know, we already have the phenomenon, for example, of Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida, who is acting in such a partisan way. She's the one who threw out the case, the Trump documents case, which is, by the way, the one case against Trump, which is indisputable. I mean, anybody else would have gone to jail for it. You're not

allowed to do that. He did it. He hid documents from the FBI. You know, he stole them. He concealed it. I mean, it's pretty black and white. And she first found a lot of technicalities. Then she found a reason to throw out the case on the grounds that the special prosecutor wasn't legitimate, which is a made-up reason and will probably be thrown out by a higher court. But by that time, the election will be over. So a judge like that, probably be thrown out by a higher court, but by that time, the election will be over. So a judge like that, who is clearly not acting in good faith, you know, she's not seeking to enforce the law. She's not abiding by the spirit of the law. She's there as a purely partisan figure to defend Donald Trump. So that kind of judge is already a symptom of decline. It's a symptom of the way in which our institutions can be undermined. And you can actually go across many different parts of the

American government and political system and find other examples. I mean, another one that you might know about is Jim Jordan's Weaponization of Government Committee. This is a congressional committee that, among others, investigated another guest on your show, Rene DiResta, for allegedly being involved in trying to censor conservative commentary during the 2020 election. And the whole case against her was literally based on untrue facts, things that didn't happen. And she kept saying, this didn't happen, this didn't happen, I can show you this didn't happen. And she kept saying, this didn't happen, this didn't happen, I can show you this didn't happen. And they weren't interested because the purpose of those congressional hearings was not to find out the truth, which is what congressional hearings

are supposed to be for, but to create a performance. You know, they were there to make a performance, to attract attention, to create social media narratives, you know, to create talk on far-right television shows and networks. And once you have government institutions being used in that way, they're already not functional. And my fear about Trump is not that he would, there would be Nazis, you know, but that more and more and more of our institutions would begin to be hollow and empty and fake. And that's because he's not interested in them. He's not acting in good faith. He is president because he doesn't want to go to jail and because he thinks he might make money. And his foreign

policy always was actually based on those interests. You know, how is this good for me? How is it good for me personally? Either help, why does it help keep me in power? Or why does it help make me rich or make my son-in-law rich? And, you know, in that sense, he resembles these modern autocrats who are described in my book. And the book was conceived, by the way, a couple of years ago before I knew who the candidates would be in the 2024 election. But he resembles them in that their primary interest is not the well-being of their own countries and their own citizens, or the success of the United States,

or the values that America stands for and has always stood for for the last 250 years. His primary interest is in himself. And that links him directly to Putin, to Xi, you know, to the leaders of a range of autocracies, even the leaders of Iran. That's what they're all interested in. They're interested in staying in power. And that's what he's interested a few days ago, once again, how much he admires Xi Jinping, which is, by the way, should be a red flag for all the China hawks who think that if they elect him, they'll, you know, they'll get pushed back against China. That's why he admires Putin. That's why he liked meeting, you know, the dictator of North Korea, because they have this, they're in, he recognizes them as soulmates. They run, they think about power and they think about money in the same way that he does.

Yeah. Well, one of the worst things about Trump is how he's pandered to and amplified the lunatic fringe of the right wing. And obviously much of this is a story of what's happened on social media, but this has happened to such a degree that even mainstream Republicans are afraid of the violence from, possible violence from the MAGA cult. So we know from people like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney that there were members of Congress who would have voted to impeach him, but they were afraid for their lives and the lives of their families. I mean, so that's another way in which- And it affects people at a much lower level, too. I did an interview a few days ago with Stephen Richer, who's a Maricopa County election official,

who was one of the people who certified the election in Arizona after Trump lost in 2020. And he had threats to his life. He had, you know, harassment from people. He had, you know, people coming to his life. He had, you know, harassment from people. He had, you know, people coming to his house. And not only him, sort of secretaries and very ordinary employees of the election office, you know, people who wanted those kinds of jobs because they pay well enough and they're nine to five jobs and they're not difficult, suddenly found themselves the focus of this horrible culture war that they didn't expect to be in.

I mean, nobody goes to work for the Maricopa County Election Commission because they think they're going to be, you know, standing up for democracy to fight dictatorship. And yet that's where these people found themselves. So it wasn't just Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney who might have the money and resources to have private security. It was also all the way down. You know, small election officials, local officials, Republicans all over the country who have been affected by the violence and the anger that this cult has inspired. Yeah. But it was literally other members of Congress who don't have the resources of Romney and Cheney who made a decision to just keep their heads down. And so it's already, I mean,

that's already harming our democracy. And it's, again, it's this diffuse threat. You can't really draw a straight line from Trump's mouth to, you know, the front door of some embattled person who's now been doxxed online and their life will never be the same. But you sort of can, right? I mean, it's like, it's all too predictable. If he's putting someone on blast on social media, naming names, and he knows what his cult is going to do subsequent to that, it's completely irresponsible and it really does seem like it's taken us to a new place politically in America.

We're in a new place. I mean, the atmosphere of violence and the level of fear that people, as I said, not even just at the top of politics, but all the way down the chain, now feel about saying what they think and about doing their jobs in some cases is something that I don't, I just, I can't remember it. I'd be hard-pressed to find a moment in American history. I mean, maybe it's what Black Americans experienced in the segregated South. Maybe you can point to that as a precedent. But that's what you have to go back to in order to find a moment when there was so much violence in the air and so much genuine fear of speaking out.

And when the price for speaking out, if you're a Republican inside the party who is in any way critical of its current leadership, the price is very, very high. And I don't remember that ever. Well, I saw a comment on my substack that at first glance looked completely crazy, but then after thinking about it for a moment, it seemed not crazy.

And that fact struck me as a clear measure of just how far we've come from normal. So the comment was, I don't have it here, but it was essentially the person was saying that he thought that the safest course now would be for Trump to win in November, whatever the risks of his presidency. in November, whatever the risks of his presidency, because the MAGA cult is such that it will simply not believe him losing, especially if it's at all a close election. And that poses that the inability to accept this next election with Trump losing poses a much greater danger of civil chaos in America. Now, I don't know if this is true, but the fact that I can't immediately dismiss that is a measure of just how deranging Trump has been to our politics. No, I mean, the fact that Americans can now contemplate the idea that an election will be and could be stolen, and the fact that Americans are, you know, afraid

of the result of elections, physically afraid, I think is, you know, I think, again, I think that's new. I mean, you have to go pretty far back in U.S. history to find a similar moment. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sure you can, in the 19th century, I'm not sure you can find, it compares in the same, exactly the same way. But the level of fear and anxiety and violence that surrounds politics in the United States, once again, you know, what is it that Trump is encouraging through this kind of behavior through the, for example, the constant stream of lies? That's actually the thing about him that bothers me the most. You know, even during that horrible debate with Joe Biden, one thing caught my attention. At one point during the debate, Trump said Democrats want to abort babies in the eighth month and the ninth month. You know, they want to abort babies after they're born. Democrats want to kill babies. And I was like, wait, you know, that's insane. I mean, but the repetitive lies are now we're all adjusting. You know, we kind of screen them out.

But one of the effects that they have is they mean that we screen everything out. And this, again, is another, this is a tactic borrowed from modern autocracy. This is what Putin does. He puts out a series of lies, you know, that whenever something happens, there's 300 different ways of describing it. And eventually people say, right, I don't want to listen to this anymore. I want to turn off the television. I want to check out of politics. I'm not going to vote. It's too hard to understand. It's too upsetting. And I hear, that's what I hear around me. I hear people saying, I'm not watching politics. I don't pay attention to it. I don't listen to it. You

know, people just don't want to be involved because it's so ugly. And because the discomfort with the lies and the discomfort with the fact that we have a leading candidate for president who doesn't even want to tell the truth, that's not even his primary goal, who's not actually describing reality, it's so disturbing. Yeah. I mean, it's beyond any sort of ordinary lying. I mean, it's just he lies for no purpose. I mean, there are the lies that make sense, and then there are lies that are merely contradicting what he said five minutes ago to no advantage. It's just, you know. Well, except that the advantage is what it does is it makes people feel, I don't want to hear anymore. I don't understand this.

So what it creates is nihilism and cynicism and apathy. Yeah, it's just a physiological bankruptcy. And those are the most common political emotions in China and Russia and Iran as well. People feel cynical. They feel apathetic. They don't want anything to do with politics. They don't want to be involved in any civic movement. They don't see the point of it. That's what the effect of the lies is. And so in that sense, it's intentional. It has an impact. It creates an atmosphere.

Are you as worried or more worried about the people around Trump? I mean, there's Trump himself, this grotesque political object who is, to my eye, a unique problem to deal with. And if he went away, I can't imagine a Trump-shaped object replacing him in quite that way. But he's surrounded by more ideological people, more systematic people. I guess I still don't think I know who J.D. Vance is, given his tour from being the author of Hillbilly Elegy to now being the toady's toady of Trump. But take a figure like Steve Bannon. I mean, how worried are you by the machinations of Steve Bannon and people at that level of the movement? So I don't know about Bannon in particular. I mean, he seems pretty post-alcoholic to me whenever I see a picture of him.

I'm not sure how enthusiastic a member of some new regime he would be. But there's certainly plenty of other people at the lower level, and we've heard noise from some of them in the last year or two who do think a lot more systematically than Trump himself about how to change the nature of the American state. So we have Kevin Roberts, who's the head of the Heritage Foundation, talking about a revolution coming and it will be bloodless as long as the left allows it to be, whatever, which is a very sinister thing to say. We have people who've been plotting out ways in which they will, you know, replace expertise and knowledge at places like the Environmental Protection Agency and instead put in loyalists so that, and this is something, by the way, I saw happen in Poland in the years when we had an autocratic populist government in charge there. I lived there part of the time. And when you take them away and you put your cousins way I saw happen in Poland in the years when we had an autocratic populist government in charge

there. I lived there part of the time. And when you take them away and you put your cousins or your party members or your, you know, flunkies in their place, what you begin to get is very bad government and bad decisions. Again, some of it might not be dramatic. You might not see anything happen overnight, but you will see this hollowing out, this gradual decline, this increased dysfunctionality. federal communications regulators used against media, you know, to make life hard for, you know, whatever it is, whether it's CNN or NBC or another piece of the media that Trump doesn't like. So once regulators and once institutions that are meant to have some neutrality are meant to act according to the rule of law become political tools, when they become, you know, political tools, when they become, you know, partisan mechanisms, whether it's, again,

IRS, FCC, FDA, once they become, once they're used with specifically political partisan ends in mind, then they become qualitatively something different. And then we're already ruled by a very different kind of government. And again, I have lived, I lived through a version of it. And what you, what you have is a pretty profound decline and you begin to have declines in quality of life and quality of regulation and so on. And you also begin to have this increase in the level of fear. You know, once, once the state becomes not a neutral thing that's, you know, maybe it doesn't work very well a lot of the time, or maybe it's too bloated or maybe it's got too much money. But it isn't malign.

It isn't trying to destroy the president's enemies. Once that changes and once it becomes something very different, then, as I say, you're living in a different political situation. And what I worry about is that there are now enough people around Trump, which was not the case during the first term, there are now enough people around Trump who are interested in that kind of change and who want to alter the way the state and state institutions work and that they will enable that. So it's not even so much the ideologues like Bannon, it's the practitioners, some of whose names we don't yet know, but we may eventually know. So, but you say you're not worried about fascism. So what are

your worst fears here? So I say I don't use the word fascism because it's got the wrong connotation. So what are we talking about? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now

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